Fourth Way Information
Learn why The Fourth Way exists and why a teacher is necessary.
Fourth Way Introduction
Learn about the main ideas of the Fourth Way.
Fourth Way School
Learn what distinguishes a school from an organization or study group.
Fourth Way Books
Ebooks by a student in a Fourth Way school, along with a list of recommended Fourth Way books.
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We need to remember that the system does not belong to us. It is objective knowledge.
Robert Burton
Self-remembering is a nuisance to the machine, which wants to be mechanical and waste time.
Robert Burton
Never think any external action or achievement is more important than remembering yourself.
Robert Burton
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Fourth Way Teacher
copyright © PantheonPress 2003 · all rights reserved · copying of this material by permission only
Robert Burton is a conscious Fourth Way teacher whose teaching includes all the major ideas of the System presented by George Gurdjieff, Peter Ouspensky, and Rodney Collin. In Mr. Burton’s Fourth Way school—The Fellowship of Friends—the primary focus is on self-remembering and transformation—what the System calls the two conscious shocks. All other ideas, and all work in the school, revolve around these two pillars of conscious evolution.
Founded in 1970 and now in its fourth decade, The Fellowship of Friends is increasingly dedicated to conscious evolution due to Robert Burton relentlessly, lovingly reminding his students to remember themselves in—to be present to—as many moments as possible each day; and teaching them how to transform rather than resent the small and large suffering that comes their way. At breakfasts, lunches, dinners, teas, and meetings with his students around the world, the oft repeated core of Mr. Burton’s message is that it is essential to introduce conscious presence through self-remembering, and that it is possible to prolong presence and make it permanent by transforming suffering.
Mr. Burton’s teaching also comprises areas of knowledge which Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and Collin touched on but never fully developed. Chief among these is the idea of Influence C. Whereas Gurdjieff and Ouspensky described Influence C as the conscious source behind life on earth and as the higher mind behind the System, and whereas Rodney Collin wrote about "higher school," none of them said anything more specific. What Robert Burton says, quite specifically, is that Influence C is System terminology for conscious, immortal beings who awakened through earthly roles and ultimately ‘escaped’ the death of their physical body; and that their rare achievement was possible with, and only with, the direct help of conscious beings who had previously been helped to do the same. A few examples of such awakened beings are Socrates, Christ, Leonardo da Vinci, Johann Goethe, Walt Whitman, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and Collin.
According to Mr. Burton, what distinguishes an authentic Fourth Way school from simply a group of people studying the System is the degree of Influence C directing the teacher and assisting the school. A self-avowed teacher may be in imagination about his or her level of being and may be receiving no outside help at all, in which case it is not a school but merely an Influence B group. Or perhaps the teacher is receiving outside help but none of the students are, in which case it is a legitimate group but still not a true school. What characterizes an actual school is that the teacher as well as the students receive direct, conscious, outside help. In this respect, Mr. Burton says that although numerous individuals have been awakened independently over the previous two millennium, the last actual Fourth Way school in recorded history was the school of Christ. Furthermore, that the Bible is a record of the teaching of Christ in esoteric code which embodies the main principles of The Fourth Way—to those who know how to read its keys. In the last several years, Mr. Burton has pursued an in-depth study of the Bible and has divulged an explanation of many of its simple but hidden keys.
Another area of knowledge which Robert Burton teaches is that of lifetimes and the idea that we experience more than one lifetime. This idea is not new to religion, philosophy, or psychology, yet it has been much misunderstood and distorted, most recently by New Age enthusiasts. According to Mr. Burton, it is not possible to know anything about previous lifetimes. At the same time, he says that ascending souls develop through a series of nine lifetimes until consciousness reaches its crescendo in the ninth and final life, at which point—and only at which point—it is capable of fully blossoming and surviving death. Additionally, not everyone in a school may be in their ninth life. Full consciousness may therefore not be accessible to them, even though they may receive varying degrees of outside help from Influence C as they pass through the stages of earlier lifetimes.
