The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff

A Call to Consciousness

Human beings live in a sleep of mechanical identification, mistaking automatic reactions for conscious life, and the first step toward awakening is the recognition of this sleep through self-observation—dividing attention between the inner and outer worlds to begin the act of self-remembering.

• Man experiences a fundamental nostalgia for Being—a longing for permanence and absoluteness—that drives the essential question ‘Who am I?’ and constitutes the first step on the way toward awakening.
  • This question cannot be answered by thought, feeling, or bodily sensation alone because each operates in isolation and from conditioning rather than direct self-knowledge.
  • The wish to be is behind all manifestations, but it is not yet a conscious impulse—it is the ego’s substitute for actual being.
• The life force in man is a single irrepressible energy that he mistakenly identifies as his own, and this identification—claiming the force as personal—cuts him off from it and creates a heavy, inert sense of ‘I.’
  • The child wants to have, the adult wants to be—but the constant desire for ‘having’ creates fear and a need for reassurance rather than genuine presence.
  • Every act, however small, is an affirmation of this force; even hanging up a coat or writing a letter expresses it, yet the force is not personal and becomes diminished when claimed as such.
• Ordinary human life is a state of sleep in which functions—thought, feeling, and body—operate mechanically and without a common direction, so that what we call ‘I’ is merely a shifting series of automatic reactions rather than a unified self.
  • Most of the time one acts without knowing it and realizes only afterward what was said or done, as though life unfolds without conscious participation.
  • The search for ‘I’ must begin with feeling the absence of ‘I’—recognizing the habitual emptiness—and seeing through the lie of always affirming a false image of the self.
• When I begin to see, I begin to love what I see.
• Self-remembering requires dividing attention in two directions simultaneously—one part remaining aware of a higher possibility, the other engaged with outer life—so that a genuine ‘I’ begins to form between these two poles.
  • Where our attention is, God is: Presence is constituted by the quality and direction of attention, not by belief or intention alone.
  • The first initiation into self-knowledge is learning to see—not simply to observe from a fixed point, but to be in direct contact with what is seen, with no separation between observer and observed.
• Conscious struggle is oriented not against identification but for Presence—the energy wasted in mechanical reactions must be reclaimed to serve the work of being, which requires both willingness to suffer and clarity about what one is struggling toward.
  • Going against a habit like eating or sitting in a certain way is not a struggle to change the habit itself but a struggle with identification, to free the energy otherwise wasted.
  • A ‘watchman’ in oneself—a stable, voluntary attention—is the only active element; everything else is passive and subject to mechanical forces.
• Man is double—bearing both a divine nature and an animal nature—and a conscious human being is one who is vigilant in both directions simultaneously, neither withdrawing into the higher nor being swallowed by the lower.
  • If he withdraws into the higher part, he becomes distant from his manifestations and can no longer evaluate them; if he slides into the animal nature, nothing resists it.
  • The sacred manifests as inner consciousness: where three forces—active, passive, and reconciling—are united, the divine is present, and the aim of all inner work is to contain and unite these three forces.

Opening to Presence

Presence is not a fixed state to be attained but a dynamic act of opening—receiving impressions of oneself consciously rather than reacting automatically—and this requires voluntary passivity, correct bodily posture, and the experience of two simultaneous currents of energy (involution and evolution) within oneself.

