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The Fourth Way
What is The Fourth Way?
Gurdjieff's mission was to bring a method of self-development, based on a powerful ancient teaching, to the West. It has become known as the Fourth Way, or the Work.
In the ordinary conditions of cultured life the position of a human being, even an intelligent one, who is seeking for knowledge, is hopeless. In life circumstances there is nothing resembling either fakir or yogi schools, while the religions of the West have degenerated to such an extent that for a long time there has been nothing alive in them.
The Fourth Way requires no retirement into the desert, does not require a person to give up and renounce everything by which they formerly lived. This means that the preparation for the Fourth Way is through being involved in ordinary life, fulfilling the requirements and embracing all conditions.
Then in the Fourth Way the first principle is that one must not believe anything; one must learn; so faith does not enter into it. One must not believe in what one hears or what one is advised, one must find proofs for everything. If one is convinced that something is true, then one can believe it, but not before.
People believe or disbelieve when they are too lazy to think for themselves. In the Fourth Way you have to choose; you have to be convinced. You are told that you must remember yourself, but it would be wrong for you to remember yourself because you are told. You must realize that you are doing it for yourself, not because somebody told you.
Because of the friction of ordinary life, the Fourth Way can be the shortest route of all to self-realization:
It can be the shortest of all, because more knowledge enters into it. The Fourth Way is sometimes called the way of the ‘sly’ man, or the path of wit.
This means that the ‘sly’ man chooses the path which provides the most intelligent but often the most indirect route, and for this knowledge has to be available.
Thanks to this the Fourth Way affects simultaneously every side of person's life, ones being. It is working on all three aspects at the same time. (The fakir works on the physical; the monk on the emotional; and the yogi on the mental).
What is similar in all the ways is the possibility of ‘changing Being’. If you think of all that makes up Being, such as wrong work of centres, identification, considering, negative emotions, absence of unity and so on, you will understand that all this can be changed in each of the four ways, (but the Fourth Way strives to produce a balanced and harmonious working of all aspects).
The more a person understands their own processes, the greater will be the results of effort. This is a fundamental principle of the Fourth Way. The results of the work are in proportion to the consciousness of the individual at work on themselves.
Ouspensky continues:
“Furthermore, the Fourth Way has no definite forms like the ways of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi. And first of all it has to be found. This is the first test. It is not as well known as the three traditional ways. There are many people who have never heard of the Fourth Way and there are others who deny its existence or possibilities.”
Frank Pinder has said this about the work of Gurdjieff:
“Gurdjieff came to sound a big ‘Doh’ – to help the up-flow of the law of seven, against the current of mechanical life. Gurdjieff came to give us a new world – a new idea of God, of the purpose of life, of sex, of war. But who are ‘Us’.
‘Us’ are those who accept him and his teaching and help to carry out this work. This world of ours cannot be saved in our measure of time. Had it been possible it would have been ‘saved’ long ago by prophets and teachers who have been sent.
Those who look for the world to be saved by a single teacher in a given time are shirking their own responsibility. They wait in the hope of a ‘second coming’ with no effort on their part – indulging in the disease of ‘Tomorrow’”.
Adapted from:
In Search of the Miraculous
and
The Fourth Way
by P.D. Ouspensky