Rodney Collin (April 26, 1909–May 3, 1956) was a British writer in the area of spiritual development. His work was heavily influenced by his teacher, P. D. Ouspensky, and through him, G. I. Gurdjieff, and their system of spiritual development. Rodney Collin is one of the most well known of Ouspenky's students, and a prolific writer. He met Ouspensky in the autumn of 1936. "Rodney Collin immediately recognised that he had found what he had been searching for in his reading and travels. From then on he dedicated all his time to the study of Mr Ouspensky's teaching." [1] Collin's best known work, The Theory of Celestial Influence, is an ambitious attempt to unite astronomy, physics, chemistry, human physiology, and world history with Collin's version of planetary influences.
Within his most relevant contributions, it is the emphasis in the idea of Fourth Way school existing in different times. He says:
Rodney Collin studied the sequence of European civilizations, finding a pattern which would follow a planetary scale where the times are 10 times longer than in the case of human life. His sequence starts following Toynbee's but soon he changes some aspects, trying to follow his said pattern. Thus, his list begins with the Greeks (with roots on the Egyptian, which he considers the last one in the previous sequence), then the Romans, the Primitive Christians, the Monastic Christians, the Medieval Christians, the Renaissance, and the Synthetic. He also quotes the influence of an extra-European civilization, the Arabic one, upon the Medieval Christian Civilization.[3]
He establishes a relation between Fourth way schools and the origin and development of these civilizations. He says:
The conceptual foundations for this project are the Law of Three, arguably similar to the triad of Thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the Law of Seven, the idea that the notes of the Western musical scale encode universal stages in essentially all developmental processes. Collin unites both of these schemata geometrically using the enneagram.
Collin's other work includes The Theory of Eternal Life, which uses some of the ideas of The Theory of Celestial Influence as a point of departure to formulate a theory of the cycles and potentials of souls, e.g. reincarnation. His works The Theory of Conscious Harmony and The Mirror of Light are more spiritual explorations of humanity: faith, acceptance and forgiveness in contrast to the philosophical scope of his earlier works.