P.D. Ouspensky

PYOTR DEMIANOVICH OUSPENSKY 1878 – 1947

Philosopher, Author and Teacher of the ‘Fourth Way’

This website celebrates his life and work and the continuing development of his teaching by his pupils and successors in London UK from his death in 1947 to the present day.

The Chronology section is the online home of the P.D. Ouspensky Exhibition & Conference held at Colet House, London, UK, in 2007 — the most comprehensive archive of material and images celebrating Ouspensky’s life and work currently available online.

The Archive section covers the Record of Audiences & Correspondence with His Holiness Shantananda Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Jyotish Peeth 1960–1993, together with a new, fully comprehensive and easily used series of Indexes. The collected papers and meeting reports of Dr F.C. Roles from 1960–1982 comprise nearly 800 previously unpublished entries that illuminate every aspect of the Fourth Way. The collected papers of Colin Lucas, a close associate of Dr F.C. Roles, further develop the connection between P.D. Ouspensky’s teaching and that of the Shankaracharya. The Fourth Way Group Papers and Gerald Beckwith’s teaching pages document the continued development of the Fourth Way between 2001 and 2013.

NEW A new page has been added to the archive containing the complete Colin Lucas papers. This collection of over 1500 pages was assembled by his son Mark after his father’s death in 1984.

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NEW.A new page has been added to the Books section featuring books published by Kharkadeh Books.

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NEW A Dutch translation of The Record of Shankaracharya Audiences is now available. Our thanks to a student of the School of Practical Philosophy and Spirituality in the Netherlands who provided the translation.

 

The Fourth Way Today section investigates the possible origin of the ‘fragments’ from which Ouspensky’s Fourth Way teaching was constructed and presents a new view of key Fourth Way concepts based on the Direct Path teaching of Atmananda Krishnamenon, as formulated by Rupert Spira and Francis Lucille.

NEW The Fourth Way Today section is being rewritten to reflect our current teaching. The first four pages are now available:
1. Introduction explains the background to this new reconstruction of the teaching.
2. Self-remembering discusses new ideas on the real origin and method of self-remembering.
3. Identification shows how the concept of identification is common to all non-dual traditions.
4. Attention discusses the real significance of Ouspensky’s double-headed arrow.
Over the next year we will be adding further pages to this section.

 

The Library section contains group papers from 2014 to the current day. These present a new view of the Fourth Way based on the Direct Path non-dual teaching.

 

The world is a world of infinite possibilities. Our mind follows the development of possibilities always in one direction only. But in fact every moment contains a very large number of possibilities. And all of them are actualised, only we do not see it and do not know it. We always see only one of the actualisations, and in this lie the poverty and limitation of the human mind.
P.D. Ouspensky.