INTRODUCTION

[Greg W. Goodwin]

THE FOURTH WAY
AN INTRODUCTION TO SANITY

What makes this particular theory about existence and consciousness any different than anything else? Just as a beginning this system of psychological development is useless if while studying its various aspects the reader becomes convinced of the ideas based on sheer logic and adopts the ideas as a belief. The first principle is: believe nothing. That suggestion is often followed up with “verify everything,” however a man’s verifications can be suspect as well. One minute there is “verification” but the next minute the verification has lapsed due to the attention being redirected by various interests and then in the subsequent minute the verification has been degraded by the mind from a direct understanding into a belief. Verification always involves an element of consciousness and when consciousness lapses then verification is merely a trace left in the mind and the heart. Believe nothing and be cautious about what is thought of as verification because it is human nature to want results immediately as a relief from “not knowing,” as a release from the resulting impatience and dissatisfaction of that condition. Typically the next leap is to begin imagining that what is very difficult to experience and arrive at has actually been experienced and arrived at simply because the mind believes it understands a concept. The desire to understand something quickly is usually loaded with identification and nothing good comes from the limitations of identification. This brings the narrative directly to the beginning: the understanding of the idea of identification. Belief is always based on identification which instantly negates the value of an idea by removing the possibility of actually understanding the idea free of preconception and predisposition. To truly understand requires a state free of identification. Even if there is a discovery of the right ideas then identification makes them wrong. During the process of trying to intellectually and emotionally understand a complicated concept, while investing the necessity of concentrated attention, there is a natural but undesirable tendency to accept the demanding subject as proven based entirely on the persuasion of logic and the amount of devoted effort. Genuine and profound truth nearly always requires an exceptional ingredient far more intelligent than mere logic in order to fully comprehend. The necessity of the expenditure of intelligence in order to fathom something difficult to grasp does not prove in and of itself that it is a viable proposition. Ultimately this system of psychological evolution is about developing the conscious state and the advanced level of being required to experience existence free of identification.

The typical human condition of psychological identification is difficult to define. There is far more to it than any single aspect, but initially identification can be defined as viewing life through the limited perceptions of an artificial and egocentric personality. The personality is artificial in the sense that everything in it has been borrowed from everyone and everything throughout its experience in life. The language, the moral values, the worldview and the numerous habitual mannerisms and figures of speech belie many underlying adopted opinions and all absorbed indiscriminately from the chaos of the surroundings. The personality is artificial due to the tendency to imitate what the person in question finds appealing in others and in the world in general and then simply replicate it. It is egocentric in the sense that rarely does each personality strive to understand a point of view outside its own jumbled, fallacious belief-system. Peering out from all this adopted “psychology” is the illusion of a single mind, one that is continuously experiencing itself as consistent and reasonable and one based at all times on a presumed foolproof sense of fair judgment. Built within the personality is a structure of psychological compartmentalization that enables the person as a practical matter to contradict himself nearly moment to moment, certainly from one hour to the next and at the very least behave somewhat erratically in the view of others while justifying the impetuous unpredictability as “resourceful flexibility.” Supposing himself to be the centralized perceiver always reliably rational even whilst complaining and feeling dissatisfied with many aspects of those around him and the circumstances in general, there is virtually no memory of the frequent outbursts of bad temper and displays of tantrum even a few hours later when there is a return to what passes for routine calm. This compartmentalization allows the blame for irritation to be projected onto everyone and everything else while the personality in question feels sincerely free of all responsibility for its own negativity. There is much more to the condition of identification, but this is the beginning of defining the concept. Identification creates the state of mind within those that are identified wherein they are acutely sensitive to the identification of everyone else and utterly blind to their own identification.

Once there is some understanding about what the “problem” is, once there is recognition of the validity behind the theory of identification, then the Fourth Way system purports to offer methods to escape this condition. The first escape is from the involuntary personality that rules the attention and “consciousness” of each modern human living in the typical social conditions of the modern world. This escape begins with the observation and recognition of the many psychological habits that make up what a man mistakes as his mind while at the same time he struggles to develop a resistance to these psychological habits. The first habit that has to be recognized as unnecessary and diseased and therefore requires experimental resistance by means of a certain psychological technique is the expression of negative emotions.

