Fourth Way Information
Learn why The Fourth Way exists and about the different levels of Fourth Way schools.
Fourth Way School
Learn what distinguishes a school from an organization or study group.
Fourth Way Teacher
Learn about a modern day Fourth Way teacher who is conscious.
Fourth Way Terms
An explanation of some of the terminology of the system (we keep adding new material to this section).
Fourth Way Books
Learn about ebooks by a student in a Fourth Way school, along with a list of recommended Fourth Way books.
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Observation of the activity of imagination and daydreaming forms a very important part of self-study.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Man in his present state is very far from self-knowledge. A man must learn how to study himself, and he must study the methods of self-study.
G.I. Gurdjieff
You can define the moments when you are nearer to consciousness and further away from it.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Self-remembering is the beginning and the center of the system and the most important thing to understand.
P.D. Ouspensky
From the very beginning we must understand that functions are one thing and states of consciousness another.
P.D. Ouspensky
You cannot identify and be aware of yourself.
P.D. Ouspensky
All possibilities of development are contained in conquering negative emotions and transforming them.
P.D. Ouspensky
We look with our eyes and do not see.
P.D. Ouspensky
Real self- remembering is not in centres, it is above centers.
P.D. Ouspensky
In order really to remember oneself one must first of all remember oneself. Try to remember yourselves when you observe yourselves. Only those results have any value that are accompanied by self-remembering.
G.I. Gurdjieff
In order to awaken, a combination of efforts is needed. It is necessary that somebody should wake the man up; it is necessary that somebody should look after the man who wakes him; it is necessary to have alarm clocks and it is also necessary continually to invent new alarm clocks.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Knowledge is one thing. Understanding is another thing.
G.I. Gurdjieff
In school you cannot deceive yourself.
P.D. Ouspensky
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Fourth Way Introduction
copyright © PantheonPress 2003 · all rights reserved · copying of this material by permission only
THE FOURTH WAY is a psychological method for developing consciousness in the ordinary conditions of life through the guidance of a conscious teacher in a school. Although The Fourth Way “takes place” in ordinary daily life, it is learned in the organized environment of a school led by someone who has already mastered consciousness in himself to a sufficient degree.
The Fourth Way ideas were introduced to the western world at the beginning of the 20th century by George Gurdjieff, an Armenian Greek living in Russia. The System, as he called it, was later organized and presented in written form by his foremost pupil, Peter Ouspensky, a Russian author. Several of Mr. Ouspensky’s books explain the Fourth Way in detail. One of them, In Search of The Miraculous, tells how he met Mr. Gurdjieff in 1915 and describes his experience of learning the System. Another book, The Fourth Way, is a record of questions and answers from meetings which Mr. Ouspensky held in London and New York from 1921 through 1945. He also wrote The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution which is a condensation of the main ideas of the System. Mr. Ouspensky’s pupil, Rodney Collin, wrote several more books based on Ouspensky’s teaching of Fourth Way ideas. Among these books are The Theory of Celestial Influence, The Theory of Conscious Harmony, and The Theory of Eternal Life.
The Fourth Way is said to have existed for millennia. According to Mr. Gurdjieff, it has always appeared and disappeared in different forms, depending on the religious and political climate of the times. The Fourth Way derives its name from the fact that it is distinct from three traditional ways of inner development which are familiar in the east: the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, and the way of the yogi.
The way of the fakir is a way of conquering the physical body by overcoming pain and hardship. The way of the monk is a way of transcending the emotions through religious devotion. The way of the yogi is a way of rising above the mind by mastering one’s thoughts. Each of these three ways provides an approach to the development of higher consciousness, enlightenment, nirvana, and similar experiences of different names. Each way is—or was—intended for different types of people, and all three characteristically require a withdrawal from everyday life. The Fourth Way, on the other hand, takes place, not in isolation or under special circumstances, but in the ordinary conditions of daily life. It is a balanced and contemporary way of transcending the body, the emotions, and the mind at the same time—all in the attempt to promote, prolong, and make permanent in oneself a conscious state of awareness and presence.
But what does this really mean? What is conscious awareness and presence? How do you recognize it in yourself? And how can it be developed?
