What is Fourth Way Wisdom Work?

One of the best ways to take a deep dive into Fourth Way work ideas and inner practices is through Maurice Nicoll's five-volume Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

This was what started me on my own Fourth Way journey.  While on a five day silent retreat in a Franciscan hermitage, I had daily contact with one of the Franciscan brothers.  Every day I came to his office to check in, and noticed this set of commentaries in his library.  I took volume two back to my own cabin, and it lilterally exploded within me.  I asked him where I could find others in my area that are working in this way, and it ultimately led me to find Cynthia Bourgeault and the Fourth Way community at Claymont where Cynthia has done a number of Fourth Way Wisdom Schools.  

While working with Fourth Way practices, I wanted to know how to integrate that Work into my own Christian framework and understanding.  Everybody kept saying, you've got to talk to Cynthia, but everytime I tried to sign up for a Wisdom School, it was already full.  In desperation, I sheepishly caught her after a talk at Shalem in Washington DC, and asked, "If I do all the grunt work and hosting, will you come to a Wisdom School at Claymont in the Washington DC area?" She graciously accepted, and I knew I was "in" because now I was the one organizing the school!

In Love is Stronger than Death, Cynthia recounts her relationship to “Rafe” — Brother Raphael Robin — the hermit monk who so profoundly influenced her life. Cynthia writes:

Like me, Rafe was fascinated by G. I. Gurdjieff, that early twentieth-century spiritual genius who had laid out a path of inner transformation frequently referred to as the "Fourth Way." When Rafe finally won permission to join an experimental Trappist community in North Carolina, he bumped into a copy of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Later, after he arrived in Colorado, someone gave him the five-volume set of Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which he read from every day, along with his Bible; these became the twin cornerstones of his spiritual work. Most of Rafe's library up at the hermitage (in addition to his Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare) consisted of books by Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff 's three most prodigious disciples, P. D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and J. G. Bennett. In a self-taught fusion of Fourth Way ideas and Christian apophatic mysticism, his deepest wish was "to have enough being to be nothing.”

Nicoll’s Commentaries are transcripts of the talks he gave to a weekly Work Group that he led in Britain from 1941 through 1953. Unlike P. D. Ouspensky’s book, his is not a systematic and ordered treatment of the Work ideas, but short commentaries that were given to meet the ongoing needs of the group he led. The Gurdjieff Society of Washington DC, encouraged by Mr. Hugh Ripman, produced a topical index to Nicoll’s commentaries.  I propose that we use that index to topically explore some of the key work ideas, such as autopilot (“man is a machine”), three-centered knowing, attention, sensation, self-observation, identification, self-remembering, external considering, conscious labor, intentional suffering, and many others.

Sign up to receive a short daily quote on many of these key work ideas from Nicoll’s Commentaries.

Please note that I may edit the quotes to be more personal and gender neutral. If you are looking up the quotes, please keep that in mind, as you may not find an exact word-for-word correspondence.