What would make for a scientific study of the Fourth Way? A conversation about what science is. its method, and its philosophy might be a good place to being. I remember being presented with the idea that I should believe nothing that I have not verified in my own experience, and especially nothing that I was told by that teacher who had me accept this as an agreement when I began to study with him. This was my first learning in the oral tradition of the 4th Way. In my observation though, this understanding is not the place that people listen and speak from in conversations about the ideas, and often instead the conversations seem to to be for the building and maintenance of a cultural consensus of belief based on interpretations of literature and lineages of teachers. Its interesting that Ouspensky in his last days said during one of the last six group meetings reported in the book Further Meetings suggested abandoning the system and starting again from the beginning. I wonder what he might say that he did not say, and if he were to have begun again, how he might have undertaken the work and his role in it. We live in different times. It is 100 years since Ouspensky published Tertium Organum and nearly 100 years since the times reported about Gurdjieff and his entry on the scene as a public figure. We are not living in those times now. The 20th Century ended 14 years ago and we living into the 21st century and it is well underway. So in our times, how do engage in this conversation, and how do we engage in it in a way that connects us to the future we are living into, while mostly remembering the past, because a scientific study of these ideas will take us into the emerging 21st century contexts, and we must leave the familiar shores where are limits and edges are to journey to where we are clearly going, because we cannot go back to comfort that nostalgia for the past provides.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 12:04:18 +0000
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