What is your first memory?  Mine was in nursery school: a teacher’s hairnet had colored glass beads that caught the light in a hallway. Their translucence, hit by the sun, transported me into a mystical state. Even now, looking at a lit chandelier, prisms of color take me back to that essential recognition of myself in that moment.

Memory can be indelible when it combines with higher states. These ‘third state’ experiences leave us with unerasable memories that stand the test of time.

The Fourth Way calls ‘impressions’ those perceptions that enter us through the various senses, whether visual, audible, or tactile. These impressions can impress themselves on us more or less deeply. When we are more receptive, more awake, they enter further to be transformed within us. Indeed, an indication of relative sleep is when we are closed off to impressions, such as being in imagination while driving and see nothing going past.

The food diagram in The Fourth Way, as laid out by Ouspensky, shows the use of impressions as a set of potential steps. The ‘first conscious shock’ is to be present to an incoming impression. This is by no means guaranteed. Yet bringing presence to the moment, looking out from one’s eyes, is the start of a more complete process that leads to higher energies.

Octaves have notes (‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’, etc.) and intervals, as musical education and the Fourth Way show us. Ascending octaves require ‘shocks’ to complete themselves. The laws we are under often prevent octaves from continuing to completion. Intervals rule the day. We make an aim, as a ‘do’ or beginning note, and then we forget the aim, due to the many ‘I’s. Indeed, we are not unified. But a shock occurring at the place of an interval carries us past the natural breaking point and enables further notes.  

Bringing presence to an incoming impression enables us to absorb and digest what we see, hear, or touch. Beyond these early notes in the octave, how do we go further? 

Transformation of suffering is called the ‘second conscious shock’ in the Fourth Way. Some call it advanced work. It is a magical opportunity to break down the results of the incoming impression into finer fuel, higher hydrogens, that teach us about the nature of reality. 

Some feel that transformation is acceptance. Say that a negative situation arises. Instead of pretending it didn’t happen, or that we didn’t deserve it (examples of ‘buffering’), we can quietly accept the situation. But this may only be a first step in the octave leading to transformation. The deepest form of transformation changes lower hydrogens circulating with us (negative emotions, or even ordinary feelings) into higher states. At this point, we learn something new. We perceive some innate truth or a glimpse of cosmic laws as a result of experiencing true transformation. Why, indeed, must things be the way they are, causing suffering? Focusing on this question in a higher state, open to perceptions of the laws behind what we experience, gives great insight.

The medieval mystic Juliana of Norwich wrote of her deep prayer to understand why evil was necessary. Finally, a revelation came, that even ‘sin’ had a place in the cosmic order. 

Thus, impressions can lead us to learn about the world around us, and our conscious reception of impressions, and transformation of our perceptions, leads us to what lies behind these things. 

A good friend, after twenty years of work in the Fourth Way, awakened more permanently in the last year. He noted that higher centers are open to all things, all impressions, rejecting nothing. Neither preference nor denial. Everything can be used; everything invites us to participate with it. As Rilke wrote:

“Being here is so much, because all that is here, this fleeting world, seems to require us and strangely concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once, everything, once and no more. And we, too, once. And never again. But this having been once, though only once, having been once on the earth, can it ever be cancelled?”

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