Fripp in his teaching does not speculate on the afterlife, but he shares the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky insistence on man in his normal state as a dozy automaton. It is a paradoxical doctrine, echoed through the ages in many teachings, including the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: we have no free will, development of one's freedom can begin only with a clear-headed recognition of one's absolute slavery to circumstance, mental associations, emotion, instinct, genetics, biochemistry, the laws of nature. Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff as saying, ‘Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all ... The struggle with small habits is very difficult and boring, but without it self-observation is impossible.’ From Fripp's Guitar Craft Monograph III: Aphorisms: ‘It is difficult to exaggerate the power of habit.’

The Danish philosopher and religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), regarded as the fountainhead of twentieth-century secular and religious existentialism, maintained that the average person, going about his or her daily routines automatically, is as incapable of sin as he or she is of repentance. Kierkegaard, who spent his life as a writer championing conscious subjectivity as the sine qua non of authentic existence, and who wanted the words "The Individual" inscribed on his tombstone, was wont to find, as was Gurdjieff, confirmation of his own views in the words of Socrates: "Know thyself." Gurdjieff put it like this: ‘Individuality, a single and permanent I, consciousness, will, the ability to do, a state of inner freedom, all these are qualities which ordinary man does not possess. To the same category belongs the idea of good and evil, the very existence of which is connected with a permanent aim, with a permanent direction and a permanent center of gravity ... Permanent truth and permanent falsehood can exist only for a permanent man. If a man himself continually changes, then for him truth and falsehood will also continually change.’

Sometimes Gurdjieff would refer to his methods as the "Fourth Way." The first three ways were the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, and the way of the yogi. The fakir struggles with the physical body, devoting himself to mastering incredibly difficult physical exercises and postures {Which will be like the Mudras and Mutras in the impact of brain lobes. I have used this to help restore the mentally ill.}. The way of the monk represents the way of faith, the cultivation of religious feelings, and self-sacrifice. The yogi's approach is through knowledge and the mind. Gurdjieff said of his Fourth Way that it combined work simultaneously on the body, emotions, and mind, and that it could be followed by ordinary people in everyday life - that it required no retirement into the desert. The Fourth Way did involve whole-hearted acceptance of certain conditions imposed by a teacher; it also involved supreme effort to devote oneself continuously to inner work, even though one's outward worldly roles might not change that much. In spite of his insistence that work without a teacher was impossible, Gurdjieff stressed each individual's responsibility:

The fourth way differs from the other ways in that the principal demand made upon a man is the demand for understanding. A man must do nothing that he does not understand, except as an experiment under the supervision and direction of his teacher. The more a man understands what he is doing, the greater will be the results of his efforts. This is a fundamental principle of the fourth way. The results of work are in proportion to the consciousness of the work. No "faith" is required on the fourth way; on the contrary, faith of any kind is opposed to the fourth way. On the fourth way a man must satisfy himself of the truth of what he is told. And until he is satisfied he must do nothing.

In the 1988 pamphlet "An Introduction to Guitar Craft," Fripp, who has explicitly called himself a follower of the Fourth Way, wrote, ‘In Guitar Craft there is nothing compulsory. One is not asked to violate cherished beliefs or accept any of the ideas presented. Rather, a healthy skepticism is encouraged.’

By its very nature, the Fourth Way is not for everyone. Knowledge is not deliberately hidden, Gurdjieff would say, but most people simply are not interested. The former leader of a Gurdjieff group in Boston, Meggan Moorehead, told me of Gurdjieff's "five of twenty of twenty." Only twenty per cent of all people ever think seriously about higher realities; of these, only twenty per cent ever decide to do anything about it; and of these, only five per cent ever actually get anywhere.

What then is this "work"? Those in the Gurdjieff school write of "work on oneself," and often capitalize the concept, as in "The Work." Gurdjieff time and again insisted on the importance of direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, and emphatically warned of the grave dangers of attempting to learn exercises from a book or cramming one's head full of abstract spiritual notions on one's own. Those who have met an authentic teacher know the sense of presence so important to the whole process, the teacher is an embodiment of the knowledge of which he or she speaks, and in a sense what he or she says is of little importance compared with the student's opportunity to observe what he or she is. Descriptions of Gurdjieff by those who worked with him are filled with references to his effortless bearing, his economy of movement, his feline grace, his almost overwhelming physical presence as well as his spontaneity and earthy sense of humor. A student in Gurdjieff's Moscow circle described his first meeting with the teacher: ‘He looked at me, and I had the distinct impression that he took me in the palm of his hand and weighed me.’ {He could cause women to feel sexually aggressive and lose all inhibition through the use of this look combined with breathing techniques.}

Although knowledge is not hoarded secretively, there are inevitable difficulties and pitfalls in efforts to share it with outsiders. Jesus called this "casting pearls before swine." Gurdjieff said students of his methods would find themselves "unable to transmit correctly what is said in the groups. [Students] very soon begin to learn from their own personal experience how much effort, how much time, and how much explaining is necessary in order to grasp what is said in groups. It becomes clear to them that they are unable to give their friends a right idea of what they have learned themselves." Ouspensky relates that in the early work with Gurdjieff in Moscow and St. Petersburg, it was strictly forbidden for students to write down, much less publish, anything at all connected with Gurdjieff and his ideas; somewhat later, Gurdjieff relaxed this rule, accepting as students many who subsequently published accounts of their experiences in the work.

Having, I think, caveated the whole matter sufficiently into the dust, I offer here a brief outsider's summary of what was involved in the work of Gurdjieff's groups.

Relaxation. Many of Gurdjieff's exercises involved or began with some sort of gradual relaxation of the muscles, starting with the muscles of the face and working downward through the body. Fripp has said that we can do nothing when not relaxed, and since his time at Sherborne has practiced a regular routine of relaxation in the morning before breakfast; such a ritual, led by a qualified instructor, has been worked into the Guitar Craft seminars. Along with relaxation goes a type of exercise for sensing the different parts of the body "from the inside." For Gurdjieff's groups, this might have involved, for instance, lying on one's back and concentrating all of one's awareness first on one's nose, then on one's right foot, and so on.

Other Exercises; The Movements. Ouspensky relates a series of what he found to be "unbelievably difficult" physical/mental exercises that Gurdjieff had picked up in various esoteric schools during his travels. In general, these involved some precise and exact combination of counting, breathing, sensing of body parts, and movements, to be done in some coordinated sequence. The famous "movements," often done to music Gurdjieff had composed himself, were dances based on those Gurdjieff had observed and participated in, notably among Sufis and dervishes, and in ancient hidden monasteries. Gurdjieff taught that the movements were not merely calisthenics, exercises in concentration, and displays of bodily coordination and aesthetic sensibility: on the contrary, in the movements was embedded real, concrete knowledge, passed from generation to generation of initiates - each posture and gesture representing some cosmic truth that the informed observer could read like a book.

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