A Real School dedicated to the practice of living in the present. With centres worldwide Welcome to the Fellowship of Friends! All rights reserved.
We are a group of men and women, young and old, who have gathered together to share the lifetime pursuit of being present. We have cultivated "being present" as a daily, even moment to moment, practice in addition to whatever we are doing, and want to help others to find their way to this practice. On this page you can inquire about practical questions on pursuing the present. Based in London, with centers located worldwide, our School provides a place for aspiring souls to live and work together in an atmosphere of beauty and effort, under the guidance of a conscious teacher. The Fellowship of Friends was founded fifty years ago on the Fourth Way teachings of George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky. Today we embrace the practical wisdom of all great spiritual traditions, recognising that all esoteric schools teach the same thing: how to be present to your own life. To learn more about our school, and about the art and science of living in the present—working with a precise method, a teacher, and the help of other dedicated people—we invite you to visit our pages, hear what our members say, or find the center nearest you, at www.LivingPresence.com. Copyright Fellowship of Friends 2022. Images courtesy of The Fellowship of Friends and public domain. Images reproduced from other sources are for spiritual and educational purposes only, and are not to be used for any other purpose.
14/09/2025
Heute wird das Wort Evolution wahllos für den Wachstumsprozess verwendet, für den Verfeinerungsprozess, den wir als nächstes betrachten werden, und für den Regenerationsprozess, über den wir am wenigsten wissen. Es wird sogar zu einer Art Herstellergarantie verzerrt, dass sich jeder einzelne Oktopus eines Tages zu einem Buddha entwickeln wird und dass alle Menschen ohne jegliche Anstrengung oder Absicht ihrerseits unweigerlich weise werden. Das ist so phantastisch, wie zu glauben, ein Reisender werde unweigerlich auf den Gipfel des höchsten Berges getragen, wenn er sein Kanu einen Fluss hinuntertreiben lässt. Der Wachstumsprozess ist in der Tat ein gewaltiger kosmischer Fluss, der ewig vom Schöpfer fließt. Verlässt sich der Mensch allein auf seine Strömung, gibt es nur eine Richtung, in die er gehen kann – nämlich abwärts. Denn um wieder auf den Strom aufzusteigen, bedarf es eines anderen Verständnisses, einer anderen Energie und einer anderen Anstrengung.
Rodney Collin
11/09/2025
You are invited to attend Part 2 of a three-part series revealing the legacy of the timeless and objective message of awakening – esoteric knowledge hidden in plain sight – within the art, writings, and edifices from schools of conscious evolution. The keys to this knowledge have been taught thr...
07/09/2025
When presence first appears, it's fragile. From the Stewards point of view, it is like a candle flame that must be protected from the whiles of the lower self.
From the point of view of the presence itself, however, it is more about maintaining its separation from the four lower centers, since any identification, even with the heart Nine, can be sufficient to wipe it out.
Therefore, immediately after His resurrection Christ, the newly transcended administrator, says to Mary (the Nine Heart): “Do not touch me.” "This also goes with ""don't hold me"" or ""don't attack me." “
Attendance must grow and evolve in order to rise to the father, but the mechanical reaction of the four lower centers is to claim them for themselves and thereby bring them down to their level.
Girard Haven
03/09/2025
THE FOURTH WAY AND ESOTERIC TRADITIONS — SCULPTING ONESELF
Withdraw into yourself and look.
And if you do not find yourself beautiful as yet,
do as the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful;
the sculptor cuts away here, smoothes there,
makes this line lighter, this other purer, until
he or she has shown a beautiful face upon the statue.
— Plotinus
Sacrifice is necessary.
If nothing is sacrificed nothing is obtained.
— Gurdjieff
Bonsai began 2000 years ago in China, where they were miniature landscapes including stones. In Japan, bonsai was refined, emphasizing the tree itself. Trimming a bonsai requires mindfulness: Pruning and watering require full attention, pulling you into the moment and requires patience at the same time. For this reason Japanese Zen monks would often cultivate bonsai trees. The cultivating and trimming of a bonsai is a metaphor for self-cultivation. In order to be able to remember oneself more, one needs see how the lower self-obstructs self-remember and then work on that. If one remains oblivious to this, one cannot be successful, although the lower self may make one think one is successful.
01/09/2025
Es läuft darauf hinaus, dass man entweder die Präsenz oder das niedere Selbst als sein Selbst akzeptieren möchte. Dazwischen gibt es nichts. Es ist entweder dieser Zustand oder Einbildung.
Denken Sie daran, dass Ihre Seele, wenn Ihr Astralkörper anwesend ist, ein bewusster Fremder ist in einem unbewussten fremden Land – Ihrem physischen Körper.
Ein großer Teil der Selbsterkenntnis besteht darin, zu wissen, was man nicht ist.
Robert Burton / Awakening
01/09/2025
Girard Haven once said that
Self-remembering occurs when you add one thing to what you mechanically perceive.
31/08/2025
BETWEEN RESURRECTION AND ASCENSION
The work takes place between two worlds: a lower world to escape, and a higher world to strive for.
