Exploring Our Three Centers

We humans are complex beings with complex functionality. Generally speaking, our functions can be divided into three “centers” — physical, intellectual, and emotional.

Each center has its own capabilities to support our daily activities. For example, suppose you want to cook a fancy meal for your friends. Your emotional center helps you choose the menu and keeps an eye on the quality of the work, your intellect evaluates the feasibility of the menu and develops a plan of action, and your physical body executes the plan.

Each center has its own characteristic energy — the sensations and tensions running through the body, the mental energy in our head, the strong feeling of emotional reactions. By paying attention to this energy we can observe our centers in action. What are our centers doing when we are in the middle of a tedious activity? when something unexpected happens? when we are upset? when we are interacting with someone?

This effort to become more acquainted with our centers is the beginning of the path to self-knowledge. We see how our centers get distracted by random thoughts, emotions, or physical impulses. We see their tendency to daydream. We begin to recognize that our inner life is too little seen, too little understood, and therefore lacks the richness and subtlety it might otherwise have.

According to Gurdjieff, a fully-developed human is unified, in the sense that three centers are always working together. How can one center understand and appreciate the work of another? What is there in us that would allow our centers to cooperate?

In this exchange we will discuss these issues, the role our centers play in our life, and the roles they might play.

Please join us for this discussion, the third in our fall series. Let us know you plan to attend by responding here: