Exploring Gurdjieff's Mysteries

When ancient wisdom meets leading edge science: a conversation with “The Fourth Way.”

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The Greek-Armenian George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866–1949) was an influential mystic, philosopher and spiritual teacher. He spent much of his life traveling the world synthesizing the key teachings of the great mystery schools.

A central aspect of Gurdjieff’s teachings are known as “The Fourth Way.” It’s also the handle of the visionary mystical meme master The 4th Way (henceforth referred to as TFW), himself an expert in Gurdjieff’s work. He was gracious enough to spend some time telling me the story of Gurdjieff’s discoveries and where he thinks leading edge science is increasingly confirming them (Listen on Spotify/Apple Podcasts).

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What is the Fourth Way?

Gurdjieff’s deliberately confusing writing and controversial, trickster nature can make his work hard to penetrate. So TFW recommended

Layman Pascal

’s unusually fun and readable new book, Gurdjieff For A Time Between Worlds.¹ Pascal half-jokingly describes Gurdjieff as “a cross between Indiana Jones, the Buddha and Borat.”

Gurdjieff emphasised the importance of disciplines aimed at head, heart and body.² This brings to mind wisdom expert John Vervaeke’s ecology of wisdom practices. Vervake recommends a mutually-reinforcing mix of embodied, meditative and contemplative practices. In Vervaeke’s own case he enjoys Vipassana meditation (head), Metta/loving kindness meditation (heart) and Tai Chi (body). My own day has spontaneously evolved into a mix of reading & writing (head), Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (body) and 1:1 meetings or time with my family (heart). [Critically: all three are positive-sum. I only write about topics that readers tell me they care about, while both sparring partners and conversational partners benefit from the exchange].

Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way combines head, heart and body at the same time, while integrating them into everyday life. Although apparently not into structured “exercises” in the conventional sense, Gurdjieff gave the following illustration (via Pascal):

Pick a finger on one hand. Sense into that finger. Experience the space, weight and inner tingling — the raw nerve phenomena — inside that finger. Spend a moment just with the sensation.

Now pick a second finger. Imagine it is connected to your heart. Let it fill with emotional vulnerability. Let it be responsive to all the interpersonal circumstances and significances of your life. Just for now let that finger be your heart.

And now, while you are holding both the sensation finger and the feeling finger, select a third finger to begin tapping an arbitrary rhythm. This is your mind finger. It is deciding on a pattern and watching to make sure that pattern gets implemented. For example, 1 tap, 2 taps, 3 taps, repeat.

In terms of daily “Fourth Way” pursuits, Pascal gives the example of mowing the lawn while listening to an intellectual podcast and expressing gratitude for a beautiful day (actually, sounds like my kind of fun, try it with our conversation?).

There is a specific benefit to this kind of “Fourth Way” sensitivity that is going to become increasingly useful. Across every domain, from markets to politics to consciousness we seem to be experiencing a period of unprecedented unpredictability. We are witnessing more anomalous events than ever before. Hence traditional “experts” will be increasingly useless. We used to have a whole class of people with an intuitive ability to assess these anomalies. These Fourth Way methods can help cultivate a necessary shamanic revival as our culture descends into transitional chaos.

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The Guest House

Gurdjieff taught that most humans are not a single unified self, but a collection of different, often contradictory parts that take turns controlling our behavior. TFW thinks the “guest house” is a useful metaphor for understanding this process, inspired by the Sufi poet Rumi. Gurdjieff suggested that human beings are like a guest house, where different “selves” come and go throughout the day—impulses, emotions, habits, and thoughts all taking turns to control behavior. However, because no single master or unified presence is overseeing these guests, there’s no true owner of the house. So it becomes unruly and falls into ruin. The goal is to bring the various parts of the house back into order so the master can return.

This illustrates another intriguing resonance between Gurdjieff’s work and the cutting edge of psychology.

