I never considered the thinking center my strong suit. Yet it was the ideas as I first read about them in, In Search of the Miraculous, that caught my interest. Learning about worlds and laws, octaves and vocabulary, was right in line with where I was in life. My thinking center was being exercised and stretched in group meetings just like in my college classes.
Then came All and Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff’s opus magnum. That was a tough nut. The way I found to crack it was to not even try parsing the words. Instead, I set myself to reading aloud in my room for one hour a day. Sort of like language emersion. After a while, it felt like Gurdjieff’s words were seeping into me, past my thinking center.
By then, Mrs. Popoff had me quite aware of my frontal lobe and constant “inner chatter” as we called it. This confirmed my notion that I was no intellect. But I continued to be interested in the ideas as Bennett unfolded Beelzebub, the Enneagram, the laws of three and seven, and triads, at Sherborne.
Enough of Reading
In fact, I remember a certain point some years after the course, when I’d had enough of reading the books and talking about the ideas. What became of interest was practicing and experiencing. Working out my own understanding.
New insights came to me about the Enneagram for instance. I began using the symbol as a kind of map of unfolding events in my life. Here’s a story I wrote using the enneagram to illustrate it.
With morning exercise, I noticed subtle changes over time. One example was that I could be experiencing an exercise and at the same time seeing thoughts which were floating by. Some of those fleeting images had significance.
I was working on the Eye of the Needle exercise. At the moment in the exercise of becoming very small and slipping through the eye, I suddenly saw an ironing board strapped to my back which jammed in the doorway.
At the time, I was feuding with Jack about household duties, thinking to make my point by not ironing his clothes. The message was clear:
You can’t get to heaven with an ironing board on your back.
Is This Thought?
Gurdjieff uses the term “mentation” which I’ve come to appreciate. My association with the word “thinking” confined me to a box of my own making. Once I began to sense and feel my head center working behind the scenes, I realized I do have an active thinking center, which I now call mentation.
Yes, there still is a need to read and study and talk, but the real mentation, which puts it all together for oneself, happens in another part of the brain. That’s the part that needs to connect with the other centers of feeling and moving. I believe that is the true “thinking center.”