Rating: 
Summary: Don't read these ignorant reviews!!
Review: Almost everyone who writes a review of this book seems to completly miss the point, which is an interesting observation in itself: remember that what you read in these reviews is not Ouspensky's ideas at all, but the reviewer's subjectivity which is often miles off target. It's startling how much people misunderstand the 4th Way! And they're so much in love with themselves that they expect others to believe the complete nonsense swirling around in their bleak skulls! Consequently, if you base your opinions on this book or on any book by any old reviewer you are a fool and you will be kept in the dark. Read the book and come to your own conclusions; don't read the trash you find here!
Rating:
Summary: Essential Practical Spiritual Knowledge
Review: I consider THE FOURTH WAY to be one of the top 100 spiritual books I have ever read. It describes a practice called Self-Remembering which makes us present-in-life and lifts us out of our robotic habits. It describes the emotional and chemical changes which happen in our body and mind when we do this practice. It talks about the two most important places to apply this willed effort (when we remember and when we are under an negative emotion which makes us not want to do it). The book gives a comprehensive advanced psychology which allows us to make deep sense of this practice. The only reservation about the book is that it makes the practice seem harder than it needs to be and it makes the theory feel overintellectual at times. This detracts from its practical value.
Rating:
Summary: Essential, but ONLY if you have valuation of its concepts
Review: One aspect of this book, The Fourth Way, that affects some negatively is it can seem to present an avalanche of separate ideas that can seem to overwhelm. Learning to awaken and practicing to awaken shouldn't seem like an act of trying to hold a thousand different ideas in your mind at the same time. Yet, as you study the ideas that are presented in this book (and the Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution and In Search of the Miraculous, to name two of the other more famous ones by Ouspensky...) you find that there are a handful of central ideas presented that have more weight and that act as a center-of-gravity of the entire language. When these central ideas are identified (Self-Remembering, Non-Identifying, Separation, External-Considering and the subtle practice of Transforming Negative Emotion are five of the most central ideas of the entire Work language...) you can then sort out all the rest of the seemingly vast array of things to observe or do or not do or ponder, etc...and see where they fall and where their place is relative to the central ideas and practices. Always re-orienting yourself by the light of the central ideas and practices. This book, the Fourth Way, also presents the cosmological side of the Work. Five of the central ideas of the cosmological side are the Ray of Creation, the Law of 3, the Law of 7, Scale (or, 'Degree') and Relativity. These ideas are used as metaphor and as models to understand the psychological side. This book is not dry and 'overly' (choose your own word) intellectual (nor is it boring if you are truly enthusiastic about learning rare ideas of a high order, ideas, by the way, that may indeed be found in various religious writings and schools but are hardly presented in such practical and precise and, yes, poetic and mysterious language). These ideas ARE poetic and mysterious and your understanding of their inner meanings and connections (not to mention your ability in actually practicing them) can increase as far as you can climb with your effort and your inspiration.
Rating:
Summary: ideas of a high order, has to be learned as a language
Review: One aspect of this book, The Fourth Way, that affects some negatively is it can seem to present an avalanche of separate ideas that can seem to overwhelm. Learning to awaken and practicing to awaken shouldn't seem like an act of trying to hold a thousand different ideas in your mind at the same time. Yet, as you study the ideas that are presented in this book (and the Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution and In Search of the Miraculous, to name two of the other more famous ones by Ouspensky...) you find that there are a handful of central ideas presented that have more weight and that act as a center-of-gravity of the entire language. When these central ideas are identified (Self-Remembering, Non-Identifying, Separation, External-Considering and the subtle practice of Transforming Negative Emotion are five of the most central ideas of the entire Work language...) you can then sort out all the rest of the seemingly vast array of things to observe or do or not do or ponder, etc...and see where they fall and where their place is relative to the central ideas and practices. Always re-orienting yourself by the light of the central ideas and practices. This book, the Fourth Way, also presents the cosmological side of the Work. Five of the central ideas of the cosmological side are the Ray of Creation, the Law of 3, the Law of 7, Scale (or, 'Degree') and Relativity. These ideas are used as metaphor and as models to understand the psychological side. This book is not dry and 'overly' (choose your own word) intellectual (nor is it boring if you are truly enthusiastic about learning rare ideas of a high order, ideas, by the way, that may indeed be found in various religious writings and schools but are hardly presented in such practical and precise and, yes, poetic and mysterious language). These ideas ARE poetic and mysterious and your understanding of their inner meanings and connections (not to mention your ability in actually practicing them) can increase as far as you can climb with your effort and your inspiration.