Plato is one of few known writers to speak about the soul developing to maturity through nine lives. The idea is also referred to in the Bible as Methuselah living 900 years, which esoterically means that he passed through nine lifetimes before fully awakening. Such knowledge may seem absurd to some and unpalatable to others, especially to those who believe they can achieve full awakening on their own terms. Nevertheless, Mr. Burton states definitively that no one achieves anything related to consciousness without it being determined and directed by Influence C; that awakening, enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it is not the personal choice it first seems to be to readers of Gurdjieff’s and Ouspensky’s and Collin’s books. Rather, it is a gift bestowed on one by conscious beings whom the Greeks referred to as immortal gods. Robert Burton says that the idea of Greek gods was and is simply mythology, but that in fact immortal gods do exist and do bestow their direct, conscious assistance, although it is exceedingly rare.
The actuality of immortal beings not only existing but revealing themselves openly is, according to Mr. Burton, realizable and verifiable only in extreme cases in the history of the earth. It is in this context that Mr. Burton perceives the looming and unprecedented destruction of humanity by hydrogen warfare, and the need for a school to prepare a seed case for preserving the highest knowledge and culture which has been developed through recorded history.
Mr. Gurdjieff first introduced the idea that the thin layer of organic life on earth exists as a transmitter of mechanical influences passing from higher regions in the universe, through the solar system, and to the moon; that this "Ray of Creation" develops by means of a continuous passage of influences from above to below in the Ray of Creation. Even more specifically, that the moon is directly fed with energy delivered to it from the magnetic fields of all living creatures—plants, animals, and humans—when they die. In this regard, natural cataclysms, wars, and other catastrophic events, while tragic from our point of view, are an unavoidable part of a universal design for the earth to feed the moon so that the Ray of Creation can develop.
In this context, Mr. Burton perceives that humanity of the twentieth century reached the conclusion of a given sequence of civilizations—as first outlined by Professor Toynbee and later elucidated by Rodney Collin in The Theory of Celestial Influence— and that, within the purposes of the Ray of Creation, the mass of humanity will be imminently destroyed by hydrogen warfare. Furthermore, that it is only due to the magnitude of such events that Influence C is releasing extensive esoteric knowledge and making its direct assistance available. Mr. Burton feels that the preparation for all these events has been long in the making and that all the work of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and Collin—as well as that of Mr. Burton's own teacher, Alex Horn—were necessary precursors to the task of the Fellowship of Friends.
To claim such knowledge and to foretell such events inevitably draws a response, and it is for this reason that Mr. Burton’s person and private life have been the repeated target of philosophic nay sayers, modern cult experts, disgruntled former members of the Fellowship, and numerous groups around the world which claim to be true Fourth Way schools—many of whom portray Mr. Burton as a charlatan or sham. No matter, Mr. Burton genuinely persists in his understanding of the task given him by Influence C.
Most importantly, Mr. Burton persists in promoting the development of consciousness in his students as he focuses more and more on how to be awake and ways to be awake in the simplest and most demanding moments of one's life. As he says, the purpose of life on earth is to be present to one’s own life as it occurs, yet it is surprising that no one realizes this, and even more surprising that everyone has to be taught—as he was—how to remember oneself. For only through conscious self-remembering can one be present to the miraculous moments and seconds of one's life. And only by means of self-remembering can consciousness knowingly ascend in the Ray of Creation to experience higher and higher dimensions of reality in the universe.
Whereas the language of all this is somewhat new, the intrinsic ideas are not. Hence, they may be construed as hackneyed philosophy or newfangled religious fantasy that is simply too good to be true. Yet, as Robert Burton says, it is good, it is true, and it is happening in his school with the direct outside assistance of Influence C.
More Information
For more information, please email us at [email protected]. Or look for the book Self-Remembering by Robert Burton. You can also go directly to the web site of Mr. Burton’s school, The Fellowship of Friends.
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