The Fourth Way: Gurdjieff and Ouspensky's Teaching Explained

The Fourth Way is the spiritual teaching of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c. 1866–1949), as recorded and systematised by his pupil P. D. Ouspensky and others, which holds that ordinary human beings live in a kind of waking sleep and can awaken only through deliberate "work on oneself" in daily life. Gurdjieff called it a fourth way because, unlike the paths of the fakir, the monk and the yogi, it develops body, emotions and mind together without withdrawal from the world. It survives today in Gurdjieff Foundations and independent study groups.

G. I. Gurdjieff: Life and Legend§

Gurdjieff's early life is known mostly from his own semi-autobiographical Meetings with Remarkable Men, published posthumously in 1963, which mixes memory with parable. He was born in Alexandropol in the Russian Caucasus, probably between 1866 and 1877, and grew up partly in Kars. His father was a Greek carpenter and amateur bard (an ashokh) who recited ancient epics, among them, Gurdjieff said, a version of the Gilgamesh story.

According to his account, Gurdjieff spent some two decades travelling through Central Asia, the Middle East, Egypt and Tibet with a group calling itself the "Seekers of Truth", looking for surviving schools of ancient knowledge, including a mysterious "Sarmoung Brotherhood". Historians have found no independent evidence for most of these travels, and Gurdjieff himself encouraged ambiguity, but they convey his claim that his teaching came from authentic, long-hidden traditions.

By 1912 he was in Moscow and St Petersburg teaching small groups. The Russian Revolution drove him south, through Essentuki and Tiflis (Tbilisi), where he first founded his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in 1919, then on to Constantinople and Berlin.

P. D. Ouspensky and In Search of the Miraculous§

Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878–1947), a Russian journalist and mathematician, had already published Tertium Organum (1912), a speculative work on higher dimensions and mystical consciousness, when he met Gurdjieff in Moscow in 1915. For several years he was Gurdjieff's most capable pupil and recorded the teaching with great clarity. His account, written in the 1920s and 1930s and published in 1949 as In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, remains the standard exposition of what came to be called "the Fourth Way".

Ouspensky broke with Gurdjieff in the early 1920s, believing that the teaching could be separated from the teacher, and led his own groups in London and later the United States. His posthumous The Fourth Way (1957) collects answers to students' questions.

Core Ideas of the Fourth Way§

Man as a machine and the problem of sleep§

The starting point is uncomfortable: ordinary people, Gurdjieff taught, are machines. Their thoughts, feelings and actions happen to them in reaction to external influences, and they have no permanent, unified "I", only a crowd of small "I"s that take turns. What people call waking consciousness is a form of sleep. Real will, real individuality and even a real soul are not given at birth but must be developed through effort.

Self-remembering§

The chief practice is self-remembering: a divided attention in which one is aware both of what one is observing or doing and of oneself observing or doing it. Allied practices include self-observation without judgement, non-identification with passing emotions, and not expressing negative emotions. Gurdjieff also spoke of "conscious labour and intentional suffering", the deliberate acceptance of friction as fuel for inner growth.

The three centres§

Human beings, in Gurdjieff's terminology "three-brained beings", have three centres: intellectual, emotional and moving (with the instinctive and sexual functions sometimes added). The three traditional ways each develop one centre: the fakir works on the body, the monk on the emotions, the yogi on the mind. The Fourth Way works on all three at once, in ordinary life rather than in a monastery or ashram.

The Law of Three, the Law of Seven and the enneagram§

Gurdjieff's cosmology rests on two laws. The Law of Three holds that every event requires three forces: active, passive and neutralising. The Law of Seven, or law of octaves, describes how processes develop in stages like a musical scale, with "intervals" where they deviate unless a new shock is introduced. Both are combined in the enneagram, a nine-pointed figure within a circle that Gurdjieff presented as a universal symbol. The personality typology now widely called "the Enneagram" was developed later, from the 1960s onward, by Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo, and is not part of Gurdjieff's own teaching.

The Ray of Creation§

Gurdjieff described a cosmic hierarchy, the Ray of Creation, descending from the Absolute through all worlds, galaxies, the sun and the planets to the earth and the moon. Humanity, in this picture, serves cosmic purposes it does not understand, and conscious development allows a person to escape some of the mechanical laws that govern lower levels.

The Prieuré, Movements and Beelzebub's Tales§

In 1922 Gurdjieff bought the Château du Prieuré at Fontainebleau-Avon, near Paris, and reopened his Institute there. Pupils undertook hard physical labour, cooking, and long hours of the Movements, sacred dances and exercises of great precision set to music that Gurdjieff composed with the Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann. The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield spent her last months there and died in January 1923.

After a serious car accident in 1924, Gurdjieff closed much of the Institute and turned to writing. His major work, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (published 1950), is a long, deliberately difficult allegory in which a being from another world describes the strange psychology of humanity. Later he taught in Paris, where he remained through the German occupation, and died there in 1949.

Sources of the Teaching§

Where did Gurdjieff's ideas come from? He presented them as an ancient esoteric Christianity preserved in hidden schools. Scholars have suggested many influences: Sufi practices and the dervish orders (see Sufism), Eastern Orthodox monasticism and the hesychast tradition (see Christian mysticism), Central Asian music and dance, Russian occultism, and the Theosophy that was fashionable in pre-revolutionary Russia. The biographer James Moore and the historian James Webb, among others, have traced these possibilities without settling the question.

The Work After Gurdjieff§

After Gurdjieff's death his closest pupil, Jeanne de Salzmann, organised the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York (1953) and related institutes in Paris and London, which continue to teach the Movements and study his writings. The British mathematician J. G. Bennett, the psychiatrist Maurice Nicoll, the editor A. R. Orage and Rodney Collin led or influenced further groups. Peter Brook's film Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979) brought the story to a wider audience. The Fourth Way's language of awakening, presence and work on oneself also flowed into the New Age and human-potential movements.

Frequently asked questions§

Why is it called the Fourth Way?§

Gurdjieff contrasted his approach with three traditional ways: that of the fakir, who disciplines the body; the monk, who develops faith and feeling; and the yogi, who develops the mind. The fourth way works on all three together and is followed in ordinary life rather than in retreat.

Is the personality Enneagram from Gurdjieff?§

Gurdjieff introduced the nine-pointed enneagram symbol as an image of cosmic processes. The system of nine personality types associated with it was developed later by Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo and popularised from the 1970s onward.

Did Gurdjieff and Ouspensky teach the same thing?§

Ouspensky recorded Gurdjieff's early teaching faithfully, but he broke with Gurdjieff and emphasised its psychological and intellectual side. Gurdjieff continued to stress the Movements, music and his own direct presence as a teacher, which Ouspensky believed could be dispensed with.

Sources and further reading§

• Tertium Organum — P. D. Ouspensky, 1912
• In Search of the Miraculous — P. D. Ouspensky, 1949
• Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson — G. I. Gurdjieff, 1950
• The Fourth Way — P. D. Ouspensky, 1957
• Meetings with Remarkable Men — G. I. Gurdjieff, 1963
• The Harmonious Circle — James Webb, 1980
• Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth — James Moore, 1991
• In Search of P. D. Ouspensky — Gary Lachman, 2004
• Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts — Sophia Wellbeloved, 2003