How can we describe a higher state of existence? The author describes how the third state of consciousness serves as a bridge to higher awareness.

Expressing the Inexpressible

Picture in your mind the most beautiful sunrise you have ever seen. Now imagine trying to explain that experience to someone who not only has been blind since birth but who is in a drug-induced stupor. Obviously, it is hopeless. Nevertheless, fully-conscious beings have been trying to do just that for millennia. 

One possibility is to give the experience names—nirvana, satori, “the peace which passeth understanding,” and so on. Another is to describe aspects of the experience using art—painting, sculpture, music, dance, etc.—or words in the form of metaphor, similes, analogy, or poetry. For its part, the Fourth Way, being a relatively intellectual approach, introduces such concepts as higher bodies, four states of consciousness, and seven levels of man, to help describe higher experiences.

Living in a Multi-Dimensional World

In the present context, the analogy that I prefer is the idea that, rather than existing in our four-dimensional world, conscious beings experience a world of six dimensions. Thus, their task of explaining six-dimensional existence to four-dimensional beings is difficult. It would be analogous to one of us trying to explain a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional being. 

Take a simple three-dimensional object, like a water glass. If one takes a vertical cross section, a glass is like the letter “U.” If one takes a horizontal cross section, it is like the letter “O.” Thus, in its two-dimensional representations, the glass is both open like a “U” and completely closed like an “O.” Nothing could be more contradictory in two dimensions or simpler in three. 

New Dimensions in the Third State

But the Fourth Way is very practical. Rather than focusing on the question of what higher states are, it focuses on the question of how to wake up. And the first step for that is to understand that one is asleep. Using Plato’s analogy of the cave, one’s life consists of looking at shadows. A school helps this awareness develop by introducing knowledge about the state of sleep. A student learns how everything happens in sleep. As Gurdjieff puts it, man is a machine which operates entirely by stimulus-response. A school teaches that this machine has four centers, false personality, true personality, and so on. More importantly, a school can give the student exercises that help him to observe these things. 

And here the school plays a trick, for observation necessarily implies divided attention. One becomes aware not only of what is observed but that something is observing. In other words, one is more conscious. One is aware of what one is doing and of the fact that one is doing it. 

The Third State of Consciousness – a Bridge

This is the beginning of what Ouspensky calls the third of state of consciousness, a state in which a man is objective about himself. In the third state, he is aware of the man whose shadow he has previously taken as reality. In this state it is possible for higher functions to develop. That is, a man can begin to see beyond the confines of the cave to the “real” world outside.

It is still a long struggle to actually walk out of the cave and live perpetually in the brilliant light of day. However, I know from personal experience that everything we have ever heard about this experience is true. Yet this is so only in the way that a drawing is a “true” representation of a three-dimensional object. 

The Color of No Thing

In the meantime, I still spend much of my time in the cave, watching the shadows. I try to be aware of the being that is making them. All the while I know that outside there is something which is literally unimaginable and inexpressible but nevertheless possible to experience in the third state of consciousness. It is analogous in wonder to seeing the trees, feeling the warmth and light of the sun, and the blue of the sky, which, after all, is literally the color of no thing.

Girard Haven is a Fourth Way author and teacher since 1974. His books are shown on http://robertearlburton.org/bibliography and available on Amazon.com. He has written other articles for the FourthWayToday, including https://fourthwaytoday.org/will-consciousness-and-being/.