on the structural nature of man

On the Structural Nature of Man

After writing the essay on chakras and the enneagram, I spent over five years studying the questions it raised from an inner point of view. That is to say, I studied it not primarily from an intellectual or theoretical point of view, but first of all from a physical point of view. The aim of this was to understand how a practical experience of the multiplications and their relationship to the evolution of inner energies might assist in the foundation for a greater inner unity.

During this period I avoided reading material by other authors on the subject, so as to be sure my deductions were based as much as possible on personal observations and intuitions, rather than material “cribbed” from other sources.

The time has come to elucidate a number of structural principles regarding this question which were not obvious to me when I wrote the first essay. Readers should read the original essay, as well as the essay titled "on the development of emotional center" before they attempt to cover this material.

One caveat must be kept at hand for those who do this. I always suspected the original essay on the enneagram was far from complete and contained significant gaps in understanding, some of which this piece will attempt to address.

Some portions of this essay are speculative; other portions, perhaps less so. The reader should attend with a critical mind and attempt to understand and interpret based on their own experience.

We are accustomed in the Gurdjieff work to speaking of three different centers. This subject has subtle complexities to it.

In the first place, as is clear, there are actually seven centers. Two of them, instinctive and sex center, act as understories for man's experience of life, and the two higher centers – higher emotional and higher intellectual center -- lie outside of man's reach in his ordinary condition. This leaves us with only three centers that allow any kind of direct contact or work.

If we examine the two higher or two lower centers, we might surmise that taken together, the three centers that lie “in the middle”—the intellect, emotions and moving center—form an entity that may enter into a relationship between a pair of the other two, either “above” or “below,” in such a way as to provide a reconciling factor for the other two. The Hebrew Star of David may well be emblematic of this relationship. (See Mouni Sadhu’s “The Tarot” for an extensive treatment of this subject.)

Taking the law of octaves at its required face value—that is, agreeing that everything proceeds according to octaves—we can say that each of the three centers is, in fact, composed of an octave of work in its own right. That is to say, the intellectual mind occupies an entire octave within the body. The emotional mind inhabits its own octave. The moving center also consists of an entire octave. In each case, the octave has a physical existence, that is to say, each of the notes in the octave has a physical location in the body which does not vary.

How do we arrive at this understanding? Let’s begin with the role of the law of three.

All octaves consist of two parts: the law of three and the law of seven. Broken down into their constituent elements, the six intermediate notes belonging to the law of seven (re, mi, fa, sol, la, si) are physically located. The elements that provide the shocks, that is, the energy that raises the rate of vibration in the intervals, are provided by the law of three. This energy is on the order of consciousness, that is, it is always provided by attention, or, an active relationship consisting of intention and effort. Unlike the notes in an octave, it’s not physically located: it’s in constant movement, moving within and between levels to provide the necessary shocks. This highlights a principle difference between the law of three and the law of seven.

We are further taught that each center has its own intellectual, moving, and emotional part. Seeing these parts from the same point of view that Gurdjieff offers us on the macroscopic level—and taking the law, “as above, so below,”—we must inevitably understand that these parts are also intelligences; i.e., they function as the law of three within their own octave, or, the functional elements in the octave that provide the shocks. So, for example, in the emotional octave, the role of the intellect might be the note “do;” the moving center might fill the interval “mi-fa” and the emotional center the interval “si-do.”

So we see that when we speak of (for example) the emotional center, we are actually speaking of a “mind” composed of three parts, or “smaller minds”, each one of which plays an active, passive, or reconciling nature--according to the role of the moment—which, if in right relationship, provides the necessary shock in an interval. In addition, the center has six flowers of its own -- points corresponding to different levels of vibration. The structure furthermore reveals an entity with a fractional nature that allows for potential deviation from right development at the intervals—just as in any octave.

