Fourth Way: Some Assembly Required

If there is one phrase which explains the general method of teaching the Fourth Way it would be: "Some assembly required."

If you're a Fourth Way fan then you're sure to know the metaphorical story about buying good leather and making your own shoes. If you don't, the Fourth Way is the leather and the shoes are what you get from studying and practicing the Fourth Way.

It's similar to the way a Spanish textbook is the source material and your ability to understand and speak Spanish is what you get from that source material. It's like that, with one major exception: standard method in the Fourth Way is to shred the textbook and require that the student put the textbook back together.


The reasoning behind this is that assembling the textbook is good practice to learn what the textbook teaches.

While this approach clearly doesn't apply to learning a language, it does make sense to take this approach in teaching the Fourth Way. The Fourth Way teaches an operating system for your mind. [1] Some of the functions of that operating system -- evaluating and prioritizing for example -- are developed by putting pieces of the Fourth Way into a complete picture. This has it's drawbacks, which I'll get to later.

The second rationale is that by putting together the pieces of the Fourth Way yourself, you're getting a perfect fit. This is exactly like how open source software works: you have access to the source code of the operating system and can modify it to suit your needs -- if you have the skills and tools, of course.

One drawbacks of this approach are evident even within standard Fourth Way texts. Over and over we're reminded that it's possible to spend years not having a clue what the Fourth Way is about even though at the same time it's possible to correctly recite Fourth Way principles in great detail from memory.

Given this problem and it's prevalence, don't you think that something would have been done about it? [2] My principle is "If you don't understand me, it's my fault." It's all about taking responsibility for my communication. However, the Fourth Way approach is to blame the student rather than taking responsibility for teaching the subject in a way that can be understood by those who want to understand it but don't.

The problem, in my opinion, is the lack of a proper and straightforward overview of the subject matter.

Consider what has to happen for someone to want to modify and compile their own operating system:

1. They have to know what an operating system is and what it does.
2. They must be dissatisfied with their current operating system.[3]
3. They must be dissatisfied with off-the-shelf pre-built operating systems.
4. They must already have or aquire the knowledge and skills to modify and compile their own.
5. They must have some idea of what they want their custom operating system to do differently than off-the-shelf systems. [4]

The problem I'm addressing here is at step 1. It's simply easier to learn about and later make your own operating system if you have a clear understanding of what it is.  Personally, it bugs me that the Fourth Way is the path of understanding, and yet, it obfuscates some basic and critical understandings required to walk the path.

Another drawback of this approach is that it requires a teacher present to answer questions and in-depth and open conversations among the students where they put the pieces together amongst themselves. (this is step 4) I don't know about establised offline schools, but it doesn't happen on the internet that often.

What happens (more often) on the internet is that these conversations get shot down by people who insist that those having the conversation put into practice what they know rather than yammering on about it. The flaw in this thinking is the failure to realize that these conversations are essential to learning something that can be put into practice.

So far I've outlined the method, the purpose and some of the problems. The solutions should be obvious.

In the first case, a big picture general overview of what the Fourth Way is needs to be always given and always readily available. There should never be any doubt what the Fourth Way is "about."

In the second case, just stop interrupting conversations among students. If someone wanted to go above and beyond that, I have a future post in the works which could provide some useful guidelines.

FOOTNOTES

[1] It may seem like it teaches a physical-emotional-logical operating system, however, those are domains of the operating system which is runs on the frontal cortex. This is similar to the way an operating system doesn't directly control a disk drive -- it communicates with it. The disk drive is a separate from the CPU (frontal cortex) yet integrated into the entire system (the entire person.)

[2] I think that "A Simple Explanation of Work Ideas" by Maurice Nicoll and "The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution" by P.D. Ouspensky are steps in the right direction.

 But alas!

 Nicoll jumps right into explaining without explaining what he is explaining. Instead of first giving the general idea of what an operating system is, he immediately says something like "There's this data, you see. And this data..." This kind of explanation leads to the "OK,SW?" response -- "Ooookaaay. So what?"

And Ouspensky goes right into rambling about how hard it is to learn new ideas. This would be like starting to explain what an operating system is by first saying "It's new. You probably won't get it." I'm not saying that he doesn't have a valid point, only that it's a terrible introduction.

[3] This list of steps represents the ideal steps. A lot of people who get involved in esoteric schools are at step 2 without going through step 1. So, they know they're dissatisfied but not exactly sure what they're dissatisfied with. (see the song Bittersweet Symphony.) These people make easy marks for sellers of snake oil who are more than willing to identify their problem as whatever they're selling. (And often they take it out of desperation, relieved to finally have an answer to the question "What ails me?")

[4] After that:
6. They must modify the source code and compile it.
7. They must debug it.