Rating: 
Summary: A Model of Thought
Review: One must keep in mind when reading this book that the author hammer the idea that all religious ideas are "models", so one must first learn the "language" to understand the ideas presented. So if you understand this, than the book may open your mind.
Second and for me the most important issue is that the book show you HOW to shut down the inner dialogue. I first read it and some years later reread it, and I managed to shut the dialogue down after a year of struggle, that was more than 25 years ago now. This keep your mind function mostly in Theta state and it gives you less stress and more insights into whatever you are "looking at".
PS. It does not make you above influenced on stress on a physical level, so change may be needed, but change are handled better.
Good luck.
Rating:
Summary: A Model of Thought
Review: One must keep in mind when reading this book that the author hammer the idea that all religious ideas are "models", so one must first learn the "language" to understand the ideas presented. So if you understand this, than the book may open your mind.
Second and for me the most important issue is that the book show you HOW to shut down the inner dialogue. I first read it and some years later reread it, and I managed to shut the dialogue down after a year of struggle, that was more than 25 years ago now. This keep your mind function mostly in Theta state and it gives you less stress and more insights into whatever you are "looking at".
PS. It does not make you above influenced on stress on a physical level, so change may be needed, but change are handled better.
Good luck.
Rating: 
Summary: For Fourth Way Completists And "Intellectuals"
Review: The Fourth Way is a collection of questions and answers transcribed at meetings with Peter Ouspensky (or is it now PC to spell it "Uspenskii"?), a teacher of the fourth way system presented by Ouspensky's teacher, G.I. Gurdjieff. There is great substance in the book, and if one were able to distill it all, it may be that it contains practically everything one might really need to know about awakening. But substance must be transmitted in a form that is palatable. I, for one, have always found The Fourth Way (the book, that is) unbearably tedious and didactic. Ouspensky was without doubt a sincere man, and he may well have been a great teacher. His writings (and I've read 'em all, including his papers at Yale's Sterling Library, which contain a few gems) also reveal him to have been stuffy, pompous, and very, very intellectual. Reading The Fourth Way, one might imagine that awakening is not only a terribly complex matter, but requires familiarity with a vast array of concepts. Tain't so. Partly because of his era, and perhaps because it pleased him to imagine that he possessed information that was truly unique, Ouspensky also labored under the illusion that the fourth way system was, as he liked to call it, "esoteric." This is quaint, but what was "hidden knowledge" to Westerners sixty years ago can now be found in countless works in almost any bookstore, and is taught by genuine teachers of Buddhism, Sufism, and other traditions. One need not join a fourth way cult led by some self-appointed Gurdjieff wannabe and get humiliated and milked in order to awaken.Regardless of the usefulness or uniqueness of the methods, however, the book itself is turgid and one of the most boring of its genre. This does not make it any more "practical" than a book that is interesting or inspiring; it simply makes it more boring. It's like being given unnecessarily unpleasant medicine by a musty old aunt who imagines that she knows all anyone could possibly know about health care. Now Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous is a different story altogether. It not only contains most of the essential material, but presents it in a way that holds the reader's interest. That one's a classic, and strongly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but very taxing reading; a mountain of esotericis
Review: The Fourth Way is one of a series of books that Ouspensky wrote describing his studies with G.I. Gurdjieff, his guru and guide who showed him the way to achieve a higher conscience through practical study and work that virtually anyone can do. A primer would be "In Search of the Miraculous." After you have read that, you will be ready The Fourth Way -- that is -- maybe. The Fourth Way is basically a how-to book on achieving a higher state of conscienceness that taken in all at once by the beginner can literally blow ones mind. Ouspensky even warns the reader that certain tecniques that he shows in the book can "break down buffers" that are needed to, well, keep one's sanity. This is heavy stuff -- great stuff, but beware, you will never see the world the same way ever again. Jim Wolf
Rating:
Summary: Extremely insightful but with a big dodgy side...
