The Fourth Way

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This is an article about the 'system' of G.I. Gurdjieff. For P.D. Ouspensky's book on the subject, see Fourth Way (book).

The Fourth Way has come to be used as a general descriptive term for the body of ideas and teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, which are also sometimes called "The Work" or "The Gurdjieff Work".

1 The Teachings
2 The Ways
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] The Teachings

When asked about the teaching he was setting forth, Gurdjieff said, "The teaching whose theory is here being set out is completely self supporting and independent of other lines and it has been completely unknown up to the present time." However, as with so much of what Gurdjieff said, the critical reader should take notice that, even amongst his closest students (Bennett, for example), much of the Work appeared derived from Sufic (Nashqbandi in particular) thought, neoplatonism, hermeticism, and Tibetan Buddhism. This is not to take away from the remarkable process by which Gurdjieff amalgamated these teachings into a form at once coherent and cohesive unto itself. In other places, Gurdjieff himself alludes to receipt of teachings from a variety of sources.

The teaching he brought centers on the struggle of working on oneself for the purpose of awakening consciousness. Gurdjieff taught that man has no soul. Rather, man must, while incarnate, create a soul whose substance could withstand the shock of death. Without a soul, Gurdjieff taught, man will "die like a dog."

He taught that the ordinary waking consciousness of human beings was a form of sleep and that higher levels of consciousness were possible, namely subjective consciousness and objective consciousness.

The development of these levels of consciousness corresponds with the development of the higher being-bodies (i.e. the kesdjan or astral, mental, and causal bodies). (Not every Fourth Way school believes in all of these.) These could be developed within the physical body in which ordinary consciousness was found, if done under the supervision and guidance of a teacher. That is, under one who has himself been trained in the science and practice of the teaching.

[edit] The Ways

Gurdjieff sometimes referred to his methods as the "Fourth Way."

The first three ways were

The way of the fakir

The fakir struggles with the physical body and self-mastery through difficult physical exercises and postures.

The way of the monk

The way of the monk (or nun) represents the way of faith, the cultivation of emotional feelings.

The way of the yogi

The yogi's approach is through knowledge and the mind.

[edit] The Fourth Way

Gurdjieff said of his Fourth Way that it simultaneously combined work on the body, emotions, and mind, and that it could be followed by ordinary people in everyday life, requiring no retirement into the desert.

The Fourth Way did involve whole-hearted acceptance of certain conditions imposed by a teacher. The Way required supreme effort to devote oneself continuously to inner work, even though one's outward worldly roles might not change that much. In spite of his insistence that work without a teacher was impossible, Gurdjieff stressed each individual's responsibility:

"The fourth way differs from the other ways in that the principal demand made upon a man is the demand for understanding. A man must do nothing that he does not understand, except as an experiment under the supervision and direction of his teacher. The more a man understands what he is doing, the greater will be the results of his efforts. This is a fundamental principle of the fourth way. The results of work are in proportion to the consciousness of the work. No "faith" is required on the fourth way; on the contrary, faith of any kind is opposed to the fourth way. On the fourth way a man must satisfy himself of the truth of what he is told. And until he is satisfied he must do nothing."

By its very nature, the Fourth Way is not for everyone. Knowledge is not deliberately hidden, Gurdjieff would say, but most people simply are not interested. Gurdjieff referred to those capable of receiving the work as "five of twenty of twenty" - only twenty per cent of all people ever think seriously about higher realities. Of these, only twenty per cent ever decide to do anything about it. And of these, only five per cent ever actually get anywhere.

By bringing together the way of the Fakir (Sufi tradition), the way of the Yogi (Hindu and Sikh traditions) and the way of the Monk (Christian and Buddhist traditions, amongst others) Gurdjieff clearly places the Fourth Way at a crossroads of differing beliefs.

[edit] Teaching Methods

Gurdjieff said that students of his methods would find themselves "unable to transmit correctly what is said in the groups. [Students] very soon begin to learn from their own personal experience how much effort, how much time, and how much explaining is necessary in order to grasp what is said in groups. It becomes clear to them that they are unable to give their friends a right idea of what they have learned themselves." Ouspensky relates that in the early work with Gurdjieff in Moscow and St. Petersburg, it was strictly forbidden for students to write down, much less publish, anything at all connected with Gurdjieff and his ideas. Somewhat later, Gurdjieff relaxed this rule, accepting as students many who subsequently published accounts of their experiences in the work.