The Fourth Way

started his own Substack this week, where he elaborates on the connections between Gurdjieff’s methods and Internal Family Systems (IFS). Within our Leading Edge community, IFS is emerging as one of the more popular and effective modalities.³ It’s a therapeutic model that views the mind as composed of multiple sub-personalities or "parts," each with its own perspectives, emotions, and motivations. The goal is integration and personal transformation by recognizing that every part of us has a positive intention, even if its methods are misguided. TFW raises a critical distinction between both approaches. As I understand it, IFS helps you connect with your true, whole self to heal the different parts of you that are struggling. Gurdjieff’s approach, on the other hand, is about strengthening and balancing these different aspects of yourself so you can grow beyond the limits of your personality.

A potential path forward would be to use individual IFS sessions to resolve acute traumas and then transition to a continuous process during daily life. Gurdjieff’s “work” involves intentional suffering (the conscious struggle against one's mechanical habits and illusions) to develop a unified will through inner exercises, group work and self-remembering,⁴ He provocatively claimed that a robber could be deemed as more advanced than many “spiritual” people. His reasoning was that some spiritual people live in passive illusions and lack a unified sense of will. A criminal, while outwardly immoral, at least has a certain strength of purpose, decisiveness, and self-mastery.

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Gurdjieff’s Meaning of Life

As TFW relates in our conversation, Gurdjieff became so obsessed with the meaning of human life that he spent years in isolation in Central Asia practicing esoteric hypnotic techniques. TFW’s interpretation of Gurdjieff’s conclusion is that humanity fulfilled a “thermodynamic purpose” in the cosmos. We could essentially transmute energy into a higher form through the deliberate evolution of our consciousness.⁵

This once again immediately resonates with the core concept of attractor intelligence. We’ve discussed this idea at length and interviewed Dr. Ulisse Di Corpo on the theory of Syntropy and Dr. Ervin Laszlo on the theory of the holotropic attractor. It’s even resonant with The Law of One material we discussed recently.⁶ All of them revolve around the idea that we can align with a higher intelligence and evolve towards greater integration and complexity.

TFW noted that this echoes the current work of the developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin. Levin’s research on bioelectricity and morphogenesis argues that cells communicate through bioelectrical signaling. One of his wilder claims is that cancer cells are essentially dissociated from the rest of the organism’s electrical field. As a result they grow at the whole’s expense. Once returned to that field they are no longer cancerous.

This mirrors Gurdjieff’s concept of fragmented human consciousness. Just as cells must remain integrated within the body’s bioelectric field for health, a human must integrate their scattered psychological parts to achieve true awareness and self-mastery. Without this integration, individuals behave like “mechanical men,” driven by unconscious impulses, just as dissociated cancer cells operate outside the organism’s regulating intelligence. By restoring bioelectric order, Levin’s work hints at a scientific basis for Gurdjieff’s idea that deliberate effort can rewire human consciousness in a way similar to how bioelectric fields influence cellular function. In both cases, order and harmony emerges from reconnection with an underlying energetic intelligence.

TFW then links Gurdjieff’s revelations back to yet another core explanatory model of the world: Dr.

Iain McGilchrist

’s hemisphere theory. As is also discussed in TFW’s latest article, McGilchrist suggests that our dissociated left hemisphere acts in ignorance of its whole system. Gurdjieff made a closely associated distinction between what he called “Essence”and “Personality.” Essence was the innate, unconditioned self, rooted in direct experience (akin to the Right Hemisphere). Personality was the learned, conditioned self, shaped by culture and habit (Left Hemisphere). In direct resonance with McGilchrist’s “Master and His Emissary” analogy, Gurdjieff believed that Essence is the rightful master of the household, but Personality can act like an arrogant, self-important servant, believing it is in charge. [Wonderfully, last week Levin and McGilchrist discussed the significant overlap in their work, and Dr. McGilchrist now has a Substack of his own!⁷].

