In this concluding part, we shall touch on the meaning of ‘dying’ and ‘being reborn’. This cannot be a very deep description because this writer has hardly any experience of it. By ‘dying’, Gurdjieff explained that it was dying to your old self, to recognise your own nothingness, and to abandon completely any notion of […]

The main part of the process of the Fourth Way is the slow work on Awakening and it seems to be the heaviest of the four phases. One first has to work with the physical manifest­ations of one’s features. For example, working on negative emotions includes work on relaxing one’s facial expressions and tensions in […]

Part III mentioned that Good Soil is needed in order for the Seed to germinate and grow. One starts with what one already has: personal moral principles and understandings, together with some knowledge of the system. This is a start, but it is all mixed up with bad habits, laziness, useless reactions, misunderstandings and basically, […]

The previous article talked about the “seed”, which can, in the end, be brought to the level of a fully fledged “soul”, provided that it is nurtured in “good soil”. As was said in that article, the seed is nothing more than a principle in the beginning. Nearly all humans contain this seed.  It is, […]

As was described in the first part, Gurdjieff said that the aim of the Fourth Way is the birth and growth of a new individuality and real ‘I’. But what is this new birth actually? The system also uses other terms for this birth, such as one’s “soul”, or one’s “astral body”. Gurdjieff said that […]

Gurdjieff said that the Fourth Way is a process of personal evolution which consists of four recognisable stages. The aim, he said, is to be ‘born’, which is a rediscovery of essence, and its growth into an individuality and the beginning of real ‘I’. But he explained that, in order to be ‘born’, one must […]