A LETTER FROM A READER

“As always, very exciting.

If I’ve understood it correctly, Gurdjieff meant that a process needs a “push” from outside in order to continue. Did he mean that a teacher is necessary — or that life itself provides these shocks?

I seem to remember that groups like the Linbu community were built on this idea: hard work, lack of sleep, deliberate strain — a bit like the Hare Krishna movement.

And what is the Fourth Way according to Ouspensky?

I remember taking a step back when everything became too theoretical. The diagrams confused me. Still, I do understand this much: the Enneagram shows movement, not a static typology.

It’s strange and beautiful to return to these ideas after more than forty years. Though perhaps the seeds were always there, quietly germinating.

Thank you. Your voice matters. It is deeply welcome.”

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MY REPLY

Dear friend,

Thank you for such a thoughtful and generous question. It carries both curiosity and memory, which is a rare combination.

You’re right: Gurdjieff taught that a process doesn’t continue by itself. Without intervention, movement slows, changes direction, and eventually becomes mechanical. Something must enter from outside – a shock, an impulse – for conscious progress to continue.

A teacher, or perhaps more accurately an experienced guide, is needed — not to direct the work, but to recognise when a shock is needed and what kind. Left to ourselves, we either protect our habits or forge ahead blindly. Working alone only takes us so far.

In the Gurdjieff lineage, it’s ultimately the group that is the teacher. The work is relational. Friction, attention, collective effort, self-observation, self-remembering all teach a person not only to receive shocks, but to begin to recognise how awakening impulses might be intentionally introduced into their own life.

Life, of course, provides us with shocks constantly. Love, loss, illness, humiliation, longing. The problem is not their absence, but our inability to make use of them. They strike us – and we receive them with our habitual responses of defensiveness, denial, pleasure-seeking or sleep.

You mention communities built around deliberate strain: hard work, lack of sleep, sustained effort. These “unpleasant” conditions are not, in themselves, distortions of the Work. On the contrary, they were a central feature of life at the Prieuré. As Ouspensky said, only super-effort counts. Without it, we never touch what he called the large accumulator – the deeper reserve that reveals both our mechanical smallness and our hidden strength.

The danger lies not in difficulty itself, but in who frames it and to what end. False teachers can easily imitate the outer form of giving shocks – severity, exhaustion, obedience – while only feeding their own authority. Discernment is not to reject effort, but a constant inner task: to distinguish conscious work from coercion, the coarse from the fine. And, as with birth, no one else can do it for you.

The fact that a teacher is not “perfect” – Chögyam Trungpa is an obvious example – does not negate the value of what they transmit. In the end, it always comes back to the same question: what am I able to make of what I am given?

Here we meet a paradox. In Tibetan Buddhism, devotion to the guru is essential for awakening. Ego must be relinquished; one must be willing to learn from someone further along the path. At the same time, discernment must never be surrendered. True teaching does not resolve paradox – it teaches us how to live inside it.

You ask about the Fourth Way. Simply put: it is work in life. Not mastering the body like the fakir, nor the emotions like the monk, nor the intellect like the yogi – but transformation of all three centres, or brains, while remaining embedded in ordinary existence. To be in the world, but not of the world. Ouspensky called it “the way of the sly man”: quiet, persistent, unspectacular, and exacting.

You also mention stepping back when the teaching became too theoretical. That makes sense. Diagrams are not just abstractions; they are meant to facilitate active mentation. To be applied, not memorized.

The Table of Hydrogens, for example, attempts to map levels of density – of matter, energy, and consciousness – from the coarsest to the most subtle. It is something that gradually comes to life as a result of observing, attention, sleep, and reawakening.

What matters most is what you already see: the Enneagram is not a personality system. It is a moving map of all life.

You write that these ideas feel different when revisited after forty years. They often do. Not because they have changed, but because we have. Seeds can lie dormant for a long time. Maurice Nicoll loved the image of the mustard seed – the smallest thing holding a whole tree. Gurdjieff was earthier: acorns, he said, need a lot of “merde” to grow.

Perhaps the conditions are simply right now.

Thank you for your listening, and for your courage in returning to this teaching. A voice only matters if there are ears that can hear – and yours clearly can.

With warmth,
Kristina

Do you have a question for The Skeleton Key?