3.3: The Fourth Way to what?

 If I were to formulate from today’s understanding what my aim was when I first joined SES at the age of seventeen, it would be to acquire a sense of peace and that clear state of awareness that went with it, and also the delight of understanding the world from a set of ideas that made it make sense. It is hard to accept that sometimes it doesn’t.

Stepping back, what is the aim of the fourth way from the point of view of its basic texts? The most fundamental texts are arguably Ouspensky’s The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution and his In Search of the Miraculous, also Gurdjieff’s All and Everything. 

Life is only real then, when I am starts with a summary of the intended results of Gurdjieff’s All and Everything, of which Life is the third series. The summary is as follows:

FIRST SERIES: To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world.

SECOND SERIES: To acquaint the reader with the material required for a new creation and to prove the soundness and good quality of it.

THIRD SERIES: To assist the arising, in the mentation and in the feelings of the reader, of a veritable, nonfantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality.

Thus, Gurdjieff is not merely bringing to the West a psychological theory but a full-blown psychological and cosmological revolution. Nevertheless the prologue to Life is only real then, when I am begins simply with self-remembering and Gurdjieff’s personal difficulty in attaining it at will, at any rate in 1927 by which time he had already been teaching the fourth way system for some time: 

“I am...? But what has become of that full-sensing of the whole of myself, formerly always in me in just such cases of self-questioning during the process of self-remembering... .  Is it possible that this inner ability was achieved by me thanks to all kinds of self-denial and frequent self-goading only in order that now, when its influence for my Being is more necessary even than air, it should vanish without trace? No! This cannot be! ... Something here is not right!”

Interestingly that same book is much taken up with the problem that in his absence his teaching had become mis-applied to the point that, “...it seemed clear to me that there stood out on the forehead of now one, now another of you, the inscription ‘candidate for the madhouse.’”

The Psychology begins with a description of the state of human beings as we find ourselves, that is, without unity, a collection of jostling opinions and feelings each one of which feels entitled to say ‘I’ at the moment in which it is active. The many ‘I’s. Most things occur in us mechanically by association, one ‘I’ to the next. The first lecture contrasts this with the idea of self-remembering, a state in which we can observe these goings on in the mind and also be aware of ourselves and our surroundings. Normally such states are fleeting and infrequent. Ouspensky writes: “The question arises, is it possible to acquire command over these fleeting moments of consciousness, to evoke them more often, and to keep them longer, or even make them permanent? In other words, is it possible to become conscious?”

Curiously the rationalist and atheist modern philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his book Consciousness Explained, presents a theory which rejects the idea of a central unifying observer and claims that we are a pandemonium (his word) of different thoughts and tendencies which sort themselves out by some kind of survival of the fittest. In developing this idea he cites Plato’s comparison of thoughts to a collection of birds in an aviary. The ancient Greek writer and priest Plutarch also wrote of our multiplicity. So the idea of the many ‘I’s is not unique to Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. Ouspensky’s project, then, is to create observing ‘I’ as a means towards the unity that both modern psychology and Gurdjieff’s system say that we do not have.

While it may be possible and even desirable to achieve greater internal unity, the fourth way goes further. In answer to a question about life after death, Gurdjieff stated that only by certain efforts can a person develop an astral body and that an astral body can survive the death of the physical body, at least for a time. This is connected with the idea of crystallisation, the idea that with sufficient work over time, higher being bodies can become fused, like powder in a retort, and overcome death. In this way self-remembering becomes, not just a method of living more fully here, now, but part of an urgent project of survival. Whether this is plausible or not I shall discuss in what follows.

The development of conscience is also important. Ouspensky wrote, “The aim of this system is to bring man to conscience.” He goes on to say, “...what should be understood from the beginning is that a man must have a sense of good and bad. If he has not, nothing can be done for him.” Conscience, according to Ouspensky, starts with “ordinary morality” and progresses to realising “the necessity of objective right and wrong” This is achieved through the removal of ‘buffers,’ that is, what stops us from fully feeling our internal contradictions. In the French language, the word conscience refers both to conscience and consciousness.

Perhaps this connects with Socrates’s claim that no-one does evil knowingly, that is, if they could see clearly the consequences of what they do, they would do nothing unjust. I emphasise this point, because it means that if your teacher shows evidence of a lack of conscience, then this is an indication that you should look elsewhere.