Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky 1878-1947.

Ouspensky is widely regarded as the other founding father to the development of the system of the fourth way. Born in Moscow to an artistic and intellectual family, Ouspensky refused to follow conventional academic training. Early in his youth, Ouspensky was fascinated by his exceptionally good memory and claimed to be able to recall events before even the age of two, an experience that later sparked his interest in the Nietzschean concept of the eternal recurrence and reincarnation.

The concept of eternal return, or the eternal recurrence stems from Ancient Greece thought, and was most prominently associated with Stoicism, that asserts that time repeats itself in an infinite loop and that the same events will continue to occur in exactly the same way for eternity, and is therefore a denial of free will, and adheres to the notion of mechanicalness and a mechanical worldview as it had also been advocated by seventeenth century philosophers. At the age of 27, Ouspensky wrote his only novella, “The Strange Life of Iwan Osokin,” in which the protagonist, despite all prior knowledge of a past life, is unable to transcend his mechanical ways, although he is rationally aware of the detrimental impact of these habits.

Memory, mechanicalness and eternal recurrence proved to be cornerstone concepts, in the teaching Ouspensky later received from Gurdjieff. While employed as a journalist, Ouspensky travelled too much of the same types of locations as Gurdjieff, but was unable to find the special knowledge as he had hoped to find. Despite his studies, Ouspensky was looking for a kind of knowledge that was radically distinct from the kind of knowledge that he considered to be ordinary knowledge. As Ouspensky tried to converge many key questions in philosophy, psychology and religion that have driven and informed humankind throughout the centuries into one cohesive body of knowledge, he still wasn’t able to satisfy his quest for that special knowledge.

Then, at the beginning of 1915, Ouspensky is introduced to a mystic teacher by the name of Gurdjieff, in Moscow, and is intrigued by his accent, persona and teachings, right from the outset. Ouspensky suspects that Gurdjieff has access to the kind of knowledge he had been looking for all this time. Ouspensky studied intensively with Gurdjieff between 1915 and 1918, and although it has never been entirely clear why the cooperation between Ouspensky and Gurdjieff stopped, Ouspensky continued to promote Gurdjieffs system, throughout the rest of his life. He lived unobtrusively in England after 1921, exerting considerable influence among writers, conducting his study groups, and publishing The New Model of the Universe in 1931. In 1940 Ouspensky moved to the United States with some of his London pupils and continued lecturing until his death in 1947, shortly after returning to England.

Through Ouspensky’s analytical work, as revealed in “In Search of the Miraculous” with the subtitle “Fragments of an Unknown Doctrine,” – the system has developed into a substantial philosophy, which to this day, enjoys great interest. Although the person and thought of Gurdjieff continue to attract thousands of new interested people to this day, the person of Ouspensky remains somewhat in the background and, to some, Ouspensky is little more than the parrot of Gurdjieff .

However, this is a severe misconception, given that well before he met with Gurdjieff, Ouspensky already had quite a name and influence as a writer and intellectual on the avant-garde of his time. Gary Lachman calls Ouspensky, in his work “In Search Of P.D. Ouspensky,” a man of genius, growing up at a time when Holy Russia was on the verge of collapse, as in 1912 Ouspensky gained national fame through his book ‘Kluck Kzaradkam,’ better known as ‘Tertium Organum.’ In conclusion, it is safe to say that without Gurdjieffs instigation, the system of the fourth way would not have existed. However, it is equally acknowledged that we owe it to the analytic works of Ouspensky, that the system of the Fourth Way was compiled into a cohesive and congruent system, as we know it today. Even though Ouspensky did not believe in the value of an academic approach to convey transformational knowledge, much of his writings and verbatim reports are valuable entry points for anyone looking for another kind of knowledge