If one were to compare the scope of Girard Haven's earlier published "Creating A Soul" with Ouspensky's "Fourth Way", then this smaller book could be called Mr. Haven's "Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution". The book contains selected and edited essays from Mr. Haven's main work, a glossary, an interview and quotes from his letters. These "Foundations" bring the practical core ideas of the Fourth Way System into a clear focus, presenting an invaluable guide to the multifaceted work towards awakening.

Contents
From the opening essay 'The Foundations of Real Work'
Self-remembering is central to the life and work of a Fourth Way student; compared to it, all else has secondary importance. For a man who can remember himself, half an hour may record impressions that would take others days, years, perhaps a lifetime to collect. Such a man has a vastly different level of consciousness. In short, he has an operational "soul," and is as different from routine consciousness as a man snoring in bed at night differs from one who has risen and goes about his daily work.
As one proceeds, self-remembering becomes more than an exercise in awareness. Curiously, in order to remember oneself, or one's soul, one must begin to forget oneself. That is, one must be able to sacrifice one's own self-indulgence, one's entrenched feeling of identity, of being at the center of one's own universe. We stand in our own light. Through self-remembering, we begin to move out of our subjective, narrow, internal world, towards an awareness of, and a relation to, an infinitely grander, more objective, more compassionate universe. Thus, the effort to self-remember, if one persists in it, leads to humility, to the creation of a soul that is capable of serving an aim greater than itself.
Until then, ideas such as "higher truth," "enlightenment," "unity," "individuality," and "inner peace" are relatively meaningless because they depend on level of consciousness - that is, one's understanding of these words depends on what one is aware of. Consequently, without access to higher states, the attitudes generated by these words help keep man in his current state of subjective, waking dreams. The first task must be awakening – the slow, arduous process of relinquishing brief and petty aims for the great one of higher consciousness. Hence, it begins to appear that others use impressive words that have little specific meaning; for example, although few have direct experience of their souls, many nevertheless anticipate that this entity, which they have not experienced directly in life, will somehow carry them into a higher plane of experience at death. Why? And who is this 'I' that holds such expectations, anyway? …