Four States of Consciousness
The Fourth Way explains that consciousness can manifest in four different degrees, called states. The first state of consciousness is the condition of being asleep at night when all but the barest sensations are turned off and you are, for the most part, oblivious to the outside world. You know only your inner world of dreams. The external world does not exist for you. Your dreams are your reality.
When you wake up from sleep, you enter the second state or waking state of consciousness. Your awareness expands beyond the realm of dreams to include the physical world in which you walk, talk, have thoughts, feel emotions, make decisions, and accomplish tasks. This is your reality in the second state. The first state of consciousness, however, is still there inside the second state. It is simply dimmed by the brighter light of earthly impressions and human activity.
In the waking state, awareness actually fluctuates throughout both the first and second states of consciousness. One moment you are attentive to the task at hand, the next moment you are daydreaming about the past or the future. Then a noise or the sound of another person’s voice ‘brings you back’ to what you are doing. You, however, take little note of these fluctuations of consciousness in yourself, nor can you control them. Even less do you realize that there is a possibility of awareness above and beyond these two states of consciousness.
The third state of consciousness is harder to recognize because it is usually so brief that it goes unnoticed when it occurs. Only through intense or prolonged experiences of the third state can a person comprehend what consciousness is, and only then is it possible to realize what it would mean to have control of consciousness in the third state.
The System explains that one reason the third state is so elusive to our perception is that we think we are already in it, or at least close to it. When we hear that it is a state of heightened awareness, we assume that we can just raise the level of our awareness whenever we choose. Although it is true that we can focus our attention when we think about it, what we don’t understand is that this is not consciousness. It is simply focused attention. A key ingredient is still missing.
In the third state and in moments approaching the third state, one experiences a more vivid view of the world. One sees everything in a more simple and clear, or a more poetic and more mystical, way. At the same time, one has a detached awareness of oneself as the seer. This may occur, for example, when you find yourself in new surroundings, or when something unexpected suddenly happens, or when you are in the presence of great natural beauty such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, or a spectacular view of earth from a jet airliner. Suddenly, you become more aware of yourself in the midst of your surroundings. Awareness is more conscious, more awake, more present. And the key ingredient is that your awareness is divided: you are aware of yourself as the observer and aware of the object or surroundings you are observing.
This heightened division of attention which comes at such moments may be quite subtle and pass almost unnoticed. It may also be profound, in which case it produces a unique sense of inner presence and calm. But even then, in that moment, its significance is not fully realized.
The Fourth Way explains that we usually experience our life from a low state of consciousness that is characterized by undivided attention; that we spend most of our waking moments in the first and second states of consciousness with only occasional flashes of the third state; and that these flashes usually pass unnoticed and unappreciated. At the same time, The Fourth Way shows that it is possible to experience more moments of our life from a higher state and how to achieve that.
If conscious self-awareness begins to grow, and as one gains command of it, it has the possibility of expanding and including yet another state of consciousness—the fourth state—which is a more objective awareness of the reality of the universe. The fourth state is the ultimate mystical nirvana which people have sought for centuries, yet it can only be reached through, and mastered from, the third state. This is why the Fourth Way focuses on how to develop the third state and how to overcome the psychological barriers which normally keep consciousness imprisoned in the second state.
Self-Remembering and Barriers
The foundation of the Fourth Way System is that no one is usually aware of himself; no one is conscious of himself; no one ‘remembers’ himself. The seemingly simple fact of being aware of one’s own existence does not occur to one. Even if a person is told about it and sincerely tries to be more conscious, they soon forget to remember to do it, to be aware of their own existence. Their consciousness unknowingly falls asleep again and everything goes on as before—with uncontrolled, undivided attention.
Of course, everyone is aware of their existence to some degree, but it is small compared to what is possible through conscious effort. For the most part, everyone takes their existence—and awareness of their existence—for granted. No one remembers about his existence on purpose. Quite the contrary: everyone is always forgetting himself one moment to the next. Even more strange is the fact that this is how Nature intended it—although Nature also provided a possibility for man to remember himself; not just occasionally, but permanently.
One of the curiosities of the third state of consciousness is that even when we know about it and want to experience it, we cannot control it. We cannot just enter a higher state. This is because we don’t have enough inner material to form that state. Even if we did have it, we don’t have the ability—the psychological muscles—to control it. We have to learn how to collect this material and how to use it.
