The Fourth Way is a way in ordinary life; it is not a withdrawal from life.

Work Program 3


These are a representative sampling of Work Programs created by members of Paul Beidler's group at Northeon Forest.

Weekly Work Program

Walking Meditation in Walnut Grove
Pick up sticks. Observe that every stick has two ends. Gather sticks in center of Walnut Grove.
Sense the feet.

Around center of Pond, silent pondering/observation of the opposing sides of one stick. Deposit sticks at the carriage house.

Work Session
Leaders in this phase of inquiry must be urged to weigh their attitudes in a reconciliation of opposites as when solitude attracts multitudes, approval begets disdain, appetite invites surfeit, spontaneity occurs tomorrow, thoughts blur reality.
See our attitudes not so much as burdens, as we did in a past meeting, but as opportunities to tilt the stick from one end to another. As we gather sticks and dead wood from Hexenkopf road up through the lower property, including the Path and the Stream, voice aloud any attitudes and an opposing reconciliation. Voice these to one another as you would ordinarily voice a Hello, how are you? in passing. Sense the Legs.
First, before working with the wood, we worked to disentangle the flower bushes along the stream from their heavy load of honeysuckle. Seekers were also encouraged to take time out during the meeting, at any point, to sit in quiet meditation.

Work Session
Continue gathering wood, moving the search for wood into the forest, up to the central site, and moving our inward search deeper in as well. Can we be transformers of the raw into the fine? Burden into opportunity? Wood into smoke? Efforts can be made to identify and alter each emerging attitude as from skeptical to poetic, cynical to optimistic, hopeless to curious.
Sense the Spine.

Tea at the central site
Pondering. Tea. Silence. Bonfire. Ponder, Wood to smoke.

Work Session
Adventurers in awareness learn that the perception of an attitude is like reading a word without spelling it out first. What can this mean?
Cards are passed to coseekers with long, difficult words taken from Beelzebubs Tales to his Grandson, i.e., Chainonizironess, Ashagiprotoehary, etc. Seekers in turn read their word aloud, quickly, without spelling it out first. The assumption is made that each word represents an elevated attitude, although a nonspecific one. As seekers continue to work in the forest to gather up dead wood, we voice this word aloud and bask in the embrace of an elevated attitude. Sense the Arms and Hands.

Closing in Walnut Grove
Gathered around the pond, seekers ponder Gurdjieffs aphorism, presented also in an earlier meeting: All of our emotions are rudimentary forms of something higher, eg., fear may be an organ of future clairvoyance, anger of real force, etc. In our role as transformers, can we elevate our normal agenda of attitudes, just as the seekers must raise the most commonplace events up to an occasion of higher relevance? Inner work during the week is to look up the word given in Beelzebubs tales (page numbers are given), and to develop exercises based on that word and its meaning, in an effort to raise our attitudes to a higher level.

Walk down the Path
Sense the whole body, and an outpouring of spirit through the top of the head and up into the realm of His Endlessness. Seekers repeated three times aloud, before walking down the path, Distant horizons beckon, where faith is self-evident, where nothing is prevented.

Endless Search © 2004 Ian C MacFarlane