Editor’s Note: How does our experience of memory expand in higher states? This writer explores the traces of higher states upon lower centers in the Fourth Way today.
And here also is God!!! Again God!… I am man, and such as I am, in contrast to all other outer forms of animal life, created by him in his image. ~ Gurdjieff (from the prologue of Life is Real only Then, when “I Am”)
Emotion as Perception
Much of the understanding of higher states depends on being able to experience time in a different way. Self-remembering brings us to a moment in time, but when higher centers come together with self-remembering, we see the past and the future implied in that moment. The benefits of this cannot be exaggerated. For instance when we bring the perception of higher centers into our personal relationships, we can bring together all our memories of a friend into the present. Consciousness is seeing everything we know about whatever we are giving our attention to in the moment.
Memory of Lower Centers
In general we think of memory as the ability to retrieve information. That information may be a name or the words of a poem. It may be an emotion we feel about a particular person, or a set of movements, like the ability to type or drive a car, or a sensation or the smell of a flower. The distinction here is that information from memories imprints on the rolls of the lower centers, but the memory itself exists in higher centers. The type of information determines in which center it is stored. The intellectual center stores words and names, for example. The moving center stores complex and simple sets of movements like walking or swimming. While the emotional center stores memories of how we feel about people, and the instinctive center records sensations and smells.
Memory Held in Higher Centers
It’s hard to talk about memory and higher centers because essentially the experience of higher centers is memory. Higher centers have access to actual memories, not only to the information which our functions store as memories. This is what we mean when we say that the experience of higher centers is timeless. One of the ways you can think about your higher self is as a collection of all your memories brought together as a single perception, in single moment. Being present and self-remembering are two processes that fix memories as part of that experience. A person of a greater being is a person who, through the long practice of self-remembering, has access to a large store of memories. A person of a lesser being has access only to those memories that have accidentally fixed in higher centers.
Wisdom, in the ordinary sense, is simply the capacity in the moment to call on that large store of experiences when speaking or making a decision. A mechanical man reacts to a difficult situation. He does not call on his accumulated experiences because he has not made the effort to fix them in his memory.
As Above, So Below
It cannot be an accident that the three brains that account for man’s primary psychological and physical makeup match, in a mechanical way, the aspects of higher consciousness. They also match, if we want to make the analogy, the three attributes of the Absolute. Man exists in the image of God because his centers represent the three forces—unity, consciousness, and will—that form the structures that make up the Absolute’s being. We can even say that man’s psychology aligns to the same architecture as the universe. And even that it is possible that the universe is the experience of the Absolute.
“Home” Is Ultimately A State
Lowers centers may serve as a mechanical representation of what is possible in a bodiless state. If so, we must also assume that the functioning of higher centers is the ultimate goal of man’s journey here. What is more, we must assume that all the other aims we pursue to the exclusion of conscious evolution—including our search for personal happiness—cannot satisfy the most primary part of our being.
We want to go home. We all know this sometimes. And we know that home is not a place but a state. But our desire to have fame or wealth or the respect of others distracts us again and again. We are all sometimes blinded by what we already know to be transitory.
–William Page is the author of the blog BePresentFirst. This is an excerpted version of a longer article. The full article can be read at http://bepresentfirst.com/higher-centers-lower-centers-and-comprehension/.