• The passive state of ordinary functioning means that one’s thought, feeling, and body each respond to impressions independently and from conditioning, never from vision or direct understanding of reality—leaving the deeper ‘I’ perpetually absent.
  • In a passive state all manifestations are reactions to images and ideas rather than to reality itself; one sees only forms—things and persons—never forces.
  • A more active thinking would hold itself in front of a fact without judgment or suggestion, with nothing but an urgency to know the truth—it would be like a light capable of seeing.
• Impressions are the essential food of inner development, but they are almost never received consciously because automatic reaction immediately closes off direct contact with the impression and substitutes a mental label for the living fact.
  • The moment of receiving an impression is the moment of becoming conscious: when one senses the left arm and immediately thinks ’left arm,’ the impression is lost—the thought of the thing displaces the thing itself.
  • Gurdjieff described impressions as food, but this food cannot nourish unless received consciously; without sufficient impressions of oneself, no conviction and no conscious action are possible.
• The mind is ordinarily hypnotized by its own content—held captive by the flowing current of thoughts, images, and desires linked by habit—so that attention has no freedom to turn toward a direct perception of reality.
  • Real knowing is possible only when attention is full and consciousness fills everything: then there are no distinctions—one thing is not more than another—and there is pure existence.
  • When the brain can be active, sensitive, and alive in a state of attentive immobility, a wholly different movement appears that leads to truth—something that cannot be named.
• The effort I can make with my ordinary means, the only effort that is incumbent on me, is one of voluntary passivity—a conscious effort.
• Each event in life contains a double movement—involution (descending toward manifestation) and evolution (ascending toward the source)—and one’s Presence has meaning only as the point where these two currents meet and are consciously held simultaneously.
  • One cannot be aware of both movements at once in the usual state; one is taken by one movement and ignores or opposes the other, yet both currents determine life and neither can exist without the other.
  • The ascending current has its source in the will to be—not ‘will’ in the usual sense but the ‘wish to be’—and making room for it requires genuine voluntary passivity, which is a conscious effort.
• The attitude of the body—inner and outer posture—is simultaneously the aim and the way, because correct posture allows the centers to come together, energy to circulate freely, and Presence to form as a unified whole rather than a collection of disconnected parts.
  • The position of the spine is always essential: when it is not straight, there can be no right relation between sensation and thought, or thought and feeling, and each part remains isolated.
  • This right attitude is not taken once and for all but must be renewed from moment to moment by a voluntary attention; the moment effort stops, the attitude becomes an immediate hindrance to consciousness.
• Presence is not the product of forcing or acquiring but of a movement of availability—an awakening of new force that appears only when all ordinary impulses are seen as useless and unable to relate one with real fact.
  • The quality of influence that reaches one depends on the quality of Presence, which depends on the relation of thought, feeling, and sensation—each purifying itself and functioning in concert for the same goal.
  • Coming together of the centers is the condition for something new to appear: from the Absolute, three forces unite to form a whole, and it is this coming together—this ascending movement—that must be learned.

In a Common Direction

Genuine inner work requires a free, silent thinking that does not impose categories on experience, a conscious bodily sensation that is an instrument of knowledge rather than mere physical awareness, and a purified feeling capable of direct relation—all three functioning simultaneously with the same intensity toward the single aim of knowing ‘what is.’

• The ordinary thinking mind functions as an accumulation of memory that automatically transforms every new impression into something already known, and this prevents any genuinely new perception—it must be understood and seen through, not suppressed.
  • Not knowing, discarding everything, is the highest form of thinking: the moment one truly sees that an answer would be false, the mind stays without answering and learns to see without judging, without a word.
  • A thought that is moved by associations is not free; the pathways it travels are strewn with fixed ideas and experiences that immobilize it—evidenced by the constant tensions in the head, face, and neck.
• Vigilance and meditation reveal the nature of thought as a factor for remembering only—not for direct perception—and only when one recognizes with the whole self that ‘I do not know’ can one be free of memory’s conditioning and open to direct perception.
  • Total attention is the process of meditation: the attention will not be total if one seeks an answer, because seeking an answer keeps one inside the known.
  • True thinking has no conclusion—it always begins anew—because reality is not fixed but alive, approachable only by a thought that is completely silent and free of all expectation.
• Sensation is an instrument of knowledge and contact with oneself—not merely physical awareness of the body—and developing a voluntary inner sensation of one’s energy is the first aim of work because without it there is no foundation for Presence.
  • In ordinary life nothing brings an inner sensation except a rare extreme blow like great sorrow or danger; a conscious person would have a permanent sensation of themselves and always know how they were inside.
  • The body obeys the attraction of the earth, and when it conforms to this consciously, a subtle ascending force is liberated—the two movements complement each other and allow the person to hold themselves upright in a new sense.
• Feeling is the essential instrument of knowing.
• A pure or global sensation—a sensation of the whole rather than of a part—opens one to the spiritual dimension in which spirit penetrates matter and transforms it, and this spiritualization is the goal of inner sensation work.
  • For a pure sensation to appear, the thought must be free and seeing without any image; under this vision the body lets go, and relaxation comes by itself, progressing with the clarity of seeing.
  • Gurdjieff had pupils say ‘Lord, have mercy,’ which opens to a feeling of nothingness and awakens a deeper energy—sensation is thus like an act of obedience to a Presence whose law one wishes to feel.
• Ordinary emotional life is entirely reactive—driven by self-centered preferences, fear, and avidity—and cannot be the instrument of knowing; a new feeling must appear that arises not from reaction but from direct contact with what is.
  • Feeling allows relation: a third reconciling force between the active and passive must appear—a feeling of ‘I’ turned toward a greater reality and simultaneously drawn by the world—making a conscious relation possible.
  • Gurdjieff gave the exercise ‘I am’ to work on feeling—directing ‘I’ as feeling into a limb, then ‘am’ as sensing—so that feeling is experienced as a more intense quality of sensing and pure feeling has no object.
• The appearance of a new feeling—love of being—is the force that makes conscious change possible, because only when one is dissatisfied enough to see the lack of accord between the centers does an energy appear that belongs to the act of seeing itself.
  • To be conscious of self is to be conscious of the impression being received: in the moment of this consciousness, what sees and what is seen blend into a single entity, the whole being is changed, and pure feeling is born.
  • The only force that could change something appears when the need becomes conscious—not anxiety but the clear seeing of a lack of accord between centers, a sense of urgency, a caring, a love of being.

