Sensitivity to light distinguishes all forms of life: plant, animal, and human, too. Indeed, what the Fourth Way calls the “magnetic center” can be seen as a sensitivity to light, an impulse searching out higher energies, higher hydrogens. A way to live differently, as described by other authors featured in this issue on illumination.

Over the decades, my experience watching new people join this work has yielded new understandings. One is that people join with various levels of being. Those who stay—and develop—seem already irradiated by higher energies. They have seen these higher worlds, and the view has never left them. Seeking to affirm and share such experiences is one reason for searching for a school. Other people come out of curiosity, a click away from a Facebook link, and soon depart, under the law of accident.

In Russia in the 1990s, some of us opened centers on behalf of the Fellowship of Friends, welcoming hundreds of new people to the Fourth Way. Eventually, a core group of new students formed in each major city: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Penza, Novosibirsk, Nijni Novgorod, Petrozavodsk, and Vladivostok. These ‘inner circle’ people had several qualities in common. Awakening was pretty much first and foremost in their lives. 

Having lived in a time when the regime curtailed and inspected what people were reading and doing, now they were able to read, translate, print, and publish works by Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. Now they could openly share such ideas with friends. No longer did they need to type up rough translations of esoteric books in quadruplicate, using carbon paper. Or smuggle the carbon copy into their home to read all through a single night, before passing it on for safety’s sake. Now printed books were available, many translated and published by our first Russian students. Instead of the KGB coming into one’s home and inspecting the bookshelf, or the building’s babushka ensuring only two or three friends visited one’s apartment at a time, now large meetings could be held. 

One could begin to look for a school of awakening.

The hunger created by such constrained circumstances, the emotional impoverishment of a cracked-down society, had certain results. Magnetic centers grew powerfully. Especially among the younger generation, who yearned for freedom, a life of meaning, travel, and after the grey Soviet winter, fresh forms of beauty. 

Coming face to face with new students in Russia in these years was a revelation. All kinds of questions were asked. “Why did Ouspensky leave Gurdjieff?” (“I don’t know; I wasn’t there.”) One young man, about 20 years old, called our apartment late one evening. “Something terrible has happened,” he said. “I have forgotten to remember myself!” 

Their questions gradually coalesced into deeper subjects. How to recognize inner obstacles to the work. Techniques to absorb higher energies. How to recognize one’s type and avoid chief feature. The role of sex energy and how to use that energy correctly. Work on householder to keep a job and be responsible for oneself. (The old Russian adage was, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”) 

These students were becoming more sensitive to what awakening requires. They grew skilled at noticing higher energies when they appeared: a beautiful sunset, a painting by Rembrandt in the Hermitage, a pregnant pause from a question at one of our meetings. They were becoming more sensitive to “light.”

“What about the ray of creation?” they asked. “And the food diagram?” At a certain point, I asked a small group to study and present on the topic of the food diagram. I certainly couldn’t go on for very long about it myself.  They did so, and we all learned from their observations and connections. This group then created a center newsletter, putting down their new understandings on various topics connected to the work. Later most of them moved to California, near our school’s headquarters, and built lives and families here.

But what became deeply clear was that people join having experienced higher states, seeking more of this fine energy. This aim, being uppermost, drove them to seek kindred spirits and direction. It was a search for the light, as in Plato’s cave, and they could not return to their old habits and fears. It was an honor to be an instrument in their lives, to affirm and meet them on such a road.  

Rowena Taylor is one of the editors of FourthWayToday.org. See earlier articles by Rowena here: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/rowena/.