(21.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - WRONG WORK OF CENTRES, Part IV - pp.80-83
This is number (21.) of our sequential postings from Volume 1 of Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
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Links to each commentary will be put on the following Contents page, as we progress through the book:
Birdlip, November 18, 1941
THE INTELLECTUAL CENTRE AS DIVIDED INTO POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTS
Let us now begin to study the negative divisions of centres and what they mean. In order to do so, let us speak to-day of the Intellectual Centre which is divided naturally into a positive side and a negative side and at the same time speak a little of what thinking is and what the Work means in regard to arranging the Intellectual Centre in its right order.
What is the function of the negative part of Intellectual Centre? Roughly, its function is to think No, to negate. The function of the positive part of the Intellectual Centre is to think Yes, to affirm. Thus the whole centre can be represented in this way.
Without a negative part in the Intellectual Centre, it would be impossible to think. What is thinking? The first definition this system gives is that thinking is comparing. Thinking is comparing one thing with another, one proposition with another, etc. But if a man only has affirmation or Yes as an instrument to think with, comparison will not be possible. Comparison requires a quality, or a choice between two things, to one of which one says Yes and to the other No. All the questions we ask beginning with why (as distinct from those beginning with how) mean that we seek a reason for something: and all reasoning involves comparison and choice—that is, selecting this and rejecting that. And it
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would be impossible to select or reject unless there were in the Intellectual Centre a twin-power—namely, the power of affirmation and the power of negation. Now the two parts of the centre should be able to work together, somewhat in the same way as the two blades of a pair of scissors work, one acting against the other. That is, a man should be able to see what affirms, as well as what negates, whatever he is thinking about, and hold them together, and between the two opposite sides find a path for his thoughts, for all genuine thinking leads in some direction in the mind (and should lead to a new place in the mind and not always along the old paths to the old places where one has been before and which are really reached without any thinking but simply by habitual association). I am speaking of genuine thinking which requires an effort and is something people rarely do. As you have no doubt heard, everyone in this Work is advised to "move his brains" once every day and this means to make a real effort to think. What we ordinarily call thinking is merely an automatic flow of associations, a flight of vague ideas and memories and phrases interrupted by an occasional slight effort to recollect something such as what we have to buy or where we have to go to-day. When the Intellectual Centre is working as a whole, all its different parts and divisions and subdivisions fall into their right order and functions but this rarely happens. The whole centre is rarely lit up. As a rule only small parts and subdivisions work—that is, it works at low pressure with only a little light and in small parts, and so cannot deal with any thoughts and ideas which need the activity of the centre as a whole. And again, people as a rule do not know what to think about. Now this system with all its ideas and principles, its tremendous background, and its practical details,—in fact, the whole teaching—is a connected organic system constructed to make a man think and teach him how to think and give him something through which to develop his own thinking. For some of the ideas are easy to grasp and on a small scale, others are more difficult and on a bigger scale, and the connection between them may not be seen for a long time, but the whole Intellectual Centre, with all its parts, small and great, is eventually needed to hold the system together in its right order so that it can work aright and transmit force as an organized and living whole. This is not a question of memory only, for memory is, first of all, a function of the mechanical or formatory division of the Intellectual Centre, which registers, and this part is not enough to comprehend the ideas of the teaching fully. It is also a question of evaluation and seeing and tasting its truth. At the same time, unless this system is registered properly in a man it cannot develop and grow rightly in him to receive and transmit the vibrations of higher centres. You must understand that there is no force in the Work itself taken as words and diagrams but in what the Work transmits through its being voluntarily understood. For when the Work is understood, then it has formed something in a man that he did not possess before and this instrument, so to speak, thus formed in him, can respond to influences of which he was not formerly conscious. And it is these influences that
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modify, change and eventually transform the man. You will see, therefore, how important it is to keep the Work alive in oneself and to hear its ideas over and over again and think of them again, and again try to act from them. For if the Work dies out in a person through the overwhelming pressure of life and its daily demands, it may be difficult to awaken it again. People easily fall asleep ; and it takes very much time, study, effort and sacrifice before the Work forms itself strongly enough in a man to remain alive of itself, so people must keep in touch with those who can keep it alive and whose task it is to do so.