The root nature of this “emotional mind” is that it is essentially composed of movement, as depicted in the enneagram. If it acquires wholeness, that wholeness must emerge from the progressive intersection and interaction between the law of three and the law of seven. The inherent nature of mind in its ultimate manifestation rests in the interaction between its vivifying qualities, as imparted by the law of three, and the six notes of its structural premise—the organs which Gurdjieff called “receivers of vibrations.” (Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson,” in the chapter “From the author.”)

We are now going to examine it from a much larger point of view. The intellectual, moving, and emotional centers in man each have seven levels in them. That is to say, we can extrapolate and understand that for each center, there can exist a developmental level (“man number”) of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7. The level of any man's intellect, emotion, or moving ability corresponds to the particular note on that octave that his intelligence has developed to.

The obvious implication is that there are a wide range of combinations of development, which can produce yogis, gurus, and so on with an extraordinary range of strengths and weaknesses, every single kind of which represents a stage of development that fall short of full harmony. Much of what Gurdjieff referred to as "wrong crystallization" represents men who have developed in such a way that, for example, the emotional center has reached a high level of development -- for example, a saint might be man number five or six in his emotional octave -- but who has left the other octaves far enough behind that further movement is tightly restricted, or even impossible. We can liken it to a free climber going up a mountain who has attained an enormous height, but finally run out of handholds, and must painstakingly back down to seek another route.

The ultimate development of man number seven relies on the completion of all his inner octaves. That is to say, a man must be man number seven in his intellect, in his emotion, and in his body, as well as the other four centers.

Just a brief "aside" here to point out that the law of three, as viewed within the enneagram, corresponds to momentum. The law of seven corresponds to location. In the same way that the existence of a particle “magically” emerges from the dialectical tension of quantum uncertainty (velocity versus location) through the agency of an observer, the existence of Being within man emerges from the effort of the physically observed interaction of the two laws. In this sense, in order for being to emerge, a man has to actually inhabit his own enneagram. Unless his awareness observes the process of interaction, the emergent potential of Being-- which represents "reality," rather than the illusion man perpetually dwells in -- goes unrealized. He continues to dwell in an unresolved “quantum dialectic” which represents potential, blocked by contradiction.

The relationship between the enneagram and the broad concepts of quantum uncertainty and emergent classical reality is perhaps an unexpected one. Nonetheless, the principles confirm Gurdjieff's contention that this diagram describes everything, if one only knew how to read it. Is it truly surprising that the process of Being arises in the same way at every level? Being, we discover, is a lawful phenomenon embedded at the root of reality, and reaching all the way to its apex.

Intellectual mind, moving mind, emotional mind. Each with three parts of its own: intellectual, moving, emotional.

In pondering this particular question, it occurred to me that the fundamental nature of each octave is that it contains the corresponding parts of the other centers within its evolution. So, with the emotional center’s octave, the note “re” consists of the emotional part of instinctive center. “Mi” is the emotional mind of sex center; “fa” the emotional mind of moving center, and so on. This means that for centers one through six, what we call the emotional octave contains all the emotional parts of the other centers.

The emotional part of higher intellectual center, however, is formed by the completion of the emotional octave.

We can extrapolate even further. Given that there are seven centers in man, we can say that each center is composed of an octave—and, furthermore, that in every octave belonging to a particular center, its corresponding notes play the role of that exact center in the octaves of other centers. It would take a rather complex table to show all the relationships.

One might think this is a reach, but in attempting to understand the idea of interacting octaves within each of the seven centers, it’s the simplest explanation. It provides an integrated structure with a logic to it that requires little manipulation or further invention, i.e., it follows the rule of Occam’s razor.

The understanding may or may not be correct, but it certainly provides a provocative model. The structure I intuit here intimately links all the parts of all the centers into one complex, interactive system consisting of seven fully interacting octaves: a structure whose interactive unity, intricacy, and complexity is exactly what one would expect, given the nature of biological systems as we known them today. Even if the details of the premise are inaccurate, surely, something much like this must take place in an inner sense. Everything is connected to everything else, and all the parts of all the centers must participate in the overall evolution of the system.

This proposed integration of seven inner octaves bears a logical, direct comparison to the ray of creation; as such, it fully supports one major idea Gurdjieff advanced, namely, that the inner structure of man is an exact model of the universe in miniature.

