View From the Real World
(T)he difficulty is that, owing to wrong modern upbringing… the lack of connection in us between body, feeling and mind has not been recognized… (T)here is no common language between one part and another. This is why it is so difficult for us to establish a connection between them, and still more difficult to force our parts to change their way of living… —Prieuré, January 19, 1923
…(P)eople have a wrong idea about… the thinking center, that is, our formatory apparatus. All the stimuli coming from the centers are transmitted to the formatory apparatus, and all the perceptions of centers also are manifested through the formatory apparatus. It is connected with all the centers. In their turn, centers are connected with one another, but these connections are of a special kind. There is a certain degree of subjectivity… Only associations of a certain strength in one center evoke corresponding associations in another…
In the formatory apparatus connections with centers are more sensitive, because all associations reach it. Every local stimulus in the centers, every association, provokes associations in the formatory apparatus…
The most primitive and most accessible is the connection between the moving center and the formatory apparatus. This connection is the coarsest, the most “audible,” the speediest, thickest and best… It is the quickest to form, and the quickest to be filled. The second is considered to be the connection with the sex center. The third…with the emotional center. The fourth…with the thinking center.
The first connection exists and functions in all men; associations are received and manifested. The second connection…with the sex center, exists in the majority of men. Consequently most people live with the first and second centers—their whole life, all their perceptions and manifestations come from these centers and originate in them. People whose emotional center is connected with the formatory apparatus are in the minority, and in their case all their life and manifestations proceed through it. But there is hardly anyone in whom the connection with the thinking center works. —Prieuré, January 29, 1923 – Formatory apparatus
…A man’s centers never sleep. Since associations are their life, their movement, they never cease, they never stop. A stoppage of associations means death. The movement of associations never stops for an instant in any center, they flow on even in the deepest sleep…
Memory, attention, observation is nothing more than observation of one center by another, or one center listening to another. Consequently the centers themselves do not need to stop and sleep. Sleep brings the centers neither harm nor profit…
(O)nly when all the connections between the centers are broken…can the machine produce what sleep is meant to produce….
If people have dreams it means that one of their connections is not broken, since memory, observation, sensation is nothing more than one center observing another. Thus when you see and remember what is happening in you, it means that one center observes another. And if it can observe it follows that there is something through which to observe. And if there is something through which to observe—the connection is not broken…
But we don’t know how to break these connections by ourselves…
When “it” so pleases, we can pass into another state; when not, we have to lie and wait till “it” gives us leave to rest. —Prieuré, January 30, 1923 – Energy—sleep
In Search of the Miraculous
“Man is a complex organization…consisting of four parts, which may be connected or unconnected, or badly connected. The carriage is connected with the horse by shafts, the horse is connected with the driver by reins, and the driver is connected with the master by the master’s voice. But the driver must hear and understand the master’s voice. He must know how to drive, and the horse must be trained to obey the reins. As to the relation between the horse and the carriage, the horse must be properly harnessed… If something is lacking in one of the connections, the organization cannot act as a single whole. The connections are therefore no less important than the actual ‘bodies.’ Working on himself man works simultaneously on the ‘bodies’ and on the ‘connections.’ But it is different work.
“Work on oneself must begin with the driver…the mind. In order to be able to hear the master’s voice, the driver…must not be asleep… he must wake up. Then it may prove that the master speaks a language that the driver does not understand. The driver must learn this language (to) understand the master. But concurrently with this he must learn to drive the horse, to harness it to the carriage, to feed and groom it, and to keep the carriage in order—because what would be the use of his understanding the master if he is not in a position to do anything? …The horse is our emotions. The carriage is the body. The mind must learn to control the emotions. The emotions always pull the body after them. This is the order in which work on oneself must proceed. But observe again that work on the ‘bodies,’ that is, on the driver, the horse, and the carriage, is one thing. And work on the ‘connections’—that is, on the ‘driver’s understanding,’ which unites him to the master; on the ‘reins,’ which connect him with the horse; and on the ‘shafts’ and the ‘harness,’ which connect the horse with the carriage—is quite, another thing. —Chapter 5
View From the Real World
This is why we are obliged to make them communicate, but not in the language given us by nature, which would have been easy…
In most of us this common language…is irretrievably lost. The only thing left us is to establish a connection in a roundabout, “fraudulent” way. And these…artificial connections must be very subjective, since they must depend on a man’s character and the form his inner makeup has taken. —Prieuré, January 19, 1923