The Work to be Present

The Fourth Way is lived through concrete daily practice—working in the quiet to find Presence and working in the activity of life to sustain it—requiring a prior decision to remember oneself at a specific moment and measuring one’s state against a higher reference rather than against one’s ordinary level.

• Understanding in the Fourth Way is not conceptual but directly proportional to one’s state of Presence: what is understood in a moment of awareness is immediately stolen by associative thinking when consciousness diminishes, so understanding must enter one’s effort as a living element.
  • It is absurd to pretend in sleep that one wishes to work while all the time dreaming that one can: the first effort is to awake, and awaking means above all to awake to oneself as one is—to see and feel the sleep, the identification.
  • The only moment from which an impetus toward real work could come is the moment of seeing oneself taken—afterward one justifies and lies, so the interval of the impression itself is decisive.
• Work in the quiet—daily inner practice in conditions free from life’s demands—is essential because only there can one come to a clear perception of an inner Presence that serves as the foundation and reference point for all subsequent work in life.
  • Each day one must give as much time as it takes to come to the certain reality of an inner Presence—returning again and again until this is known as something that cannot be doubted rather than merely a passing touch.
  • In this state one lets the functions come into Presence rather than going into them—only the attention is active, coming from all centers—and this certain reality becomes the measure of one’s capacity.
• An exercise is always a temporary aid rather than an end in itself, and it helps only at the moment when it is genuinely needed and understood; doing it passively or for others’ purposes makes it not merely useless but potentially an obstacle to further understanding.
  • Real consciousness is present only when all three parts work with the same intensity; if the center of gravity passes from head to solar plexus, this is weakness—an imaginary work that can only lead to self-deception.
  • A specific sensation exercise—sensing energy in the four limbs in sequence with counting—develops the global sensation of ‘I am’ that serves as preparation for the next phase of work.
• At the center of our work is the wish to live in a more real way.
• Work in life requires a prior conscious decision—made when one is more collected—to remember oneself at a predetermined moment and in a specific circumstance, connecting quiet practice with life practice so that each informs the other.
  • One cannot be present in just any circumstance: it is important to choose an activity that corresponds to one’s actual capacity, because if conditions are too hard they create resistance, and if too easy they provide no impulse.
  • Taking a measure of forces before a decision means knowing one’s actual capacity and anticipating resistance—including the passive ‘I’ that will say it cannot decide, which is true of it, but something else can.
• The lie at the center of ordinary life is affirming ‘I’ without having the taste of truth or reality behind it, and the struggle of all work in life is a constant effort to be free of this lie and return to the feeling of truth that is one’s actual measure.
  • My lie is affirming myself without having the taste of truth, the taste of reality: I cannot hold on to the lie and the truth simultaneously, so knowing what I am requires making room by giving up the lie.
  • One can be either an unconscious slave or a conscious servant: the difference is whether one obeys the pull of identification blindly or submits voluntarily to something recognized as higher, which is itself an act of will.
• Playing a role in life—doing what the situation requires rather than what the ego prefers—is a practice that makes inner freedom possible by separating the inner attitude of non-identification from the outer performance of function.
  • Without being strong inside, it is not possible to be strong outside; without being strong outside, one cannot be strong inside—the aim is to obtain inner freedom by doing not what one likes but what the other person or situation requires.
  • If one is present and wills to give someone a box, then ‘I’ give it and the action is conscious; if asleep, it is not really ‘I’ who gives it—the difference between a conscious and an unconscious act lies in the quality of presence behind it.

With Others

The Fourth Way cannot be practiced in isolation because certain energies can only be produced collectively, groups create conditions for higher influences inaccessible to individual effort, and the Gurdjieff Movements embody the principle of Presence in action—making the teaching kinetic and directly experiential.

