Rodney Collin

Rodney Collin (26 April 1909 – 3 May 1956) was a British writer in the area of spiritual development. His work was heavily influenced by his teacher P. D. Ouspensky and, through him, G. I. Gurdjieff and their system of spiritual development. Collin was one of the most well known of Ouspenky's students and a prolific writer. He met Ouspensky in 1936. "Rodney Collin immediately recognised that he had found what he had been searching for in his reading and travels. From then on he dedicated all his time to the study of Mr Ouspensky's teaching." Collin's best known work, The Theory of Celestial Influence, is an ambitious attempt to unite astronomy, physics, chemistry, human physiology and world history with his own version of planetary influences.

Within Collin's most relevant contributions, it is the emphasis on the idea of Fourth Way school existing in different times. He says:

Collin studied the sequence of European civilizations, finding a pattern which would follow a planetary scale where the times are 10 times longer than in the case of human life. His sequence starts following Toynbee's but soon he changes some aspects, trying to follow his said pattern. Thus, his list begins with the Greeks (with roots on the Egyptian, which he considers the last one in the previous sequence), then the Romans, the Primitive Christians, the Monastic Christians, the Medieval Christians, the Renaissance and the Synthetic. He also quotes the influence of an extra-European civilization, the Arabic, upon the Medieval Christian civilization.

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