In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, the magnum opus of the extraordinary Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the central character, Beelzebub refers to the unfortunate inhabitants of Earth — us — as “three-brained beings”. This is in alignment with Gurdjieff’s division of the human organism into three parts: the intellectual center, emotional center, and ‘moving’ or ‘instinctive’ center.
The emotional ‘brain’, on this view, is distributed throughout our middles, with a particular concentration in what we call the ‘solar plexus’.
I was reminded of all this when I saw this article the other day.
For our other mentions of Mr. Gurdjieff in these pages, have a look here, and for related posts try our ‘Inner Work‘ category.
4 Comments
G.I. Gurdjieff? I didn’t know Gurdjieff was a G.I.! I guess that makes him a regular joe.
Jeffery Hodges
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Yet another example of how old-wives tales, ancient parables, and other non-scientific pieces of knowledge actually are perceiving aspects of the world that we later come to understand through science. When confronted with a problem, often the best strategy is not to try to come up with a theory on one’s own but to look at ancient parables that deal with the issue at hand and try to test the theory with the scientific method.
A small aside, any idea why Gurdjieff recommended reading Thus Spake Zarathustra? I would recommend it to everyone but I’m curious as to why a mystic would recommend it.
DS, I don’t know how much familiarity you have with the Gurdjieff system of inner work, but there are a great many parallel lines in it and in the call to awakening in Zarathustra. (I suppose that would make for an interesting post, one of these days.)
Here’s a tiny example, but typical:
Gurdjieff was a rather unusual mystic.
Das ist gut.