‘Higher’ states of consciousness were regularly explained and demonstrated (up to a point) in the introductory meetings I attended, and occasionally led, at the London branch of our fourth way school.
Up to now I have put ‘higher’ in inverted commas because it is a commonplace that altered states can be produced, for example with alcohol, without there being anything ‘higher’ about them (other than being pleasant). The desire in humans for altered states is almost universal. Some cultures that ban alcohol permit tobacco and coffee, for example. Children sometimes play the game of spinning round until they feel dizzy, or the trick of squatting, nose-holding against expiration (Valsalva) and then suddenly standing up, to produce a momentary pre-faint. In the ’60s hallucinogens were popular with some groups of people.
According to the fourth way, at any rate as I was taught it, some drugs can give you a taste of higher states but these states are not permanent, they do not belong to you and are not under your control. Thus, on meeting the fourth way it is necessary to give up the use of drugs for this purpose.
The explanation of different levels of consciousness as we gave it in the introductory meetings is as follows:
The first level (first state) is sleep. We did not distinguish between dreaming and dreamless sleep.
Second state is ‘waking sleep’ and is what we call normal waking consciousness, but according to the fourth way this is little different from first state. In second state most of our thought, behaviour and speech is automatic, a kind of word-association, or like a pinball machine, in which one thing follows another associatively. ‘Man is a machine’ according to Gurdjieff. That this is the usual state of the mind is readily observable by anyone willing to be an objectively impartial observer. At any rate, I’ll bet I’m not the only one to have a mind that very often runs all by itself to very little purpose. The process can also be observed in normal non-academic conversation. Where a conversation begins and where it ends are usually unrelated.
Third state is self-remembering. Everything else is still going on, but we can make a little effort to be simultaneously aware of our own bodies. It is not just stuff going on, but ourselves as part of what is going on. One might say, we are actors in what is taking place. It is a subtle but at the same time a major shift in perspective. One jumps in and out of it suddenly, like that optical illusion which is now a rabbit, now a duck.
We used to induce this state by asking attendees at the meeting simply to fall silent and become aware of the weight of the body on the chair, the air on the face, the flowers in the vase, the sounds coming into the room from outside.
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