Currents · by Frater Custos · 14-minute read

The Fourth Way

Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and the idea that the human being sleeps while believing itself awake. It is the twentieth-century esoteric current that has had the greatest influence outside its own borders — and the one about which the most legends circulate, beginning with the enneagram.

In 1915, in Moscow, a Russian journalist and mathematician of thirty-seven, who had already written a successful book on the fourth dimension, agrees to meet, in a second-rate café, a man from the Caucasus with a heavy accent and the manners of a carpet dealer. Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky would come away convinced that he had found what he had been looking for in India. The man was Georgy Ivanovich Gurdjieff.

Out of that meeting comes the clearest account that twentieth-century esotericism has produced of itself: Frammenti di un insegnamento sconosciuto, published posthumously in 1949. It is the book through which everything now called the Fourth Way passes.

Why «fourth»

The name, which is in fact a formulation of Ouspensky's more than of Gurdjieff's, is explained by contrast. The traditional ways are said to be three, and each works on a single centre of the human being:

All three require withdrawal from the world. The fourth way works instead on the three centres together and within ordinary life: no monastery, no social renunciation. It is also called the «way of the sly man», because it uses short cuts — the sly man, Gurdjieff says, knows how to prepare a pill instead of fasting for years.

A detail that almost everyone overlooks, and that is the most interesting: according to Ouspensky the fourth way is not a permanent way. It has no stable forms or institutions. It appears in relation to a determinate task and disappears when the task is exhausted. Any group that presents itself today as the unbroken custodian of the fourth way is contradicting the definition given by its own founding text.

Man is a machine

The central thesis is brutal and not consoling. The ordinary human being has no will, has no unitary self, has no consciousness. He reacts to stimuli mechanically: everything happens, and nothing is really done. In place of a permanent I there is a crowd of small «I»s that take turns in command, each convinced it is the whole — the one that promises in the evening is not the one that fails to keep the promise in the morning.

Man is born in sleep, lives in sleep and dies in sleep, merely imagining that he is awake.

The state we call waking is, in this system, a second state of sleep. The states are four: sleep, waking sleep, self-consciousness, objective consciousness. Almost all human beings spend their entire lives in the first two.

The instrument for getting out of it has a precise name: self-remembering. It is not introspection and it is not self-observation. It is an act of divided attention: being aware at the same moment of the object perceived and of oneself perceiving. Chapter VII of Frammenti recounts Ouspensky's experiments in the streets of St Petersburg, and the detail that makes all the rest credible is that they succeeded for only a few minutes at a time, after which he would realise that he had walked whole blocks without having been there.

Essence and personality

Essence is what one is born with: what is one's own, hereditary, real. Personality is what has been acquired — education, imitation, language, borrowed opinions. In the average adult essence remains infantile while personality grows out of all proportion and covers it over. The work does not consist in adding something, but in weakening the «buffers» and the identifications so that essence can begin to grow again.

Hence the distinction between internal considering — dependence on the opinion of others, which consumes most of the available energy — and external considering, which is real attention to the other person.

The two laws and the Ray of Creation

The cosmological part is the one that ages worst, and it should be presented for what it is: a model, not a description of the universe.

The law of three says that every phenomenon arises from the meeting of three forces — active, passive and neutralising — and that ordinary man perceives only the first two, which is why the world appears dualistic to him.

The law of seven, or law of the octave, says that every process develops like a musical scale, with two intervals — between mi and fa, between si and do — at which the vibration slows and the process deviates from its initial direction if it does not receive an «additional shock». It is the Gurdjieffian explanation of why human undertakings regularly end up achieving the opposite of what they intended. Self-remembering is, in this scheme, the deliberate shock at the first interval.

The Ray of Creation is a descending scale: the Absolute, all worlds, the galaxy, the Sun, the planets, the Earth, the Moon — with an increasing number of mechanical laws at each step. Earthly man is subject to forty-eight orders of them. To this cosmology is attached the most misunderstood idea of all, the one according to which humanity would serve to «feed the Moon»: a cosmic function of the earthly organic realm as an organ for the transmission of energies.

The enneagram: two different things with the same name

Here popular accounts almost always get it wrong, and it is worth being precise because the confusion is enormous.

Gurdjieff's enneagram, of the Tens and Twenties, is a geometrical figure: a circle, a triangle inscribed on the points 3-6-9, and an irregular hexagonal figure 1-4-2-8-5-7 derived from the decimal period of 1/7. It is a process diagram: it joins the law of three and the law of seven and serves to read how a process develops in time and where the intervals fall. Gurdjieff is the first known source both of the term and of the figure, and he attributed the latter to an unspecified ancient source, of Sufi milieu. No attestation of the figure earlier than Gurdjieff has ever been found.

The enneagram of personality — the Perfectionist, the Helper, the nine types of the online tests — is another matter, and it has a date. It begins with Oscar Ichazo (1931-2020), who developed «protoanalysis» and taught at Arica, in Chile, around 1968-71, coining the expression Enneagram of Personality himself. Claudio Naranjo (1932-2019), a Chilean psychiatrist, studied with Ichazo in 1970, worked out a version of his own integrating it with Western clinical psychology and taught it at Berkeley and at the Esalen Institute. From there it passed into Jesuit circles with Robert Ochs, and from there into corporate training.

Put in one line: the figure is Gurdjieffian, the typology of the nine characters is a Chilean-Californian creation of 1969-72 grafted onto the figure. Anyone who presents the enneagram of types as millennia-old Sufi wisdom or as Gurdjieff's teaching is asserting something historically unfounded. Ichazo himself publicly disputed the versions that followed his own, and there was even litigation.

The institute, and what has to be said about the shadows

In 1922 Gurdjieff opens at Fontainebleau-Avon, in France, the Institut pour le développement harmonique de l'homme: heavy manual labour, sacred dances performed in a group with different rhythms for different limbs and overlaid mental counting, attention exercises, deliberately uncomfortable conditions. The music of the Movements is largely by Thomas de Hartmann on Gurdjieff's indications.

There, in January 1923, died the writer Katherine Mansfield, who had arrived at the institute in the terminal stage of tuberculosis. The case was used against Gurdjieff for years. It has to be said precisely: Mansfield was already doomed when she arrived, and she wrote of having spent serene weeks there; but it also has to be said that the institute was not a suitable place for a terminally ill patient, and that the episode marked Gurdjieff's public image for good.

Accusations of manipulation, of problematic personal relations with disciples and of authoritarian management of the group accompany Gurdjieff in his lifetime and in the later literature. They are not marginal details: they are as much a part of the history of the current as the ideas, and an account that omits them is not an account, it is a brochure.

After Gurdjieff's death, in 1949, the transmission passes above all to Jeanne de Salzmann, who had responsibility for the Movements, and branches out in several directions: J. G. Bennett, Maurice Nicoll, Rodney Collin, the Gurdjieff Foundation. Ouspensky had separated from Gurdjieff long before, teaching on his own account in London.

What remains, of all this, for someone who has no intention whatever of joining a group? One observation that requires believing nothing: that attention to oneself while acting is extremely difficult to sustain, that almost all of us spend the day in a state that resembles automatic pilot far more than consciousness, and that noticing this even for a few seconds is an unpleasant and instructive experience. The rest — the octaves, the Ray, the buffers — can be taken or left. That cannot.

An exercise, not a measurement

Self-remembering cannot be verified from outside, and those who practise it know that the difficulty lies not in understanding it but in noticing that one has not done it. Out of this difficulty — out of the observation that self-observation needs a repeatable handhold if it is not to become a story one tells oneself — has come an instrument that this site makes available: the ICF-42.