Associatively, my mind was drawn to the many external changes that had taken place in our world since Gurdjieff’s death in 1949.
Gurdjieff’s many references to time, its relativity and its primary role in “the forced need to create our present existing ‘Megalocosmos’,”4 gives it a significance equal to his other conceptions (e.g., Etherokrilno and Kundabuffer).
In a fundamental sense, we have come to understand the concept of the merciless Heropass as the Infinite Potency for All Possible Motions.
The primordial gulf that separates them derives from Gurdjieff’s insistent and balanced incorporation of the physical, emotional and intellectual aspects (i.e., the material, being-values and purposes) of this new perspective into one harmonious whole. Science, claiming no competence in the arenas of human values and purposes, is nonetheless the potent force carrier of these new motions with respect to the material world and a major qualifying influence on mankind’s philosophical and spiritual views on the Universe.
While the capacity to form resonant representations, or images, of portions of the matter/vibrations external to a creature’s body can be understood as one of the crowning achievements of brained life, this capacity has one focal vulnerability–namely, that the image created by the brain must be taken as real–otherwise its survival value would be nullified. This imperative–to trust that an image is real–can be traced in neural, ganglionic and reflexive elaborations throughout one-, two- and three- brained life. For approximately the past two and a half million years (est.), it has continued to be both a life-saving and enabling imperative for three brained beings as well; deeply entwined and essentially unalterable within the sensory-reflexive-motor pathways of the brain.
Since 1950, the survival-created vulnerability of the brain has been explored and/or exploited by any person or group with a message. The prefabricated image has become a neurological ‘Trojan horse’. We have only fragmentary understandings of how our human brain processes a television signal. In view of the strands of evidence (see below) that point out the differences in the form and sequence of the neural processing of a TV signal from the neural processes taking place in reading, conversation and physical activity, the indifference and dismissive attitude of the research community is astonishing.
~ The sensitivity (vulnerability) of the limbic (second) brain to facial image is known. ~ The nullification of the alerting reflexes of pupillary change, lens accommodation and eye scanning movements is known.
To plunge our brain into a sea of unreal, titillating and unfulfilled images goes beyond a failure to ask questions; it invades, it expands into activities that include arrogant manipulation and profiteering. Each of our brains (the ‘physical’, ‘feeling’ and ‘thinking’) needs to be fed. The quality and quantity of its food and the timing of its introduction are critical. Food for a brain (as a sensory-associative-memory-motor-neural mechanism) is not at all the same as it is for the rest of the body. The brain lives on neural impulses, from perceptions to impressions. Each of our three brains has a large arena of impressions that are appropriate to it alone.
They are vulnerabilities of the first (physical/core/reptilian) and second (limbic/emotional/mammalian) brains in particular, as the foundation of self-confidence and of a normal sense-of-self derives from the normal development of these brains.
Gurdjieff’s teaching, his wholed manifestation of Work, is a harmoniously integrated vehicle for such an inward-outward journey. It is neither the wisdom of the East nor the science of the West but a remarkable synthesis-in-law of both~and more.
point to the possibility of personal transformation, via theintentional digestionof the images formed by each brain.
Man—A Three-brained Being Resonant Aspects of Modern Science and the Gurdjieff Teaching
“… brains in beings serve not only as apparatuses for the transformation of corresponding cosmic substances for the purposes of the Most Great common-cosmic Trogoautoegocrat, but also as the means for beings whereby their conscious self-perfecting is possible.”I
Chapter 1 New Concepts
Monotheism, the interdependence of all life, and relativity theory are exemplary of this order of idea. The penetration of these ideas into the emotional and physical life of mankind is a many-centuried process, marked by periods of intense denial, distortion and unbecoming behaviors.
states that ‘hydrogen’ 12 corresponds to the element hydrogen of the atomic table. We understand this to infer the capacity to enable the unbonding and creative new bonding of various levels of substances. At the physical body level of procreation, it is the higher force at the essentially solar level of new creation–in the new, hydrogen-bonded linkages of our DNA. It is also this level of ‘hydrogen’ which can potentially vitalize and vivify the digestion of impressions. One way of compressing the “function … in the human organism”9 of this multi-leveled ‘hydrogen’ would be to say that it has a directable capacity to break old hydrogen bonds and to make new hydrogen bonds. Because it is, simultaneously, the singular proton (as H+), it carries the clear implication of a solar level resonance with: ~ hydrogen fusion–as the process which creates the atomic table of elements and thus underpins all the possibilities that open into the planetary world (World 24)10 and, ~ the coalescence of a sun, being lawfully analogous to the coalescence of a singularity (real I), thereby becoming a radiant, creative source for its system of planets (or states of being and function).