• The Work is a special current sustained by a source of energy that can only be touched by a person who is whole—each individual entering the chain is responsible for its quality, and his attitude and actions either maintain or degrade the common vibration.
  • A concentration toward a higher level by a certain number of beings produces a common vibration that can become a powerful magnetic center attracting others—this is the force of monasteries, temples, and holy places.
  • The Work will not live without conscious sharing of responsibility: the life of the Work depends on each person now, not on what those who came before already accomplished.
• Others are as necessary for inner work as the teaching itself because they provide the conditions—friction, mirror, and shared intensity—that individual effort cannot generate, and the desire to work alone reflects a misunderstanding of the teaching’s requirement for confronting self-will.
  • One becomes linked with others when recognizing one’s original nature and seeing that all share the same difficulty realizing it with the whole of themselves—this recognition generates the specific energy that is the only true help between people.
  • The basis of this Work is not a special method or special conditions but opening to another order in oneself and in others: life is relation, working together, seeing things together, feeling together, living together.
• A school of the Fourth Way is organized around the creation of a permanent center of gravity distinct from the ordinary ‘I,’ and requires both understanding of principles and a discipline based on them—always doing more than what is ordinarily possible.
  • A basic principle of the school is always to do more than what one can ordinarily do: if one does merely what is possible, one stays as one is—it is necessary to do the impossible, which is the fundamental difference from ordinary life.
  • The aim of a school of the Fourth Way is to change being from man number one, two, three to man number four with a new center of gravity, and from man number four to man number five with an indivisible ‘I.’
• Real exchange in a group requires both questioner and listener to be actively present—not in a one-sided relationship of dependence—because truth emerges from the quality of mutual attention and not from the information exchanged.
  • Nobody can teach—only work: before responding to others’ questions one must take one’s own measure, and if one can respond a little to a question, it is to oneself that one is responding.
  • A false attitude in groups develops when questions and answers become external—both participants relying on knowledge—so that an event of genuine understanding fails to take place even when all the elements are present.
• The Gurdjieff Movements are a direct way of living the idea of Presence, requiring a quality of attention maintained simultaneously on several parts of the body so that a new octave of energy is produced when thought, body, and feeling are united at the same intensity.
  • We do not ‘do’ Movements—we try to understand movement itself: the body must feel the energy and follow the movement, letting it flow without thought intervening, so the movement is done under a vision that is still automatic but freer.
  • Only with a stable Presence—a second body—will one be able to do the Movements as they were intended, because the effort of relation between the centers that the Movement requires brings the energy necessary for the formation of higher bodies.

To be Centered

Unity of being requires an inner center of gravity—located in the abdomen—around which all the centers can organize themselves, and breathing is the living expression of participation in a force larger than oneself, so that developing a conscious relation to breath reveals the very movement of life passing through the organism.

• Being centered means each part of oneself renounces the pretense that it alone is the whole—thought, feeling, and body each become voluntarily passive to a finer energy—producing a circulation of force that constitutes genuine Presence.
  • Our aim is to be centered in the sense of a concentration of our energies and of finding the center of our being: from this center one can maintain right relation with all parts of oneself and follow their movements without being lost in them.
  • When concentrated in this center of gravity, a new ‘I’ appears capable of opening progressively to the higher centers—the usual ‘I’ no longer judges and evaluates, and there is more stability.
• Gurdjieff taught that within the physical body finer substances interpenetrate it and, under certain conditions of unified attention, can form an independent second body—the first feeling of unity is the beginning of this formation.
  • When there is a center of gravity for one’s functions and shocks from outside do not affect it because their vibration is slower than that of the concentration, one is at the same time open to a vivifying shock from another level that communicates a quicker vibration.
  • The first feeling of unity—of being a whole—requires a voluntary attention concentrated at the point of division of forces and held there; this depends on the feeling of ‘I,’ the feeling of Presence.
• True relaxation is not passivity but the letting go of the ego’s persistent attitudes—coming to the precise balance between tension and letting go that allows an inner form to hold itself, different from habitual tensions, integrating all parts.
  • In each tension, however small, the whole of oneself is engaged; what is difficult to understand is the attitude needed for letting go—the respect that alone allows an unconditional opening rather than demanding what is ‘owed.’
  • What one exercises is not the body or functions but the whole being: the body must be perceived from within, as the seat and base of life inseparable from the whole, and its proper state is felt as a gift of unity.
• Breathing is the fundamental movement of a living whole in which one participates—the perceptible breath is not the true breath, which is an imperceptible current that animates inhalation and exhalation and puts the body in contact with all levels of being.
  • We do not let ourselves breathe naturally: either we resist or we force the breath to be more complete, and this intervention reflects a false attitude of the ‘I’—a refusal to trust the fundamental rhythm of life.
  • The three stages of breathing practice move from becoming conscious of physical breathing and letting it be, to experiencing that the whole ‘I’ (not just the body) is breathing incorrectly, to understanding that it is not ‘I’ but the universal Being that breathes.
• Saying ‘I Am’ with the rhythm of breathing—coordinating ‘I’ with inhalation and ‘Am’ with exhalation through successive parts of the body—is a practice that develops the sensation of Presence as a whole and fills the body with the active elements of air.
  • When one feels free enough, breathing can be experienced as though this Presence were breathing—breathing very light and subtle—which is both the sign and the instrument of incarnation, the spirit taking on a definite density in matter.
  • The sequence of filling—right arm, right leg, left leg, left arm, abdomen, chest, head, whole body—is a systematic practice for developing the inner form through which higher energy can act.

Who Am I?

The question ‘Who am I?’ cannot be answered by any function of the ordinary mind because what one seeks to know is consciousness itself—the knower rather than the known—and approaching it requires passing through the recognition of ego as illusion, the dissolution of fear, and an inner silence in which the self is abandoned and reality revealed.

• The ordinary ‘I’ is an imagination—a construction of accumulated memories, beliefs, and preferences—not a real self, and all one’s actions and thoughts are motivated by the defense of this imagined ‘I’ without one’s knowing it.
  • This ferocious egotism is me, and I have to become conscious of its action: everything I do arises from this action—not as something foreign that can be put aside, but as what I am, unable to be otherwise.
  • We are not what we believe ourselves to be: blinded by imagination we overestimate ourselves and lie to ourselves all day, at every moment, throughout our lives—and only accepting this idea without preconception could allow us to see it.
• Fear is not a permanent reality but arises only when thinking fixes on past or future rather than the active present—when one is wholly present, fear does not exist, and the total attention of the present moment is the only state in which the unknown can be discovered.
  • We have never with our whole being inquired what death is: the fear of death is merely the survival impulse of the imagined ‘I’ created by our identifications, and approaching death honestly dissolves this illusion.
  • Free of fear and illusion, moment after moment we die to the known in order to enter the unknown—at each moment one dies, one lives, one loves, one is.
• The question ‘Who am I?’ approached without words, with all other thoughts in submission, opens a state of questioning without words in which an echo of the response is felt through a sensation of life—showing that the work has penetrated more deeply than the surface.
  • I penetrate the state before thinking arises, observing from where the thought ‘I’ comes—in the state of questioning, the resonance of ‘Who?’ becomes the magnet attracting all the force of perception.
  • The resonance of ‘I am’ must become more important than everything else: this is my soul itself that is here—the very substance of inner search.
• Silence is not an absence of energy but a state of the greatest energy—the creative space in which the mind is no longer an observer of the unknown but is the unknown itself—and it appears not by seeking silence but by seeing the process of thought and its conditioning.
  • The silence that appears when one sees oneself taken by illusion is revealing, but only if one does not wish for it: when the mind is very quiet, a state opens that is reality, with immense possibilities.
  • The wish to be conscious is the wish to be, and it can only be understood in silence—this is the point at which the search for consciousness becomes identical with the search for being.
• The true self—consciousness itself—is what remains when all temporary states are seen as appearances on a deeper, unchanging ground; it belongs to the Absolute, is like space (unattached, pure, infinite), and to know it is to be it.
  • The self belongs to the Absolute—I cannot exist outside the Absolute, outside the Self of the Absolute—yet I constantly consider myself as outside the Absolute and address it as though it were external to me.
  • All thinking comes from the thought ‘I,’ but when one looks within and returns to the source, the thought ‘I’ disappears, and when it disappears, the feeling ‘I am’ appears by itself—then consciousness, our true nature, is attained.

Toward a New Being

Evolution of being is not automatic but requires conscious shocks at specific intervals in the inner octave—particularly the first shock of self-remembering (passing mi to fa) and the second shock of emotional transformation (passing si to do)—and this entire process is oriented toward a cosmic purpose: producing in man the energy that serves the universe’s need for a higher level of consciousness.

• The Fourth Way demands a different kind of initiative than other paths—broad discernment that distinguishes the mechanical from the conscious—and what can be attained is proportional not to obedience but to the state of awakening and understanding.
  • The level of being is determined by what enters into one’s Presence at a given moment—the number of centers that participate and the conscious relation between them—and this level of being determines everything in one’s life, including understanding.
  • The Fourth Way is to be lived, not simply thought or believed: the ideas of Gurdjieff contain knowledge from a higher level that is in code—unless one can live and decipher the ideas, this knowledge will always be deformed.
• Change in being comes through transformation of energy—an inner process analogous to metallurgical fusion—in which friction between yes and no produces a heat that fuses scattered elements into the compound of a second body with a single, indivisible ‘I.’
  • Without the higher centers being activated, transformation cannot happen: to allow contact with them, the intensity of the lower centers must increase through the friction of conscious struggle.
  • Even without conscious effort the body produces the very fine material Gurdjieff called si 12—used by the sex center—which can also participate in a new octave within the body, saturating all cells to allow crystallization of a second body.
• The ascending octave toward consciousness passes through degrees of intensity (do through si), and at the critical interval between mi and fa, the first conscious shock—self-remembering—provides the additional force needed to continue; without this, the effort returns to its starting point.
  • At the interval mi-fa, the thinking and body alone are no longer sufficient: the whole body must voluntarily offer its participation, consciously submitting to allow the force from another level to manifest—this is decisive.
  • The second conscious shock (between si and do) is an emotional shock that changes the whole character of a person—it can only appear after sufficient sustained Presence allows the feeling to warm, purify, and transform its emotions to positive.
• The first conscious shock—coming to a collected state—enables the energy to serve different aims than when dispersed by outside influences, and the practice of returning to collectedness (a state where thought does not wander) must be repeated until it becomes second nature.
  • A collected state comes not by the thought resolving to be collected but by seeing—through the vision of dispersion and lack—a spontaneous movement of letting go and becoming conscious of what it means to be.
  • There is a specific exercise for coming to a collected state: representing that one is surrounded by an atmosphere extending about a yard, concentrating all attention to prevent it from escaping its limits, then drawing it in consciously—feeling throughout the body the echo of ‘I’ and silently saying ‘am.’
• Man’s wish to be is not merely personal but cosmic—the universe has a need for the new being that a human could become—and this realization transforms the entire meaning of inner work from self-improvement into cosmic service.
  • The Fourth Way has always existed but only within a limited circle; today it can renew the weakening link between the two levels of the cosmos—this calls for a great work beginning with establishing centers where this way is lived with others.
  • In a state of prayer a person produces a special emanation that concentrates in the atmosphere above the place where it is produced; through the exercise of breathing while thinking of Christ, Buddha, or Mohammed, one can take in and crystallize this accumulated material.

In a State of Unity

Unity of being requires a specific quality of seeing—not ordinary thought-based perception but a direct, non-reactive awareness—combined with conscious sensation as the essential bridge between the physical and higher dimensions, and both depend on an active attention that functions as the fundamental conscious force connecting inner reality with outer life.

• There is only one great life, and one can enter its experience only by first coming to unity in oneself: the two movements in a person—energy from above penetrating, and energy below dispersed—must be reconciled through an attention that can follow both simultaneously.
  • The forms and the reality are parts of a single whole existing in different dimensions—the real is not affected by the material of thinking and cannot absorb it—yet the material of thought absorbs the real and constructs illusions based on forms.
  • When centers are absolutely still without movement, the energy can pass through them and one sees what was not seen before: things appear and disappear in the void but are illuminated, and in this seeing one is no longer so taken by them.
• Seeing is an act—not a method or a direction—and the possibility of this act appears during its own occurrence and disappears when it stops; it is only in the act of seeing that a certain freedom can be found.
  • Seeing does not come from thinking but from the shock of realizing that the thinking mind cannot perceive reality—at this moment of sincerity and humility, a different vision activates that has the capacity to know.
  • The act of pure seeing is an act of transformation: when one sees a real fact without reacting, a source of energy appears that is not thought, and the attention becomes charged with a special liberated energy.
• Conscious sensation is the essential experience on the road to consciousness—the impulse to look into the depth of oneself is an indispensable step in the evolution of consciousness, and without it nothing is either certain or pure.
  • In the beginning, sensation is almost the only instrument for self-knowledge; later, consciousness will have to become deeper, more interior—but the initial step of learning voluntary inner sensation is what makes all subsequent development possible.
  • The wall of tensions is the wall of the ego: the unknown in one’s Presence provokes suggestions that give a shock to the mind, which reacts by presenting a form, and with this reaction the notion of ‘I,’ egoism, springs forth—blocking the passage of finer energy.
• The role of conscious attention is to contain the forces at play—neither taking sides nor demanding anything—so that when thought and body have the same intensity, a third seeing appears that maintains the relation and allows new energy to form.
  • Conscious attention requires a relation between the centers, but their vibrations are not of the same frequency; the energy that would ‘reconcile’ must do nothing other than contain—the moment it takes sides, it ceases containing and is degraded.
  • A right inner posture—conscious sensation throughout—must become a continual attitude in all activities of daily life: in walking, speaking, every kind of work—an attitude in which attention is active and the body consciously passive.

