Schools of the Miraculous

Schools of the Miraculous

“It seemed to me that even the beginning of contact with a School may have a miraculous nature.” ~ P.D. Ouspensky

P.D. Ouspensky was imagining making contact with schools such as those of Pythagoras, the schools of Egypt, or those who built the cathedral of Notre Dame and other schools of the distant past. He said “it seemed to me that the barriers of time and space should disappear on making such a contact.“ He came to the conclusion that “whatever the name of the school: occult, esoteric, or yogi, they should exist on the ordinary earthly plain, like any other kind of school.“

One of the roles of a Fourth Way School is not only to evoke presence but to expose our sleep and weaknesses. When this occurs within a School, there is a Teacher and students around us who can offer their observations of our habitual or “mechanical” behavior and we can begin to see ourselves more objectively, to see what keeps us asleep and what evokes higher centers or states.

The rise of civilizations at different intervals throughout history often can be traced from the hidden influence of special Schools and their teachings. One could construct a sort of family tree of these conscious Schools because their threads intertwine from ancient beginnings to the present. Masters and their conscious Schools have influenced each other and shaped human culture. To list a few examples that began from a conscious source: the Egyptians who built the Pyramids and wrote the sacred Pyramid Texts; the Greeks, handing down The Laws of Solon and writings of Plato on Socrates’ Discourses - the Platonic School; Judaism and its sacred Kabbalah text; Christians, whose influence began with the Gnostic Gospels and continued in the Eastern Orthodox Church with the Philokalia; Muslims, whose sacred Islamic text is the Quran and the mystical dance of the Dervishes and the poetry of the Sufis; the Masons whose crowning achievements were written in stone in the Gothic Cathedrals of Europe; the Buddhists and their sacred text, the Tripitakas, to list only a few.

G.I. Gurdjieff taught that “Schools are imperative. First of all because of the complexity of man’s organization. A man is unable to keep watch on the whole of himself, that is, all his different sides. Only school can do this, school methods, school discipline – a man is much too lazy … if a man were able to work [by] himself everything would be very simple and schools would be unnecessary.“

A Harlem Renaissance writer and follower of G.I. Gurdjieff, Jean Toomer, noted that “This work is for those who are conscious of the need of a key to their own life.” P.D. Ouspensky reminds us that “the Fourth Way has to be found. This is the first test.” We are students in a Fourth Way School and even though these posts may be inspirational, they are not a Fourth Way School - just shadows of our collective experience within the bright light of a School.

Whirling Dervishes, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1895

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