The History of the Fourth Way: School Realized

The Fourth Way is a line of spiritual teaching that was initiated by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff in Russia in 1912. Gurdjieff initiated a lineage of Fourth Way teachers that has continued down to the present day. It is this lineage that our history traces. It includes the teachings of George Gurdjieff, Peter Demian Ouspensky, Rodney Collin, Alexander Francis Horn, and Robert Earl Burton. The measure of a Fourth Way teaching is not how many followers it attracts, or how many publications it generates, or how many successful theater or dance companies it produces. It can succeed in all these things and still fail. The measure of the teaching is given from an objective level that is beyond human understanding. The teacher was originally tasked from this level, and that task is a cross that they bear, for their understanding will always be partially human. Evidence of the Fourth Way teachers having been tasked in this way, is given by the fact that each one of them made efforts beyond any human expectation until the last day of their respective lives. A problem in writing about the Fourth Way teachings is that the core vision of each group was not carefully recorded. This was not something intended by the teachers, it just happened. The original vision was impressed on the inner circle, but the inner circle, for the most part, did not write. They were challenged just to support their teacher and to do their own Work. The teachers themselves wrote teaching material, but they did not write the story of their own teachings. The outer circle wrote, but wrote in a journalistic way, without the guidance needed to produce a clear record of the vision level. Because of all this, we have a work of reconstruction before us. In sum, whatever the nature of the source material, or the manner of presenting it, or the conventions used, the overriding aim of this book is to salvage the essential vision of each of these teachings and to interpret their history in light of it.