Gradually, the sense of self-esteem of the lower world disappears, but before it can fully enter the higher world, there can be a long time in which one experiences oneself from the perspective of an interworld.
At the beginning of work, the lower world is the world of the false personality and the higher world is the one of the essence (the core of being).
The initial separation and subsequent transition from one to another is achieved by the creation of something between false personality and essence, that is, a true personality.
Later, the true personality crystallizes itself as an administrator*, and the administrator enters the essence, to be precise, the heart Nine *.
The lower world is then perceived as the lower self and the higher world as presence.
The combination of administrator and nine hearts forms the in-between world. She must turn her attention to all three worlds and learn to participate in all three simultaneously.
*ADMINISTRATOR.
A group of "I's" that grows out of Deputy Administrators and usually able to observe the MACHINE and control it according to the target, awaken.
*Heart Nine.
The emotional part of the king's heart. It is called the gate to the higher centers, because, when developed correctly, he experiences life in a wordless, symbolic way, which is very close to the experiences of the higher emotional center.
From
The Art of Presence
By Girard Haven
27/08/2025
Wenn man nach einer Schule sucht, sucht man in Wirklichkeit nach seinem Selbst. Ein Lehrer ist wirkungslos, wenn die Schüler nicht nach ihrem eigenen dritten Auge suchen.
Es ist ein Irrtum zu glauben, man könne nur mit Worten unterweisen; der eine unterweist mit edlem Auftreten, der andere mit unerschütterlicher Treue, ein weiterer mit Sparsamkeit, wieder ein anderer mit Nächstenliebe und noch ein anderer mit Bescheidenheit; und so verhält es sich auch mit den anderen Tugenden.
Robert Burton / Awakening
26/08/2025
Die einzige Möglichkeit, mit Autorität zu sprechen, besteht darin, aus bewusster Erfahrung zu sprechen.
Kein Lehrer bringt eine neue Botschaft; sie sorgen nur dafür, dass die alte funktioniert.
Ein echter Lehrer muss die Zustände hervorbringen, von denen er spricht.
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What would a school of the Fourth Way look like in our decade?
It would probably include all the classical teachings from around the world.
A narrow minded, regional approach does not belong to our age. To study only the Fourth Way, and to memorise its words and ideas, as if it were a religion, will not take us anywhere.
A modern school would also probably use technology to help its members evolve and stay connected to it. While the Fourth Way was formulated at the dawn of the machine age, we are now in an electronic age where technology is the god.
We still understand the metaphor of the machine, but it does not have the immediacy that it perhaps once had.
Nevertheless, man has not changed. The basic human problem, at least in my experience, is still imagination.
Most people are in imagination practically all the time. How many people in the world are able to stay out of imagination all day long, every day?
One thousand, one hundred, ten?
But isn’t this the promise, the birthright of being human? We are born with the equipment for it.
Because of this, the teachings of Gurdjieff are still very valid for our time. The psychology of human sleep, of imagination and identification, of wrong work of centers where the precious higher energies generated by the machine are simply thrown out uselessly, has not changed for hundreds of millennia.
To break this sleep, a school is necessary.
“No real development of being is possible without schools, or rather, it is possible to a certain extent, but it is generally incomplete.
Right development of being is impossible without schools, because one cannot look after oneself, one cannot be sufficiently strict with oneself. And it is not only a question of being strict—one simply cannot remember things at the right time, one will forget, or one will make things easy for oneself.
If it were possible to work by oneself, schools would be a waste of time and systems would not be necessary; but since they exist, it means that it is impossible without them. …
“From the first days at school a man begins to study mechanicalness and to struggle against mechanicalness in himself, against involuntary actions, against unnecessary talk, against imagination, against the expression of negative emotions, against daydreaming and against sleep. In making a step along the line of knowledge a man must make a step along the line of being.
“The principles of school work, all the demands made upon him, all help him to study his being and to work to change it.”, remarks Ouspensky in the Fourth Way
We are a group of men and women, young and old, who have gathered together to share the lifetime pursuit of presence using Fourth Way methods. Through Self-Remembering, a practice similar to "Mindfulness", we have cultivated a moment-to-moment discipline that allows us to be present to our lives.
The aim of this page is to help others find their way to this practice. You can inquire here about practical issues regarding the pursuit of this stairway to a higher state of consciousness.
Based in London, with centres located worldwide, we are part of a School that provides a place for aspiring souls to live and work together in an atmosphere of beauty and effort, under the guidance of a Conscious Teacher.
It was in 1970 that Robert Burton founded the Fellowship of Friends, in the Fourth Way tradition taught by George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky. Today we embrace the practical wisdom of many of the great esoteric traditions, recognizing that all true esoteric schools teach the same thing: how to Be Present to the states of Higher Consciousness always available in our daily lives.
To learn more about our School, and about the art and science of living in the present - working with a precise method, a Teacher, and the help of other dedicated people - we invite you to visit our pages, hear what our members say, or find the centre nearest you, at www.LivingPresence.com.