Review: There's things that bothered me about the concepts brought forward in this book and there were other sections in it that were really rewarding.
The author Uspenskii goes through a marathon of questions and answers with a journalist (or is it a member or members of the audience, this is not clear) displaying the main ideas of the "school" as they are concentrated in a system of life-approaches called "the way". This is, by the way, a bulky book spanning over 600 pages.
This concept is basically focused on self awareness even if this is expressed in different terms, which in turn is nothing new in its own as this has been explored by the Chinese, Egyptians and Greeks 1000s of years ago. What might (and that's a big "might") be new here is the way this is achieved as Uspenskii talks repeatedly about "remembering oneself" hence achieving a primary state of awareness and working your away into deeper states as you become more concious, or, as he puts it, "not alseep".
There's of course plenty of food of thought as he develops this idea to his questioner:
-he states that most people need or (wind up doing so )to lie numerous times a day since they are not knowledgeful for the most part about what they're talking about, therefore they talk conciously about things they dont know.
-lies are a further way of keeping someone asleep as he perceives himself and the world around him as something other than they really are.
-In any case noone "posseses" only one self but several selves that vie for dominance and become expressed in different occasions and circumstances. But there are also "fake" or negative or imaginative selves that can slowly set a stronghold in the inner world of someone and thus perpetuate the "sleep".
This, along with countless other ideas that are presented in the "4th way" are, indeed, tremendously interesting and could be used to develop oneself further into what one really is.
The problem with Uspenskii is that throughout the book he maintains with a passion that all this cannot under any circumstances be achieved without the help of the "school"
which is an institution set up by himself after the inspiration he received from Giurdiiev (the one who conceived this whole philosophy).
This, in my mind, is a terribly stretched point, if not a rather suspicious one. There's no reason why someone could not achieve awareness on his own (people have done it to certain degrees for ages) especially when Uspenskii does a very unconvincing job explaining why someone would needthe "school's" help. There's several examples of people, who, yes, seeked "help" or inspiration in outer sources but did not need to attend a "school". As there are examples of the opposite too.
He's asked about this several times in the book and his answers are always vague and evasive. Another quite obvious contradiction, is that, while Uspenskii basically advocates detachment and non-identification with anything, he asks in reality that one identifies with the school, for how could one arrive to the belief that he needs a school without identifying with the idea that alone he's useless in that cause?
In any case, even with this rather dodgy occurence in his layout, Uspenskii does present a very insightful concept albeit one that could, in popular terms, be called a "best-of ancient philosophies".
The ideas presented by this Russian philosopher are definitely deep-cutting and can become very powerful tools in one's effort to evolve. Recommended but not for those who have a weak spot for being dominated by someone else's world.
Rating:
Summary: "Big Brother" or "Big Me"?
Review: This is a record of Ouspensky's successful, methodical teaching in London, early in the Twentieth Century. So, the reader gets some insight into how Ouspensky led groups and taught publicly, which should give the clever worker-bee some clues on how and in what way Ouspensky succeeded. Some observations I've made in interacting with this material:
I'm not convinced Ouspensky's teaching on "negative emotions" is as tight or accurate as it ought to be. There's room to inquire here.
Self-remembering, self-remembering. Depending on your approach, you can really shake it loose or build in yourself an internal Panopticon. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (who had a healthy dose of Gurdjieff in him) had this to day (in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism): "Self-remembering is quite a dangerous technique, actually. It could involve watching yourself and your actions like a hungry cat watching mice, or else it could be an intelligent gesture of being where you are" (p. 73). Putting it another way: "Things are very hard and deadly honest, deadly serious, like...a living corpse...This is the self-consciousness of watching youself, observing yourself unnecessarily. Whatever we do is constantly being watched and censored" (p.111). See the peril and the promise?
Given the potential for trouble, it's a very dumb idea to try this without a teacher, in person. The fourth way (at least by my admittedly limited understanding) should not be a machine for manufacturing neurotics and paranoids.
Finally, if you'd like to know what a Panopticon is and how it works, check out Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It's probably Foucault's best work, and it's very timely.
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