Higher Centers

Higher Centers

FROM 'A QUESTION OF PRESENCE' BY SERGIO ANTONIO

Man has an extremely unstable sense of identity. He may believe “I am my body,” or “I am my ability to think,” or “I am my feelings.” He may be in imagination, prey to uncontrolled ‘I’s, or identified (for example, with a suffered injustice, or with his own beauty or intelligence, or with his own defects). Each of these ‘I’s, each of these identifications, is an impostor, taking over the role of our real identity. Yet within us there is something foreign to what Gurdjieff called “the machine.” It is our true Self. The Self is the seat of our identity.

Different traditions have different names for the Self: Witness, Master, Ruling Faculty, Third Eye, Soul. It is who we really are. The machine—the set of sensations, thoughts, and feelings—is only the vehicle that hosts it.

We can’t observe it—anything that can be observed is machine, no matter how precious and noble it might seem to us. The visible is but the shadow of the invisible. The Self is that which observes, not that which can be observed, my teacher said. “You are what observes, not what you observe.”

From a certain point of view, to experience it is simple: it is enough to be simultaneously aware of yourself and of what is before you. Lifting a glass of water, taking it to your mouth, taking a sip, putting the glass down. That's it.

The Fourth Way mentions two higher centers. These two centers constitute the Self, the soul. In the state of presence, higher centers see through the eyes, hear through the ears of the machine.

Our higher faculties are always there, vigilant and attentive, but are obscured by the noise produced by the lower centers, particularly by their wrong work. By our haste, distraction, imagination, identification, negativity. It is like having five barking dogs in the house. Only after we understand what they are like and what they want—to eat—and have fed them, will they calm down, and then we can hear the music that is always playing.

The higher emotional center is often evoked by beauty. We may experience it by chance: the first time we see the ocean, or an extraordinary work of art, a special building. It is a contemplative emotion, not personal, intense but simple, accompanied by the sense of I am here. It is self-remembering.

The higher intellectual center works with an even higher energy, so fine that it pushes the limits of what the human machine can bear; it can seem severe, even frightening, because it has to do with great objective laws that can annihilate our body, like death. You may have experienced it if you were in an earthquake or a car accident, or suffered the death of a loved one. A vigilant state, where everything seems to happen very slowly and with great clarity and silence.

Rilke gives us a wonderful description of it in his first elegy:

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against its heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty’s nothing but beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.

When we have experiences of higher centers and remember them or relate them to others, it is often another part of the machine, such as the intellectual center, that remembers and talks about them. And none of the lower centers is really capable of translating the experience of higher states. Only the Self can know itself.

My teacher suggested that the highest interpretation of the famous phrase “Know thyself,” inscribed on the temple of Delphi, is Know this state. Know presence. Experience your Self, the higher centers, not the machinery of the lower centers and the multitude of the evanescent ‘I’s.

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Image: Back Panel of the Golden Throne of Tutankhamun