The Canon / Pillars / New Thought
Pillars · 1949
In Search of the Miraculous
Foundational InfluencesIn Search of the Miraculous is Ouspensky's systematic record of the teaching he received from Gurdjieff, presenting the Fourth Way with a clarity its founder rarely offered. Its central claim is that ordinary human beings live in a state of "waking sleep," mechanical and unaware, and can awaken to higher levels of being through disciplined inner work.
The book expounds the cosmological and psychological framework of the Work—the law of three, the law of seven, the ray of creation, and the practice of self-remembering—organizing scattered oral teaching into a coherent whole. Its method joins metaphysical scheme to practical self-observation.
It remains the definitive exposition of Gurdjieff's system and the bridge that carried his ideas to a broad Western readership. Combined with Ouspensky's own speculations on higher dimensions of consciousness, it fed later consciousness studies and "expanded states" discourse.
In its words
Man such as we know him, is a machine.
Practices it teaches
Self-Remembering — the double-headed arrow of attention
Self-remembering is the central practice of G.I. Gurdjieff's system, the Fourth Way, as recorded by his pupil P.D. Ouspensky.
Self-Remembering as Experiment — timing how long you can hold the divided attention before you fall asleep
Self-remembering is the keystone Ouspensky inherited from Gurdjieff, but Ouspensky's distinct contribution is the experimental temperament he brought to it.
Self-Sensing — placing attention inside the body to anchor presence
Self-sensing is Gurdjieff's bodily anchor for presence. Where self-remembering can feel mental, self-sensing is concrete: you deliberately place attention inside a part of the body and feel it from within — not…
Non-Expression of Negative Emotions — refusing to give automatic outward vent to unpleasant feeling
Of all the Fourth Way disciplines, the non-expression of negative emotions is the one Ouspensky personally singled out as biggest.
Non-Identification & Non-Considering — catching the moment you get lost
For Gurdjieff, the great thief of presence is identification — the moment attention is swallowed by something so completely that "of themselves nothing remains." You become the argument, the worry, the irritation…
Self-Observation — recording the machine without changing it
Self-observation is the first practical work Gurdjieff gave, the ground on which self-remembering stands. Its premise is blunt: "Man is a machine.
Mental Photographs of Oneself — collecting whole-state snapshots over time to see the real you
Where in-the-moment self-observation watches the machine running now, Ouspensky's "mental photographs" are a longitudinal, archival practice: you take impartial mental snapshots of your whole state at striking…
Observing the Work of the Centres — sorting every reaction by which 'centre' produced it, and catching their wrong work
This is Ouspensky's analytic, categorising form of self-observation. The four "centres" — intellectual, emotional, moving, instinctive — are Gurdjieff's map, but Ouspensky's distinctive emphasis is that observation…
The 'Stop' Exercise — freezing the body to break automatism
The "Stop" exercise is the most dramatic — and most clearly teacher-bound — practice of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way.
Lineage
The author
P.D. OuspenskySystematizer of the Fourth Way; higher dimensions of consciousness
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Key terms
Kindred books