“It is impossible to become free from one influence without becoming subject to another. The whole thing, the whole work on oneself, consists in choosing the influence you wish to actually subject yourself, and falling under that influence.” – G. I. Gurdjieff

What brought you to read this article today ?

To work in the Fourth Way, we need to be attracted to higher states or repelled by our lower ones.

Joining a Fourth Way group can in many ways can be a welcome and emotional adventure. One can share with others who have formed ‘magnetic centers’ an appreciation for the teachings of Gurdjieff or Ouspensky. This also leads to our own verifications that we are many ‘I’s, that we cannot ‘do.’ Such work comes with a rejection of mechanical attitudes and identifications we call ‘A Influence.’ 

The Magnetic Center

This magnetic center often forms around our prior experience of higher states. It can also come from exploring the historical remnants of experiences of other spiritual traditions. Traditions that were formerly on a conscious level, linked to a conscious teacher, the Fourth Way classes as B Influence.

For our purposes here, let’s take these conscious C Influences, higher centers, energies, and states as synonymous.  In moments of presence, they are not exclusive. To split hairs over definitions can be distraction from the experience of such higher states.

In a Fourth Way group, we have the chance to make those verifications deeper. We experiment with practical work to balance our mechanics and minimize the wrong work of our lower centers. Such group work can give a taste of being under less laws than normal life (World 96 and 48). It can bring us closer to the natural order of World 24 and sanctuary for the growth of our essence.

Sharing esoteric knowledge and higher impressions with those moving away from A Influence can be a refreshing experience. It has its place. However, without guidance from a conscious source (World 12 and 6), it leads only to B Influence.

Searching the internet, one sees a plethora of discussions, some very erudite, some more subjective, of Fourth Way topics. These discussions constitute the turning in circles of pursuing B Influence as an end in itself. As Ouspensky stated nearly a century ago, a correctly formed magnetic centre will only accept C Influence.

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“It’s not the same to talk about bulls as to be in the bullring.” – Spanish proverb

In this respect it was somewhat confusing, when I first met my own teacher, to see how little he shared of the knowledge and theory of the Fourth Way. I came to recognize that he does not teach a particular exposition of B Influence but the recognition and submission to C Influence. This was what my magnetic center had actually been seeking. It has become more apparent as time passes that any real change of being must come from connecting with energies beyond the normal workings of our habitual psychology. And that no real change was possible without outside help from this higher level.

If the main purpose of a real school is to develop ‘being’ in its students and to transmit C Influence to the world of man, then leaving behind the ephemera of B Influence is good deal, as the price of admission, to having a more meaningful experience of life.

Our encounters with C Influence often provoke fear or resistance at the level of our lower centers. Our lower centers seek to degrade the experience into the comfort of blind faith, superstition, sentimentality, or else in cynical disbelief. 

Working with Conscious Influence

Still it is here, in a C influence school, that we find real work that can give real results. It provides the consistent support of other students’ insights to keep this work simple. And it keeps ourselves humble enough to start working with conscious Influence. And how to distinguish between this help and what our own imagination may conjure up in this regard?

“There is no question of faith or belief in all this. Quite the opposite, this system teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything that you see, hear and feel. Only in that way can you come to something.”  – P.D. Ouspensky

Sensing the difference between A, B, and C Influences and being responsive to their different energies, moment by moment, opens whole new areas of work for us. This effort gives the possibility to transform the suffering that we receive in separating from our repetitive mechanical reactions.

This is a living wordless work needing continuous efforts. Luckily, the consistent support available in a school with an active connection to C Influence can help us rise from our mechanics. And to reach a state where assistance is readily available, making an ever deeper  connection with higher forces.

What does it mean to be working with conscious influence?

Whenever the possibility of being present or the awareness of sleep shocks me into the third state, it seems the higher influences are available there and then. Higher forces are both the cause and experience of the higher state they engender.

Here, the nature of exercises available to us becomes more personal and the demands made to use them more immediate. Our relationship to existing tasks and exercises changes from an obligation to make a payment to the privilege of using tasks as a bridge to sustaining presence.  A connected sequence of efforts to reach presence can replace the mechanical control of lower influences, our old habitual refuge.

Here as we sail beyond the edge of our map, the work becomes an intimately personal journey in the direction of the unexpected.

The touchstone here is presence, within a state of essence rather than personality. An awareness of higher forces opens the door to the higher state that is their homeland.

I have verified that when I have a moment of presence around our teacher, I can look up and see he is waiting there in the moment in that state for us to join him.

Are you ready to do so Now?

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“When a person experiences the work of higher centers, many questions find their answers, and a person is able to recognize what is real and what is not.” – Robert Burton

Walter Scott has practiced the Fourth Way for decades and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. He runs a Facebook group for those interested in the Fourth Way: https://www.facebook.com/groups/229759281572325