G.I Gurdjieff was born on January 13th, the Eastern Orthodox New Year, at least we are led to believe. As students of his work gather all over the world to feast in celebration, and make toasts with Armagnac, a tradition started by Gurdjieff himself once he settled his school down in France, I think about him and his influence on my profession through Ida Rolf. Though it is not well known, as nothing about Gurdjieff really is, Ida Rolf gave her first public demonstrations in front of The Gurdjieff Society of London. Her teacher, John G. Bennett, was a British intelligence officer who eventually moved to America and set up a school of his own in West Virginia. This school, known as Claymont, still exists today, carrying on Bennett's own particular approach to Gurdjieff's work and even hosts classes for the Rolf Institute at times.
Gurdjieff was an Armenian mystic who brought a system of development with a distinctly eastern flavor to the west in the early 20's century. It revolves around the idea that humans go through life in a very low state of consciousness, basically sleep walking through life. With inner struggle and work on one's self it is possible to wake up and become fully conscious, receiving the effects of higher cosmic forces that will transform him into an awakened being. His system is so vast that it is probably best to focus on one aspect of it for this article, and that topic this time will be human functions and their energies.
Gurdjieff's teaching, also known as the 4th Way, says that man is divided. His whole life is governed by thoughts, emotions, cravings and habits that make all of his decisions for him without there being a greater sense of the whole. At any moment some urge arises and writes check that the rest of the being will have to pay for. Our energies and manifestations are governed by our functions, know as centers, of which there are primarily three, the intellectual, the emotional, and the moving centers, that operate like three separate brains. It is because of this Gurdjieff referred to humans as three brained beings. Each center has its own agenda, and operates on a different energy that the others. These energies have known characteristics, and are observable and palpable, and have a particular flavors of their own.
The intellectual or thinking center is the aspect of ourselves that most people would identify as our very being, though this is an illusion. The thoughts, no matter how lofty or deep are just as mechanical as any other aspect of a person, and do not really define the individual. The thinking center operates with an energy that is the slowest of all the centers. It's job is to analyze, divide, and categorize, so it must be slow and methodical. We use the intellect to learn how to type or drive a car, but it is too slow to actually do those things in real time. Anyone who wants to compare speeds of centers may observe how fast an emotional reaction is, in which one might act before they even have a chance to think about what they are doing.
The emotional center is what motivates us to act. An intellectual idea with no emotion behind it is likely to be an inert idea. Gurdjieff compares the human being to a horse drawn carriage. The driver is the intellect, the horses are the emotions, and the carriage is the body. In an ideal configuration, the driver commands the horses, and the carriage is carried along by them. Hopefully the carriage is well attended to and maintained. The carriage, or the body, is most closely associated with the moving center, and this will take some explaining, but note that it is not the driver who is to be in command of the whole situation, it is the Master inside the carriage. We would probably like to think that our intellect should call the shots, but according to this world view, it must actually be subservient to a higher force within, the Master of the Carriage. (There is a wonderful stop action animated film by this name, based on Gurdjieff's ideas, I highly recommend it.) Now back to the moving center.
The moving center is often divided into two centers, the moving and the instinctive. The moving center is all learned movements, physical habits, and body training. The instinctive center governs innate functions and reactions. Pulling one's hand away from a hot stove before there is time to think is a function of the instinctive center, as is the beating of one's heart. Learned reflexes like, typing, driving, martial arts, dance, is all a function of the moving center, even if it was necessary to learn them first with the intellectual center. Also, cravings and physical needs and desires are mostly functions of the moving/instinctual center, except for Sex.
Do I have your attention now? There is another center that is independent from the three primary centers and that is the sex center. It's job is sex, reproduction and in a certain sense, creation. When functioning properly, the sex center will bring two people together and begin the process of conception and gestation. When that energy is totally internalized it will begin a process of crystallization and fermentation within, creating something akin to a soul. Gurdjieff did not believe people ordinarily had souls, and only those with self work and this inner crystallization had any ability to live beyond the death of the body, because they were forming a second body within. For this to happen, the energy produced by the sex center has to be functioning properly and contained properly, but this might not be what you think. It does not mean abstinence.
An ordinary survey of spiritual and religious ideas may convey the notion that abstinence would be the way to contain such sexual energy, but Gurdjieff was clear that this is only sometimes the case. Some people may need to be abstinent, at least for a while, and others may need to have more sex. What is important is the sex energy is not being used up by the other functions, as it is of a very high velocity, and other centers may tend to rob it of its energy even if they are not designed to function on it. It could be said that because of this, most of the things we do are a result of sexual energy. Dressing nicely, self adornment, going to church, socializing, handing out in bars and cafes, sports, are all impulses fueled by sex energy. A very clear indication of the wrong centers using sex energy is the overzealousness, an utter uselessness of the activities engaged in. Competition, breaking world records, climbing dangerous mountains, even driving fast. If a person has an unquenchable desire to put their life, and other people's lives a risk for no reason, that is Sex Energy, albeit sex energy being used by another center.
It is said that only a normally sexually functioning individual has the possibility for self development, but this is not about kinks and fetishes that Gurdjieff viewed as being relatively harmless, it is about the centers doing only their job, and functioning on there own energies. When we start thinking with our emotions, or trying to feel for others with our intellects we have a problem. We can really have a problem when the intellectual center is fueling ideas with sex energy, especially if they are non-sexual ideas. In some sense, this is similar to our struggle as Rolfers, we try to get muscles and other structures to do their job and not the job of other muscles and structure. When muscles start doing tasks they are not designed for, they do it poorly and wrongly, wasting energy and even doing damage. In the same sense, Gurdjieff's view was that only the right work of centers can provide an atmosphere of balanced development, a form of development that could lead to the individual becoming a conscious being , a "man not in quotation marks" as he put it.
It may be pointed out that there are yet two more centers in the human being that we rarely experience but are quite functional, the Higher Emotional Center, and the Higher Intellectual Center. From these centers issue forth psychic abilities, objective consciousness, and a greater understanding of ourselves and the universe. They are fully functional and do not need to be developed, what needs to be developed in man is his lower self, which will form a resonance that will allow our ordinary minds and emotions to communicate with our higher functions. This being said, the three originally mentioned centers, the Intellectual, the emotional, and the moving are what we should direct our attention to when we begin to work on ourselves.
"The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and 'consciousness' cannot evolve unconsciously." G.I. Gurdjieff
Anyone who wants to know more about these topics may direct their attention to some written materials like P.D. Ouspenky's- In Search of the Miraculous-
or Gurdjieff's own Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson- If you are feeling adventurous. Also, an inquiry into work with groups would best be directed to the Gurdjieff Foundation, of which there are many local groups in many locations around the U.S.