In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching

Ouspensky's record of his years with Gurdjieff between 1915 and 1918, widely regarded as the clearest and most comprehensive account of the Fourth Way system ever written. Beginning with their first meeting in Moscow and following the work through St. Petersburg, Essentuki, and into the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the book presents Gurdjieff's ideas in the order in which Ouspensky encountered and grasped them: man as a machine, the multiplicity of 'I', self-remembering, the four bodies, the Ray of Creation, the Law of Three, the Law of Seven, the food diagram, hydrogens, the table of matter, self-observation, and the conditions required for genuine inner development. Gurdjieff himself authorised the book, though he asked that it not be published until after his death. It remains the essential introduction to his teaching — rigorous, coherent, and accessible in a way that Gurdjieff's own writings are not — and has brought more people to the Fourth Way than any other single text. Its subtitle, 'Fragments of an Unknown Teaching', reflects Ouspensky's conviction that what he received was a portion of something larger, whose full scope he never entirely grasped.