Gurdjieff was clear in his description of the need to strive to bring the parts of our inner life -- the intelligences of body, emotions, and mind -- into balance. "To perceive with one center is delusion; to perceive with two is hallucination. Only when presence in the three centers is balanced do we perceive the real world."

In our last meeting we spoke about a model of a human as a three-centered being. We make use of this model to observe and study our inner life. An aim of our work is to come to know directly, to understand our own nature and design for ourselves. Do I see three centers each with a unique intelligence, perception, associations?

In our last meeting we explored the concept of essence and personality. In short, essence is our being, the design and nature with which we are born. Personality is what is acquired--all our skills, and learned behavior. 

In our Harmonious Development meeting last Thursday we spoke about attention as a capacity of Being. Attention is a powerful force that can lead to suggestibility and obsession, or serve as a catalyst of inner work and transformation. 

In our meeting we talked about the practice of self-observation. This is the first step in our process of inner work, and a practice that continues and deepens over time. With self-observation we study ourselves directly, both the general design of our human instrument, and the features and patterns of our particular nature and personality. 

In last week's meeting we discussed the background and method of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way, and some of the principles and practices of inner work in this tradition. We also discussed the meaning of Being, as the term is used in this work, and experienced some of the means of working in our Being.