The Study Society

The Study Society is registered with the Charity Commission as Registered Charity Number 1155498. Its stated objects are for the public benefit:

It is based at Colet House, Barons Court, London.

The Society was registered in 1951 by Dr Francis C. Roles, four years after the death of his teacher, the Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, who had settled in England in 1921. The Society was set up to continue Ouspensky's work as a "School of the Fourth Way".

The Fourth Way is a concept used by G. I. Gurdjieff to describe an approach to self-development learned over years of travel in the East that combined what he saw as three established traditional "ways," or "schools" into a fourth way. These three ways were of the body, mind and emotions. According to his principles and instructions, Gurdjieff's method for awakening one's consciousness is different from that of the fakir, monk or yogi, so his discipline is also called the ‘Fourth Way’. His pupil P.D. Ouspensky from 1924 to 1947 made the term and its use central to his own teaching of Gurdjieff's ideas, and after Ouspensky's death, his students published a book titled The Fourth Way based on his lectures.

P. D. Ouspensky had developed his system of Self-discovery from the fundamental idea that ordinary human consciousness is incomplete and that it is possible for it to evolve further by personal effort and understanding. Historically, this approach has generally been confined to closed orders, religious or otherwise and directed to the development of one particular human faculty: intellectual, emotional or physical. Ouspensky promoted the practice of a ‘Fourth Way’, whereby ordinary people, remaining engaged in life, could work on all three aspects simultaneously. His teaching asserts the unity of the individual with the whole cosmos in both structure and potential.

In Russia, Ouspensky had learned a system of knowledge and certain practical methods from G. I. Gurdjieff and until his death in 1947 Ouspensky devoted his life to further developing this system in the light of his own ideas. He established large groups of pupils in London and New York. Ouspensky’s London headquarters before and following World War II were at Colet House. This work led him to the conviction that the system was essentially incomplete; in particular it lacked a simple method to allow the ideas to develop naturally into behaviour and experience.

...
Wikipedia