Gurdjieff told his students that work could not begin to live until emotional center was active. As was pointed out in my original essay on the subject, the emotional center is an actual physical inner structure, corresponding to what yoga calls the chakras. Gurdjieff made this clear in the last chapter of "Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson." The six “inner flowers” which I have written about in numerous other essays correspond to six of the seven "minds" of emotional center. As mentioned earlier, the seventh mind emerges from the integration of the other six.

Rather than calling them “chakras”—a term used by schools that, from what I can gather, no longer seem to fully understand their actual role in the body—Gurdjieff’s intimations firmly suggest these flowers or chakras are “notes” in the octave of emotional center--although each one of them also represents a fully developed emotional “mind” in its own right. As such, the emotional center constitutes its own ray of creation.

Another way of saying this, for those who prefer a more emotive terminology, is that every center contains its own divine consciousness. That consciousness, however, is not fully realized by the awareness of the human mind unless the entire octave is complete, rather than leaking energy out in many directions as a consequence of inadequate relationship.

I feel reasonably certain that the physical structure of the body contains analogous systems for both the intellect and the moving center. There are yoga diagrams depicting channels that go up (or, if you will, down) the right and left side of the body, with a third “major” channel in the middle. Based on my own experience, I suspect the left and right channels are actually pathways directly connected to the physical structure of moving center (and sensation.) The central channel is, in these diagrams, more or less lumped together with the side channels, even though I suspect its structure is a separate entity belonging to emotional center.

For the time being, however, I want to concentrate on emotional center and why it is so important.

As Gurdjieff explained in Chapter 9 of "In Search of the Miraculous," the absorption of prana--higher substances in the air -- has a direct effect on the work of inner organs, as long as the effort to undertake this is taken consciously, that is, with attention. So it is quite possible to feed the emotional center with material that will assist it through ordinary breathing. This is one of the reasons that Gurdjieff maintained that beings under right conditions experience bliss when taking in the second being-food. It is a food for the emotional centers.

One of the essential dangers of this practice stems from the fact that one can intentionally feed energy into any note in the octave under a given set of circumstances. If there is no corresponding level of vibration in other parts of the octave, the energy will turn against itself, and may become decidedly negative. I only bring this technical matter up in order to discourage experimentally minded types from fooling around with breathing “exercises.” Gurdjieff had an excellent reason for recommending we avoid them.

Operating at a higher rate of speed than intellectual or moving center, the emotional center has the greatest degree of sensitivity in the body, making it a primary communication channel for our inner work. The driver (intellect) can make good contact with the carriage (sensation) but there is no motive force unless the horse (emotion) is available to do work. Once again, we can draw analogies to the quantum state. The observer creates the conditions that resolve both location (the carriage, or structure) and momentum (the driver, or emotion.)

One of the primary aims of acquiring higher hydrogens through inner work would be to improve the functionality of emotional center. That means bringing the various “notes” in emotional center-- the inner flowers--into a better relationship. The more whole the inner emotional state, the more it facilitates and adds impetus to the dialogue between intellectual and moving center. It provides the motive force for the energy that connects these other parts; without it, we find ourselves dead in the water.

The great difficulty that we encounter in an inner sense -- the reason that all of us are, generally speaking, so passive and negative -- is that we don't form the required higher "hydrogens," as Gurdjieff called them, that are needed to feed the emotional center. And the emotional structure is the "spiritual superhighway" that ultimately supports the work of the other two structures. If things go wrong there, everything goes wrong. As is well known, emotional deficits can even cause us to get sick and die. That underscores the need for the proper understanding and nurturing of the emotional center.

In addition, because of the speed of emotional center, if it is working in a healthy manner, its perceptions are able to intuitively grasp needs of the organism long before the mind or the body get there. In other words, the horse will instinctively take us in the right direction if it is properly fed and treated with respect.

