3.1: Doorway to the fantastic: a very brief history of the fourth way

The Fourth Way is not an invention of Robert Earl Burton, although Robert Earl Burton’s version is. 

The Fourth Way emerged from the teaching of George Gurdjieff, an Armenian Greek, brought up in the cathedral city of Kars in what is now eastern Turkey. Gurdjieff, according to his own account, gathered around him a small group of seekers of wisdom, and came back from Central Asia with the System.

Gurdjieff taught his version of the System in Russia where he was joined by Russian writer and thinker Peter Ouspensky. Whereas Ouspensky was an intellectual, Gurdjieff was rather an unashamed trickster (read for example The Material Question in Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men). Gurdjieff claimed that he had learned the System from a mysterious monastery in Central Asia, the Sarmoung Brotherhood, which has never been identified. He presented what he had learned in a bizarre nomenclature that was probably of his own devising, in which there are traces of Greek and probably other languages (for example, what Ouspensky later called the Law of Seven Gurdjieff calls Heptaparaparshinokh). Ouspensky unpicked the language, systematised it and re-presented the System in terms that at least appear clear.

Ouspensky eventually parted company with Gurdjieff for reasons that are differently stated in different sources, but which amount to Ouspensky feeling that the direction of Gurdjieff’s work had changed, in particular that whereas Gurdjieff had initially insisted on personal verification, he later seemed to be requiring his students to take everything on trust. The tension between personal verification and unexamined belief is a theme that I shall return to from time-to-time in this essay.

All the successors of Gurdjieff as far as I know went in search of Influence C. According to Ouspensky, Influence C, otherwise known as ‘conscious influence,’ is the direct communication of esoteric truth from someone who has previously received it. Ouspensky felt that the System was incomplete (In Search of the Miraculous was originally entitled Fragments of an Unknown Teaching) and in particular that it lacked a simple method for students to become conscious. He experimented, for example, with continuous prayer.

Student of Gurdjieff, J. G. Bennet describes part of his search for a teacher in Journeys in Islamic Lands, and Ouspensky’s student Rodney Collin travelled to Mexico looking for inspiration among the pyramids of Oaxaca. Dr Francis Roles, the student of Ouspensky who continued the Ouspensky Work in London and founded the Study Society, and Leon MacLaren who founded the School of Economic Science (SES), eventually met the Maharishi. From the Maharishi they learned the meditation method known as Transcendental Meditation, but resisted the Maharishi’s attempts to take over their organisations. Instead they went to the source, the Maharishi’s teacher, the Shankaracharya. In this way the SES and the Study Society claim the continuation and development of the fourth way System through the connection with the Advaita philosophy of India. Gerald de Symons Beckwith of the Study Society says that the knowledge of liberation manifests in different guises at different times and places, and indeed the intention to adapt the System to the Western mind was explicit in Gurdjieff’s activities from the beginning. The SES, of which I was a member for four years, had adopted Vedantic Sanskrit terminology by the time I was a member, and the Study Society mixes the Vedanta with Ouspensky’s terminology. 

The origin of Gurdjieff’s branch of the System itself could be from the Sufis of Central Asia. J. G. Bennett in his joint work with H. L. Shushud, Masters of Wisdom of Central Asia (based on translations of medieval texts), attributes to Gudjduvani the idea of self-remembering in a very similar phrase to that used by Gurdjieff—‘Remember yourself always and in all situations.’ However this phrase does not appear in the version authored by Shushud alone.

If you look on Google Maps and drop the little yellow man onto a photograph in, say Samarkand or Khorezm, you will see dusty towns with the usual drab twentieth century commercial buildings and flats, and scattered around, extraordinary mosques the size of cathedrals or small forts, decorated in exquisite coloured tiles. These speak to the existence in the past of something remarkable, just as we stand in awe of the medieval cathedrals of Europe.