The Fourth Way - A Journey
The 'Fourth Way' is the name given to the teaching introduced to the West by G.I. Gurdjieff. It was first taught in England in the 1920s by P.D. Ouspensky, who had studied with Gurdjieff in Russia. Ouspensky wrote an account of this period of study which was published after his death as In Search of the Miraculous.
The Teaching — as PDO described it — was a series of 'fragments' of esoteric knowledge; knowledge about man's psychology and possible development on the one hand and about the laws of the universe, cosmology, on the other. Ouspensky assembled these fragments into what he termed the 'System', and this he taught in England and the USA until his death in 1947. He was very much a thinker in his own right, and continued to develop his own ideas particularly about the nature of time, recurrence and higher dimensions, (his books Tertium Organum and A New Model of the Universe, and his novel, The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, all express these ideas).
A Living Tradition
Ouspensky insisted that in order to survive as a living tradition the System must be continuously developed and reconstructed by practical experience — and with knowledge of the contemporary scientific understanding of human consciousness. But he also became convinced the 'System' lacked a simple accessible method — one that it must surely once have had. He charged one of his closest pupils, Dr Francis Roles, to continue the search until he should rediscover such a method.
In 1960, Dr Roles found a form of meditation he recognised unmistakably as the missing element in Ouspensky's teaching. In 1962 he established a lifelong connection with the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math, in North India, HH Shantanand Saraswati.
The SHANKARACHARYA is a representative of the ancient non-dual tradition of the Advaita Vedanta, which declares the essential oneness of the individual with the universe. It has always served as a beacon light for all traditions.
After 30 years of reconstructing Ouspensky’s system under the Shankaracharya’s guidance, Francis Roles said: “There is only one consciousness. All the levels are levels of impediment to that consciousness. Everything is that consciousness. That is what we have to feel and know.”