system: explanation
If we don’t admit that these ideas come from higher mind, they have no meaning, although they are interesting from the ordinary point of view.
Mr. Ouspensky
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The System
copyright © PantheonPress 2003 · all rights reserved · copying of this material by permission only
The system of The Fourth Way is a set of psychological ideas which is objective knowledge—meaning that it comes from what Mr. Ouspensky called higher mind, or Influence C. The system ideas are not something subjective invented by man himself. In this sense, they have nothing in common with ordinary psychology, nor can ordinary psychology explain them.
Systems of ordinary psychology, all of which are subjectively different, have to do primarily with two of the four lower functions in man—the intellectual center and the emotional center—and the maladies these are subject to. Ordinary psychology does not recognize the existence, or the psychological role, of the other two lower functions, the instinctive and moving centers. Nor does it recognize that states of consciousness are an altogether different phenomenon from the four functions.
The Fourth Way system includes knowledge about psychology, but its purpose lies beyond that. Its purpose is to promote the development of consciousness.
As Mr. Ouspensky points out, the ordinary mind cannot discover System ideas by itself. Strangely, we have to be taught that we have four lower centers, that imagination and identification are harmful forms of sleep, that we are not conscious of ourselves, and that we do not recognize the significance of remembering ourselves. No one has ever taught us these essential things about ourselves as human beings on a planet within a solar system in a vast universe. It is not even a concern to the average person who is happily or unhappily preoccupied with living.
The system offers objective explanations about all these things. Most importantly, it provides an explanation of how consciousness can awaken and escape from the forces which keep it in a state of psychological sleep inside the man-machine.
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