Rodney Collin was a student of P.D. Ouspensky in the last decade of Ouspensky’s life. He was with Ouspensky at Lyne Place, England, at Franklin Farms, New Jersey, and lived with him until Ouspensky’s death in 1947. The following excerpts are from letters written by Rodney Collin to his friends and students in the Fourth Way, published in the 1950s.

From The Theory of Conscious Harmony, by Rodney Collin

AUGUST 9, 1955 I can’t help looking back at all those years of Ouspensky’s work between the wars as preparation. Preparation for something that was actually conceived in the end, and by virtue of which all our work and possibilities were transformed. That was the time of sowing and cultivating the soil, this is the time of harvest. Many of the methods and attitudes of the time, it seems to me, had inevitably to be cold, harsh and even in a sense negative. Such methods and attitudes now seem outdated by the very achievement which they helped to make possible.

Two very clear examples were in the teaching about negative emotions and imagination. All the emphasis was on not expressing negative emotions, and on the dangers of imagination. Probably this was all that was possible at that time. But it is extraordinary how all our people here are unanimous in feeling that the transformation of negative emotions direct into affection and understanding is now possible for us… Further, this very fundamental change of attitude has come to be linked in all our minds with the idea of ‘abandoning the system’ and ‘reconstructing everything’. In other words, with the entry of the miraculous.

The Final Days of Ouspensky

MAY 1, 1949 There is much to say about Ouspensky’s last months on earth. He returned to England in January 1947, a very ill man, but far from broken, a free one at last… He held three or four big meetings in London in which he spoke in quite a new way. ‘I abandon the System.’ And refused to hear anything about its words or theory. Forcing people to penetrate to what they really understood and wanted in their hearts. These meetings baffled some people, but made a very extraordinary impression.

Then he retired quietly to the country for the rest of the summer. He hardly spoke at all even to the people who were eating and sitting with him. …At the end he said one strange morning, ‘Now you must reconstruct everything, from the very beginning.’

He died on October 2, 1947.

Recreating and Reconstructing the Way

Abandoning and recreating seems to me the only way of keeping alive the hidden connection which lay behind the system. If one clings to the old, it fossilizes, and oneself inside. The idea of reconstruction seems to be endless. It will be different for each person according to his knowledge and capacity. Reconstruction of the knowledge… But chiefly its reconstruction inside oneself, as the controlling principle of one’s life. Which means reconstruction of one’s life itself, past, present and future, in memory and in fact. And above all, reconstruction of one’s relation with one’s teacher, and all that follows from the line of his life crossing one’s own

MAY 1, 1952 According to my understanding, the ‘system’ that Ouspensky said he abandoned in the last stage of his life was the system in In Search of the Miraculous. Or rather the language and manner of presentation, the exterior form… The laws and principles that were indicated there cannot be abandoned, because they are laws of the universe itself. But what now becomes clear is that by one stroke he saved the system from becoming dogma to us. And our understanding from becoming frozen in words and set for us. At a certain point, with much work and attention, one must master a whole system of real knowledge. Then at another point one can advance further only by abandoning that system and continuing along the road without luggage. It seems contradictory, but it is so.

Rodney Collin’s letters, published as The Theory of Conscious Harmony, is available here:
Rodney Collin – Theory of Conscious Harmony.