The fourth way to nowhere

My father was by turns a Quaker, a Catholic and a Buddhist, my mother an atheist, and my primary school teacher believed that her dog was the reincarnation of her previous dog. Thus I grew up a natural skeptic. It is odd, therefore, that I ended up believing a large number of the unprovable fragments of an unknown teaching that is Ouspensky and Gurdfjieff's fourth way, as embellished by the leader of a modern fourth way cult.

This book is a careful critique of a whole set of beliefs related to, but not exclusive to, the fourth way path of inner development. At the same time it is a personal history of how the author, despite a modern education, got drawn into a cult, and believed (to quote the White Queen in Alice), at least 'six impossible things before breakfast.'

Those readers already familiar with the fourth way, and perhaps even members of one or other of the organisations that have sprung up in connection with it, should find the analysis in this book useful and perhaps challenging. There are indeed ideas in the fourth way worth considering, not least the idea of self-remembering, which has a lot in common with more recent movements such as mindfulness. There are other ideas which are questionable, or remain to be proven, such as the fourth state of consciousness or the idea of recurrence: Ouspensky's version of re-incarnation. No genuine seeker after truth should be deterred from asking her- or himself, "what do I really know, what is merely provisional, and what is likely to turn out to be wrong?"

This is also a plea that one aim of any spiritual or psychological practice or movement should be kindness, if humanity is to survive the various catastrophes that now threaten it, and an assertion that aspirants to self-development can arrive, with the right efforts, at a place where it is no small achievement to be content to be ordinary.