On The Fourth Way, the primary way of doing both is a practice called self-remembering. Self-remembering is an intentional effort to divide your attention and be aware of yourself in your surroundings as often as possible. Divided attention means holding attention on the realization of yourself being aware, while simultaneously being aware of either your outer world (where you are and what you are doing) or your inner world (of thoughts, feelings, and sensations), or both at the same time. Through divided attention you become aware of whatever you are observing in the moment while remaining aware of yourself as the observer. For instance, right now it is possible to be aware of these words on the page while also being aware of yourself reading them. It sounds simple, yet this double awareness, this divided attention, never happens by itself. It requires conscious effort every moment. Without effort, awareness always slips back into ordinary, one-way attention.
Divided attention is the chief characteristic of the third state, and the effort to divide attention through self-remembering can induce the third state if it is sustained often enough and long enough. This attempt to reach the third state is the main method taught in a Fourth Way school. Everything else about the school revolves around the discipline of learning to remember oneself—to be consciously present to each moment of each day.
Imagination
Self-remembering is indeed the magic potion for anyone seeking higher consciousness. Yet, simple as it is, it is hard to achieve because of the psychological barriers that prevent divided attention.
The most pervasive barrier which prevents divided attention is imagination. Imagination includes daydreaming, random associations, dwelling on the future or the past, or imagining things about oneself or about other people. A person with his gaze fixed in thought is in imagination. Awareness of himself and his environment is absent, entirely absorbed by the inner workings of imagination. Although the person is physically in the waking state of consciousness, he has psychologically lapsed into imagination, into the realm of dreams. But he does not see any harm in this, partly because it is so comfortable and so satisfying to be in imagination.
Another example of imagination is when someone looking at a scene or listening to an idea starts to think about—to imagine—a similar scene or a similar idea. Instead of seeing or hearing what is in front of them, the person actually sees or hears it in their imagination. They do not realize it, but they become whatever they are imagining. They themselves—their consciousness—virtually disappear in the clouds of imagination. Consciousness falls asleep.
Imagination can also manifest through talking (including talking to oneself); through activity (such as always being busy); even through eating (frantically or in a trancelike state). Without divided attention, all these activities absorb the awareness that could otherwise go into promoting self-remembering.
When a person first hears about imagination, he perhaps sees it as the exception to his normally alert state of mind. He does not see that it is actually the rule; that imagination interferes with almost every moment of his life; that, unbeknownst to himself, he even imagines who he is and how he appears to the world. But if he hears about divided attention and tries to remember himself, he may gradually begin to ‘wake up’ by realizing more and more often that he has forgotten to remember himself. This shows him the power that imagination has over his inner life. It also shows him what it might mean to truly remember himself, to become fully conscious of himself and his existence.
Identification
Awareness is easily lured into imagination because of a second barrier to self-remembering called identification. Identification happens when self-awareness is drawn or pulled away by a person or object or interest and when, as a result, it loses its ability to divide attention. It sounds ludicrous, yet everyone is to some degree identified almost all of the time. But no one realizes this, no one is conscious of this, precisely because consciousness is in a state of identification.
A cat chasing a mouse is identified. So is a person who is intent on a task or point of view, or immersed in anxiety or worry, or captivated by another person, or totally lost in a television or computer screen. In all these cases, the person’s awareness has completely surrendered itself—its identity—to the object of identification. Rarely does anyone suspect that identification pulls attention in the opposite direction of conscious awareness—that it virtually sucks the soul out of whoever is identified.
Identification is usually regarded, not as a loss of the precious material of consciousness, but as necessary interest or enthusiasm, as focus and dedication. It is considered normal, useful, even essential. To be without identification is to be listless, unproductive, boring. The Fourth Way, however, explains that the opposite is true: that identification steals one’s real identity and ultimately destroys it; that identification is the mechanical opposite of conscious self-remembering; and that real will is required to control identification and regain control of consciousness.
Internal Considering
A third barrier to self-remembering is a particular form of imagination about and identification with other people called internal considering, or inner-considering. Inner-considering happens when we imagine what other people think about us: whether they notice us, admire us, approve of us, and respect us; or, on the other hand, when we suspect that they are not treating us with enough respect or that they are secretly ridiculing us. Inner-considering may create a simple anxiety which prompts us to adjust our hair before entering a room, or it may cause such overwhelming nervousness and fear that we absolutely cannot speak to someone or perform in public.
