Conscience: The Search for Truth

A collection of five short essays compiled from Ouspensky's meeting transcripts and originally printed in private editions of no more than 300 copies each between 1952 and 1955, after his death. Each essay concentrates on a single important concept from the Fourth Way system — making the 'nuggets' of his teaching easier to extract than in the broader compilation of The Fourth Way. Together they cover the practical psychological side of the system: self-remembering, negative emotions, consciousness, conscience, and the conditions for inner development. The introduction provides an unusually detailed account of Ouspensky as a teacher — his distrust of the written word as a primary vehicle for truth, his insistence that the system could not be learned from any book, and his meticulous attention to the precision of language in both his writing and his spoken answers at meetings. The essays themselves derive from shorthand transcriptions of his London meetings between 1921 and 1947, carefully edited for continuity and selected to serve as accessible entry points into his larger works.