The importance of novelty in evolution

[Asolsutsesvyl]

I have wondered before and consider if maybe it isn't that the paths are what produce the types but rather the paths are "created" by different types.

What came first, the path or the wanderer?

Something tells me it is the Wanderer who carves the path.

Gurdjieff had the idea that there's two types of path: objectively, each individual has a unique path, but subjectively, generalized frameworks can be created to exist as "paths" to help those striving to go in some particular direction.

Well, the four generalized ways described by Gurdjieff are all meant as right hand paths. He largely seems to have limited his descriptions of real left hand striving to occult attempts to cheat the requirements for evolution, skipping as much as possible and using brute force to jump from the lowest to the highest, at the risk of ultimately finding the innermost hidden treasure to be empty.

The three traditional paths are old frameworks with traditions and all kinds of baggage and surrounding structure. They are the familiar fakir self-torture and physical self-mastery, monkish blind devotion to spiritual authority in search of a perfection of the heart, and yogic striving for real mind-over-matter transcendence. They all require monomaniacal lopsided focus and external distance from normal life for success.

The Fourth Way instead uses ordinary life as an esoteric obstacle course in which balanced training and inner distance between what is of real value and the transient and illusory influences of the world is the distance which counts. But all known attempts, beginning with Gurdjieff's and on, to provide successful Fourth Way schools are failures in practice, in how it worked with the students.

And from the start, it seems that Gurdjieff was extremely pessimistic about human evolution, to the point where experiments and the use of hypnosis on esoteric students to see if it could lead to anything at all, instead of nothing, was what he devoted himself to. And he more generally viewed the four general ways he described as the best bets, and did not really seem to do justice to unique individual paths and their travelers (and what we understand as wanderers) outside of generalized paths in his teaching.