Insights

We ordinarily imagine ourselves to be independent beings making independent choices.

We choose what we believe. We decide what matters. We select our ambitions, preferences, loyalties, and values. We encounter the world, consider our options, and act.

Careful observation reveals something considerably more complicated.

Much of what we call our own has entered us from somewhere else.

Language was given to us. Customs were inherited. Opinions were absorbed. Desires were stimulated. Fears were learned. Our ideas of success, beauty, morality, respectability, happiness, and even spirituality have been shaped by influences acting upon us since childhood.

This does not mean that human freedom is impossible.

It means that we should not assume freedom before we have learned to recognize what acts upon us.

The Inner Tradition provides a remarkably useful map for doing this. In the terminology later preserved by the Fourth Way, the influences reaching human beings can be understood as 'A,' 'B,' and 'C' influences.

They do not merely describe different kinds of information. They describe different directions in which a human life can be drawn.

'A' Influences: The Current of Ordinary Life

'A' influences belong to the ordinary movement of life.

Money. Status. Politics. Fashion. Entertainment. Reputation. Career. Pleasure. Security. Social expectations. Ideology. Competition. Recognition. Possessions.

None of these is necessarily evil.

Indeed, many are necessary. We must earn a living, participate in society, maintain relationships, care for our bodies, fulfill obligations, and navigate the circumstances into which we have been born.

The defining characteristic of A influences is therefore not that they are bad, it is that they belong to the horizontal current of ordinary life.

And within that current, they continually oppose and replace one another.

• One society prizes what another condemns.

• One generation rebels against the values of the generation before it, only to establish conventions against which another generation eventually rebels.

• One political movement produces its opposite.

• One fashion replaces another.

• One person devotes his life to acquiring wealth; another sacrifices wealth for recognition; another rejects both in pursuit of pleasure.

The objects change, but the movement continues.

This is why 'A' influences are said to cancel one another. They generate tremendous activity without necessarily producing corresponding development of being.

A person may travel enormous distances horizontally while remaining inwardly where he began.

The General Law

Behind this ordinary movement lies what the Inner Tradition calls the General Law.

The General Law maintains the equilibrium of ordinary human existence. Humanity must reproduce, organize itself, build societies, produce food, conduct commerce, establish governments, fight wars, raise children, manufacture things, maintain institutions, and perform the countless other activities necessary for collective life.

Nature requires this activity.

Consequently, enormous forces continually draw human attention outward into the maintenance of ordinary existence.

Most people never experience this as coercion. They simply experience it as life.

This is precisely what makes the General Law so effective.

There is always something demanding attention:

• Something to acquire.

• Something to fear.

• Something to defend.

• Something to become angry about.

• Something to desire.

• Something happening somewhere that apparently requires an immediate opinion.

'A' influences provide much of the material through which this law operates.

And unless another direction appears, the horizontal movement of life can consume an entire existence.

'B' Influences: Fragments From Another Direction

Yet something strange appears within ordinary culture.

Scattered among the products of ordinary life are fragments that do not seem entirely to belong to it:

• A saying of Christ.

• A passage of Scripture.

• A myth of Osiris.

• A Hermetic teaching.

• An alchemical image.

• A sacred proportion encoded in a temple.

• An icon.

• A piece of music.

• A story whose meaning seems greater than its narrative.

• A spiritual practice preserved long after its original explanation has disappeared.

These are what the Work calls 'B' influences.

They have entered ordinary culture, and consequently we can encounter them under ordinary circumstances. We may find them in books, buildings, rituals, paintings, myths, religious traditions, or apparently accidental conversations.

But they originate from another direction. B influences are fragments of Tradition.

Some have survived intact. Others have become distorted. Some remain surrounded by institutions that no longer understand what they preserve. Others have crossed cultures repeatedly, acquiring new names and symbols along the way.

The vessel need not understand what it carries. Yet something remains.

And unlike 'A' influences, genuine 'B' influences ultimately point in the same direction: toward the unrealized possibilities of the human being.

Why Some Things Haunt Us

Most people encounter 'B' influences without recognizing them.

A person may hear a parable of Christ hundreds of times and experience nothing beyond familiarity. Another hears the same words once and cannot forget them.

Someone walks through an ancient temple and sees architecture.

Another experiences the disturbing intuition that the building is saying something.

Someone encounters an esoteric symbol and sees an historical curiosity. Another feels that he has encountered something he somehow already knows but cannot yet explain.

This difference matters.

'B' influences do not compel. They attract.

And when a person repeatedly responds to them, something begins to form.

The Fourth Way calls it the magnetic center.

The Magnetic Center

The magnetic center is not yet a higher center. Nor does possessing one mean that a person has awakened.

It is an orientation beginning to form within the ordinary personality.

The person gradually recognizes that certain things belong together:

A saying encountered years ago suddenly illuminates a symbol discovered somewhere else. A religious teaching begins to resemble an alchemical operation. A myth seems to describe something personally observed during self-study. Traditions previously regarded as unrelated begin revealing a common structure.

Fragments begin attracting fragments.

Eventually the seeker realizes that what he has been collecting may not be separate things at all. He has been gathering pieces of a Tradition.

This produces an increasingly uncomfortable division within his life.

The horizontal world still makes its demands. Bills must be paid. Work must be done. Relationships must be maintained. Ordinary ambitions and desires continue to operate.

Yet another direction has appeared: The person begins to sense the vertical.

