How does one develop being, in a Fourth Way School?
“Use your mentality, wake up to reality.” These are fine words from Cole Porter, but as the song goes, “I stop before I begin.” We have all verified that “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
Do We Wish to Work?
Once one has encountered the Fourth Way, coated one’s curiosity with a desire to awaken, and developed a budding magnetic center, then what? One can only read for a certain amount of time before knowledge descends into opinion and imagination. There are blogs where one might post questions, or even answer a few. However, according to Ouspensky, “The possibility of escape is only in schools, that is, with the help of C influences.” So, at some point, one must decide: do we wish to work or not? The chance to meet a school is very rare.
One can crystallize in seeking, experimenting with different groups, and dabbling one’s toes in different waters. All this without the trials of fire and water which temper our work. Trials through which one truly sees one’s level of being.
Deepening Observing ‘I’
A school has students. Not followers, not scholars. Individuals who live both within and without, simultaneously. My own life, as I type or think at this moment, is disarmingly mechanical on one level. The cogs in the cranium, the muscles in the fingers, and various feelings of frustration or satisfaction. Is there an observing ‘I’? Actually not, most of the time.
Yet a steward can emerge to replace observing ‘I’, through effort and right attitude. A steward can invoke presence. Most often, the aim to be present is an invisible compass guiding external aims. Moreover, this inner aim is calibrated according to the familiar principles of not lying, not being in imagination, and not identifying.
Developing Being – Taking Risks
The inner work is a craft long in the learning. The more one takes risks, the more one fails. And the more one learns, until the triad changes. Being emerges at the expense of security, familiarity. One leaves the known and commits oneself to the unknown.
For many in my school, this has meant major life changes. Such as finding work in another country, developing a new art form, or reviving an old one that lay fallow for years.
A real school has a real teacher, who knows what it is to have clay feet with immortal longings. A teacher has been through this stage with his own teacher. A teacher creates an environment for dissolving false personality, allowing essence to emerge. And how? Through delicately administered exercises that minimize mechanicality and educate essence.
Thus our students have planted a vineyard, built indoor and outdoor theaters, and fostered the arts in the service of a beauty that invites presence. We literally “sweat out” our personality in order to continually refine essence. This process occurs particularly in the intellectual part of the emotional center, the seat of compassion and love. Only then can help from C influence become permanent in the work of students. And so students become teachers, and builders themselves of New Men.