“Sleepers Awake!”

An accidentally Advent reflection on Three-centered Awareness and the Esoteric Path

One of the things I’ve most come to appreciate about the Gurdjieff teaching is that it manages to bring a measure of quantification to the otherwise messily subjective topic of permanent spiritual awakening—a.k.a., “enlightenment.”

For years (decades, in fact), as a loyal foot soldier along the path to inner awakening I gritted my teeth against those stories of spontaneous spiritual enlightenment. From Buddha under his Bodhi tree to Eckhart Tolle on his park bench in Vancouver, the literature abounds with stories of instant and permanent self-realization. Suddenly the clouds part, the heavens open, and one simply sees. Mu!!, as they call it in Buddhism—spontaneous, full-spectrum nondual awakening. But for myself, I could no more make this Mu moment happen than I could flap my arms and fly over the moon. The more I squinted to see, the more cramped and fragmented the view became. However sincerely I wanted to “mu,” I continued to quack.

Gurdjieff, at least, offered me a quantitative analysis of the conundrum in his teaching—and in that, a potential way forward. According to his teaching, human intelligence is in fact three-centered. Like a tripod, our human minds consist of three legs of perception, three discrete systems of intelligence: the “intellectual center,” “emotional center,” and “moving center.”

Intellectual center is our thinking brain; its skills are planning, conceptualization, symbolic logic, rumination, and self-reflection. Emotional center is our feeling brain. It explores the world through sympathetic vibration—i.e., the ability to entrain with another vibrational field (be it a fellow human being, a tree, or a rock), and hence to know that other field from the inside. Moving center is our sensing brain; it explores the world through rhythm, sensation, gesture, and mimicry. It’s the brain you use to stack wood, ride a bicycle, ski down a hill, learn a foreign language, or understand why self-surrender is an act of spiritual strength, not weakness.

Now here’s the quantitative part: According to Gurdjieff, all three brains must be “online” and in conscious communication with one another in order for a subject to qualify as awake. Anything less—no matter how brilliantly or passionately any one of these brains may be performing as a solo agent —the net result is sleep. Brilliant, impassioned sleep, quite possibly. Perhaps even “enlightened” sleep. But still sleep.

Over the years, three-centered awareness has proven to be my single most important takeaway from the Gurdjieff Work. The training to get there was brutal; I fought the gift all the way. I would be holding forth voluminously during some group discussion circle about a philosophical nuance I was trying to make, only to be interrupted by some senior group member: “And where are your feet?” I thought it was rude. I didn’t yet realize that they were actually directing me toward that proverbial first footstep that would actually launch the journey of a thousand miles.

Forget all those fantasies of spontaneous enlightenment, I slowly realized. Forget trying to figure out whether it is by grace or by works. Here—in this moment—I could empirically ascertain whether my three-centered awareness was out of balance (it nearly always was) and make a quick course correction by simply bringing attention to an underutilized part—in my case, not surprisingly, the feet. Instantly I felt more contained, more rebalanced, and could begin to regroup from a slightly more spacious center that I could dimly sense growing in myself. It was a small step, but it was at least something I could do. The duck could not yet “mu,” but it could at least begin to quack like a real duck, not a bovine wannabee.

I am not trying to set the Gurdjieff teaching on some pedestal here; like all spiritual teachings it has its strengths and weaknesses. I am sharing this reflection with you now because of the light it sheds on the topic we’ve been circling around these past few posts: question of “secret” or esoteric teaching and the appropriate protocols that need to be observed around them. Once these two key affirmations are in place—that there actually is a path to be tread, a way to get from here to there; and that this “way” has to do not so much with revealing increasingly more abstruse levels of information (the processing of which would chiefly involve the intellectual center), as with deepening and attuning the centers so that they can actually “run” the “enlightenment” program—then the spiritual journey begins to take on a whole new configuration. And the question of what constitutes an esoteric teaching can begin to be seen in a whole new light.

“Wachet auf,” y’all! Let the grand season of enlightenment be underway. G.I. Gurdjieff and J.S. Bach wish you a Happy Awakening!

🎵Bach - Cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme BWV 140 - Van Veldhoven | Netherlands Bach Society

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme—manuscript of the first movement