Inner-considering may also take the form of imagining that we are not considering other people enough; that we are not treating them with enough respect or politeness or courteousness; that we don’t ever quite meet other people’s expectations and requirements.
When we are under the influence of internal considering, we see ourselves as the center of the universe and are constantly evaluating everything in relation to ourselves, which is why it is called internal considering. It is an imaginary, distorted point of view which takes an enormous amount of our energy; but, more importantly, it is a form of psychological sleep that is contrary to self-remembering. In fact, one of the best ways to promote self-remembering is to turn the psychology of inner-considering around and see oneself, not as the center of things, but as part of a larger whole. This means seeing other people, not in terms of our need for recognition or approval, but according to their needs and the needs of the larger whole, or larger reality, in which we find ourselves.
Turning internal considering around like this is called external considering. External considering means thinking of others for their sake: seeing them and their circumstances from the outside—as they really are—rather than from inside ourselves and from the point of view of our wants and how we imagine things to be. Used correctly, external considering becomes an invaluable tool for self-remembering. It broadens awareness and expands the territory of divided attention. It may even extend to awareness of oneself in relation to the entire universe and its purposes, its needs, its reality.
Negative Emotions
A fourth barrier to divided attention and self-remembering is the outward expression of negative emotions which results from a combination of imagination, identification, and inner-considering. Simply put, we imagine that other people and circumstances conspire to make us negative; that they are the cause of our negativity or suffering. We immediately justify this notion and feel the urge to vent our reaction and ‘set the record straight’ by expressing our frustration, opposition, self-pity, or anger. The spectrum of negative emotions also includes all forms of irritation, frustration, impatience, judgment, anxiety, worry, suspicion, indignation, hatred, resentment, and fear.
The outward expression of negative emotions is usually considered harmless and useful—a necessary release of energy and an inevitable show of character. After all, it seems true that someone or something has made us negative, that the cause of our negativity is outside, and that we have a right to blame the cause and air our complaint.
The Fourth Way turns this rationale upside-down by explaining that the cause of all negativity is not external, but internal. Negative emotions are simply a by-product of the wrong view we have of ourselves and others, of the world in general, and especially of the role of suffering in our life. At the same time, expressing negative emotions is never useful, necessary, or a sign of strength. On the contrary, it is always a sign of weakness. It is detrimental to consciousness, pointless in itself, completely unnecessary, and due simply to emotional immaturity and shortsighted thinking. But most importantly, the material needed for conscious awareness is corrupted and lost through the psychological manufacture and expression of negative emotions—precisely because negative emotions serve to outwardly reject reality rather than inwardly accept, embrace, and transform it.
For this reason, students in a Fourth Way school pay special attention to controlling the expression of negative emotions with the aim of harnessing the energy behind negativity and eventually transforming that energy into a higher level of perception through which one sees oneself, others, events, and particularly one’s own suffering as they really are, not the way one imagines them or would prefer them to be. Such transformation of negative emotions accompanied by such transcendence of suffering marks the conscious passage from the second state of consciousness to the third and even fourth states of consciousness.
Consciousness, Unity, and Will
Science, psychology, and religion generally portray man as having consciousness, unity, and will. After all, we appear to be conscious, to have an individual self, and to control our actions.
The Fourth Way views these traits in a different light. It explains that our actions are a mechanical, involuntary response to outside stimuli; that human beings are universal puppets controlled by visible and invisible forces acting upon them each moment.
Nor are we the unified beings we suppose ourselves to be. We are driven, not by our brain, but by four separate brains which the System calls centers: the intellectual center, the emotional center, the moving center, and the instinctive center. Each of these centers has its own perceptions, its own responses, and its own memory. Yet all four work in unison to produce a feeling of unity and an appearance of continuity in our actions. But behind these, our inner world is actually a continual chain of feelings of ‘I’ (I am hungry, I am full, I am happy, I am sad, I want, I don’t like, I think, I hate, I can, I never can).
