Emotional centre
Fast affective response — heart / solar plexus
The emotional centre — much faster than the intellectual, located at the heart / upper solar plexus. It is the centre of feeling, of immediate evaluative response, of like and dislike, attraction and repulsion. Gurdjieff insists that the speed of the emotional centre is normally far above the speed of the intellectual: the emotional centre has 'finished' its evaluation of a person, a situation, a piece of music in less time than the intellectual can frame the question. Most ordinary affective life is not the work of the emotional centre proper but of the cheaper sub-attention called 'negative emotions' (resentment, irritation, envy) which the work of the Fourth Way is in part to recognise and not to feed. The emotional centre's own positive functions — courage, gratitude, beauty-recognition, devotion — require the conscious labour of self-remembering. We render the rendered point at mid-sternum, the canonical heart-locus.
Point 2 of 4 in Gurdjieff Fourth Way — Body Centres
Cross-tradition overlaps
No overlapping points are registered for this point.
Sources
Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, ch. III, ch. V (primary_canonical)
“The emotional centre works much faster than the intellectual centre, and the moving centre still faster — the speeds of the centres are absolutely incommensurable with one another.”
Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, vols. 2–3 (secondary)