Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York:
Talks and Lectures with A.R. Orage 1924-193
Essence is a particle of the center of conscience of the universal being. It is the voice of God in the individual that is, objective conscience… —Saturday, 12 November 1927 part 2 of 3
Man is a product of heredity and environment… All that comes through heredity is called essence. While that which is the result of the interplay between essence and environment is termed personality… —January 1925 – theory
Essence is that part of us with which we are born. It contains all particles of planetary matter corresponding to all planets by which we are affected at the time of conception, or at the time of birth. Since the planetary influences are never the same, it follows, that each person in essence is constituted differently. —January 1925 – essence
…When you speak of essence you speak of it in relation to the personality. Personality depends upon temperament… (which) may be defined as the configuration… of wishes deposited in us by the planets at the time of our conception.
Planets deposit matter which functions psychologically as wishes. We are wishes, and our life is a fulfillment of our wishes…
A structure… without wishes… would not live. The wish to live is planetary. Heredity did give a structure — the physical body (the instinctive), composed of muscular, nervous, and cerebral systems. But not until emotional and intellectual centers are formed do we… feel and think. The formation of centers is planetary. The capacity of centers is given at birth, (due to heredity.) The actual functioning is due to planetary influence…
Man is really his own wish. That is why we call that essence… —Tuesday, 12 May 1925 – essence
…We must discover if possible by self-observation what this essence is; people’s way of life must be in accordance with their essence, to produce a balanced and happy life. There is no success or happiness in working against essence. You must discover if you are an intellectual, emotional, or instinctive type — the instinctive type is the more predominant type, 90% of us are such…
An exercise in retrospective observation to help discover your essence may be a review of your childhood. Remember as far back as you can how you looked and how you reacted, through all the years of childhood, youth, and all intervening years. See yourself as a child of three or four, if possible(. W)hat was your appearance(? R)emember your reactions to as many incidents as possible(. B)uild this gradually up to the present time(. C)arry it on from day to day, and eventually you will find a recurrence in it all of the part of you which is your essence, persisting, in spite of conditions and changing circumstances. Essence is the original self without the falseness of affectations imposed upon us by education and social pressure(. T)o discover it we must discard the personality traits. It is often very crude. —Mrs. Hares Notes – imagination and thought
Essence can never be changed, it has potentialities which may be developed, but everything must be in line with essence
…Essence has ninety types arrived at by the combination of structure and planetary determination. The structural types are limited to twelve. —5 January – further discussion as to essence and personality
We cannot get far until we have classified ourselves as to type. I see before me many types, like a dog fancier at a show. The dog fancier sees Newfoundlands, Terriers, etc. I see those before me who personally wish to be, to do, to know. Which one are you essentially? Do you wish to be something more than you are? Do you wish to do something more than you do? Do you wish to know something more than you know?
We begin self-study by trying to classify ourselves according to these three large classes of types.
…This method is for those who are looking first of all to know “what kind of a being am I?
We say a human being is an organism with three brains. …We have a brain for being, a brain for doing, and a brain for knowing. —Monday, 11 November 1929 – vi
We start life hereditarily limited and with three blank centers. In life we fill up these three centers…
…While all have three centers at birth, we might say they vary in size. We all started at a single note at the beginning, at birth. We say a full sized center at birth is 3. A proper distribution at birth, of center potentialities, would be 3,3,3. But we are never born 3,3,3. We are born with centers limited to a development of 3,2,1; 2,3,1; 2,1,2, 2,2,1; etc…
These possibilities at birth cannot be changed during life. We cannot change heredity…
How do the three centers become relatively filled? All centers can be developed according to their potentiality for experiences—according to the inherited pattern. —Monday, 21 October 1929 – III
Men can be divided into three main classes or types — the practical, athlete or man of affairs; the aesthetic, artist or religious; the intellectual, scientist or philosopher. A small degree of supremacy in any one of these fields militates against the other two. The greater excellence he exhibits in one, the greater his prejudices against the other two classes… —Beyond Behavior – Kathryn Hulme Papers
…Are we predominantly practical, emotional, or intellectual?
Each of the types has its two opposite manifestations. Positive muscular dominant is physically active and energetic; negative is physically lazy. Emotionally positive means optimistic; negative — pessimistic. Positive intellectual is the constructive criticizer, the one who as a rule finds himself in agreement with proposed statements; the negative is the destructive critic. Sometimes we exhibit characteristic of all three, but the question is which system guides the mechanism usually?
To ascertain the answer, the examination of no temporary–or present–period will suffice; it is only how the organism tends habitually to act over long periods that counts, for it is the time factor that points to type. To this end we must review our life, not introspectively, but by the ordinary exercise of pictorial memory, dividing it for convenience into such phases as infancy, childhood, school, married days, etc. This process will take up considerable time, and during it we shall inevitably have some light thrown upon the two kinds of our present characteristics: those resulting from environment… and those resulting from heredity — our “essence”…. —Beyond Behavior – The Old New Method – Kathryn Hulme Papers