THE FIFTH WAY – AN INTRODUCTION

– by Lillian Delevoryas Amis

Speaking to students of Robin Amis (circa 2016)

[Robin and Lillian Amis led the team that brought the translation of Mouravieff’s three volumes of Gnosis to the English-speaking world in 1989-1993.]

Our objective is to present the Fifth Way, as set down by Mouravieff in the 1950s and 1960s through his Geneva University course and subsequently the Gnosis series. When we first received Gnosis in 1986 for retranslation, the part that appealed most to us was the idea of the Fifth Way and the Polar Being – it was the first time we came across a theory about the two sexes that made any sense. Apart from lust, procreation, and romance, there didn’t seem to be any other options – and all these were transient ‘passions’ that, when they disappeared, love also disappeared. In fact, Mouravieff uses the popular quote, ‘Marriage is the graveyard of love,’ to express this view.

So, faced with these alternatives, the idea that there was something more to be achieved when man meets woman was a huge revelation – and 30 years later, although we can’t claim to have penetrated the essence of this teaching, it still makes the most sense to us, as it will for countless others, and bringing it out into the world for young people who are just beginning their adult life seems a good counterbalance to the trivialisation and vulgarisation of sex that has become endemic in modern society.

Thirty years ago, when we first published Gnosis in English, there was a flurry of seekers who were completely taken by this concept, to the point where they left their existing marriages in search of their ‘Polar Other’. At this point. Robin stopped featuring it in his talks and began to downplay it in general. It obviously wasn’t the right time. Annie Lou Staveley, a wise old woman who was teaching in Oregon and had studied with Gurdjieff in Paris, advised her group to ‘treat your common garden variety husband (or wife) as your polar being – just use the idea to act ‘as if’ you were’ – and that seemed as good an instruction as any.

In the meantime, time has moved on, and even though (according to Mouravieff’s students) the teaching on the Polar Being was a teaching for the Age to Come, it would seem that this age is already upon us, or at least the transition into it has begun. The idea itself has taken hold, and judging from several websites, several students of Gnosis have pursued this idea and taken it further, for example, Cynthia Bourgeault in her books The Meaning of Mary Magdalene and Love is Stronger than Death. Cynthia was a student of Robin’s briefly and has had a solid grounding in Fourth Way Work. As an exponent of the Fifth Way, she would understand the necessity of first beginning the inner work of Work on Oneself before one can progress further. This inner work is generally referred to as “purification” by the church.

At the same time, Mouravieff himself stated that working as a couple is considerably more efficient than working alone, and that in the future this will be the preferred way, and will be protected, as it were. He states elsewhere that in the past, monasticism was the prevalent way in which inner work was undertaken, and the individual was under the protection of a monastery. Mouravieff uses the same word ‘protected’ to refer to the Fifth Way, and also states that monasticism as a ‘way’ will be replaced by working on oneself in life, and this would embrace the idea of marriage and a relationship with another. This also relates to the idea of the 3 stages of inner Work. Beginning with work on oneself, then progressing to work with others, and finally working for the Work itself, for the spiritual or church community. In each stage, one expands to include more and more – from the selfish concern of one’s own development, one moves on to include another, and from there, opens out into a larger whole.

When one goes into the teachings about Polar Beings more deeply, the concept exists that when two people, man and woman, effect their transformation as a couple, they create another “abler soul” between them, to quote John Donne. But it doesn’t stop there. That is the point where they become truly useful to the work, and it is this newly created being that is involved in the evolution of mankind. 

“When love with one another so
Interinanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.
We then, who are this new soul, know
Of what we are compos'd and made,
For th' atomies of which we grow
Are souls, whom no change can invade.”

- from The Ecstasy - John Donne (c. 1572 – 1631)

But we mustn’t digress and go into speculation. It is our aim in this book to present the doctrine as Mouravieff presents it in his 3 volumes of Gnosis, enlarged upon by other Christian teachings, as well as those Russian philosophers of the 19^th Century who have helped shape his thinking on the subject (Solovyev, Berdyaev, etc). To do this we have extracted from his 3 volumes all the references to the Fifth Way, and have presented them here as they were written – so that the reader can see clearly what Mouravieff’s viewpoint was.

By doing this, we have also tried to establish that as this teaching has become disseminated at large, it was M’s original formulation in the mid twentieth century that set the stage in the next century for implementing it in the world. We have tried to fill in the gaps with excerpts from his own unfinished novel ‘Initiation’, which is a description of his own experience of the Fifth Way. Other useful texts are Vladimir Solovyov’s The Meaning of Love, Philip Sherrard’s Christianity and Eros, and Paul Evdokimov’s The Sacrament of Love. 

In no way do we, as students of Robin Amis and Mouravieff, claim to have the key or have all the answers to the questions that this magnificent teaching poses. We aim to bring it out into a world which appears to be ready for it at this crucial junction in history, where things seem to be disintegrating as quickly as they are built up. The greatest disaster area in modern times seems to be that of the relation between man and woman – the question of sexuality – of gender confusion – all these – leading to the deterioration of marriage and the family as a unit – would point to the need for a radical re-thinking of the role of the sexes in the Age to Come. Because it is such a novel idea, those who embrace it will have to use it in their own lives to fathom its meaning – and we are all in this boat together. Those brave souls who make it their own will no doubt contribute to the knowledge and awareness of the teaching as it finds its way into more general circulation. 

Published texts by Boris Mouravieff, which discuss the concept of the Polar Being and the journey of The Fifth Way:

    The Substantial and the Essential, Ch 8-10, Praxis Research Institute

    Gnosis Volumes I, II, III, Praxis Research Institute (PDF or hardcopy)