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“the
mother of invention and the father of abstract
thought”, as MacLean emphasises. It is the seat of
symbolic language: it reasons, plans, worries,
writes books and sonnets, creates, invents and
composes. But it is also through its centres for
vision, hearing, taste, smell and physical
sensations that we relate to the outside world and
interact with it through motor-sensory schemes.
The
neurone networks of the neo-cortex can thus be said
on the one hand to constitute the neuro-physiological
equivalent of Gurdjieff’s ‘intellectual centre’, and
on the other hand, to represent a fair part of our
‘motory centre’, since they control our motor
responses to sensorial stimuli.
The
relationship with the ‘emotional centre’ should
however be sought in the ‘paleo-mammalian brain’,
which is part of the limbic system, the headquarters
of our emotions. If we limit ourselves to the level
of mice, rabbits and cats, the limbic system is
anchored to survival, to self preservation and
preservation of the species, and its behaviour
rotates around the ‘four Fs’: feeling, fighting,
fleeing and fucking. “One of the peculiar
features of the emotions,” observes MacLean,
practically echoing the words of Gurdjieff, “is that
they are never neutral: emotions are always pleasant
or unpleasant,” positive or negative.
And
that’s not all. But, as the psychologist Daniel
Goleman strongly maintains (again calling to mind
the words of Gurdjieff), they are also much quicker
than rationality: through the amygdala, a kind of
emergency switchboard in the limbic system, the
emotional neuronal routes can often by-pass the
neo-cortex, committing what amounts to ‘emotional
kidnap’ against the rational brain. These
kidnaps are then modulated or at times inhibited, in
superior mammals, by the pre-frontal lobes of the
neo-cortex, which, on slower time-scales, succeed in
regaining control of the situation. Whereas a large
proportion of the mental life of birds, fish and
reptiles rotates around them, in that their survival
depends on the constant analysis of the environment
to locate predators or potential prey.
And
it is from these same reptiles that we humans
inherited the third component of our ‘trinity’
brain: the so-called ‘reptilian brain’,
located in the encephalic stem and surrounding
structures, the site of those same ‘archaic
behavioural programmes’ and automatic senso-motory
reactions that stimulate snakes and lizards. “Stiff,
obsessive, forced, ritualistic and paranoid,” as
MacLean defines it, “it is full of ancestral
experiences and memories.” Being represented so
persistently in the brain’s circuit schemes, it is
condemned to repeat the past continuously. The
ancient reptilian brain does not profit greatly from
the experience. It is thus an excellent candidate to
represent Gurdjieff’s ‘instinctive centre’ (and to
some extent also the ‘sexual’ one, which is of
particular importance in the gurdjieffian system).
However, to complete the neuro-scientific picture,
we must add to this ‘vertical’ subdivision of the
single and triune brain a ‘horizontal’ subdivision,
into the two hemispheres - left and right,
interconnected through the corpus callosum.
As is
well known, the left hemisphere is active,
constructive, algorithmic, gradual and logical. It
benefits from limited exemplification and from trial
and error procedures. It is capable of learning by
applying rules. Again, the left hemisphere is
usually the seat of language and thus of rational
thought: it is linear, concentrated and analytic. It
discriminates, measures and categorises: it is thus,
by its very nature, fragmentary. But also expansive,
competitive and aggressive.
The
right hemisphere, in contrast, tends to prefer
synthesis: it is holistic and non-linear,
contractive and synthetic, passive and co-operative.
It is the seat of intuitive thought, does not seem
to learn from exposure to rules and examples, but
needs to be exposed to rich, associative structures,
which it tends to grasp as a whole. Intuitive
knowledge seems, in fact, to be founded on direct,
non-intellectual experience of reality, which
springs from an open state of consciousness.
In a
nutshell, using well-known oriental terminology, we
could call the left hemisphere yang, therefore
active, positive and masculine (at the basis of
rational knowledge and thus of egocentric activity),
whilst the right hemisphere is yin, thus passive,
negative and feminine (at the basis of intuitive
knowledge and thus of ecological activity).
Gurdjieff, too, speaks of a ‘horizontal’
subdivision of the centres into two halves: one
‘positive’ and one ‘negative’. This duality is seen,
for example, in the intellectual centre in the form
of the yes-no contraposition, i.e.
‘affirmation-negation bipolarity’, and in the
instinctive centre in the form of the dual concept
‘pleasure-pain’. And the emotional centre also seems
to consist of the two halves represented
respectively by pleasant and unpleasant emotions,
even if in the ‘Fourth Way’ Ouspensky warns that
‘negative emotions’ work with the help of a separate
‘artificial centre’, which fuels them above all by
‘imitation’.
Ouspensky himself then emphasises how either half of
each centre is in turn divided into three parts, in
a kind of overall ‘fractal’ or ‘holographic’
structure where all can be found in the part, and
the part in all.
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