The Fourth Way by P.D. Ouspensky: Gurdjieff's System in His Own Words

The Book

The Fourth Way was published posthumously in 1957, ten years after Ouspensky's death. It is compiled from verbatim records of the meetings Ouspensky conducted in London (1921-1940) and New York (1941-1946) over a period of twenty-five years. The records were kept by students and arranged by subject after Ouspensky's death.

The result is a comprehensive reference work on Gurdjieff's psychological and cosmological system as Ouspensky understood and taught it. Where In Search of the Miraculous presents the system as a narrative (Ouspensky's account of studying with Gurdjieff in Russia), The Fourth Way presents it as a systematized body of knowledge, organized by topic and developed through thousands of specific questions and answers.

The Q&A format is itself a teaching tool. The questions are not academic but practical: "How do I self-remember?" "What do I do about negative emotions?" "How do I know which centre is working?" The answers address not just the intellectual content but the psychological attitude behind the question. Ouspensky is often sharp with questioners who seek intellectual understanding without practical application: "You cannot understand this by thinking about it. You must try it."

The Fourth Way as a Path

Gurdjieff distinguished four ways of spiritual development:

The Way of the Fakir: Mastery of the physical body through extreme endurance (standing on one leg for years, lying on a bed of nails). Develops the physical will but neglects mind and emotions. Takes very long.

The Way of the Monk: Mastery of emotions through faith, devotion, and surrender to God. Develops the emotional life but may neglect mind and body. Requires a religious framework.

The Way of the Yogi: Mastery of the mind through concentration, meditation, and intellectual discipline. Develops the mind but may neglect body and emotions. Requires withdrawal from life.

The Fourth Way: Works on body, emotions, and mind simultaneously, in the conditions of ordinary life. Does not require monastery, ashram, or withdrawal. The "school" is daily life itself; the "teacher" is self-observation; the "practice" is remembering oneself while doing everything one normally does.

The Fourth Way is described as the fastest path because it does not develop one function at the expense of others. But it is also the most demanding because it operates without the support structures (monastery, community, guru) that the other three ways provide. The Fourth Way student is alone with their own efforts, sustained only by understanding and the occasional help of fellow students.

The Four States of Consciousness

Ouspensky describes four possible states of consciousness, of which most people experience only two:

First State: Sleep. Ordinary physical sleep, with dreams. In this state, the body is immobile and consciousness is turned inward, processing the day's experiences.

Second State: Waking Sleep. What people ordinarily call "consciousness" but is actually a form of sleep. In this state, the body is active but consciousness is mechanical: reacting to stimuli, following habits, running on conditioned responses. The person believes they are conscious (they can walk, talk, drive, work) but they are not aware of themselves. They function like well-programmed machines.

Third State: Self-Remembering. Genuine consciousness: awareness of oneself AND one's surroundings simultaneously. In ordinary waking life, attention flows outward: you see the street, the people, the traffic, but you do not see yourself seeing them. In self-remembering, you are aware of the street AND aware of yourself standing on it. This divided attention is the beginning of real consciousness.

Fourth State: Objective Consciousness. Perception of reality as it actually is, without the distortions of personality, conditioning, or subjective bias. This state is described in the mystical literature of all traditions (satori, samadhi, gnosis, the Beatific Vision). It is extremely rare and cannot be achieved without first establishing self-remembering as a stable faculty.

Self-Remembering: The Central Practice

Self-remembering is the Fourth Way's core practice. It is not meditation (which involves withdrawing attention from the world), not mindfulness (which involves non-judgmental observation of experience), and not concentration (which involves focusing on a single object). It is the simultaneous awareness of oneself and one's environment: a divided attention that includes both the inner and the outer.

Ouspensky describes self-remembering as the "missing link" in human psychology. Every psychological system describes consciousness (First and Second States) and higher consciousness (Third and Fourth States) but does not explain how to get from one to the other. Self-remembering is the method: the deliberate act that transforms mechanical waking state into genuine consciousness.

The practice is deceptively simple and almost impossibly difficult. The simplicity: just be aware of yourself. The difficulty: you will forget almost immediately, because the habit of identification (losing yourself in whatever you are doing or thinking or feeling) is so deep and so automatic that it reasserts itself within seconds. The entire Work consists of attempting self-remembering, failing, noticing the failure, and attempting again.

The Three Centres

Ouspensky presents the human being as a three-centred machine:

Intellectual Centre: Thinking, reasoning, comparing, analysing, planning. Located (metaphorically) in the head. Operates through words and concepts. Relatively slow. Most people over-use this centre, trying to think their way through situations that require feeling or action.

Emotional Centre: Feeling, desiring, appreciating, valuing. Located (metaphorically) in the chest. Operates through feelings and images. Much faster than the intellectual centre. Under-used by most modern people, who have been trained to distrust emotions and rely on rational analysis.

