Humans are three-centred beings

In my journey towards wholeness, one of my early lighthouses was British psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who writes in The Politics of Experience (1967): “When our personal worlds are rediscovered… we discover first a shambles… genitals dissociated from heart; heart severed from head; heads dissociated from genitals.” It took me a long to time to realise the paradigm shift behind Laing’s soundbite: humans are three-centred beings.

‘Normal’

Laing, who extensively studied schizophrenia, describes a devastated inner landscape with little difference between the insane and supposedly sane: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience… Our collusive madness is what we call sanity.”

I remember many years ago having some energy work done. The practitioner stated that most men are energetically cut off at the throat (no connection to heart or genitals) while most women are cut off at the navel (no connection to the genitals).

These cut-off points are thresholds of shame. Historically, it’s been shameful for men to display their emotions (hence they are cut off from the heart) and for women to display their sexuality (cut off from the genitals).

Dissociated from these lower centres, we’ve built a world of systemic inequality, entrenched violence, emotional and environmental unsustainability. Yet we still consider ourselves to be the most intelligent beings on the planet.

Writing at the height of the Cold War, Laing observed: “Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity… The perfectly adjusted bomber pilot may be a greater threat to species survival than the hospitalized schizophrenic.”

Three-centred beings

As we slowly reconnect with our dissociated hearts and genitals, we realise that we are three-centred beings: head, heart, and genitals. The head is a thinking centre; the other two are feeling centres. Many people live exclusively in their heads, some have a limited heart connection, few have any genital connection at all—that’s why sexuality is humanity’s most controversial issue.

Spiritual teacher Georges Gurdjieff (ca. 1870-1949) describes the three-centred human in terms of a three-story factory. The chemistry between the three centres—or storeys—creates a fully conscious, internally cohesive human being.

In In Search of the Miraculous Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, who studied under Gurdjieff, quotes his descriptions of the thinking, emotional and sex centres:

“Our principal error is that we think we have one mind… unless this is understood nothing else can be understood… Each centre has its own memory, its own associations, its own thinking… In a normal healthy man, each centre does its own work, that is, the work for which it was specially destined and which it can best perform. There are situations in life which the thinking centre alone can deal with and can find a way out of.”

(Gurdjieff later expands his system to five centres—“the thinking, the emotional, the moving, the instinctive, and the sex”—but I’m sticking to the basic three here as the concept of three-centred beings is foreign enough.)

Wrong work of centres

However, none of us is a “normal healthy man” (or woman); as Laing identifies, we’ve been shattered by humanity’s journey through emotionally suffocated patriarchy. As a result, our disconnected centres don’t function properly:

“In Western culture it is considered that a man may possess great knowledge… and at the same time he may be, and has the right to be, a petty, egoistic… and absent-minded man… Personality… is the result of the wrong work of centres.”

Gurdjieff attributes a lot of humanity’s problems to ‘the wrong work of centres,’ such as “the attempts of the thinking centre to feel or to pretend that it feels.”

Not only is the output from our ‘factory’ severely impaired by this wrong work, but the input—the amount of energy expended by our being to achieve its tasks—is greater than necessary, producing inefficiency issues.

I’ve written about this in Solve problems at their source – mental, emotional or sexual. Because we’re operating from a single centre, the mind, we think the mind is the only problem-solving tool at our disposal.

We expend colossal energy trying to effect changes and solve problems using the wrong tool for the job. Mental energy excels at solving mental problems. But emotional issues can only be solved by feeling, and we must engage with our sexual energy to rewire and reparent sexual dysfunctions.

Underdeveloped sex centre

Humanity, at its current stage of evolution, has an overdeveloped intellect while its collective emotional centre and the sex centre in particular are underdeveloped. Our immature, over-reactive emotional centre—the collective unconscious—is the guiding force of humanity at this time.

Yet Gurdjieff pinpoints the underdeveloped sex centre as the key problem:

“The chief evil… is not in sex itself but in the abuse of sex… the wrong work of centres in relation to sex… Sex… governs all other centres… the other centres rob the sex centre of the energy which it does not use itself.”

This is because, in patriarchy, the sex centre is in shame. We shut down its energy, which leaks out elsewhere. Our minds try to direct our sexual and emotional activities. As a result, we become confused between sex and nurturing, neither of which the mind is capable of correctly governing.

Body shaming

In men, body shaming causes the penis to become an appendage we’re not permitted to meaningfully inhabit, shamed into darkness and separation. Unhealthy expressions of male sexuality which inevitably result are attacked, shamed, and cancelled.

“The energy of the sex centre in the work of the thinking, emotional, and moving centres can be recognised by… a vehemence which the nature of the affair concerned does not call for… People who experience unpleasant feelings… connected with sex are inclined to regard them as a great virtue… in actual fact it is simply disease.”

Echoing Gurdjieff, early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich writes in The Function of the Orgasm (1942) that “man is the only biological species which has destroyed its own natural sex function, and that… is what ails him.”

Sefer Yetzirah

The concept of three-centred beings did not originate with Georges Gurdjieff. He claimed to have studied ancient wisdom in the oasis towns of central Asia before appearing in Moscow in 1915.

There are parallels between Gurdjieff’s centres and verse 1:1 of the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, a work of Jewish mysticism of ancient but uncertain origin. According to Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, this complex verse describes a three-tiered structure comprising Wisdom (Chakmah, masculine/mind), Understanding (Binah, feminine/heart), and Foundation (Yesod, sexual organs).

The healing of R. D. Laing’s “shambles,” the uniting of head, heart, and genitals through trauma release, is the only pathway out of the “collusive madness” of our single-centred existence to unified, balanced three-centred beings.

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash