The Fourth Way

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The Fourth Way is the name given to the teaching brought to Europe in the early twentieth century by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian who claimed to have gathered fragments of a forgotten knowledge in his travels through Central Asia and the Near East. Its followers usually call it simply the Work. Its central charge is severe: that a human being ordinarily lives in a state much like sleep, reacting mechanically and without genuine presence, and is capable of a real waking only through deliberate, demanding effort.

The name comes from a fourfold scheme. Gurdjieff taught that the traditional paths to inner development each took one part of the person as their lever — the way of the fakir disciplines the body, the way of the monk the emotions, the way of the yogi the mind. Each demands withdrawal from ordinary life. The Fourth Way, by contrast, works on all three at once and is pursued in the midst of daily existence rather than in a monastery; its practitioner was sometimes called the “sly man,” who finds in a single act what the others reach by long separate labors. The most often cited practice is “self-remembering” — a divided attention in which a person attends to an act and to the fact of doing it at the same time, held to interrupt the automatic flow of mechanical life.

Much of what is known of the teaching comes not from Gurdjieff directly but from the Russian writer Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky, who met him in 1915, taught a version of the system for decades, and set it down in a book published after both men had died. Gurdjieff’s own principal writings are dense and deliberately difficult, and the two men parted; the result is that the system reaches most readers already shaped by its transmitters. Scholars treat its claimed ancient sources with caution, since Gurdjieff named no schools and left no trail that can be checked, and much in the teaching bears the marks of its own early twentieth-century moment.

What practitioners held was that conventional psychology had mistaken the human condition — that there is no stable single self but a crowd of shifting “I”s, each speaking as though it were the whole; that what people take for free will and consciousness is mostly habit; and that a durable inner unity is not given at birth but has to be built, and can be lost. The teaching has carried unevenly, through small groups working under a teacher rather than through institutions, and it has drawn both serious students and the charge that its founder was as much a manipulator as a guide. It remains, a century on, one of the more demanding of the modern esoteric currents, and one of the least willing to flatter the condition it sets out to describe.

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