The Fourth Way as Racial Contract: A Critical Race Theoretical and Millsian Critique of Gurdjieffian Philosophy
Also, here.
The esoteric system known as the Fourth Way—popularized by the Armenian-Greek mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (d. 1949 CE) in the early twentieth century—presents itself as a universal teaching of inner development, promising to awaken the sleeping man to higher levels of Being through ‘conscious labor and intentional suffering’. Drawing selectively from Sufism, Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and other religious traditions, the Fourth Way purports to offer a harmonizing synthesis of spiritual paths fit for the modern, secular world. Yet behind this claim to universality lies a structure of erasure, domination, and white supremacy masked as mysticism that demands serious interrogation. Here we offer precisely such an interrogation through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Charles W. Mills’ magisterial The Racial Contract (1999), revealing the Fourth Way not as a path of awakening, but as a covert iteration of the racial-colonial episteme that is white supremacy.
Gurdjieff and the Myth of Esoteric Universality
From the outset, Gurdjieff positioned himself as a collector and interpreter of ancient wisdoms. Yet what he presented as a synthesis was in fact a colonial abstraction: spiritual technologies stripped from their theological, historical, and cultural matrices and reassembled into a system that privileged the Western initiate. Much like the liberalism that Mills critiques, Gurdjieffian teaching claimed to be raceless, timeless, and universal, while in fact presupposing the racialized, imperial worldview of European modernity.
The very notion of the ‘sleeping man’ becomes suspect in this frame: who is asleep, and by whose standards? The Fourth Way constructs its subjects through the lens of European interiority, framing indigenous spiritualities as fragmented traditions awaiting integration by the enlightened white adept. In doing so, it reproduces what Mills would call a ‘racial epistemology’: a structure of knowing in which whiteness becomes the arbiter of value, depth, and truth.
The Epistemology of Ignorance and the Cult of Presence
Mills’ concept of the epistemology of ignorance is essential here. He argues that white supremacy is not just enforced politically or economically, but cognitively: it actively constructs systems of denial, forgetting, and misrecognition. Gurdjieff's notion of ‘self-remembering’ functions within this very mechanism. What is remembered, and what is deliberately forgotten? The answer: history, colonialism, slavery, racial trauma—all dismissed as ‘identification’.
The Fourth Way teaches its students to dissociate from emotion, memory, and narrative. In so doing, it enacts a form of spiritualized whiteness: a disembodied detachment masked as transcendence. This is not awakening. It is racialized amnesia, a refusal to acknowledge the historical and embodied realities of nonwhite peoples. Just as CRT critiques the myth of color-blind law, so too must we critique the myth of race-blind presence. The Work’s insistence on disidentification is the mystical analog to liberalism’s false neutrality. Both allow whiteness to evade accountability while preserving its centrality.
The Racial Contract of Esoteric Hierarchy
In Mills’ terms, the Racial Contract precedes and structures all social, moral, and political contracts of the modern world. It is an unspoken global agreement among the ‘Tribes of Europe’ to exploit, marginalize, and exclude nonwhite people from full humanity. The Fourth Way can be read as a mystical instantiation of this contract.
The Teacher-student relationship in Fourth Way circles is highly hierarchical, and often secretive. The Teacher is typically coded as the one who has awakened beyond all social constraints. Yet this ‘awakening’ often looks remarkably like colonial mastery: the ability to control affect, suppress history, and silence dissent. It is no accident that the most prominent Western Fourth Way lineages have been overwhelmingly white, male, and structurally indifferent to issues of race, empire, and indigeneity. Where CRT insists on counter-narratives and situated knowledge, the Fourth Way demands that students abandon narrative altogether, seeing their own stories as obstacles to consciousness. This is nothing less than a metaphysical rewriting of the Racial Contract: nonwhite memory, trauma, and voice are obstacles to ‘Work’.
Spiritual Bypassing and the Denial of Structural Racism
One of CRT’s foundational insights is that racism is not an aberration within liberalism, but constitutive of it. Mills builds on this to show that white supremacy is the ground condition of modern political order. Gurdjieffian thought, far from challenging this order, offers a way to spiritually bypass it. By encouraging students to focus solely on internal mechanics—their reactions, identifications, habits—the Fourth Way leaves no space for engaging the world as it is. Structural injustice becomes ‘illusion’; anti-racist struggle becomes ‘unnecessary identification’; grief becomes ‘sleep’. In this way, the Fourth Way becomes a spiritual technology of empire: it trains subjects not to resist injustice, but to interiorize it as their own fault.
Our case subject—as analyzed in earlier essays—is a product of this logic. Her inability to face memory, trauma, or historical complicity is not a personal failing alone. It is an ideological outcome of Fourth Way programming—what we have called sophisticated ‘occult brainwashing’.
Toward a Mysticism of Resistance
CRT and Mills do not reject spirituality. What they reject is any system—secular or sacred—that masks domination with universality. In contrast, traditions like liberation theology, womanist theology, Islamic mysticism, and decolonial gnosis offer alternatives: forms of spirituality that are accountable to history, to grief, to justice.
Mysticism does not have to mean erasure. Presence does not have to mean silence. And inner Work does not require the disavowal of the world, but rather a deeper accountability to it. As Mills argues, the racial contract must be named, exposed, and overturned. So too must the spiritual systems that replicate its logic beneath the veil of light.
The Real Work Begins With Remembering
Gurdjieff claimed the Work began with self-remembering. But we must insist that any true Work today must begin with remembering history, empire, pain, and the long arc of struggle that brought us here. The Fourth Way, in its current forms, cannot lead to that remembrance. It leads only to further forgetting, dressed in the robes of presence.
To break the Racial Contract, one must break its mystical analogues too. That is the real Work. That is the path beyond illusion. That is the Fourth Way’s reckoning.
