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.
02/01/2026
Одно из моих любимых высказываний о самовоспоминании принадлежит Уолту Уитмену, хотя он и не называл это самовоспоминанием: «А теперь главный урок принятия: не предпочтение, но и не отрицание». Это значит — просто принимайте то, что предлагает каждый момент
«Самовоспоминание»
Ум, несомненно, первое условие для счастья.
Софокл
Жизнь водит за нос, и дурачит нас, и дразнит,
Скорей подружка, чем заботливая мать.
Но если хочешь, чтоб была она как праздник,
Её ты даже не пытайся понимать.
Райнер Мария Рильке
Андреа Мантенья
Мадонна с Младенцем и херувимами, 1485 г.
Пинакотека Брера, Милан
Das Ziel ist es nun, hier so viele bewusste Spuren wie möglich zu hinterlassen, damit auch diejenigen, die nach uns kommen, entkommen können.
Herr Gurdjieff litt weit über das Verständnis der Menschen Nummer vier hinaus, um das Wissen für sie zu erlangen. Seine Aufgabe war es, es klar und präzise niederzuschreiben. Unsere Aufgabe ist es, die Worte zu sein.
Schulen sollen mehrere bemerkenswerte Menschen – bewusste Wesen – gleichzeitig hervorbringen. In Schulen können mehrere bewusste Wesen gleichzeitig mit derselben Aufgabe hervorgebracht werden.
Aus dem Buch "Awakening"
30/12/2025
30/12/2025
Egypt is the ultimate mysticism. It has shaped all the following schools. Of course, everything that became Egypt was adopted by prehistoric tradition.
The system does not originate in Egypt, but it was perfected there.
# school carries the same message, but it creates a unique, outstanding version of that message that differs from other schools.
From the book "Awakening"
Discussing his search in Egypt for the source of esoteric knowledge, Gurdjieff said, "It will seem strange to many people when I say that this prehistoric Egypt was Christian many thousands of years before the birth of Christ."
Of his discoveries, he said, "The Christian church, the Christian form of worship, was not invented by the fathers of the church. It was all taken in a ready-made form from Egypt, only not from the Egypt that we know but from one which we do not know.
This Egypt was in the same place as the other but it existed much earlier.
Only small bits of it survived in historical times, and these bits have been preserved in secret and so well that we do not even know where they have been preserved."
P.D. Ouspensky,
In Search of the Miraculous
25/12/2025
Schulen werden nie müde, dieselbe Botschaft zu vermitteln, da sie dasselbe Problem behebt – den Schlaf.
Wortlose Präsenz, die sich ihrer selbst bewusst ist, ist eine Lektion, die vom höheren Einfluss selten gelehrt wird und nur in Schulen vermittelt wird.
Schulen konzentrieren sich darauf, das instinktive Zentrum zu kontrollieren und präsent zu sein.
Aus dem Buch "Awakening"
23/12/2025
Erwachen bedeutet, alles, was nicht du selbst bist loszulassen, bis zu deinem letzten Atemzug.
Man braucht immer Geduld; und je näher man dem Ziel kommt, desto mehr Geduld braucht man.
Was auch immer du tust, versuche es mit so viel Präsenz wie möglich zu tun, denn letztendlich ist das alles, was wirklich zählt.
Aus dem Buch "Awakening"
17/12/2025
THE FOURTH WAY & ESOTERIC TRADITIONS — THE STEWARD AS THE CHARIOTEER
We will liken the soul to the composite nature of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer.
One of them is noble and good, and of good stock, while the other has the opposite character, and his stock is opposite. Hence the task of our charioteer is difficult and troublesome. – Plato, Phaedrus
Work on oneself must begin with the driver. The driver is the mind. In order to be able to hear the master's voice, the driver, first of all, must not be asleep, that is, he must wake up. Then it may prove that the master speaks a language that the driver does not understand. The driver must learn this language. When he has learned it, he will understand the master. But concurrently with this he must learn to drive the horses. The horses are our emotions. Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous
Image: Apollo and Aurora, Gerard de Lairesse (1671)
Man has no real will. He must learn to submit to something higher.
G. I. Gurdjieff
The more you abandon your own will, the more God’s will becomes yours.
Meister Eckhart
The good man is invincible, for he aligns his will with the whole.
Seneca
Image: Jacob Peter Gowy, Hippomenes and Atalanta, c.1635 - c.1637
11/12/2025
People spend their entire lives in varying
degrees of identification.
Robert Burton
Wakefulness is the way to life.
The fool sleeps as if he were already dead,
But the master is awake and he lives forever.
Buddha
Creatures of a day, what is anyone?
What is he not?
Man is but a dream of a shadow.
Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine,
there rest upon men a radiant light and, aye, a gentle life.
Pindar
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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.
