The Fourth Way

As soon as a man awakens for a moment and opens his eyes, all the forces that caused him to fall asleep begin to act upon him with tenfold energy and he immediately falls asleep again, very often dreaming that he is awake or is awakening. - George Gurdjieff

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.