If a man is in a higher state of consciousness then why would he express disappointment, much less outrage, at anything that happened? In a higher state one has to assume that it is possible to actually see why things happen the way they do and how things could not have happened in any other way. So the non-expression of negativity is a touchstone for a higher state because it indicates that a conscious man can witness reality and accept it by understanding directly that there is no alternative. In a higher state of consciousness there is no one to blame for the unpleasant events in life because it is clear that people are living in psychological sleep and it is understood how difficult and in most cases impossible it is for anyone to wake up.

It makes sense that those identified with their particular agendas in life, usually directly connected to instinctive wants and emotional desires, are more than a little dismayed when they do not get what they want, when the world fails to cooperate with their wishes. A man expressing negativity is a man living in a frustrated ego and in order to escape the thousand frustrations of the ego he has to raise his consciousness. Here is the Catch 22 of the condition, in order to attain a higher state at will it is necessary to give up the expression of negativity first because expressing frustration depletes the energy needed for a connection to the centers of higher consciousness. A man has to separate from this frustrated ego and turn the energy that the ego typically uses to manifest its disapproval and disappointment into a moment of recognition of a more valid perspective where the laws that operate the world are seen as more legitimate than the laws that operate what a petty personality wants.

Anyone in their right mind understands that a state in which there is no resistance against expressing negative emotions as the world inevitably refuses to conform to expectations is existence in a compromised condition of ‘no will’. An observer in his right mind will understand that the intelligent redirection of energetic frustration into “self-remembering,” that is, to simply watch oneself and the world rather than react predictably will within seconds result in recognition of the possibility of turning what appears to be a bad situation into an advantage if possible. It will be seen how to find a solution to the difficulty because suddenly there is a higher state due to concentrating the attention rather than losing attention to an over-emotional reaction. Expressing negative emotions is a sure sign that a human being is wasting the time allocated by life in a state of witlessness while complaining about what is useless to complain about.

The effort of non-expression of negativity depends entirely on correct motivation. Anyone avoiding expressing negativity because he knows everyone will judge him for being out of control is wasting his time with this effort. Those imitating an enforced appearance of “pleasantness” out of peer pressure are wasting their time. Forced non-expression of negativity actually results in less consciousness as those under such force are subject to coercion and fear rather than their own initiative. The only good motivation for conserving energy through the control of negativity is the payoff when there is a moment of transformation of the energy in question into reality, when the higher consciousness transcends the personality. This is certainly not for everyone and in fact any element of non-voluntary compliance will turn the effort into its opposite. As it is with any difficult expedition, a climb with increasing steepness puts more strain on the explorer due to the fact that the elation only finally comes once he’s reached the top and actually sees what the view is. Those that have been to the top never forget it and they never forget the need to get back up there. It is the higher portion of the heart that wants the will to be able to turn anger into understanding. That is conscience. Consciousness only gives a man power over himself. The wish for power over others and control of events, other than influencing them with a finer example of human behavior, is an impulse that comes out of the ambition of the instinctive center.

The expression of a negative emotion is what happens in an interval in a descending progression of events instead of the possible shock of self-remembering, which could facilitate an ascending progression. One way to think about negative emotions is that each one of them is a failure at a point where the conscious resistance of the negative emotion and the transformation of the impulse to express it could result in a better state of awareness which might improve the general quality of a man’s life. How many relationships, friendships and opportunities in a person’s life failed because there were uninhibited negative emotions at a crucial point? Expressing negative emotions in a routine and inattentive way significantly decreases the quality of life by missing the opportunities for the creation of intelligent shocks at critical points and the occasional more violent explosions of negativity destroy many possibilities altogether.

Ouspensky while illuminating this system of psychological evolution through the use of diagrams makes it clear that the reason the “wrong work” of the lower functions has to be stopped through effort is that it is usurping the energy needed to develop a connection to the higher centers and that a man has to build an intentional link of will between the lower centers of the machine and the higher centers of consciousness that have been disconnected through corrupt socialization, through the development of a false personality.

“The process of transforming the substances which enter the organism into finer ones is governed by the law of octaves.
“Let us take the human organism in the form of a three-story factory. The upper floor of this factory consists of a man’s head; the middle floor, of the chest; and the lower, of the stomach, back, and the lower part of the body.” --In Search of the Miraculous

The third food, the term the Fourth Way uses to refer to the reflected light perceived by the eyes, the sounds heard through the ears, possibly the more refined sensations that come into our awareness through the skin, through the nerve plexuses and other organs of the physical body, possibly even the associations and intentional thoughts and feelings produced internally within the centers, all feed the psychological side of the machine. The third food stimulates and nourishes the emotional center, it energizes the emotional story in general, it creates associations in the instinctive-moving story and offers the possibility for transformation of incoming impressions into the finer and higher thoughts, feelings and sensations perceived by and produced in the intellectual story.