TFW also draws a resonant parallel to the work of cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman. Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception posits that what we perceive as reality is not an objective truth but a useful interface evolved for survival. What we perceive is more like an icon on a desktop, rather than the inner workings of the computer. We evolved to perceive only what was necessary for survival, not the full reality of existence. Gurdjieff similarly taught that ordinary perception is an illusion, shaped by conditioning and mechanical behavior rather than true awareness. Because we have now succeeded in making our daily environment safe and secure, we may be collectively transcending the stage when fitness is considerably more important than truth. With a higher sense for truth, comes a greater freedom to connect with those hidden forces more useful for long term cooperation than short-term survival. This might include a fundamentally holistic, loving and cooperative attractor intelligence.

Source: The4thWay. Obviously.

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Tying it Together

The end result of Gurdjieff’s “work” is that we become unified around a single transcendent goal.⁸ Gurdjieff was responsible for bringing the Enneagram to the modern world and TFW believes that it’s a useful tool when it comes to helping us identify what that goal actually might actually be.⁹ The Enneagram can help reveal your “Chief Feature” and your “Holy Idea” (you can take the personality test here). The Holy Idea is what the right-hemispheric Essence knows, but what the left-hemispheric Personality can distort into a “False Belief.” Below are the some examples by Enneagram type.

Source: ChatGPT

Looking at the False Beliefs, it seems they are “dissociated” in a typically left hemisphere way. The left hemisphere is fundamentally disconnected and concerned with safety, domination and control. As Levin noted, dissociated parts can grow at the expense of the organism: a classically left hemispheric trait. The false beliefs seem typically competitive rather than cooperative, which is also what you’d expect from Hoffman’s limited perceptual system: narrowly optimised for survival, not truth. Fear contracts our awareness.

The holy idea is what it looks like when left and right, personality and essence, are healthily integrated. It’s what our life feels like when we are harmoniously aligned with the Tao, or holotropic attractor. One thought that came to me in writing this was the concept of vibration. One criticism I’ve read of IFS is that people talk about their parts endlessly without ever integrating them. Perhaps aligning around a transcendent activity raises your vibration so that your dissociated parts spontaneously reintegrate. Just as a cancer cell returning to the correct energetic frequency realigns it with the whole bodily system. Love is a “high vibration”, unifying force, so does doing what we love in service of love integrate our parts?

From the little I now know about Gurdjieff, he was a flawed and complex person. But, as interpreted by an expert like TFW, there is an electrifying degree of resonance between Gurdjieff’s teachings and the most robust emerging scientific models.

There are a handful of models, ideas and thinkers that fellow “meaning nerds” have been synthesizing for the last decade or so. The fact that these ideas also emerged from Gurdjieff’s explorations of the world’s great mystery schools is a further indicator that at the very least they’re worth exploring. Listen to our conversation above to dive deeper.

You can follow The4thWay on X (recommended!), check out his YouTube channel and Substack for more detail (subscribe in the box below).

1. TFW and Layman had an excellent conversation about his book.

2. Pascal categorises them as follows:

(a) praxis & ethos oriented toward psychotechnologies such as mental concentration, pure witnessing, deep study of sacred texts, psychological investigation of the “self,” etc. Sages, concentrators, jnanis, philosophers, psychoanalysts.

(b) praxis & ethos oriented toward psychotechnologies such as prayer, surrender, heartwork, emotional archaeology, intentional gratitude, transcendental love, etc. Lovers, devotional monks, artists, performers.

(c) praxis & ethos oriented toward psychotechnologies such as hatha yoga, breathing, bodywork, physical ordeals, pain conversion, persistence in elemental intensities, tai chi, martial arts, dietary upgrade, etc. Healers, fakirs, warriors, builders.

3. See my recent piece What Woo Works?

4. “Self-Remembering”is described here.

5. See TFW’s excellent lecture Gurdjieff, AGI, and The Thermodynamic God

6. Leading Edge’s Di Corpo Interview and Laszlo Interview, Law of One interview.

7. You can watch it here and this is Iain’s Substack.

8. Despite his later trajectory, this Jordan Peterson lecture on Jacob’s Ladder discusses this idea as well as the Shamanic Revival. It remains one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve ever heard.

9. You can take the test at his recommended site here. I am apparently a 3. For a more nuanced take check out TFW’s video: The Enneagram of Personality: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Development