Two kinds of mentation

     "Since I have happened to touch upon a question that has recently become almost an "obsession" of mine, namely, the process of human mentation, I consider it possible, without waiting for the place in my writings I had designated for the elucidation of this question, to speak at least a little in this first chapter about some information that accidentally became known to me.  According to this information, it was customary in long-past centuries on earth for every man bold enough to aspire to the right to be considered by others and to consider himself a "conscious thinker" to be instructed, while still in the early years of his responsible existence, that man has two kinds of mentation: one kind, mentation by thought, expressed by words always possessing a relative meaning; and another kind, proper to all animals as well as to man, which I would call "mentation by form."

     "The second kind of mentation, that is, "mentation by form"--through which, by the way, the exact meaning of all writing should be perceived and then assimilated after conscious confrontation with information previously acquired--is determined in people by the conditions of geographical locality, climate, time, and in general the whole environment in which they have arisen and in which their existence flowed up to adulthood."

 Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff, Viking Arkana Edition, 1992, page 14