First Force, Second Force, and Third Force are important concepts in The Fourth Way/The Work. Understanding these concepts will clarify how to approach your endeavors in a manner that doesn’t create counterforce. First Force is the “I want/I need/I should” doership posture; Second Force is the resistance that arises in response to it. Without Third …
“Reification is defined as the process of treating abstract concepts or statements as concrete entities, allowing for the assertion of additional facts about them, such as provenance and attributes.” – ScienceDirect In simpler words, reification is when we “make a ‘thing’” out of something that isn’t actually a thing. Take, for example, when a couple …
Read more “Reification: The Vestigial Faculty of Objectification”
Truth Statements are Hypnotic Suggestions There is a part of the mind that accepts truth-statements and compels one to conform to them. Even if you know it to be untrue at an intellectual level, you will find yourself acting as if it were true. Quite often, through your activity, you make it true. And then …
Wanting Leads to the Wrong Life Our default state is wanting. Most of our activity can be summarized as: This quadratic hell is what I call the wrong life — the quintessential, out-of-Alignment exsitence. Why? For the very reason that wanting is not necessary. It is not as if you will become an inert object …
Pagan Metaphysics has been consistently misrepresented by monotheistic traditions as primitive or philosophically inferior. This claim rests on a fundamental confusion between the Absolute Principle (Brahman, the Tao, Guénon’s “Supreme Principle”) and a personal creator God. What monotheism presents as theological advancement represents, from the perspective of traditional metaphysics, a catastrophic descent into anthropomorphic literalism.
Traditional spiritual texts—scripture, sacred poetry, metaphysical treatises—were written in a language modern readers no longer speak. Not Sanskrit, Arabic, or Greek, though learning these helps immensely, but the language of symbol, correspondence, and multiple simultaneous meanings. The contemporary mind, trained by literalist fundamentalism on one side and materialist skepticism on the other, approaches these texts …
Read more “Occult Literacy: Reading Esoteric Texts Without Getting Lost”
Gurdjieff’s higher centers—the dormant emotional and intellectual capacities beyond ordinary consciousness. Learn why they don’t function and how to activate them through Fourth Way practices.
When modern seekers encounter traditional spiritual texts—the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, Plotinus’ Enneads, the Tao Te Ching, Sufi poetry—they often experience one of two responses: either the texts seem impenetrably obscure, or they seem deceptively simple. Both responses signal the same problem: the reader lacks qualifications the text assumes are already present. Traditional teachings were …
Read more “Underground Study Groups, and What Traditional Texts Assume You Already Have”
The field of Consciousness Studies presents itself as the cutting edge of interdisciplinary inquiry. Neuroscience meets philosophy. Psychology engages with contemplative traditions. Eastern wisdom and Western science bridge together. Consciousness Studies practitioners speak of “neurophenomenology,” “contemplative science,” and the “hard problem of consciousness” with an air of profound discovery. They talk as if materialist reduction has matured …
Read more “Against Academic Consciousness Studies: The Epistemological Fraud of Profane Inquiry”
There are no Conflicts The so-called conflicts you’ve read about in history books or experienced with the people around you are merely unfoldings of what is. Conflicts have no ontological weight. Opponents also do not exist. Conflicts only exist internally. Holding on to internal conflicts — seeing parts of unfolding as “conflict” — only weakens …
Read more “Conflicts aren’t Real: The Parasitic Concept of Opposition”