One of the reasons the possibility for the transformation of impressions into the finer and higher psychic activity of the intellectual story is so seldom realized is that the eliminative function used to rid waste products from the psychology is inordinately active in modern citizens. The eliminative function is so active that undigested impressions, what would otherwise serve as psychological fuel, are eliminated along with the waste produced as a residue by the basic processes in the psychology.

Modern personalities eject much of the finer energies that enter their awareness before there is a chance for digestion. The instinctive-moving story of the emotional center is for the most part the over-used function for psychological elimination. Chiefly this elimination takes place through the process of directionless, aimless and pointless talking and emoting.

It is unnecessary emotionally motivated talk that creates much of the negativity in the environment. Such talk is under the law of accident. Words are exchanged without aim, without the use of the intellectual story of the factory, and invariably misunderstandings arise that lead to conflict. An aimless octave is eventually a descending octave; when friends begin to talk from the instinctive-moving story of the machine then sooner or later the discussion will falter and end up on a point of disagreement. From there the intensity of the words will accelerate into the negative side of the emotional story.

Asking people to cease unnecessary talk is precisely like asking them to remember themselves, because that is what it would take to accomplish such a feat. People exist in their instinctive-moving story for the most part and therefore have no possibility of digesting and refining impressions enough to energize attention at the level of the intellectual story; they have to talk to rid themselves of the unused material coming in through their centers that they can find no higher intelligent use for. During rambling discussion eventually one or another person is accidentally offended and the expenditure of energy accelerates to the emotional story, the realm of hostile judgments.

For those habitually existing in the instinctive-moving story most of their activity is simply stimulus-response. An individual hears or reads some words, mixes them with his emotional accounts against the speaker or writer, or against the expressed thought and ideas, or he merely mixes what is said with associative material already in his centers and then replies with an opposing argument or a tangential elaboration using nothing more deliberate to guide his thoughts than the initiative of the formatory apparatus (the automatic reaction of related thoughts).

Average humans do not remember themselves because they don’t make an effort to create an intentional space between the automatic reaction of their lower centers and an intelligently calculated response formulated by their intellectual parts of centers. The creation of such a pause for the intervention of deliberate intelligence over ‘gut reaction’ is the first degree of self-remembering, it is the very first effort of separation of the higher from the lower that is required for the generation of self-awareness. One of the reasons average citizens fail to create such a psychological space for separation is because they really do not possess any vital information to relay to others. The casual protocol is such that one personality expresses an opinion just to take space in the awkward silence created by inner considering and then the other personalities respond based solely on the advancement or the defense of the world-view they inadvertently borrowed from other personalities along the way.

It can be readily observed that typical citizens do not remember themselves and therefore possess no inherent state of self-consciousness; this fact can be easily and correctly assessed by the observed detail that the majority of speakers never express themselves from the quality of the intellectual story. Expressions from most speakers are the product of the instinctive-moving story and come filtered through an identifiable false personality, through an easily recognizable artificial ego installed in them as an unconscious habit during the process of socializing with other people that also had and have no idea of the necessity for inner psychological work in order to produce anything of quality.

Such a psychological artifact, an artificial ego, an involuntary personality that is unaware of its own reactions much less the origin of those reactions, is something that is usually made passive during the most basic phase of inner psychological work and without such internal work involuntary personality animates men’s reactions entirely. This perceptibly self-satisfied functioning from the mentality of personality contains a discernable lack of conscience. The indicator of false personality is a certain underlying pride or conceit around the content and the expression of the various opinions the individual in question has accumulated. This is what makes this level of personality artificial; it borrows its mannerisms, its figures of speech, what it says and why it says it from those individuals that made a strong impression on it throughout its life. The precise person and the precise moment the opinion or mannerism was adopted through imitation is long forgotten, but the relic is left in the active personality of the speaker.

Any manifestation of conscience within the circumstances of this typical psychological condition would probably be initially only a vague desire originating from the distance of the intellectual story of the emotions that wishes to discontinue the ongoing externalizing activity of the instinctive-moving story as it compulsively usurps and eliminates all the necessary energy required for the generation of intelligence. Conscience would question the sentiment of self-satisfaction produced when repeating the imitated attitudes acquired from others while pretending that they are original.

