Three Lines of Work in a School
The following outline is from Ouspensky’s The Fourth Way:
The first line is work on oneself: self-study, study of the system, and trying to change at least the most mechanical manifestations. This is the most important line. The second line is work with other people. One cannot work by oneself; a certain friction, inconvenience and difficulty of working with other people creates the necessary shocks. The third line is work for the school, for the organization. This last line takes on different aspects for different people.
The principle of three lines is that the three octaves must go on simultaneously and parallel to one another, but they do not all begin at the same time and so, when one line reaches an interval, another line comes in to help it over, since the places of these intervals do not coincide. If a man is equally energetic on ail three lines, it leads him out of many accidental happenings.
The First Line of Work
Naturally, the first line begins first. In the first line of work you take—knowledge, ideas, help. This line concerns only yourself, it is entirely egocentric.
The Second Line of Work
On the second line one must not only take but also give—communicate knowledge and ideas, serve as an example and many other things. It concerns people in the work. So on this line one works half for oneself and half for other people.
The Third Line of Work
On the third line one must think of the work in general, about the school or the organization as a whole. One must think about what is useful, what is necessary for the school, what the school needs. So the third line concerns the whole idea of school and all the present and the future of the work.
Three Lines as Three Forces
[A] ‘school’ of the Fourth Way is an organization which introduces three forces into its work. What is important to understand is that there is a kind of secret in schoolwork. Not in the sense of something actually hidden, but something that has to be explained. The idea is this. If we take schoolwork as an ascending octave, we know that in each octave there are two intervals or gaps, between mi and fa and between si and do. To pass through these gaps without changing the character or the line of the work it is necessary to know how to fill them.
To guarantee the direction of the work in a straight line, I must work on three lines simultaneously. If I work only on one line, or on two lines, the direction will change. If I work on three lines, or three octaves, one line will help another to pass the interval by giving the necessary shock.
Ouspensky adds:
It is very important to understand this. School work uses many cosmic ideas, and three lines of work is a special arrangement to safeguard the right direction of the work and to make it successful.