CHAPTER 2

The Mammal Instrument— Inner Processes

When you are identified with the mind you cannot be very intelligent because you become identified with an instrument, you become confined by the instrument and its limitations. And you are unlimited—you are consciousness.

Use the mind, but don’t become it . . . mind is a beautiful machine. If you can use it, it will serve you; if you cannot use it and it starts using you, it is destructive, it is dangerous. It is bound to take you . . . into some suffering and misery . . . Mind cannot see; it can only go on repeating that which has been fed into it. It is like a computer; first you have to feed it

. . . But you should remain the master so that you can use it; otherwise it starts directing you.

(Osho. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, 171)

From birth we are taught untruths, many of them unintentional, from ignorance. One such important untruth is that we have a soul. This is very bad teaching, because it suggests that the soul is separate from myself, as in: You have a car; thus, the car is a possession of mine, separate from me. So we grow up believing that the soul is somewhere in the body and is a possession of mine, but is not who I am.

Good teaching would help me to understand not that I have a soul, but that I am a soul, and I exist for a brief moment in a human biological instrument,* a human body. We are souls having a human experience. As far as I can tell, we humans are the only creatures on the planet with two natures in one body: we are “human beings”: a human, which is mammal and is the body; and a “being’* which is not human and is not the body. Here I will use “being” and “soul” to mean the same thing. The souls who are sent to Earth are sent to a kindergarten for undeveloped souls; we are souls in embryo. We are sent here to develop ourselves, with help. We cannot do it alone. And help is always available, if I have the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it. Of all the sources of help available to the soul in its development, none is more crucial, more helpful, more revealing, or more direct and personal than self observation.

It is a beautiful system we are born into, as perfect and precise as the intelligence which made it and us. Because we are meant to function and develop efficiently, safely, and effectively in this school for souls, this kindergarten, the curriculum is designed not as a generalization, so that one-size-fits-all, the way our ordinary external education is designed. In this school, self observation reveals exactly what is needed and wanted by each individual soul, when it is needed, how it is needed, and at what speed it will be implemented. We do not learn at the same pace. Very intelligent people may learn slowly. The learning which arises from self observation happens at exactly the pace with which I am able and willing to observe, no more, and no faster. Thus it is safe and it is tailored precisely to the needs of each individual soul. I am in charge of the amount and the pace at which I learn.

The first thing which needs to be understood, and this will be repeated in many different ways throughout this owner’s manual because it is difficult for the human mind to believe, is this: the act of self observation is the only change a human being needs to make in her behavior; everything else, all fundamental changes in behavior, emotion, and thinking arise as a by-product of this practice. In other words, self observation is radical, revolutionary, evolutionary, and fundamental change in the inner world of the human biological instrument. Werner Heisenberg was a twentieth-century German physicist. He had an insight which altered the way we see physics, and this insight was called “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.” It said simply this: The act of observation changes the thing observed. And this proved to be true on the micro, as well as on the macro level, from the observation of subatomic particles to the observation of galaxies. The laws of physics and the laws of metaphysics are identical; physics describes external laws, metaphysics internal laws. Thus, self observation changes what is observed within. I do not have to change anything; in fact, to attempt to do so is error and leads to trouble. I don’t know what to change or how to change it.

All I have to do is observe myself honestly and without judgment.

We are souls in a mammal body. The body has inner functions, among which are intellectual, emotional, instinctive, and moving functions. Each of these functions uses a special energy unique to its function and different from the energy of the other functions. Thus, the energy required for thought is not the same as the energy of emotion. This is easily observed and also this difference may be sensed as well as observed. Observation includes sensing the body, sensing its limbs, its weight and mass, as well as the energy which moves within it. Each of these energetic functions within has its own energy center,* sometimes called in other systems “chakras.”