This is the beginning of the seeker.

'C' Influences: Living Transmission

'B' influences are fragments of conscious teaching that have entered ordinary life.

'C' influences are different.

They are direct, conscious transmission from the living Inner Tradition.

A book can preserve a 'B' influence for centuries without anyone involved in its preservation understanding what it contains.

'C' influence cannot operate in that way. It requires consciousness at both ends of the transmission.

Someone must know what is being transmitted. And the person receiving it must have developed sufficient preparation to recognize and receive it.

This is why the formation of a magnetic center matters. Without it, genuine C influence may be encountered and simply interpreted according to ordinary categories:

• The teaching becomes philosophy.

• The exercise becomes relaxation.

• The symbol becomes decoration.

• The ritual becomes ceremony.

• The school becomes a social organization.

• The words may survive while the transmission disappears.

'C' influence therefore requires something more than exposure to esoteric information. It requires contact.

Traditionally, this is the function of the school, teacher, initiatic community, or living chain of transmission.

Where 'A 'influences pull horizontally and 'B 'influences point toward another direction, 'C' influence teaches the seeker how to travel in that direction.

Tradition and Counter-Tradition

But this creates a serious problem.

Not everything claiming to come from above actually does. The existence of genuine 'B' and 'C' influences inevitably produces imitation.

There are teachings that stimulate imagination rather than consciousness.

• Schools that cultivate dependence upon a teacher.

• Systems that inflate personality while promising transcendence of personality.

• Movements that offer extraordinary identities instead of difficult Work.

• Teachings that provide increasingly elaborate cosmologies while demanding almost no transformation from the person studying them.

And experiences that feel spiritual precisely because they flatter what already exists within us.

This is why the Christian Inner Tradition places such importance upon diakrisis (διάκρισις)—discernment.

Discernment is not cynicism. Nor is it simply intellectual skepticism.

It is the developed capacity to distinguish one influence from another by its quality, direction, and fruit.

• Does a teaching increase fantasy or perception?

• Does it strengthen identification or expose it?

• Does it make the student feel exceptional, or make self-deception increasingly difficult?

• Does it demand belief, or does it provide something that can be tested through Work?

• Does it produce dependence—or greater responsibility?

• Does it merely add knowledge to personality, or does it require a change of being?

These questions matter because counterfeit verticality may be more dangerous to the seeker than ordinary horizontal life.

Someone completely absorbed in 'A' influences may eventually become dissatisfied. Someone convinced that an imitation is the Way may stop searching.

A Flood of Influence

The problem has become especially acute in modern life.

For most of human history, the number of influences reaching a person in a single day was relatively limited.

That condition no longer exists.

We carry devices designed to compete continuously for attention. News, advertising, entertainment, outrage, political messaging, pornography, consumer desire, social comparison, celebrity, fear, and the opinions of millions of strangers can enter consciousness from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep.

The horizontal current has become a flood. And the mechanism is increasingly personalized.

Algorithms learn what captures our attention and provide more of it. What agitates us returns. What confirms us returns. What stimulates desire returns. What produces identification returns.

From the standpoint of Inner Work, this is significant.

Attention is the material upon which influences act. What repeatedly receives our attention acquires energy.

This makes the ancient discipline of watchfulness—nepsis (νῆψις)—particularly important.

We cannot discriminate among influences we have not first learned to see.

Observing Influence

This teaching can be tested immediately: For one day, observe what enters you. Not merely what you consciously choose to read or watch. Notice what captures attention.

• What changes your emotional state?

• What produces desire?

• What makes you angry?

• What opinions appear in your mind after encountering someone else's?

• What continues repeating internally hours after the original stimulus has disappeared?

• What makes you feel important?

• What makes you afraid?

And then observe another category.

• What causes you to remember yourself?

• What produces stillness rather than stimulation?

• What awakens a question that refuses to disappear?

• What reveals something about yourself that you had not previously seen?

• What calls you toward greater responsibility?

• What reminds you that another kind of life may be possible?

The purpose is not to construct a paranoid world in which every influence must be labeled and feared. The purpose is to discover something much simpler: our inner life is continually being acted upon.

Becoming Capable of Choice

This brings us to the paradox at the center of the teaching.

At first, the question appears to be: Which influences will I choose?

But that assumes precisely the freedom the Work asks us to investigate.

• If I am completely identified with an influence, who is choosing?

• If an advertisement creates a desire that I immediately experience as my desire, where was the choice?

• If an ideology supplies an opinion that I repeat as my opinion, who examined it?

• If an insult produces anger before I have even seen the reaction begin, what exactly decided to become angry?

The first task is therefore not choosing correctly. It is becoming conscious enough for genuine choice to appear.

• 'A' influences surround us.

• 'B influences remind us that another direction exists.

The magnetic center begins to orient us toward that direction.

'C' influence provides living help from those who already know something of the Way.

And diakrisis (διάκρισις) gradually teaches us to distinguish among them.

This is why the study of influences belongs to self-knowledge. We cannot know ourselves without discovering what continually enters us, what we unconsciously obey, and what within us responds when something from another level appears.

The question is not whether we are influenced. We are.

The question is whether we will remain unconscious instruments through which influences pass—or become capable of seeing them, distinguishing them, and eventually choosing what we are willing to serve.

That capacity is not given to us fully formed. It is one of the things the Work exists to develop.

Pierce!

September 26, 2025