The photon, as the mass-less carrier of the electromagnetic force, mediates (or reconciles) all charged (+ and -) interactions, travels at the speed of light and has frequencies of vibration corresponding to wavelengths from 108 to 10-16 meters. It is truly a cosmic matter/energy and, at differing frequency ranges, it plays a primordial role in every life-process.
We are passive recipients of that energy. What would it imply to be an active participant in that infinite range and nuance of energies? Gurdjieff clearly points to this potential participation, via the functional integration of our three brains, in portions that are part of the full range of matter/energies from ‘hydrogen’ 48 to ‘hydrogen’ 6.
Chapter 2 The Triune Brain
Dr. MacLean coined the expression, the “triune brain,” to express his perception of the fundamental threeness yet oneness of the human brain, emphasizing, at the same time, the prodigious, developmental steps that separate the brain of the reptile from both the old and new mammalian ‘brains’.
With these classification criteria in mind, we can move now to our focal questions, “What is a brain?” and, “What is the triune brain?” and, “Why should a brain have evolved anyhow?”
However, where, in all this microcosmic and multicelled life, is there a sense of the future? What is ten, one hundred or even a thousand years when there is no individuated, subjective experience of time; when the ‘future’ does not exist, even in potential form, until it is the ‘present’?
The source of food does not exist until direct contact is made with the surface membrane. By direct contact, we mean to include any carrier of information–be it in molecular or ionic form or an electromagnetic radiation. Each of these is certainly a carrier of information that can produce reactions at the cell membrane level but they are not yet images of the outside world. There is no process of the transformation of energies at the cell boundary that will serve to reconstruct a whole image of something in the outside world. Rather, the molecular, ionic and photonic energies are initiators of a single or a chain reaction that begins at the cell surface in that moment.
Why a Brain? With this context in mind, we may ask more specifically, “What can a brain bring to this remarkable affirmation/constancy of life?” It can bring hope. Why hope? Because, the objective essence of hope lies in the confident, exploratory motion, built on faith ~ which can engage in a perceived but undetermined future.
Moreover, without survival or persistence in form, whether measured by food, defense or mating, there could be no experiential exploring. Survival becomes, for an emerging first-brain creature, the primal reconciling force, balancing each developing ability to image the world with a resonant capacity in motion.
The first brain will build or create these resonant images from octaves of photonic, atomic and molecular forms, motions and energies (figure 2 a) and the triadic form of afferent inputs, image-building and organized, patterned reactions (2b).
Survival itself is triadic: to survive 1) by finding/taking in food, 2) by defending itself/escaping a predator, and 3) by finding a mate/reproducing itself (figure 2 c). Survival, or persistence-in-form, thus relates the one-brained creature to the present moment, the near future and the distant future.
With all its subtleties and power, however, the first brain could only see (and hear, taste, touch and smell) into the outside world. The inside world, the world within its own body, remained essentially un-imaged.
Images are likenesses; resonant representations of some aspect of the world inside or the world beyond the external membrane of a creature.
It is now understood that the membrane apparatus transforming sound waves into neural impulses (analogous to the retinal apparatus for vision), operate on the piezoelectric principle. This principle is based on the phenomenon that mechanical deformation of certain ionic crystals will induce an electric current.
Aural images in the early first brain were largely concerned with spatial orientation (both balance in space and location), relative to other life-forms and objects. The remarkable coherence of schools of fish and other ocean creatures is based on this form of image. Over time, additional images are formed which are largely messages; warning signals of prey/predator and alerting signals of possible mates. The sound waveforms, extending over time and containing variable combinations of frequencies, became highly individualized, encoded messages with specific, compressed meanings.
Touch, like taste, appears to have four major categories of transformer/ receptors–pressure, hot, cold and pain. Life, especially of the two- and three-brained variety, has differentiated these four categories with such subtle and interwoven nuances that an infinitude of subjective experiencings has resulted. For example, recall the distinctive qualities of a pat, a lick, a scratch, a pinch, a hug, a nudge, an itch, a prick, a tingle, a tearing/lacerating pain, the coolness/contact of an ice cube or the precise hot pain of a drop of lead solder.
So we say, “I’m alright–why do you always think something’s wrong?” and we say it with such a bite! Nevertheless, our second brain-modulated expression has given us away and, by denying it, we have simply added another deceit to our list of unreal, unwholesome behaviors.