The previous article talked about the “seed”, which can, in the end, be brought to the level of a fully fledged “soul”, provided that it is nurtured in “good soil”.

As was said in that article, the seed is nothing more than a principle in the beginning. Nearly all humans contain this seed.  It is, so to say, one’s “birthright”. But the vast majority of people either do not know or do not wish to know about it. However, if you are interested in awakening, you surely have this seed.

So when one was born physically, a free gift was given one.  But the ‘gift’ comes with a proviso:  One has to work to develop this seed by putting it in “good soil”. This is called “creating a soul”.

Now good soil contains all the right nutrients for the seed to sprout. But one doesn’t have such good soil in the beginning. This has to be developed, and that takes time. There is some relatively good soil made up mostly of one’s esoteric interests and one’s personal moral understandings. These form what Gurdjieff called one’s magnetic center, which attracts teachings and texts about awakening.

It is a start, but it is not pure enough to feed the seed directly, no matter how many books one reads. Books can contain esoteric knowledge but it is always mixed with ordinary knowledge and a novice will not know the difference. Besides, words in themselves are not adequate to explain the true nature of self-remembering.

Sooner or later, one will have to find a person, a teacher, who can show one the way forward, and help one avoid the many pitfalls along the way. Only then will one gain a direction for self-remembering and to start working. A side benefit of this is that one will meet other students who are also trying to remember themselves.

From then on, working on oneself consists of work on not identifying, not inner considering, not expressing negative emotions, not lying (in the system sense), and separating from imagination. And at all times, working on these has to be  accompanied by self-remembering. In fact the whole point of these efforts is to create moments of self-remembering. The soul remembers itself (at first very weakly, but later on, as it grows, it will remember with more force).

One may start by working on one of these. At the same time, one needs to observe how one’s psychology reacts to the special efforts required to do this.  This is called self-observation. One observes the reaction, not the intent of the effort. If you are successful, you will see a (very) great resistance to the effort. For example, one will see I’s that tell one that “you are not doing it right”.

However, keep going. Everything one does at this stage is an experiment. There are no failures, only lessons. Indeed if you think it is too difficult, you are probably doing the right thing.

After a while it will become clear that the obstacles mentioned above (identification, inner considering, etc.) are all connected with each other and one will need to work on each of them at some time or other. This is progress.

At this point one can say that one is working on the Fourth Way and is creating a soul.

John Stubbs is the author of “Inner Connections”, available on Amazon.