Moving/Instinctive Centre: Physical movement, habitual actions, bodily functions, sensory perception. Located (metaphorically) in the body. Operates through sensations and reflexes. The fastest of the three centres. Largely ignored in modern education, which focuses on the intellectual centre almost exclusively.

Most psychological problems arise from "wrong work of centres": using one centre where another is appropriate. Thinking about a decision that requires feeling. Feeling about a situation that requires clear thinking. Reacting physically when the situation calls for patience. The Fourth Way student learns to observe which centre is operating in each moment and to bring the appropriate centre to each situation.

Identification: The Mechanism of Sleep

Identification is Ouspensky's term for the state of being completely absorbed in whatever is happening. When you are angry, you become the anger. When you are worried, you become the worry. When you are reading an interesting book, you become the reading. In every case, the "you" (the observer, the one who could be self-remembering) disappears into the experience.

Identification is the mechanism that maintains waking sleep. As long as you are identified with your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and activities, you cannot self-remember, because self-remembering requires a separation between the observer and the observed. Identification collapses this separation: there is only the experience, with no one standing outside it to observe.

The first practical work in the Fourth Way is to begin noticing identification. Not to stop it (which is impossible by direct effort) but to notice it: "I am identified with this conversation." "I am identified with this worry." "I am identified with this pleasure." The noticing itself creates a momentary separation, a flash of self-remembering that weakens the identification slightly. Over time, these moments of noticing accumulate, and the capacity for non-identified awareness grows.

Negative Emotions: The Great Energy Waste

Ouspensky makes a sharp distinction between genuine negative emotions (appropriate responses to real situations: grief at a death, fear in genuine danger) and manufactured negative emotions (the chronic, habitual negativity that constitutes most human suffering: irritation, resentment, self-pity, jealousy, anxiety, boredom, indignation).

Manufactured negative emotions serve no purpose. They are entirely unnecessary. They consume enormous amounts of energy that could be used for self-remembering and genuine development. And they are the primary food of identification: when you are irritated, you are completely identified with the irritation, which prevents any possibility of self-remembering.

Ouspensky's practical prescription: do not express negative emotions. This does not mean suppressing them (which creates pressure) but choosing not to feed them through expression (complaining, arguing, brooding). Without expression, most negative emotions lose their energy and dissolve. With expression, they gain energy and reproduce. The Fourth Way student learns to observe negative emotions without expressing them, which gradually reduces their frequency and intensity.

Self-Observation: The Foundation

Self-observation is the Fourth Way's foundational practice. Before you can change anything about yourself, you must see what is actually there. Most people have almost no genuine self-knowledge: they believe they know themselves, but their self-image is a construction of imagination, vanity, and conditioning that bears little relationship to their actual psychological reality.

Self-observation means watching yourself as you would watch a stranger: without judgment, without justification, without attempting to change what you see. You observe your thoughts (noticing how they arise and dissolve without your control), your emotions (noticing how they are triggered by external events and internal associations), your physical habits (noticing posture, tension, gesture, movement), and your interactions with others (noticing identification, internal considering, lying, self-presentation).

The key rule: observe without trying to change. Change that comes from observation is genuine. Change that comes from effort without observation is mechanical and temporary. First see yourself as you actually are. Change will follow.

The Many I's

One of Ouspensky's most unsettling teachings: you do not have a single, unified "I." You have many "I"s, each with its own desires, opinions, and agendas, each claiming to be the whole person. The "I" that decides to diet in the morning is replaced by the "I" that eats cake in the evening. The "I" that resolves to meditate is replaced by the "I" that watches television. Each "I" makes promises the others do not keep, because each "I" is unaware of the others.

This multiplicity explains the otherwise baffling inconsistency of human behaviour. You are not "weak-willed" when you break a resolution. You are a different "I" from the one who made the resolution. The resolution-making "I" has been replaced by a cake-eating "I," and neither knows the other exists.

The Fourth Way work of self-observation gradually reveals this multiplicity. The student begins to notice that their "I" changes from moment to moment, from situation to situation. This is disconcerting but necessary: you cannot unify what you have not first seen as multiple. The goal is not to eliminate the many "I"s but to develop a permanent, observing "I" that can witness the others without being absorbed by them. This is the real self: the "I" that remembers itself.

The Fourth Way vs. In Search of the Miraculous

Who Should Read It

Students who have read In Search of the Miraculous and want to deepen specific topics. The Fourth Way provides detailed treatment of concepts that In Search introduces narratively.

Practitioners who want practical answers to practical questions. The Q&A format addresses the actual problems students encounter: "How do I deal with negative emotions?" "How do I know if I'm self-remembering or just thinking about self-remembering?" "What do I do when I can't observe myself?"

Anyone interested in a systematic, psychologically precise approach to spiritual development. The Fourth Way is one of the most detailed practical manuals ever written for the development of consciousness.

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