I have made this digression in order to shew how the Intellectual Centre working as a whole is necessary for the full comprehension of this system and how the system is constructed for this purpose and can organize the whole Intellectual Centre aright into an instrument that can begin to respond to the influences coming from Higher Centres. But as this subject belongs to "Relative Thinking" (which alone brings the Intellectual Centre into right action) we will now here return to the divisions of the centre into positive and negative sides and consider them in regard to the wrong working of centres (and parts of centres).
Let us take negative thinking. Negative thinking occurs when a man thinks only or mainly from the negative side of the Intellectual Centre. He uses the negative part to think with. As was said, the two sides, positive and negative, should work together and check each other. Now if a man starts to think, let us say of this Work, from the negative side of the Intellectual Centre and lets this side continue its activity unchecked, he is bound to reach a denial of the Work, because the negative side can only join things together in the form of increasing negation. The end-result will therefore be No. This negative thinking, about matters such as the Work is concerned with, is very common to-day, but in order to flourish it must discard or reject or disparage anything which does not agree with it.
Negative thinking takes many forms in different people. Some people have well-developed systems of entirely unchecked negative thinking about different things—about themselves, about others, about life, about the world, the Universe, and so on. These systems have formed themselves independently of the positive side of the Intellectual Centre and are therefore one-sided, unchecked, unchallenged by any opposite thinking and often a source of illness.
One of the easiest things is to disagree. To habitually disagree is to use the negative part of the centre. Habitual disagreeing, finding fault, picking holes, splitting hairs, etc., is to use the negative side unchecked: and a negative thinker is, in brief, a man to avoid, for whatever you say to him he will try to destroy it. He cannot help doing so for he is, so to speak, intellectually in reverse and can only go backwards. All this is wrong use of a centre. On the other hand, a person who thinks, let us say again of this system, only on the side of affirmation, will never grasp it. It will never become real to him, for he will not have passed through any temptations in regard to it and struggled and worked it out for
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himself by slow degrees.
There is a story in the Work that once upon a time man was perfect. Man was in touch with "higher centres". In fact, it is said he conversed with gods. But he was very weak, because, never having denied and always having affirmed, he did not know how to meet with denial. So he fell easily from his high position, for he had no strength of thinking and understanding from himself. Now he has to find his way back to where he once was, with the power of denial to help him.
ADDITIONAL NOTE
There are some very interesting things that can be said in regard to the two divisions, positive and negative, of the Intellectual Centre, if we take them in conjunction with other centres, such as the Emotional Centre. For example, a man may have negative thinking and positive feeling or will towards a thing. Or, on the contrary, he may have positive thinking and negative feeling or will. In order to illustrate this, the example given in the Gospels is useful to think about:
"A man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to-day in the vineyard. And he answered and said, I will not: but afterwards he repented himself and went. And he came to the second and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not. Whether of the twain did the will of his father?" (Matthew XXI xxviii-xxxi)
A person who has a too-mechanical affirmation from the Intellectual Centre will say "Yes" but that belongs to his thought—not to his will. The basis of the will is in the Emotional Centre. So he says "Yes" with his thinking, but eventually "No" with his Emotional Centre. Or a man has negative thinking and positive feeling. He says "No" with his mind but his feeling says later on ''Yes". The parable or psychological definition can be understood differently. But it means that a man is not one—and has two distinct sides which do not necessarily agree.
Another thing that can be said is that if a man has no Magnetic Centre (which affirms the existence of two kinds of influences in the vortex of life—namely A and B) he may start only from the negative side of thinking once he meets work of this kind and so spend all his time in disproving. A feeling starts a certain kind of thinking. Our intellectual apparatus as it is, divided into positive and negative, can give any result according to whether one side or the other is set into action. It can prove or disprove anything. It is valuation—the Emotional Centre—that is decisive. Regarded as a pure machine, the two sides of the Intellectual Centre are mutually destructive. This is why it is said that a third factor is necessary for the proper working of the centre.