The Fourth Way: Fools, Fallacies and Lost Tracks; How the Desperate Get Lost
Aug 22, 2025
People keep getting this backwards. They cling to the fantasy that some leader, some teacher, some group is going to drag them up the mountain. As if enlightenment is Uber and they just need the right driver. That’s the first lie. Gurdjieff buried the bone deep when he said the obstacle isn’t out there—it’s not your neighbor, not your boss, not the broken economy. It’s the lies you whisper to yourself at 3 a.m., the excuses you recite like a mantra, the endless “later” that never comes. That’s the prison. And the wardens? They’re internal. You. No one else.
The Fourth Way was never meant to be a franchise. Yet the modern scene is bloated with groups, committees, weekend retreats with teachers parroting words they barely grasp. People sit in circles nodding, as if nodding is a transformation. They’re waiting for a group to do the heavy lifting. They confuse community with consciousness. It’s easier that way—substitute belonging for the brutal work of self-excavation. That’s why they stagnate. That’s why they “follow the Work” for decades and still sleepwalk through their days.
Self-Observation, Self-Awareness, Self-Remembering
Here’s where the words matter. Gurdjieff spoke of self-remembering—but too many people flatten it into a slogan without understanding its edge. Self-observation comes first: seeing the machine, cold and clinical, catching the reflexive reactions, the cheap emotions, the automatic speech. It’s a dissection without anaesthesia. Then comes self-awareness—the shock that you are not just the machine but the witness of it. The observer becomes aware of itself. That’s the first spark.
Self-remembering, though, is a different voltage. It isn’t thinking about yourself, it isn’t introspection, and it isn’t therapy-talk. It’s the sudden fact that you are here, and you know you are here. Presence doubled back on itself. Like waking up in the middle of a dream and realizing you’re dreaming. Some say it’s “remembering the real self,” the one that existed before layers of conditioning piled on top. Children had it—they lived raw, unfiltered. Not saints, not sages, but unmasked over time, which gets buried under habits, fears, borrowed identities. To remember the self is to break through the amnesia.
People confuse this with “self-awareness” because that’s the modern word. But awareness alone can float off into concepts. Remembering demands action—it means there was something lost, something forgotten, and now it returns. Not a theory. A shock. A moment of presence you can feel in your bones.
Machines in the Prison
Are we really machines? Gurdjieff said yes—not metaphor, not hyperbole. Look at your own life and watch the loops. You start a project with fire, then the energy collapses, you rationalize, you abandon, you restart. Same octave, same collapse. Anger fires, subsides, and returns tomorrow. You promised yourself you’d change—but the same reactions come back, automatic, predictable. Tell me that isn’t machinery.
But here’s the sting: the prison has no guards. There’s no cosmic warden. The gate is wide open. You’re the one who paces the cell, clutching the key in your pocket, insisting it isn’t there. That’s what it means to be asleep. A machine on autopilot, convinced it’s free.
Groups and the Lie of Belonging
So do you need a group? Gurdjieff hammered the importance of groups, yes. He said without friction, without others to mirror you, you’d fall back asleep. But let’s be honest—most groups today are embalmed corpses of what once had life. They parrot old formulas, quote G like scripture, polish rituals but forget the shock. You saw it yourself: the oldest groups in New York repeating, not creating. Nods, not breakthroughs. Followers, not fighters.
The truth is harder: you don’t need a group, you need shocks. You need something that cuts through inertia when the octave stalls. Sometimes that’s a teacher, sometimes a circle of honest mirrors. But sometimes it’s solitude. Sometimes it’s a brutal failure. Sometimes it’s the unbearable weight of seeing yourself repeat the same loop for the hundredth time. The shock can come from outside or inside—but without it, the octave collapses.
The Law of the Octave in Flesh and Blood
Every process follows the law of octaves, not as a mystical chart, but as a lived reality. You begin a practice—Do. You push through enthusiasm—Re. You settle into rhythm—Mi. And then—interval. At Mi–Fa, energy weakens. Distraction, boredom, rationalization. That’s where most people stall. They comfort themselves with talk of “waiting for a group” or “the right teacher.” They don’t see that the shock must come from their own hand.
Push past, and you hit Fa, Sol, La. Things deepen. But then again, at Si–Do, the final wall appears—resistance, doubt, sabotage. Without a major effort—without a shock—transformation never comes. You cycle back, again and again.
That’s why people live decades on spiritual treadmills. They never supplied the shocks. They let the intervals devour them.
Fools and Fallacies
The fallacy is simple: outsourcing your awakening. Believing in saviors—whether in human form or as cosmic luck. Fools join groups and trade their agency for belonging. They talk of the Work, but they refuse to bleed for it. They mistake vocabulary for vision.
Gurdjieff wasn’t sentimental. He called us machines for a reason. He wanted the insult to burn. He wanted the word to slap you awake. If you’re offended, good—it means something’s rattling inside. But if you soften it into metaphor, if you excuse it away, you’ve lost the bone he buried.
The Line of Fire
Look at the examples. Buddha didn’t sit around waiting for consensus. He cut through with the Four Noble Truths: suffering is real, craving fuels it, no savior is coming. Walk the path yourself. Jesus, stripped of churches and gold, told people the kingdom is within. He overturned tables not because of commerce but because ritual had replaced presence. “Pick up your mat and walk”—no excuses, no intermediaries.
Epictetus, a slave, said your body can be bound but your mind is yours. Marcus Aurelius, emperor, wrote in the margins of his empire that nothing external can derail your inner work unless you let it. Power or chains, it doesn’t matter. The shock must be taken, not begged for.
Same current, different tongues. Refusal to outsource awakening. Refusal to wait. Refusal to soften the truth with comforting illusions.
Digging the Bone Up
So where does this leave the so-called “Fourth Way”? Not in the groups embalmed in ritual. Not in the lectures of men who memorized G’s words but never tasted them. The real Work is raw: it’s the daily refusal to lie to yourself. That’s the excavation. That’s the bone G buried.
Self-observation is the scalpel. Self-awareness is the first shock. Self-remembering is the act of coming home, even for a breath. And the octave? That’s the battlefield where you either collapse into sleep or inject the shock that propels you upward.
Yes, you’ll need friction. But don’t romanticize groups. Friction can come from solitude, from struggle, from honesty, from failure. The only thing it can’t come from is excuse.
Conclusion: Alone, But Not Abandoned
The desperate get lost because they want to be carried. They hand over their agency to leaders, groups, rituals. They look outward when the whole Work points inward. The fools confuse following with becoming.
But here’s the naked truth: you already hold the key. You already are both the machine and the mechanic. You’re the prisoner and the gatekeeper. The shocks are everywhere if you dare to use them.
You don’t need a guru to finish the octave. You need to stop lying to yourself at the intervals. You need to walk into the shock instead of dodging it. You need to remember the self that was buried under years of habit and noise.
And if you do—even for a moment—you’ll see what all the teachers, saints, and philosophers saw: that the way isn’t handed down. It’s seized.
That’s the Fourth Way. Not a group, not a teacher, not a ritual. Just you, refusing to sell your freedom for comfort, tearing the excuses out root by root, and standing up awake—if only for one raw, blazing second at a time.
