Intellectual centre
Slow logical thought — head
The intellectual centre — the slowest of the four lower centres, located in the head. It is the centre of discursive logical thought, of comparison, of the formation and following of words. Ouspensky records Gurdjieff's repeated insistence that the intellectual centre is profoundly slow compared with the emotional centre — perhaps thirty thousand times slower — and that confusion of centres (the intellectual centre attempting work that belongs to the emotional centre, or vice versa) is the principal cause of human dysfunction (ISM ch. III). The intellectual centre's natural function is the analysis of discriminations that do not require speed — the mathematics of a problem, the construction of an argument, the planning of a campaign. It is helpless in the face of fast-moving emotional or instinctive demands and produces only a delayed, frequently misdirected response. In the Fourth Way curriculum the principal task of self-observation is the recognition of which centre is in fact functioning at a given moment.
Point 1 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 (primary_canonical)
“The intellectual centre, working slowly, is incapable of solving the problems demanded of it by the rapidity of the emotional centre's perception.”
Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, vol. 1 (secondary)