Higher Centers Explained: Gurdjieff’s Path to Awakening
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.
Underground Study Groups, and What Traditional Texts Assume You Already Have
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 …
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Against Academic Consciousness Studies: The Epistemological Fraud of Profane Inquiry
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 …
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Polypsychicism: The Doctrine of Many Selves
The Polypsychic Being Part I — Origins of the Idea of Many Selves In the early twentieth century, Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky and his teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff introduced a psychology that still feels ahead of its time. They began from a simple observation: a human being does not think, feel, or act as …