Human beings have the possibility of intelligence and the possibility itself seeks to be fulfilled, each must to some degree willfully ignore and resist this inherent aspiration for quality in order to continue with the wrong work of the instinctive-moving story as it eliminates accumulated impressions from the centers and avoids experiencing the genuine sensation of human contact. Each has to choose to feed the gratification of conceit when employing an artificial social appliance that allows the expression of superficial emotion as a defensive fortification between casually interacting fabrications of self-esteem.

The first symptom of personality (as opposed to a less contrived and therefore freer psychological nature existing within the essence of humans) is that personality automatically assumes that it is somehow in the majority and even presumes to speak for the majority. There is a kind of automatic crowd emotion built into the species that insists that together-we-are-always-right. That there is a cohesive “we” that agrees on anything when a subject is examined in depth and detail is a hallucination, nevertheless, the average person lives under the assumption of such a hallucination. Before there is any possibility of “consciousness” of any significant degree it is necessary to rid oneself of the inborn tendency to ignore reality and agree with the delusional assumptions of the majority.

In one university experiment there was arranged a panel of students with the task to view a length of line on a sheet and then choose from several other lines of varying lengths the one that was identical in length to the sample line. What was not explained is that only one of the six or so students was being tested, the others were in on the experiment. For a few samples all the subjects chose the obviously correct length. As the experiment progressed the insiders began to choose the wrong line length and the subject of the experiment, situated fifth in line and now feeling the group pressure, began to doubt his own perceptions eventually just ignoring what his own eyes were telling him and voting with the majority for the wrong length of line. This phenomenon was repeated with many test subjects. The lesson of such experiments is the necessity to loosen the impulse to follow the dictates of popular sentimentality over often unwelcome practicality, to choose a lie over the truth because it would be inconvenient to stand out as a lone dissenter in favor of recognizing reality. The superficial emotional pressure to agree as a group is an unconscious force on all but those able to remove themselves from the group mentality through self-remembering. It is bizarre to watch people involved in various spiritual groups purporting to seek the benefits of higher consciousness while actually functioning from the lowest function of the emotional capacity. A group reality is established through one doctrine or another and the majority gradually accepts the belief-system, forcing the dissenters out of the emotional glow of welcoming solidarity. Under such a mentality groups tout their idea of “consciousness” as a readily accessible popular form of entertainment available to each and every human “always and everywhere.” Belief is an acceptance of ideas without the necessity of any demonstrative challengeable proof. Belief is usually a group identification. As unpopular as it may seem, the truth is that there is a bit more “denying force” to developing higher consciousness than meets either the eye or the crowd philosophy that all that is ever required to do the improbable is overwhelmingly positive enthusiasm.

What is relevant to the subject of identification is the very real fact that people in general are ruled by the ignorant perceptions inured into the lowest capacity of their emotional awareness. Basically people are ruled by the instinctive base of the emotional function. Base sentimentality and the crudest sense of justice that is imaginable is what operate “civilized” human beings through most of their lives. Why? For one thing maybe 70% or so of the population is born centered in one of the rudimentary functions of the lower organic devises of perception just to start with so most people are in fact born non-intellectual. It is in their essence to see the social side of life through the common and superficial abbreviations of insensitivity that operate the ignorantly herd-oriented majority. The lesson derived from the panel of college students offering their vote on which line is equal in length is that the herd mentality in people refuses to accept their own perceptions and instead adopts the perceptions of the mainstream. The rudimentary functioning of the emotional perceptions want beyond anything else in life to be accepted and liked and to those ends it will watch the emotional cues coming from everyone else and agree with them regardless what the actual reality is. Being part of the collective illusion of superficial emotional agreement is far more important to most people than any actual facts.

One of the reasons nature experimentally developed the rudimentary level of the emotional function in mammals is the increased life expectancy of off-spring when they are under the protection of parents actively feeling the emotion of adorability that arises when they look at their helpless and innocent little bundles of flesh. There is no need for the fickle instinctive calculation that reasons if the species is to continue then these little replicates need to survive, too many selfish desires can easily override that instinct as is seen in nature where fish and reptiles routinely abandon their young and even cannibalize them. For mammals, particularly humans, the feeling of “love” so overwhelms the mother that she would willingly die that her offspring could survive. Of course this is only true in average cases; there are aberrant individuals that do not feel the instinctive emotion of protective motherhood. Outside of the original biological design of protective motherhood the base level of emotional perception serves in the lives of people as a very ineffective surrogate conscience. It “feels sorry” for those it perceives as somehow “disadvantaged.” In the interactions of the perceived social order for example, the perception from baseline emotions is a collective empathy that only ever offers a show of ‘compassion’ without the inconvenient follow-through of actually making a contribution or an improvement. Rather than the conscience-based need to help there is the appearance of caring, doing more good for the reputation of the compassionate than the one in need of compassion. Compassion without action is a particularly vile form of emotional self-gratification in that there is a self-righteous self-congratulation for feeling for another while not actually having to take any responsibility for the emotion. Emotional displays purely for the benefit of making a general show of “humanity” in the effort to be recognized and approved of exemplify one of the many shades of identification that originate in personality and help offer support to the illusion that there are higher values animating the actions of people.