Even after we undertake enough work to develop a stronger connection to sensation, the sensation of emotional center is lacking. Based on my own work, there can be no doubt: even if the mind-body connection is well formed, the emotions often don't participate in a meaningful manner. When Jeanne DeSalzmann referred to "staying in front of our lack," she may have been referring directly to the inherent organic experience of our failure to bring a connection between the intelligence/awareness, the moving center/sensation, and the emotional part, which fills the torso of the body from top to bottom.

We must work, in other words, to inhabit the vessel and see the way in which it fails relationship.

The failed relationship can only be cast in the context of octaves that do not function properly; in order to understand this in anything other than a theoretical matter, it is necessary to begin to sense and to see the activity of octaves within the body.

For reasons that remain unclear to me at present writing, it appears as though it is much, much more difficult for men to come to this type of sensation in the thinking center's octave. It is much more available in the moving center, and, ultimately, in the emotional center, which contains what the yoga schools called chakras. Because of the (relatively) more direct accessibility of the chakras, a great deal of the work that such schools do is rightly directed towards emotion, even though it may well be they don't directly understand how they have concentrated their work on this single octave.

One other aspect of this matter fascinates me, and that is the nature of mind as intricately related to the law of three. Awareness and intention, which one might characterize as active, manifest through this law; matter and receptivity, passive forces, operate through the law of seven. The two forces find their reconciliation in the creation of a single entity that transcends the essential character of either. The active force of mind finds its expression through the passive force of matter, and matter discovers its evolutionary and emergent properties through the participation of mind.

Human beings find themselves uniquely situated at the confluence of these two forces, “between two worlds,” as it were.

The technical considerations in the first part of this essay are bound to leave many readers either puzzled, or perhaps even disinterested. We’re all looking, after all, for a less clinical, more tactile, more human way of understanding our inner work, and dry descriptions of octaves and structures, notes and intervals, don’t appeal to most of us. I’ve watched many an eye glaze over when the subject came up.

I decided to split this essay into two parts so that readers who don’t feel like wrestling with mental pictures of octaves and their intricate connections could get a sense of the practical message behind these matters.

The emotional parts of man have largely collapsed, so that the inner emotional octave never moves past do-re-mi: if even that far. The emotional part of us is supposed to be providing the forward movement in life; it’s supposed to be serving as the tactile sensory tool for knowing what is good and right in a life; it’s there to keep us on track. But, as all of us know, it’s not functioning well. Most of us have had occasion to study this problem firsthand in one way or another. We see ourselves—and also our spouses, friends, and sons and daughters—continually struggling with emotional deficits. It’s the quintessential pop song of western civilization: “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

The “patches” we can apply are limited. We’ve got psychotherapy; we have medication; we have religion. Above all, we have escapism, in which we ignore the dysfunctional nature of emotional center in the hopes that if we go away, when we come back later, it will be better. The entire phenomenon of sleep itself might be summed up as a going away with the hope that when we come back, it will be better.

Ultimately, we need to begin to see the chief initial aim of inner work as the healing of the emotional octave. No matter how smart we are, if this part doesn’t function well, we’ve basically had it. So the yoga school’s emphasis on the study of the chakras actually is a study of the healing power of the body… through emotional center. It’s only through creating a new form of dialog between the parts of emotional center that we can lay a foundation upon which other real work can take place.

This healing is not a magical healing that restores the health of the body (although it may well have an impact.) It is not a superficial, or formatory, healing that applies platitudes, formulas, rules, laws, conditions and requirements on our behavior. It is, rather, the development of a sensitivity to the emotional parts that encourages them to discover each other and work in greater harmony.

Without that work, a man can have no real love of self. And if he has no real love of self, he will never be able to have love for another. It is only out of the development of our own inner capacity for love, beginning at home with respect for ourselves, that real love for others can begin to grow. Perhaps this is what Gurdjieff meant by conscious egoism; I don’t know, the phrase is his, not mine. I can say that I speak with confidence when I assert that the love of our neighbors begins with the love for ourselves.

