The Fourth Way
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- 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 is the name G. I. Gurdjieff gave to his ideas and teachings, which are also sometimes called "The Work" or "The Gurdjieff Work".
Gurdjieff's teaching mainly addresses the question of people's place in the Universe and their possibilities for inner development. He also emphasized that people live their lives in a form of waking sleep, and that higher levels of consciousness, higher bodies, and various inner abilities are possible.
Gurdjieff taught people how to increase and focus their attention and energy in various ways, and to minimize daydreaming and absentmindedness. According to his teaching, this inner development in oneself is the beginning of a possible further process of change, whose aim is to transform a man into what Gurdjieff believed he ought to be.
Contents |
[edit] Overview
Some of those who had contact with Gurdjieff saw him as a spiritual Master[1] – someone who possessed what Gurdjieff himself called objective consciousness – a form of consciousness gained by the practice of self-remembering and work on oneself; in other words a human being who is fully awake or enlightened. Others saw him as an esotericist or occultist. Gurdjieff widely admitted his teaching was esoteric but he claimed that none of it was veiled in secrecy. Rather, Gurdjieff claimed that many people either don't have an interest or the capability to understand certain ideas.
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." The exact origins of Gurdjieff's teachings are unknown, but various people have offered various sources.
Gurdjieff taught that humans are not born with a soul. Rather, a man must create a soul through the course of his life. Otherwise, Gurdjieff taught that a man will "die like a dog." He also taught that the ordinary waking consciousness of human beings was not consciousness at all but merely a form of sleep and that higher levels of consciousness were possible.
To provide conditions in which attention could be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff also taught his pupils "sacred dances" or "movements" which they performed together as a group, and he left a body of music inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, which was written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann.
[edit] The Ways
Gurdjieff sometimes referred to his methods as the "Fourth Way."
The first three ways are:
- 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 that his Fourth Way was a quicker means than the first three ways because it simultaneously combined work on all three centers, 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 next to 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. Gurdjieff said that secret knowledge is not deliberately hidden, and in some cases not hidden at all) 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.
One of the notable factors in Gurdjieff's teachings is that all the different subjects that he thought fit together and relate to each other. Thus by studying one thing, Gurdjieff said that the person simultaneously studies many other subjects.
[edit] Teachings and Teaching Methods
Gurdjieff's teachings mostly focused on the acquiring of the ability to perform conscious labors and intentional suffering.
Conscious Labors - This is a labor where the person who is performing the act is not absentminded during his act, but rather is aware the entire time of what he is doing and at the same time he is striving to perform the act more efficiently. This in theory sounds easy, but in practice is nearly impossible even for a short time due to the wondering and weakness of the human mind.
Intentional suffering - This is the act of struggling against the desires of the physical body such as daydreaming, pleasure, food (in terms of eating for reasons other than real hunger), etc...
Gurdjieff claimed that these two acts were the basis of all evolution of man.
A brief summary of other exercises/teachings involved in the work of Gurdjieff's groups:
- Relaxation. Gurdjieff claimed that people's bodies are over-tensed during their actions, and thus they unnecessarily waste a lot of energy. Gurdjieff focused on ways of relaxing the physical body and minimizing the tenseness of the human muscles. Also, this muscle tenseness is the main reason that people can't fall asleep quickly when they go to bed.
- 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.
- 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.
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 due to the fact that Gurdjieff said that students of his methods would find themselves unable to transmit correctly what is said in the groups. Somewhat later, Gurdjieff relaxed this rule, accepting as students many who subsequently published accounts of their experiences in the work.
[edit] Symbolism
In his explanations Gurdjieff often used different symbols such as the Enneagram and the Ray of Creation. Gurdjieff said that "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 Madame de Salzman, 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.
