Rodney Collin was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 writer in the area of spiritual

Spirituality

Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...

 development. His work was heavily influenced by his teacher, P. D. Ouspensky

P. D. Ouspensky

Peter D. Ouspensky , , a Russian esotericist known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff, whom he met in Moscow in 1915.He was associated with the ideas and practices originating with...

, and through him, G. I. Gurdjieff

G. I. Gurdjieff

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff according to Gurdjieff's principles and instructions, or the "Fourth Way."At one point he described his teaching as "esoteric Christianity."...

, and their system of spiritual development. Rodney Collin is one of the most well known of Ouspenky's students, and a prolific writer. He met Ouspensky in the autumn of 1936. "Rodney Collin immediately recognised that he had found what he had been searching for in his reading and travels. From then on he dedicated all his time to the study of Mr Ouspensky's teaching." Collin's best known work, The Theory of Celestial Influence, is an ambitious attempt to unite astronomy

Astronomy

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

, physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

, chemistry

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

, human physiology

Human physiology

Human physiology is the science of the mechanical, physical, bioelectrical, and biochemical functions of humans in good health, their organs, and the cells of which they are composed. Physiology focuses principally at the level of organs and systems...

, and world history

World History

World History, Global History or Transnational history is a field of historical study that emerged as a distinct academic field in the 1980s. It examines history from a global perspective...

 with Collin's version of planetary influences.

Within his most relevant contributions, it is the emphasis in the idea of Fourth Way school existing in different times. He says:

Schools of the fourth way have existed and exist, just as schools of the three traditional ways existed and exist. But they are much more difficult to detect, because - unlike the others - they cannot be recognized by any one practice, one method, one task, or one name. They are always inventing new methods, new practices, suitable to the time and conditions in which they exist, and when they have achieved one task which was set them they pass on to another, often changing their name and whole appearance in the process.

Rodney Collin studied the sequence of European civilizations, finding a pattern which would follow a planetary scale where the times are 10 times longer than in the case of human life. His sequence starts following Toynbee

Toynbee

Toynbee is a surname, and can refer to :* Joseph Toynbee, British physician, pioneer of otolaryngology,* Arnold Toynbee, British economist, son of Joseph Toynbee* Paget Toynbee, British Dante scholar...

's but soon he changes some aspects, trying to follow his said pattern. Thus, his list begins with the Greeks

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 (with roots on the Egyptian

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...

, which he considers the last one in the previous sequence), then the Romans

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

, the Primitive Christians, the Monastic Christians, the Medieval Christians, the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

, and the Synthetic. He also quotes the influence of an extra-European civilization, the Arabic one, upon the Medieval Christian Civilization.

He establishes a relation between Fourth way schools and the origin and development of these civilizations. He says:

Thus schools of the fourth way were undoubtedly behind the designing and construction of the great Gothic

Gothic architecture

Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....

 cathedrals, though they had no special name and adapted themselves to the religious organization of the time. For a time the Cluniacs sheltered them, for a time the Freemasons. In the seventeenth century, similar schools were responsible for much of the new scientific and medical research, sometimes under one name and sometimes under another. In the eighteenth century again, fourth way schools borrowed many of the discoveries of Greek and Egyptian archeology to clothe their ideas and their organization, while some of their leaders - in order to penetrate the luxury-loving and sophisticated circles where they had work to do - might even appear in the guise of fashionable magicians or mesmerists.

The conceptual foundations for this project are the Law of Three, arguably similar to the triad of Thesis, antithesis, synthesis

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis

The triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis is often used to describe the thought of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel never used the term himself, and almost all of his biographers have been eager to discredit it....

 of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...

, and the Law of Seven, the idea that the notes of the Western musical scale encode universal stages in essentially all developmental processes. Collin unites both of these schemata geometrically using the enneagram

Fourth Way Enneagram

The Fourth Way enneagram is a figure published in 1947 in In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky, and an integral part of the so-called Fourth Way esoteric system associated with George Gurdjieff...

.

Collin's other work includes The Theory of Eternal Life, which uses some of the ideas of The Theory of Celestial Influence as a point of departure to formulate a theory of the cycles and potentials of soul

Soul

A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...

s, e.g. reincarnation

Reincarnation

Reincarnation best describes the concept where the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, is believed to return to live in a new human body, or, in some traditions, either as a human being, animal or plant...

. His works The Theory of Conscious Harmony and The Mirror of Light are more spiritual explorations of humanity: faith, acceptance and forgiveness in contrast to the philosophical scope of his earlier works.

Publications

• Palms and Patios
• The Theory of Eternal Life
• Hellas
• The Theory of Celestial Influence
• The Christian Mystery
• The Herald of Harmony
• The Pyramid of Fire
• The Whirling Ecstacy
• A Programme of Study
• The Theory of Conscious Harmony (published posthumously)
• Mirror of Light (published posthumously)