A Presence with its Own Life

Through sustained inner work a body of energy—a second body—can form within the physical body, sustained by the friction of conscious struggle between yes and no and nourished by voluntary suffering; this new Presence has its own density, rhythm, and life, and its formation is the central practical aim of the teaching.

• Pure sensation—burning, without object or image—is the name of God, and through it one can know one’s participation in the highest; the body is the instrument for this experience, which constitutes spiritualization in the most concrete sense.
  • We can know God only through sensation: pure sensation is the name of God—pure, burning sensation—and this is why the body is the instrument for experiencing what is highest rather than an obstacle to be overcome.
  • In a state of deep abandon and right posture where body and mind become one, sensation becomes finer as tensions dissolve—revealing a layer beyond mental forms that is never reached by usual consciousness, felt as a void empty of ego.
• A relation between the three lower centers is absolutely necessary for opening to a new energy—this new energy must then become a Presence felt as alive with its own density and rhythm—and everything in one must be subordinated to it.
  • This energy has to fill the whole body, and one must have the impression that it is from this energy that one moves; one begins to feel this Presence almost like another body—containing the physical body rather than being contained by it.
  • A force from a higher part of the mind needs to pass in the body and find a place that is free in order to act on the other centers: the slightest tension makes this impossible, and one must come to a state with no tension anywhere.
• To stay in front of one’s insufficiency—rather than escaping it—is voluntary suffering, and it is this staying that gradually intensifies energy to the point where an active force appears that makes the passive force obey.
  • The ego reasserts its dominance constantly: to stay in front is voluntary suffering—not the mechanical suffering of ordinary life which is merely a reaction of the machine, but suffering prepared by placing oneself in conditions that bring it and staying.
  • In the staying, an energy of higher quality develops, a more conscious attention; the thinking and sensation intensify through the active force of this attention, maintaining a relation between them, and a new feeling appears.
• Conscious struggle—the intentional confrontation between the ‘yes’ of a higher aspiration and the ’no’ of automatic nature—is what produces the substance needed for the second body to form, and a specific physical task undertaken against habit is the practical form this struggle takes.
  • I awake in order to be whole, to become conscious with a will to be: the second body has as its substance a finer intelligence and sensitivity, and like the physical body requires food—a substance similar to electricity produced by concentrated attention before the various movements of thinking, feeling, and body.
  • The exercise most important for opening to a different state of being—given by Gurdjieff—begins with ‘Lord, have mercy’ in the four limbs, progresses through conscious breathing with ‘I Am,’ and distributes refined energy through successive centers to fill the whole Presence.

The Essential Being

The essential being is immobile—the ground from which all movements arise and to which they return—and approaching it requires recognizing and releasing false attitudes shaped by ego, developing genuine faith (the lived certitude of going beyond ordinary ‘I’), and ultimately experiencing the death of the ordinary self as the precondition for the emergence of a real ‘I’ that participates in the eternal.

