The Fourth Way |
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We have a spirit, which is immortal, and all our efforts at self-remembering are to make a conscious connection with it. - Peter Ouspensky
The Fourth Way system of ideas was brought to the West by George I. Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic, and his student Peter Ouspensky, a Russian journalist and philosopher, in the twentieth century. The system was uniquely developed to suit the modern age with its emphasis on man as a sleeping machine, a cosmology based on laws and energy, the various factories that comprise the machine, and man’s latent higher possibilities to reach a permanent state of awakening. The chief methods of the Fourth Way are self-observation, the non-expression of negative emotions and the practice of divided attention, whereby a person observes both his environment and himself in it simultaneously. This division of attention, if practiced with a third impartial point as reference, leads a person to a higher experience of presence called Self-remembering.