The exercise Beelzebub gave Hassein—to sense all the parts of himself as if they were conscious, and ask them to participate and help—is an exercise exactly in this direction of love for ourselves. We invite the fractured parts within us to recognize each other, and to reconnect.

When I speak of self love, I don’t speak of anything related to what we call ego, to aggrandizement. I speak rather of a self-valuation that emerges from the inner experience of gratitude; of humility; of compassion. Of a self-compassion that springs from the disinterested inner observation of the ordinary self, without judgment, but accepting the baseline conditions of our inherent humanity, with all its flaws and deficiencies.

The cultivation through a deliberate inner awareness of the existence of the structure of emotional center can begin the proper flow of “prana” to feed the organism in a right way. Ultimately, the cultivation of sensitivity though an inner understanding of the multiplications, and the invitation of the mind to the body and the emotions to participate in such an inner exchange, will slowly—I emphasize the word—help lead us to this greater wholeness I speak of.

The property of valuation I mention above is a critical function of emotion. Our failure to establish right valuation—in general—is a result of the collapse of the development of the emotional center’s octave. Because we remain, for the larger part, in a repeating cycle of the first few notes in the octave, our sense of valuation never deepens much beyond our immediate material concerns.

It’s only if and when emotion begins to function at a higher rate of inner vibration that valuation begins to acquire characteristics that transform it. So unless we actively engage in a healing work for the emotional center, we’re unable to discover the deeper aspects of right valuation. In the absence of such a sense, valuation never acquires inner stability and is constantly influenced by outer circumstances in such a way as to “lead us into temptation”—that is, to sway our inner judgment in an unacceptable manner.

The premise that our primary defect—or at least the one most significant to our chances for inner development—lies in the emotional center explains, in large part the great emphasis placed on non-expression of negative emotion in the Gurdjieff Work. Because of man’s intensely psychological orientation, he underestimates how deeply emotional his work ultimately needs to become. All religions center themselves around this emotional call—a call that can be heard all too clearly in the Gurdjieff/De Hartmann music.

Non-expression of negative emotion is one of the few things Gurdjieff said man can “do.” That makes it a pretty big deal, in a landscape that is painted as otherwise devoid of ability. He furthermore indicated that non-expression of negative emotion was preparation for the work on the second conscious shock, which was intentional suffering—once again, an emotional work. We might say that while all the fundamental work of attention (conscious labor) is attendant upon the lower story (see the diagrams in the first essay) the most essential work, that which affects the upper story and creates the possibility of contact with higher centers, is far more emotional in character.

In moving through our lives, the one thing we fail to realize is that it is possible to do things two ways.

That may be an oversimplification, or it may not be: we can either do things with negativity, or without it. Negativity, in other words, is not a necessity in the living of our daily lives. It’s just a ubiquity we accept without questioning. With the right kind of inner work we may discover that most—and perhaps all—of what we wish to accomplish in daily life is possible entirely without negativity. Of course, because of our “broken” state, we all bring a great deal of negativity to life, but it doesn’t have to be there. We just don’t see that; we don’t believe it, and, in perhaps the most perverse of all manifestations, we don’t want it to be that way. Negativity, you see, serves the ego in almost every instance. It is, in our known case, almost entirely mechanical. There may be such a thing as conscious negativity, but we certainly don’t know what it is and would not know how to use it.

In old-fashioned railway steam engines, the engineer had to deploy a device called the dead man's handle in order to move the train forward. It was designed in such a way that if he ever let go -- for any reason, but especially the reason that he was dead (by heart attack or pistol shot, or whatever) -- the handle would automatically move back to the off position, stopping the train.

Not long ago, in my immediate vicinity, the question was raised as to what we have in us that might stop us from assuming we have developed to a high level (or any level whatsoever) when, in fact, we have not. In other words, how do we know if we have reached a level -- any level? Metaphysical history is, after all, littered with the remains of what I call “99% masters”-- men who thought they knew everything, but were missing something that fell into what we would call the "unknown unknown” for those men.

