In the Fourth Way, separation of oneself from oneself is a key step to inner development. If we are at the mercy of our own thoughts, impulses, and emotions, we cannot step onto the path of awakening for very long. Seeing the real and unreal in ourselves requires discrimination born of this separation. 

Gurdjieff, 1923: As long as a man does not separate himself from himself he can achieve nothing, and no one can help him. To govern oneself is a very difficult thing.

Ascent and descent

The lower cannot see the higher.  To develop higher aspects of ourselves requires tools to ascend, a ladder.  When we ascend, when we awake for a moment, the higher state remains in our memory, and shows the way back to a more whole existence. 

René Daumal, Mt. Analogue: You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above.

Different worlds, different energies:
the unreal and the real

The real world exists, but what within us is real enough to experience it? Man, containing different worlds, is a mirror or microcosm of the cosmos. The world of negativity, of political polarization, of cruelty and false pretenses, the Fourth Way calls world 96. It exists below our ‘natural’ level. While world 48 is the ground of everyday actions, colorless in aspect, that carry us through our occupations and concerns, without negativity.  A still higher world exists, of nature, including our original essence. In this world 24, we are open, capable of directly experiencing people, nature, and other phenomena.

Essence is a bridge to presence and higher states

Essence absorbs what is real. It is porous and can perceive differences in energies. Part of work on oneself is to find ways to rediscover our essential nature. Even after long years of programming in personality to develop adult attitudes and occupations, we can return. 

Essence is a bridge to presence, and presence is a doorway to higher centers. 

Higher states are not perceptible to personality, not even to the deputy steward that can develop (in personality) from work in the Fourth Way. This deputy steward, born from observing I’s, helps set one’s house in order.

We study who we are, and who we are not. Instead of living a life identified with our thoughts, feelings, and body, we watch, and discriminate. We base this work on inner separation–of the observer from the rest of ourself.

Such separation serves the higher within us, while protecting against the lower parts that seek to remain asleep. 

Masks protect what is vulnerable

With experience, we can verify that false personality is relatively unreal. Even neutral aspects of personality that we require for living begin to appear as merely necessary masks.

Masks protect essence from infection, but need not be worn in safer situations.

Forging a new identity

The search for the real world, the effort to make ourselves more real, is ultimately a quest for immortality.  

To escape death means no longer validating our identity among lower worlds, no longer using negativity, no longer believing our long-held attitudes, likes and dislikes. Aligning ourselves to what is immortal, we forge a new identity. 

From a letter by Rainer Maria Rilke, in 1904:

“Immortality? I believe that nothing that is real can pass away. But I believe that many people are not real.”

Rowena Taylor is an editor of FourthWayToday.org, and has been a student of the Fourth Way for more than four decades.