Surprisingly, we are not aware of our ‘I’s constantly replacing and contradicting each other; partly because we have never studied ourselves as stimulus-response machines, and partly because our consciousness pulses at such a low level unaware of itself and unaware that it is something separate from all the psychological ‘I’s. Instead of consciousness being independently aware of itself, it attaches itself to each ‘I’ that appears in the present moment. It becomes each ‘I’ that is produced by the four centers. It is not sufficiently developed to recognize that functions are one thing and that it—consciousness—is something else.
Four Lower Centers
Although the aim of The Fourth Way is to promote the development of consciousness, it is difficult at first to understand what consciousness is because it is a wordless state of awareness which is neither thought, feeling, movement, or sensation. To fully grasp this, it is necessary to study what is not consciousness by learning to recognize in oneself the four lower centers themselves, the endless chain of 'I's produced by them, and the deceptive sense of a larger ‘I’ behind them—and in this way to arrive indirectly at the realization that consciousness is none of these things which it can observe; rather, that it is the observer which observes, the seer aware of itself seeing.
The Intellectual Center
The intellectual center in man produces all mental constructs such as ideas, concepts, intellectual interests, logical comparisons, and associative thoughts. The intellectual center is reading these words now, trying to comprehend or contradict these ideas, and probably relating them to other ideas it has heard or read about. The intellectual center is the part of us that responds to ideas and information with definitions, associations, opinions, and analytical opposition. It is the home of our feeling of intelligence.
The intellectual center is also a storehouse for collecting, defining, sorting, and retrieving information. It is a necessary instrument in this respect, yet due to its tendency to give intellectual form to everything, it does not and cannot actually see anything. This sounds strange at first, but the fact is that the intellectual center responds to what is seen by immediately giving it a label, a name, a description, a cross-reference association. And if it cannot, it critically rejects the object, person, or situation it is faced with. What is important to understand from the point of view of consciousness is that the intellectual center obscures being truly awake to, truly present to, whatever is right in front of us. Instead of awareness witnessing each remarkable moment that unfolds in front of us and absorbing each through conscious divided attention, the intellectual center tries to displace awareness with names, logical explanations, associations, and related memories.
Try, for instance, to walk or drive down the street and intentionally look at what is in front of you as you go. If you succeed in dividing attention between yourself and the things you see, while at the same time sidestepping all thought about what you see, you will invariably discover the intellectual center encroaching on your effort by trying to displace conscious awareness with random thoughts and associations. You may even 'awaken' at a certain point to realize that consciousness got so lulled by the imagination produced by the intellectual center that you ceased to see out of your eyes altogether.
The Emotional Center
The emotional center is a separate part of us which produces responses to people, to visual impressions, and to events. Its responses include feelings of like and dislike, judgment, envy, jealousy, suspicion, criticism, sympathy, self-pity, anger, resentment, admiration, appreciation, compassion, and creative insight. The emotional center is especially sensitive to people and gets particularly upset when it feels that other people do not pay us enough attention or give us enough respect. It is the root of our sense of uniqueness ad justice. It is also the source of our approvals and judgment about other people, as well as about ourselves.
Among the lower centers, the emotional center is the fastest and most perceptive when it is functioning properly. It has a remarkable capacity to appreciate nature, beauty, friendship, and the arts. It is quite sensitive to beautiful order, be it a simple clean room, a skillful flower arrangement, or a Greek statue. This same sensitivity gives rise to appreciation of the mere spectacle of life on earth and the fact that everything has come to exist in the first place, and in this regard the emotional center can, through divided attention, bring us to the threshold of conscious awareness where we have the possibility of stepping beyond emotions in response to the world and experiencing pure seeing—wordless beholding—of the mystery of creation.
The ability to move consciously, however, from the perceptive heights of the emotional center to the pure presence of conscious awareness is something that has to be learned and developed. Even then it remains so easy and tempting to cling to the familiar and believe that emotions are consciousness itself. It requires repeated training to know the difference between them—between functions and consciousness—in oneself, and considerable practice to learn to navigate knowingly from the one to the other.
The Moving Center
The moving center is a third brain, or center, which produces all physical movement, all sense of satisfaction or inconvenience from movement, and all visualization of movement in three-dimensional space, such as when we drive or plan or play chess, or when we solve architectural or engineering or programming problems. Our moving center imitates, improvises, and invents, and it prides itself in its movements and physical accomplishments. It gets frustrated, too, when our momentum is interrupted by circumstances or by other people.
