In this concluding part, we shall touch on the meaning of ‘dying’ and ‘being reborn’. This cannot be a very deep description because this writer has hardly any experience of it.

By ‘dying’, Gurdjieff explained that it was dying to your old self, to recognise your own nothingness, and to abandon completely any notion of who you are. It is replaced by a new experience of being conscious and alive and being aware of this consciousness. This is being reborn. It is Real ‘I’.

Real ‘I’ just observes and notes. Everything else goes on the same way but is now on display. It is an advanced stage of work and is a wordless psychological state which may be the third state or even the fourth state. Indeed, words cannot really describe it. But the state itself is definitely recognisable to Real ‘I’ itself.

Real ‘I’ can produce ‘I’s in the machine to execute some needed action if this is necessary. In this way it controls the machine, and we can talk about real Will.

The point is that having worked on Awakening for a very long time (this varies from person to person depending on their essence and their fate, but typically it can be 10 or even 20 years), one’s true personality has reached such a maturity that a new formation is created within it.  This new formation is known as Steward.

Whereas true personality had been concerned with controlling mechanics and promoting self-remembering, Steward is designed to Focus on the present moment.  More than that, it focuses one’s entire being on presence and the effort to maintain that presence (that is, continuous self-remembering). Its response to any stimulus is to create presence. Mechanics do not interfere because Steward has the being to cut them out of the picture immediately and zoom in to presence.

The state of Presence is actually an opening up of Higher Centres.  Higher Emotional Centre is active while in the third state of consciousness, while Higher Mental Centre is also active when in the fourth state.

For this, Steward uses a special set of work-‘I’s which are single words, that symbolise complete actions, actions that have laboriously been worked on by true personality for years.  Each work-‘I’ then becomes a name for an entire psychological action. Only a few work-I’s are needed.  Our school uses 30.

It is outside the scope of this article to say what these work-‘I’s are, since it would take too long in this article to explain them. But we can say that the 30 work-‘I’s are the “sly man’s pill”  that Gurdjieff talked about when comparing the Fourth Way with the other three ways.

But even Steward can fall asleep. The state of continuous presence is not easily obtained. Countless times throughout the day Steward has to step in and create presence again, and again, and again. For this it uses a special sequence of work-‘I’s. Gradually, the periods without presence get shorter and shorter.  The aim, of course, is to have permanent presence.

Once one has reached such a condition one can be called a Conscious Being.

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