The Reality of Being
14. I need impressions of myself
We need to see what is in the way, and we need to understand why receiving an impression is so difficult. It is not because I do not wish to receive it. It is because I am not able. I am always closed, whatever the circumstances of life. At times, maybe for a flash I am open to an impression. But almost immediately I react. The impression is automatically associated with other things and the reaction comes. The button is pushed and this or that thought, emotion or gesture must follow. I cannot help it, first of all because I do not see it. My reaction cuts me off from the impression, as well as from the reality it represents…
In Search of the Miraculous
Chapter Eighteen
“… You must understand that each center is divided into three parts in conformity with the primary division of centers into ‘thinking,’ ’emotional,’ and ‘moving’… In addition, from the very outset each center is divided into two parts: positive and negative…
A Study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching, Kenneth Walker
Knowledge and Being
…Ouspensky… said that the dividing up of the centres in this way was best illustrated by a consideration of Intellectual Centre. First came the division of intellectual centre into positive and negative halves. Both affirmation and negation were necessary in thinking, but in some people one of these two sides was too active. There were people who had a tendency to say ‘No’ to everything, and there were others who were more inclined to say ‘Yes’. There were also strange mixtures of affirmation and negation in our conduct. In certain cases negative thinking was associated with positive feeling, and in other cases positive thinking was associated with negative feeling…
Ouspensky explained that it was the second subdivision of the two halves of centres into moving, emotional and intellectual, which was closely related to the subject of attention. The difference between these three parts of Intellectual Centre was that in the lowest or moving part of it thinking went on without any attention at all; in the second or emotional part attention was attracted by the intrinsic interest of the subject; and in the third highest and intellectual part of Intellectual Centre attention had to be directed on to the subject by an effort… The same was true of the subdivision of the other centres into moving, emotional and intellectual parts.
‘The lowermost or moving part of intellectual has been given a special name’, continued Ouspensky. It is called ‘formatory centre’, and it … is capable only of carrying on a low-grade type of associative thinking… It makes decisions which by rights should be made only by the intellectual part of Intellectual centre…
Toward Awakening, Jean Vaysse
State of Presence chapter
…(T)he only difference between sleep… and the ordinary waking state is that the… mechanical part of the intellectual function, which reacts and associates automatically, is reconnected. The role of this formatory apparatus is to link together and coordinate the impressions received by the different centers… But the higher centers remain disconnected, and the I goes on sleeping; the lower centers are still cut off from one another, and no direct confrontation is set up between them, with the result that each goes on with its own imagining.
Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York
Talks and Lectures with A.R. Orage 1924-1931 – January 1925 – the formulatory center
…The potential “I” has an ally in the organism; the human brain cells. These, once stimulated, carry on its work as best they can… recall one to observe, impel one to make the effort etc. and, though they do not actually observe — in the sense that only “I” can observe yet they do much work, and the “I” whenever it partially or more fully awakes, will find that much “business” will have been done by these allies. In addition… they can set about the task of subduing the… formulatory center — to the service of the higher intellectual and emotional centers, to the control of the “I.”…
Toward Awakening, Jean Vaysse
Centers and Functions
…(S)elf-observation leads us to the conclusion that the ideas which are our ordinary mode of thought are of a purely mechanical order….
Indeed, for the intellectual center to become capable of other than purely reactive and automatic thinking, it has to function on another level, the level of a presence and of a stable, all-enveloping, soundly established I. Then independent thoughts are possible with a development, true “reflection,” and foresight that conform with our overall sense of individuality and which characterize real “subjective” thought…
…(E)ach center has its own memory. Attached to it… there are recording apparatuses made of sensitive matter, which would be compared today to computer memory banks, but which Gurdjieff likened to blank cylinders of wax. Everything that happens to us, all that we see, hear, do and learn, is recorded on these… Every inner and outer event leaves an impression on these rolls… Moreover, these… impressions engraved on the rolls of the different centers are linked together at the level of the ordinary mind by associations.
…The machine is so constructed that… the recording of impressions… automatically creates a tendency for some of them to connect together, so that when one is evoked all those associated with it are recalled. Such associations are produced… first, when impressions received together… are inscribed simultaneously on corresponding rolls; and second, when impressions… on the same roll or on rolls of different centers have a certain similarity (so that they are mutually aroused by a phenomenon analogous to resonance).
…(D)ifferent impressions received simultaneously on one or several rolls are… linked together… If a man comes to realize, at least for a moment, a degree of unity in himself, all the impressions received together on such an occasion, by the different centers, become linked and remain linked in his memory, thus helping to establish this unity.
…Impressions having a certain inner similarity are also evoked by one another and… are repeated in the same center. This is the basis of the conditioning and habits which maintain the mechanicalness of ordinary life.
But if a man, through special work, becomes more conscious, then more subtle and more complete relationships of inherent similarity are established between his different rolls, and put at his disposal an aggregate in which all the life impressions are associated together at the different levels.