As the most visible of the lower centers, the moving center is also the most mesmerizing. Movement seems to give us life and represent that we are conscious beings busy accomplishing things on planet earth. Often, the busier someone is and the more they get done, the more alive and in control they feel. Yet, as the Fourth Way explains, it is all on the surface and all automatic. It is not the action of conscious presence and will. It merely happens to a person out of mechanical impulse.
The moving center is so fast, so competent, and so consistent that it deceives its owner as well as other people into thinking that it is identity itself. What it does not see, however, is that it is always automatically visualizing and anticipating its next movement so as to link all its movements into a smooth continuum. But, like the intellectual and emotional centers, even its useful functioning displaces full awareness of what is right in front of it. In the case of the moving center, it moves through the moment without being consciously present to the moment.
Once you learn to observe this, it is alarming to realize that you can go through a rapid series of elaborate movements—in the kitchen, at a desk, or behind the wheel of a car—without seeing clearly what is right in front of you. But realizing this can be the beginning of the verification that, as Mr. Ouspensky said, “Functions can exist without consciousness.” In other words, that the lower centers can operate efficiently on their own without consciousness being aware of itself or aware of them as they function.
The Instinctive Center
The fourth center in the human machine is the instinctive center, which invisibly governs the five senses and all the inner workings of our physical organism, such as breathing, digestion, sneezing, tissue building, healing, and so on. Although most of the operations of the instinctive center go on behind the scenes, the instinctive center is also the realm of outward sensitivity, such as with attunement to climate and temperature, of other people's energy as sympathetic or threatening, and the omnidirectional sense that we are being watched or noticed or approached from behind.
The instinctive center may also give rise to certain intuitions such as sensing that a particular person may be in the neighboring vicinity, or that a relative may telephone soon. It can sometimes ‘read’ the well being of others. And because all of these perceptions are wordless and invisible, they can easily deceive us into mistaking them for higher consciousness—when, in fact, consciousness and perceptions from higher states are quite different.
Whereas the intellectual center logically defines and explains what is in the moment, and the emotional center evaluates and discriminates about what is in the moment, and the moving center visualizes and manipulates what is in the moment, the instinctive center senses and seizes upon what is in the moment. With its radar-like perception, it stealthily notices, greedily clutches, selfishly hordes, and craftily takes advantage of the opportunity to gain, to get ahead, to ensure the welfare of our biological existence.
More than any of the other lower centers, the instinctive center exists for itself. Consequently, it exhibits no interest in the awakening of consciousness and is even opposed to it. In this regard, the instinctive center’s decision-making power, which easily governs the other lower centers, can be so calculating and subtle that it is difficult—even with the help of those who understand it—to see how it incessantly tries to distract consciousness from dividing attention and being present in the moment.
One reason it is hard for us to see each of the four lower centers separately is that they normally function in unison, each serving a distinct purpose in our life, together linking us to the surrounding world. We experience the world through our four centers, yet this experience is not conscious awareness. Our thoughts, feelings, movements, and sensations—and all the feelings of ‘I’ that they produce—are not consciousness. They are simply mechanical functions which can operate with or without us being conscious of them. More importantly, they can operate without our consciousness being aware of itself watching them.
In the first and second states, consciousness is mixed with the functions of our lower centers. Only with the help of a conscious teacher and a school can one truly distinguish consciousness from functions and learn how to develop consciousness on its own. The distinction between the two is simply too elusive and knowledge by itself cannot enable a person to be honest enough with himself to know what is pure consciousness and what is still thought, feeling, movement, or sensation.
Once, however, consciousness starts to develop separately from the four lower centers, and from the many ‘I’s produced by the four centers, it can begin to arouse two higher centers in us: what the System calls the higher emotional center and the higher intellectual center. The higher emotional center refers to development in the third state of consciousness; the higher intellectual center refers to development in the fourth state of consciousness. Both higher centers are latent but remain undeveloped because they can only emerge when we are able to control consciousness—that is, to consciously, consistently remember ourselves.