• Our essential nature is immobility—the great force of life in which all movements appear—and change in being passes through four stages: critical watching of false attitudes, trust and letting go of what impedes, consciousness of essential being, and courage to endure the formless without classifying.
  • In transformation the question is not how to achieve a more open state but how to allow it: the energy is here—our role is not to make it appear but to let it pass in us, and the more we ’try,’ the more the way is blocked.
  • The predominance of ‘I’ shows in the body: in the second stage (trust), the accent in breathing passes from inhalation to exhalation, and what was hardened is dissolved and reconstituted for the formation of the second body.
• A wholly different vibration underlies all ordinary movements—more luminous and intelligent than usual awareness—and when one’s tensions fall away in response to its influence, one becomes permeable and attuned to it, discovering that the essential effort is always consciousness of ‘I.’
  • What contains the energy is temporary, the energy is permanent: when with a pure attention as a kind of sixth sense one disengages from associations and reactions, one touches one’s essence—the current of life—and this forms a new center of gravity.
  • The experience of touching essence is what could be stable, constituting the material of the second body—this is the only work, an engagement from which can be born the substance of a higher form.
• Faith in the Fourth Way is not belief but the lived certitude of having gone beyond the limits of one’s ordinary ‘I’—a direct recognition of a reality felt through a feeling beyond usual feeling—and it cannot be transmitted but only comes through understanding.
  • Faith appears at the moment of actually recognizing that one has lived something beyond the perception of the senses, known through a feeling beyond usual feeling of oneself—it is not at one’s disposal but arises when one wishes to listen and feels the action of a deeper reality.
  • Remorse of conscience is the feeling that illuminates—bringing vision of insufficiency—and it is only with this feeling that one begins to see clearly and that voluntary suffering allows true, higher feeling to appear.
• The death of the ordinary ‘I’—seeing simultaneously the ego and the real ‘I’ so that freed attention knows one’s essential nature—is what is meant by remembering oneself, and reveals that the ordinary ‘I’ is a phantom projection of the essential rather than a real center.
  • Remembering oneself is the emotional shock that occurs when all the energies in us come into contact—emitting a creative vibration—and it means dying to oneself, to the lie of one’s imagination.
  • In returning to the source, one becomes conscious of that which arises not to fall back, that which is not born and does not die—the eternal Self: the ordinary ‘I’ is a projection of the essential, and the essential is not something separate from manifestation.

To Live the Teaching

The teaching is not a system of ideas but a life to be lived—in creative action, in the attitude of vigilance and meditation, and in the way one embodies conscience and relationship in daily existence—and the culmination of this work is a state of consciousness in which being and becoming, self and world, are experienced as a single life without before or after.

• Creative action is qualitatively different from automatic action: it is not repetition from memory but a response to the present moment alone, requiring a life force that is recognized as truth and obeyed—and it is this force, not the person, that creates.
  • In a creative action there is only one possible speed, and no other tempo can replace it: the force itself sees what has to be done and directs thought and body, creating an act containing a dynamism and intelligence that are irresistible.
  • In order to create it is necessary to be liberated by voluntary death, the death of the ego: creative vision belongs only to one who dares to look into the depths of himself as far as the void—a matrix created by the constant movement of interiorizing and manifesting.
• Meditation is not contemplation but the highest form of intelligence—intense vigilance that liberates the mind from its reactions—producing tranquillity not by seeking it but by becoming conscious of the conflict of desires, which then dissolves.
  • Understanding comes not by an effort to acquire or become, but only when the spirit is still: in this state of vigilance one does nothing but is present—the mind concentrates without boundaries in a clear observation without choice.
  • When the mind is perfectly quiet without illusions, ‘something’ comes into existence not constructed by the mind that cannot be expressed in words—this is what meditation in its proper sense produces.
• We always obey a relation—either to something higher or to the lower—and watchfulness is the real aim of all work because without inner watchfulness, whether alone or with others, one is taken by one thing or another and the possibility of a different level is lost.
  • The continual vision of what takes place in us is the beginning of crystallization, the formation of something indivisible and individual: the clearer the vision, the more alive the impression, and the greater the transformation of thought and feeling.
  • Lucidity—being totally conscious of oneself in walking, sitting, speaking—dissolves all forms of conditioning through observation that takes place across an inner space, with an attention that is clear, whole, and without limits.
• Conscience awakens not by reference to a pattern or concept but independently, in the individual, when one maintains attention at the depth where energy is entirely free—and this is expressed as the emotion of being, which is the authentic inner life.
  • A close relation between Presence and body is necessary so that from their cooperation an unknown movement appears creating a new force: without the body the Presence cannot be determined on earth, without Presence the body is only an animal.
  • Playing a role in outer life while maintaining non-identification within is like a rite or service for inner life: without being strong outside it is impossible to be strong inside, and the outer frame concentrates the force that would otherwise scatter.
• To know means to be—when there is no longer ‘I’ and ‘me’ but genuine unity—and in this state the force of consciousness is experienced as love: impersonal, like the sun, attached to nothing yet drawing everything to it, identical with the divine.
  • With consciousness, I see what is, and in the experience ‘I Am,’ I open to the divine, the infinite beyond space and time—the higher force that religions call God—and my being is Being.
  • There is no before, no after, only life itself: in this state one does not seek, does not wish, does not expect anything—there is only what ‘I am’ in this moment, knowing how and why one is here.