A brief outsider's summary of what was involved in the work of Gurdjieff's groups:

Relaxation. Many of Gurdjieff's exercises involved or began with some sort of gradual relaxation of the muscles, starting with the muscles of the face and working downward through the body. Along with relaxation goes a type of exercise for sensing the different parts of the body "from the inside." This might have involved, for instance, lying on one's back and concentrating all of one's awareness first on one's nose, then on one's right foot, and so on.
Other Exercises; The Movements. Ouspensky relates a series of what he found to be "unbelievably difficult" physical/mental exercises that Gurdjieff had picked up in various esoteric schools during his travels. In general, these involved some precise and exact combination of counting, breathing, sensing of body parts, and movements, to be done in some coordinated sequence. The famous "movements," often done to music Gurdjieff had composed himself, were dances based on those Gurdjieff had observed and participated in, notably among sufis and dervishes, and in ancient hidden monasteries. Gurdjieff taught that the movements were not merely calisthenics, exercises in concentration, and displays of bodily coordination and aesthetic sensibility: on the contrary, in the movements was embedded real, concrete knowledge, passed from generation to generation of initiates - each posture and gesture representing some cosmic truth that the informed observer could read like a book.

See Movements in the Fourth Way

Division of Attention. Gurdjieff encouraged his students to cultivate the ability to divide their attention, that is, the ability to remain fully focussed on an external object or internal thought while being aware of oneself. One might, for instance, let part of one's attention dwell in one's little finger, while the other half is aware of our own presence. In the division of attention, it is not a matter of going back and forth between one thing and another, but experiencing them both fully and simultaneously. Beyond the division of attention lies "remembering oneself" - a state, permanent in a "conscious" person, fleeting and temporary in the rest of us, in which we see what is seen without ever losing sight of ourselves seeing. Ordinarily, when concentrating on something, we lose our sense of "I," although we may as it were passively react to the stimulus we are concentrating on. In self-remembering the "I" is not lost, and only when we maintain that sense of "I," according to Gurdjieff, are we really awake. Like mastery on a musical instrument, such forms of heightened self-awareness can be developed only with years of practice.
Hands, Head, and Heart. With many variations and complications over the years, Gurdjieff's theoretical picture of the human organism boils down to a tripartite model consisting of three "centers": the moving, the intellectual, and the emotional. Becoming a genuine person involves balancing the three centers and becoming capable of conscious labor and intentional suffering.

Abstract Symbolism. Gurdjieff was fond of elaborate theorizing - the construction of intricate symbolic systems embodying or representing the relationships between phenomena at all levels of existence from the atom to the universe. Ouspensky described Gurdjieff's concept of "octaves" - the musical scale do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do taken as a sort of universal yardstick for determining the measurements and proportions of all of nature's parts. For an accessible approach to the understanding of the laws of octaves and triads in the inner and outer worlds, see Rodney Collin.

[edit] Symbolism

Another symbolic thought-form with which Gurdjieff worked was the enneagram, a circle with nine points around its circumference. Said Gurdjieff, "The enneagram is a universal symbol. All knowledge can be included in the enneagram and with the help of the enneagram it can be interpreted ... A man may be quite alone in the desert and he can trace the enneagram in the sand and in it read the eternal laws of the universe. And every time he can learn something new, something he did not know before."

Through the elaboration of the law of octaves and the meaning of the enneagram, Gurdjieff offered his students alternative means of conceptualizing the world and their place in it. Gurdjieff's ideas could be only partially expounded in ordinary words and sentences; to go beyond language he drew on music (he played several instruments and John G. Bennett tells of him improvising unearthly melodies on a small organ late at night), dance, and visual symbols such as the enneagram.

[edit] Conditions

Gurdjieff laid emphasis on the idea that the seeker must conduct his or her own search. The teacher cannot do the student's work for the student, but is more of a guide on the path to self-discovery. As a teacher, Gurdjieff specialized in creating conditions for students - conditions in which growth was possible, in which efficient progress could be made by the willing. To find oneself in a set of conditions a gifted teacher has arranged has another benefit. As Gurdjieff put it, "You must realize that each man has a definite repertoire of roles which he plays in ordinary circumstances ... but put him into even only slightly different circumstances and he is unable to find a suitable role and for a short time he becomes himself."

[edit] After Gurdjieff

After Gurdjieff's death in 1949 a variety of groups around the world have continued, or attempted to continue, The Work. J. G. Bennett ran groups and also made contact with the Subud and Sufi schools to develop The Work in different directions. Maurice Nicoll, a Jungian psychologist also ran his own groups based on Gurdjieff and Ouspensky's ideas. The French institute was headed for many years by Madam de Salzman - a direct pupil of Gurdjieff. Under her leadership, the Gurdjieff Societies of London and New York were founded and developed.

Today in the United States much of the Fourth Way groups can be attributed to either Alfred Richard Orage or Willem Nyland, both former instructors at "The Institute" founded after Gurdjieff's death to further his ideas. There is much debate as to the ability of one to follow Gurdjieff's ideas after his death through groups, with some critics pointing to the fact that Gurdjieff (apparently) failed to raise any of his pupils to his level of understanding. Proponents of the continued viability of Gurdjieff's system, and its study through the use of groups, however, point to Gurdjieff's insistence on the training of initiates specifically in the task of interpreting and disseminated the ideas that he expressed cryptically in Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson. This, combined with Gurdjieff's almost fanatical dedication to the completion of this text, suggest that Gurdjieff himself intended his ideas to continue to be practiced and taught long after his death.