Behind the glad handedness and conditional openness of the group identification, one of the traits of the lower emotions in people is the intolerance toward those that do not seem to be uniform in either appearance or temperament. Typically the majority turns against such individuals with enough vengeance to cause them to conform or retreat. The demandingly habitual personality that was forged out of the social pressure of falsity, the defensive personality that began to develop when the teasing of the playground attacked anything that stood out as dissimilar to the dictatorial severity of unoriginal mediocrity, can never know itself much less comprehend anything original in nature because it is itself a synthetic construction contained in an artificial compartment of the mind. It can never see beyond the false world of limited and foreshortened emotional horizons where the power of brutal judgment and the need to belong within the protective cult of the common denominator of a presumed crowd agreement reigns. Only if suddenly struck by the luck of some emancipating adversity will a man be made to see himself trapped with everyone else in this stale atmosphere created initially from pushes and shoves, from sneers, from rejections and the subsequent defensive clumping of similar creatures wearing and expressing the same exterior markings. Otherwise there is no possibility of ever stepping clear of the enforced fascination that is caught forever on the words issuing from the minds of collective traders so invested in one another that they imagine there exists no landscape beyond the range of their voices. As long as a socialized product of the opinion of everyone else imagines that it is always of the same voice, always of the same mind, always the same reliable character then it will never see outside itself into a mind of higher discernment.

“The ordinary mind, refracted by the countless and contradictory promptings of different sides of human nature, must reflect the world as manifold and confused as is man himself. A unity, a pattern, an all-embracing meaning - if it exists - could only be discerned or experienced by a different kind of mind, in a different state of consciousness. It would only be realisable by a mind which had itself become unified.
“What unity, for example, could be perceived by even the most brilliant physicist, philosopher or theologian, while he still trips absent-mindedly over a stool, becomes angry at being short-changed, fails to notice when he irritates his wife, and in general remains subject to the daily trivial blindness of the ordinary mind, working with its customary absence of awareness? Any unity he reaches in such a state can exist only in his imagination.” –Rodney Collin

Another central subject of identification is the question of whether there is life after death. It’s a simple thing for the brain to produce this question, but is the thinking brain really alive? Is the sophisticated functioning of the intellectual mind really something more substantially existent than a mere wonder-computer made out of meat? The question is not actually whether there is life after death, but rather the question is if there is actually life during life. Is the rambling and wandering of the thoughts, emotions, sensations and motions something produced by actual “life,’ or is it no more “alive” than the nightly migrations of cockroaches across the kitchen floor in search of what intrigues cockroaches? Are insects really alive? They are biologically animated, but is that actually “life” in the sense that it is something so significant that it exists eternally? Are typical people really more significant than insects? There are nearing seven billion human beings on earth at one time as it is, what does heaven look like with all the souls from history crowded into one ultra-dimension? Does it resemble the chaos and inequity of life on earth? Are some souls wealthy, sitting in ethereal casinos gambling over the ridiculous exploits of the humans below while other souls are living in shacks chasing off the souls of immortal roaches? Never mind what intrigues insects, what intrigues people? One thing that intrigues them are questions about security. Is the body safe and secure forever? Obviously not. Well then what about this personality that I call “me?” Will it still be asking hopeless questions even after the body shrivels and returns to dust? Will this relatively superficial and utterly naïve and conceited narrator operating through the voices of the brain still be situated in a location somewhere debating with other more or less amateurish “philosophers” expressing opinions about life beyond the grave even as life on earth flows away without experiencing much more than shallow thoughts and trivial feelings? The question is not: “Is there life after death and what’s it like?” The question is rather: “What is real life like on earth? Are we really alive here?” Hell is being so ignorant that we do not even realize how ignorant we are, so that it feels like heaven.

Greg W. Goodwin