Spiritual works that unfetter themselves from traditions can tend to produce such situations. Traditions, hidebound and form--oriented though they may be, tend to have safeguards. Mavericks, outsiders, and Unique Celestial Gurus may routinely eschew such limitations, but they do so only at their own risk.

In Christianity, and Islam, and Buddhism, the dead man's handle consists of compassion and humility. No matter how far we go, in these traditional practices, it is firmly understood that in the absence of these two features, any development whatsoever is ultimately flawed. And, indeed, we discover these two practices at the heart of Gurdjieff's work. No coincidence, perhaps, considering his firmly Christian roots, his deeply Islamic practices, and the large dose of Tibetan Buddhism he spiced his teachings with.

The practice of outer considering is above all a compassionate one. And the sensing of one’s own nothingness is the quintessential ingredient of humility. In the first practice, we work to develop and understand empathy. In the second, we kneel before what Gurdjieff called "his endlessness" in abject acknowledgment of our subservience. The entire chapter of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is about the second practice. It's likely that no other single piece of literature sums man's vanity and obligations up in such a comprehensive manner.

These two understandings are closely tied to development of emotional center. As the emotional octave becomes more whole, these two experiences should deepen. And, in fact, they relate to the two intervals of the octave.

The practice of outer considering is above all a practice of attention. In order to have compassion, we must attend to those around us -- discover their humanity, see that we are just like they are. We must attend to their manifestations, attend to their needs, attend to an understanding of the difficult and even desperate situations we all fall victim to. So, in a very real sense, the practice of compassion is directly related to conscious labor.

The practice of sensing one's own nothingness is related to intentional suffering. In placing the ego under the authority of something much larger, of course we suffer. None of us want to give up this thing that we believe makes us what we are. It is only the willingness within us to intentionally allow a force greater than ourselves to act that can make anything real possible. This is directly related to the idea of submission, of the surrender that Islam demands of man.

And why, you may ask, are these two qualities of compassion and humility so important? It’s quite simple, really.

In the way of the fakir and the way of the Yogi, tremendous strength and tremendous intelligence may be developed, yes. However, in the absence of the development of emotional center -- the way of the monk -- they are subject to abuse. Only the proper development of emotional center can help a man who develops in other ways to avoid the disaster incumbent upon one who has too much strength, or too much intellect, without enough heart. And in both cases, without the heart, one will inevitably lead others astray -- a crime which is difficult to redress.

Do we need to know all the rules? Certainly not. A great deal of what takes place in the inner action of multiplications and octaves will always remain unseen; like a grandfather clock, the greater part of the mechanism need not be examined in detail in order for the machine to work well. Indeed, the machine is so complex that if any part does need intensive examination, only an expert will do. This is why the numerous sacred societies Beelzebub visited on earth were always divided into multiple disciplines.

Not only that, the experience of self is an emergent one. That means that even if we know some, or most, of the rules and laws that govern the arising and experience of self (the “laws of world creation and world maintenance,” taken from one perspective) the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.

Hence, we don’t need to pick the clock apart in order to use it; but we do need to have an idea of how it’s constructed, and deeply respect that—in part, so that we don’t go fiddling around with parts we don’t properly understand, like the breathing. We do need to make sure it is attended to: cleaned, wound up on a regular basis, calibrated occasionally so that it keeps the correct time. We also need to attend to its alarms: after all, they are there to help remind us of tasks, the time of day, where we are.

All of this activity is conducted in the hope and on behalf of a greater emotional well-being, which in and of itself can help feed our work.

It’s quite true that the “healing,” “sealing,” or or “re-unification” of the emotional center can lead to sensations of bliss and joy. That should and must not, however, become our aim. Bliss and joy may be, as Gurdjieff intimated, the birthright of man; but they are rewards for the performance of labors that call on other parts; parts that must be willing to suffer, and not in any ordinary way.

The aim of inner work is not the reconciliation of outer life. True, that can happen; true, right inner work changes the quality of outer life. In the end, however, the true aim of inner work is not attached to the question of outer life. It reaches into much deeper places.

*On the Structural Nature of Man*

On the Structural Nature of Man