Essence and Personality
For the purposes of self-knowledge and self-study, the Fourth Way distinguishes two other aspects of man’s being: essence and personality. Whereas the four lower centers are the source of our many feelings of ‘I’, it is in our essence and our personality that they take shape as a unified feeling of self which feels like ‘me’. The main thing to realize is that although this distinct sense of individuality is not consciousness itself, it provides a necessary platform for the development of consciousness.
The Fourth Way explains that essence is our own, it is ourself as a human being. This includes our physical constitution (our race, culture, and temperament), our psychological makeup (the way we see and respond to people and to the world), and our innate tendencies or talents (aestheticism, artistic abilities, academic interests, intuitive know-how). None of these are learned or borrowed or contrived. They are we as we are born, and although they may be suppressed or camouflaged during our life, they do not change.
By contrast, personality is not our own. It is everything we learn, everything we are taught, everything we imitate, everything we try to become. It is the mask—the ‘persona’—we wear during our earthly life. This mask changes faces and even tone of voice when circumstances change. For instance, we wear one mask at the office, another at home, another when things are going well, and another when we are under pressure. The difference in our masks is sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle, as our psychological mood about ourselves adjusts to the circumstances at hand. These changes can also be hard to detect because the feeling of ‘me’ (the larger sense of ‘I’) underlying them remains more or less the same.
Essence is the most fundamental and receptive part of our nature. Personality is more complicated and more resistant, however it also acts as a protective layer which shields essence from influences that may have an impact on the sensitive fabric of essence. For example, essence is strongly affected by things like man-made industry and brutality, and by things like changes in the weather and cycles of the moon and planets. Personality acts as a buffer which minimizes the effect of these influences. In right order, personality protects, normalizes, and humanizes essence. What often goes wrong, however, is that personality takes on a life of its own and we start—sometimes at an early age—to believe and feel that we are our personality, and to lose touch altogether with our true nature, our essence.
In the conditions of ordinary life, essence and personality also overlap and interfere with each other so that a person’s true nature may be almost unrecognizable beneath his upbringing or education or professional training. In most cases, essence hides behind personality, although sometimes personality hides behind essence. Sometimes there is an imbalance one way or the other. And sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between them at all.
Personality is a necessary part of our makeup, yet it is in our essence that each of us has the possibility of conscious evolution. Essence is the seed case, so to speak, which harbors consciousness and the possibility of promoting consciousness. Therefore, a large part of the work in a Fourth Way school is designed to help people distinguish essence from personality in themselves and to restore the right relation between essence and personality so that consciousness can establish itself in essence and cease to be stifled by personality.
Although personality serves a useful role, by its very nature as a protective device it wrongly filters, and can even distort, the school influences trying to reach essence. Consequently, in the course of evolution personality needs to be minimized and rendered secondary to essence. Perhaps the largest dimension of such discipline is learning to control the expression of negative emotions and learning to transform rather than resent the small and large suffering that inevitably comes our way. It is by this means that essence promotes the growth and full awakening of consciousness.
Law of Three and Law of Seven
To further understand what consciousness is and how it can be achieved, one must also understand man’s place in the universe. The Fourth Way provides a key for this in two fundamental laws: the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. The idea is that these two laws produce and govern everything in the universe, including the life of man as an unconscious, as well as a potentially conscious, being in the universe. This sounds so simple as a statement, yet it is almost incomprehensible to fully grasp what it means to be unconscious, and even more so what it would mean to become conscious, in the incredibly mysterious and unknown place we call the universe—of which we are rarely even a little bit cognizant.
The Law of Three states that everything in the universe and in man is the result of a combination of three forces. All phenomena, all events, all activities result from triads in which an active, a passive, and a neutralizing force come together. In the Fourth Way System, these three forces are referred to as first, second, and third force. The first force is always active, the second force is always passive, and the third force is always neutralizing.
As an example, suppose that intense interest in a subject appears as a first force and compels you to begin some kind of active study. Before long, the second force of passive resistance appears in the form of inertia or laziness. This second, or denying, force opposes the first force of your original interest. A third force then enters to neutralize the offsetting effect of the first two by reinforcing one of them. For instance, a third force of reward may be strong enough to overcome your laziness, thereby strengthening the first force and leading you to further study. On the other hand, hunger, a sense of pressing duties elsewhere, or the sunny day outside may swing the triad in favor of resistance, in which case you ‘decide’ to postpone or abandon your new undertaking without even so much as recalling the zest with which you first began it.
