What do Fourth Way authors say about going beyond knowledge, going beyond the system, and changing the location of our sense of ‘I’?
From Views from the Real World, Gurdjieff:
Beyond this world, beyond the limits of our knowledge, there lies a world, incomprehensible for us, of noumena—a shadow, a reflection of which is the phenomenal world.
Describing what work can be done in schools, what change can come, In Search of the Miraculous, by P. D. Ouspensky:
Two years ago G. asked me whether I felt a new I inside me and I had to answer that I felt no change whatever. Now I can speak otherwise. And I can explain how the change takes place.
It does not take place at once, I mean that the change does not embrace every moment of life. All the ordinary life goes on in the ordinary way, all those very ordinary stupid small I’s, excepting perhaps a few which have already become impossible.
But if something big were to happen, something which would require the straining of every nerve, then I know that this big thing would be met not by the ordinary small I, which is now speaking, and which can be made afraid, nor by anything like it. —But by another, a big I, which nothing can frighten and which would be equal to everything that happened. I cannot describe it better. But for me it is a fact… You know my life and you know that I was not afraid of many things, both inward and outward, that people are often afraid of. But this is something different, a different taste.
What is the work that we do in a school?
Is the work done in a school the work to develop an observing ‘I’ and a steward?
Ouspensky in The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, describes two very different levels of school work:
A school, in the full sense of the term, must consist of two degrees. It must have two levels in it, one level where men No 1, 2, and 3 learn to become No. 4, and the other where men No. 4 learn to become No. 5. If a school has two levels it has more possibilities, because a double organization of this kind can give a larger variety of experience and make the work more quick and more sure.