Intellectual center is thinking center, head-brain, left hemisphere; emotional center is emotions, and is located roughly in the region of mid-breast-solar plexus; instinctive center is located at the navel; and moving center is located at the base of the spine. These centers of energy can be sensed with directed attention. Each of these centers operates with a different energy and at a different speed. To illustrate this is simple. Suppose a man is walking through the tall grass to the river and alongside the trail a snake is poised to strike. Before he can consciously do anything, his body leaps aside. This illustrates the relative speed of centers in relation to each other. Instinctive center is so fast that it can break down, absorb, and disseminate one sip of alcohol or one pain pill, within seconds or even milliseconds of its ingestion, which when you consider it, is truly astonishing. If intellectual center had to do that, it would take days, weeks, years. Following instinctive center in speed is, as you may have deduced, moving center. Moving center responds to instinctive center’s reaction to the snake very, very quickly, from survival need. For the purpose of simplifying things, some traditions join moving and instinctive centers, speaking of them as “instinctive-moving center” and speak then of “3-centered man.” The Gurdjieff Work, for example, uses this simplification, and it is useful for our purposes here as well. (For more exact description of speed of centers, see Ouspensky. In Search of the Miraculous. 193-195, 338-340 and Ouspensky. The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. 76-82).

Intellectual center is much, much slower and after the fact. Once the body is safely out of danger, the mind reacts, but too slowly to save my life. That was the job of instinct-moving. And always last to know is intellectual center, always last-to-know because it is by far, far, the slowest of the four centers. Once I have an emotional charge and the body is out of danger, now the intellectual center grasps the situation and it begins to take what has happened in the past and project it into the future, as in: “Oh my God! I’m never walking down that path again.” And yet—ponder this—it is to this center, the slowest of all the centers, the center which is always the last to know, which we assign the impossible burden of running the life. This is not what it was designed to do, but what it has been forced to do by our culture and our lifestyle. Our entire educational system is designed to educate only the intellectual center. Emotions and feelings, which are not the same, have no place in our education. Nor does instinct. We used to at least give a nod to the physical body, moving center, with what we called physical education. But even that much has mostly disappeared from our technological and scientific educational structure. The result is an unbalanced human. Every one of us is unbalanced, that is we have our center of gravity or response to life, in one of the three centers: instinctive-moving, or sensual person; emotional person whose primary response to life is emotional; or intellectual person, whose primary response is to think about things. In each of us, one center dominates and thus our response to stimuli differs according to our type or center of gravity. One response is no greater or more valuable than another; they are all equal and all equally unbalanced and inappropriate to the situation at hand.

So in order for intellectual center to carry out this assignment for which it was not made and cannot perform, it must slow everything down. To do this, it runs everything through its stored habits = predictable, controllable, don’t have to think about it = automatic pilot = less stress from an impossible job. Whereas, if I trust my instincts, I get a whole different set of responses, not from the past, habit, but from an immediate response to the present situation. Operating from habit, I am inefficient and inappropriate most of the time.

One of the first tasks of self observation is to try to observe these centers in action and sense the quality of energy which is appropriate to the workings of each center. There are more than three centers of course, but for purposes of self observation, it is useful to begin by trying to discern the action of these three centers and to sense the energy unique to each one.

The Star-Driller’s Attention

(for Little Moose)

In a dark and narrow tunnel they kneel

one behind the other

lit only by lamps on their hats,

drilling holes for dynamite.

The front man holds the 5-foot drill

with its star-shaped, tapered point.

One hand is inches from the butt.

His beam is focused on the point.

He never looks back.

The rear man swings the 12 pound hammer

with all his might.

His beam is focused on the butt.

He never looks away.

The rhythmic noise of the blows is deafening

in that small tight place so

their ears are plugged and they never speak.

Sometimes the front man will tire

and wish to rest.

He cannot yell,

he cannot turn,

so just after the hammer strikes

he places his thumb

directly over the butt

where the hammer lands.

The rear man’s beam

is focused on the butt.

He never looks away.

(Red Hawk. The Sioux Dog Dance, 13)