The Fourth Way is one of the most comprehensive statement thus far published of the ideas taught by the late P.D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky always began--as this book begins--by telling each group of new students that "The most important ideas and principles of this system do not belong to me. This is chiefly what makes them valuable, because if they belonged to me they would be like all other theories invented by ordinary minds--they would give only a subjective view of things."
Much of Ouspensky's teaching went unrecorded except in the memories of those who heard him. However, at many of Ouspensky's groups, secretaries recorded as much as they could, and in the decade after his death in 1947 a few of his pupils studied these transcripts and put verbatim extracts from them into a form suitable for publication. This book is the result of their work. (About 10,000 pages of transcripts are now in the Archives & Manuscripts Department of Yale University Library, for the use of future generations.)
One of Ouspensky's students who was present at both the first London meeting in November 1921 and the last one in July 1947 said some thirty years later: "This was a method by which certain essential truths were formulated and passed on in such a way that the real understanding of them could be reconstituted by others much later. We have all had our small share in this process--and that, maybe, is all we have been here for: 'strands in the fabric,' the future and purpose of which we shall not see."
About the Author
P.D. Ouspensky was a Russian mathematician and esotericist known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff, whom he met in Moscow in 1915. Ouspensky studied Gurdjieff's system for 10 years before traveling and studying independently across western Europe. He died in Surrey in 1947 and The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution was published shortly after his death, together with In Search of the Miraculous. Ouspensky's papers are held at Yale University Library's Archives & Manuscripts department.
