The Seven Psychic Factors, Part I

 

I was recently asked by a friend in the work to comment on a remark Gurdjieff makes  in the third talk of the third series. This talk begins with the title, “Delivered by me to a pretty rarefied assemblage.”

His choice of words, so often the case, is arch. Rarefied can mean “distant from the lives and concerns of ordinary people;” but it also means “in air of a higher altitude, where it is more difficult to breathe.” The suggestion indicates that one has to make more than the usual effort under these conditions. A struggle is proposed; and of course he gives us one.

Gurdjieff goes on, in the first paragraph, to point out that his intention is to deliver information that will prevent us from being a vehicle for “collective titillation.” Titillation is the arousal of interest or excitement, especially through sexual suggestion. One need not intuit his dissatisfaction with previous efforts to understand his work—he states it outright. Said efforts, according to his choice of words, have taken place largely in the intellectual and sex centers of his pupils. The indication that his listeners should stop reading newspapers and magazines, intellectual fodder of the first order, underscores this. 

His further and repeated insistence that one ought cognize and sense with “all of ones being” expands on the question. Having dealt with the primacy and partiality of intellect and sex energy, we begin to see that the missing lower centers here are sensation, feeling, and intuition — all common subjects for Gurdjieff in his exchanges with members during the wartime meetings of 1943 and 1944.

My friend’s question hinges on the remark Gurdjieff makes about the need to crystallize seven different “data” in himself, specifically inherent only in man, which function in strict accordance with the law of seven. During the talk, Gurdjieff iterates only three of these. We know, however, that it’s possible to understand what all seven of these “data” (i.e. understandings and forces) consist of if one understands them from the perspective of the enneagram. 

This gives us a further clue to the nature of the diagram itself in the context of this conversation, because Gurdjieff is indicating that the first three “data points,” information about the nature of inner force and its action, have specific natures. The questions here must be:

• What are those three forces?
• Do they fit into a tangible model of the diagram — whether already familiar or not?
• Can we deduce the nature of the other four forces from that point? 

We might call what follows an examination of the enneagram of man. Familiarity with The Universal Enneagram and The Sixth Sense will be helpful with what follows here, but is not absolutely necessary.

Gurdjieff immediately makes it quite clear that these “data” actually indicate forces acting in man, because he remarks first of all that they are “psychic factors,” that is, motive the elements of the soul, and secondly, that they “engender in the presence of man three definite impulses.” 

These three forces have specific and unique individual characters which he proceeds to iterate. They are as follows:

“Can”

“Wish”

“The entire sensing of the whole of oneself”

He furthermore indicates that the third force, the entire sensing of the whole of oneself, is “of all the seven exclusively proper to man impulses the most important,” because, he tells us, in its association with the first two, “almost composes and represents the genuine I of a man who has reached responsible age.”

In order to cast further light on the exact nature of this “entire sensing of the whole of oneself,” it’s useful to recall the following quote from Wartime Meetings 1943, meeting number one:

“Our aim is to have constantly a sensation of oneself, of one's individuality. This sensation cannot be expressed intellectually, because it is organic. It is something which makes you independent, when you are with other people.”

Gurdjieff refers to an organic nature of sensation multiple times during the course of these meetings; and of interest here is the fact that he says in this third talk that it is “the most important” of the seven impulses. This means that it is foundational. It represents the bedrock upon which the structure of being rests. 

I’ve discussed this question of organic sensation as being the “first attention” in other writings; and we can understand it, both from experience itself and from Gurdjieff’s remarks, as the glue which holds Being together. Gurdjieff’s remark refers to the fact that that the organic sense of being creates our individuality. The functions of thinking (can) and desire or emotion (wish) have no true or lasting binding force within us without this organic sensation. 

This sensation, furthermore, is impartial — it’s the entire sensing of the whole of oneself, not the sensing of one limb or another limb or the feet and so on. That is to say, it’s what I refer to as the molecular sensation of being—an octave relationship with every cell in the body. 

This is emphatically not the same as the sensation we generally encounter in exercises; it is of a different order, hence its appellation as organic; and it is the essential entity that Gurdjieff and Mme. De Salzmann so urgently wished to awaken in pupils. Continued efforts in this most essential of directions were most recently championed within the Gurdjieff Foundation by the late Jean-Claude Lubtchansky; and still find a strong voice in Patty Llosa, who is still with us. I fear, nonetheless, that the vital importance of this question is in general poorly understood, which is probably why I sometimes begin to sound like a broken record on the matter.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.