Intellectual Centre
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The Intellectual Centre or Thinking Center is one of the the Centers described by Gurdjieffian Fourth Way philosophy and correponds to the faculty of reason posseed by humans but not, Gurdjieff implies, by any other animal. It has two components: the False Intellectual Center and the Higher Intellectual Center. The Intellectual Center corresponds to a personality type that the Gurdjieffian thought calls the Thinking Man or Man Number Three and the Way of the Yogi and to janana yoga.
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[edit] The Lower (or False) Center and the Higher (or True) Center
[edit] The Lower or False Center
The Lower (or False) Center corresponds to the normal level of reasoning and insight in ordindary people from day to day.
Like other of the lower Centers, it performs automatically, most of the time. Like an autistic savant, it has wondrous capacities, yet severe limitations and prejdudices and false beliefs blind it so that, for example, it may come up with erudite proofs for some completely wrong belief or waste its time on utter trivia.
[edit] Place on the Ray of Creation
The Lower Emotional Center corresponds in to Gurdjieff hydrogen number 48 (Earth Level on the Ray of Creation) and to the physical body. Those whose center of gravity have the title Man Number 3.
[edit] The Higher or True Center
The Fellowship of Friends, a Ouspensky-Gurdjieff derived organization, defines the Higher Center on its website as:
The higher intellectual center may be evoked mechanically, for example, by the severe shock of a life-threatening experience that produces a state of extreme clarity [see: Acute stress reaction], the perception of time halting, and an unusual ability to perceive what is happening in the moment. It may be evoked consciously by accepting and enduring a period of extreme suffering.
This state of awareness Fourth Way calls the Objective Consciousness also known as the Fourth State.
[edit] Place on the Ray of Creation
The Higher Emotional Center corresponds to the Gurdjieff hydrogen number 6 (All Suns Level on the Ray of Creation) and, in some Gurdjieff-derived systems to the Causal or divine body. Humans whose center of gravity reside here have the title Man Number 6.
[edit] Analogies in other systems
- The lower Intellectual Center corresponds to "Talker", one of the three souls described by the Gurdjieff-influenced neopagan Feri Tradition.
- In terms of neuroanatomy, the False Intellectual Center (and arguably the Higher Intellectual Center, too) has similarities in function to that of the neocortex or to the Central Nervous System as a whole.
- In the Theory of multiple intelligences, the Intellectual Centre corresponds to thinking functions and (arguably) IQ scores.
[edit] See also
- Centers (Fourth Way)
- states of consciousness (Fourth Way)
- The Laws (Fourth Way)
- Transformation of Suffering
- conscious suffering
- Air (classical element)