Not knowing about forces and triads, and due to our limited perception in the second state of consciousness, we remain blind to third forces and powerless to control them. At best, we see only the first and second forces, unaware that results are determined by neither of them, but always by the invisible influence of a third force. This, however, is man’s plight in the second state of consciousness. To escape it requires an understanding of how to bring, or connect to, the right third force at the right time, and how to do so consciously.
The other universal law—the Law of Seven—states that everything which happens in the universe and in man does so according to ‘octaves’ and ‘intervals’. Octaves refer to the fact that no activity continues to develop in the same direction it started in; that it inevitably changes its direction or nature, or both. Intervals refer to the fact that nothing—be it a business venture or a civilization—continues to develop with its original intensity; that it is always gaining or losing intensity as it progresses.
This explains why there are no straight lines in Nature; why we cannot think or do what we intend; and why things so often stop, deviate, or turn out differently than we planned. To free ourselves from this law, we must understand octaves and intervals and learn how to apply the ‘shocks’ that will keep octaves moving in the same direction. Nowhere is this more true than in the octave of trying to become increasingly conscious in the universe.
Triads and Octaves
Together, the Law of Three and the Law of Seven combine to produce all events (triads) and all series of events (octaves) in the universe. On the scale of man, this means that a person cannot evolve by himself because he lacks the required third force and continuity of effort. No matter how persistent his efforts, they will always be met by an equal amount of resistance from the mechanical parts of himself. And no matter how well he may begin the journey of self-development, he is doomed to deviate, fall, or fail at each interval. If he wants to create a conscious triad in himself and make his efforts continuous, he has to align himself with the third force of a teacher and school. He has to be taught how to bridge the intervals that await everyone who tries to become more conscious.
Three Lines of Work
As Mr. Ouspensky explained, schools of the Fourth Way serve as a conductor of third force. The influences of a school provide the shocks needed to bridge intervals in the work of conscious evolution. The most practical example of this is the three lines of work: work on oneself, work with others, and work for the school. By ensuring a balance of effort on all three lines, the student is able to keep moving in the original direction, and with sufficient intensity, for as long as it takes to achieve the development of consciousness. In short, a school enables a person to use the Law of Three and the Law of Seven consciously, for his aim.
Influences A, B, and C
In discussing the nature and work of a conscious school, the question naturally arises: How does one find and recognize a real school? The Fourth Way explains that this search and this ability to find are a result of varying influences which act on a person during the course of his life. These influences are called influences A, B, and C.
Influences A are the most prevalent and the most mechanical. They include all influences that originate from life itself, such as concerns about food, shelter, health, family, money, possessions, social status, power, success, and fame. These influences are mechanical in their origin and in their action. They stem purely from mechanical impulses in man and produce only mechanical results in his being.
Influences B, on the other hand, are conscious in origin although they, too, are mechanical in their action and in their result. B influences come originally from a conscious source outside the mechanical world of man, but because they reach man by being introduced into the general flow of A influences, they act on him mechanically and can produce in him only mechanical results.
Influences B are transmitted through literature, philosophy, psychology, religion, music, art, and science. For most people, these fields of interest become an end in themselves. But they can, in their purest form, evoke in a person the desire for deeper understanding about existence in the universe. If Influences B have this effect, they may collect in a person and form a focal point or ‘magnetic center’ which finds itself increasingly interested in, and eventually in search of, a conscious school.
The third kind of influences, called Influence C, are conscious in their origin in the universe and conscious in their action on man’s being. Whereas A and B influences are intended for the most part to reinforce man’s mechanical tendencies and self-satisfying illusions about himself, Influence C promotes the evolution of his consciousness. But Influence C can produce this effect only in a properly developed magnetic center. When a magnetic center meets an authentic school, it comes into contact with Influence C, the conscious source behind life. As abstract or absurd as this may sound to our modern minds, this conscious ‘source’ nevertheless exists and holds out to those who seek it the possibility of an altogether new relation to themselves, to the world around them, and to the larger—much larger—universe in which they find themselves.
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