Gurdjieff's Higher Psychic Centres and the transmission of Objective Knowledge: the mysteries of Christ

"In ordinary conditions the difference between the speed of our usual emotions and the speed of the higher emotional center is so great that no connection can take place and we fail to hear within us the voices which are speaking and calling to us from the higher emotional center." (P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, pp.194-195)

Modern Christianity has forgotten how to speak to the parts of man that actually matter. It tickles the surface with sentiment, dogma, and social utility, but rarely touches the deeper substrata of human being—the hidden chambers of the soul where the mystery of God and man must be lived.

The Church speaks to the outer man, but Christ came for the inner man. And, according to Gurdjieff, the inner man is asleep—but not dead.

Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way teaching—as preserved by P.D. Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous (ISM) —makes a provocative claim: we already possess two higher centers of perception and knowing. One he calls the Higher Emotional Center, the other the Higher Thinking or Mental Center. Though Gurdjieff makes a different presentation in his book Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson regards these centers in relation to"Gradations of Objective Reason", he states in ISM that these higher centres are fully formed, permanent faculties of the human being—but remain disconnected from our ordinary waking consciousness due to a lack of inner development.

“These [higher] centers are in us; they are fully developed and are working all the time, but their work fails to reach our ordinary consciousness.” (ISM, p. 142)

It’s as if man is a temple wired for divine electricity, but the circuits have never been connected. The power is flowing. The sanctuary remains dark.

What Gurdjieff claims resonates with the Apostle Paul:

“The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

There is a faculty in man that must be reactivated. A spiritual body must be born. The veil must be torn—not ritually, but neurally. And that’s the terrifying implication: the centers of divine communion are present in us now, but blocked. Our surface personality, our ordinary “I,” our day-to-day consciousness is too fragmented, too slow, too self-concerned to receive their input. This is why Paul speaks of a “renewing of the mind” (Rom. 12:2), and Jesus so often says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” It’s not a figure of speech. It’s neurology. It's esoteric physiology. It’s the painful truth that we are not wired for heaven until the wiring is reconnected through inner work, grace, and purification of the heart.

Transmission of Objective Knowledge

Gurdjieff makes clear in ISM (pp. 279-280) that the transmission of genuine Objective Knowledge is via these Higher Centres:

"Realizing the imperfection and weakness of ordinary language the people who have possessed objective knowledge have tried to express the idea of unity in 'myths,' in 'symbols,' and in particular 'verbal formulas' which, having been transmitted without alteration, have carried on the idea from one school to another, often from one epoch to another.

It has already been said that the higher psychic centers work in man's higher states of consciousness: the 'higher emotional' and the 'higher mental.' The aim of 'myths' and 'symbols' was to reach man's higher centers, to transmit to him ideas inaccessible to the intellect and to transmit them in such forms as would exclude the possibility of false interpretations. 'Myths' were destined for the higher emotional center; 'symbols' for the higher thinking center. By virtue of this all attempts to understand or explain 'myths' and 'symbols' with the mind, or the formulas and the expressions which give a summary of their content, are doomed beforehand to failure. It is always possible to understand anything but only with the appropriate center. But the preparation for receiving ideas belonging to objective knowledge has to proceed by way of the mind, for only a mind properly prepared can transmit these ideas to the higher centers without introducing elements foreign to them. "

This explains, like the Bible, and particularly the Gospel of Christ, the meticuluous care and exposition of Gurdjieff's magnum opus, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, as an epic myth filled with symbols, verbal formulae and wise sayings. His book, as stated by Gurdjieff himself, was written to speak to the subconsciousness of the reader in which lay the hidden connection to the higher centres.

The Higher Emotional Centre and the Beatific Heart

Gurdjieff taught that the higher emotional center, associated with the Astral Body (the"Kesdjan Body" in Beelzebub's Tales) uses a finer energetic substance—what he called Hydrogen 12. When the lower emotional center is refined through conscious labours and intentional suffering, it can temporarily connect with this higher organ.

“In those cases where the work of the emotional center reaches the intensity and speed...a temporary connection with the higher emotional center takes place and man experiences new emotions...for the description of which he has neither words nor expressions.” (ISM, p. 195)

The New Testament calls this agapē. It is the uncreated love of God poured into the purified heart by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). It is not human love elevated—it is divine love descending into a vessel prepared to receive it.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matt. 5:8)

The heart, when purified through suffering and surrender, becomes a new sensory organ. It begins to “see” God, not as a belief or doctrine, but as experience—not hallucination, but an inner knowing of terrible clarity. It is the direct perception of Reality through a faculty most of us have never used.

Paul again:

“...that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith...that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:17–19)

The Higher Intellectual Centre and the Mind of Christ

The higher thinking center (associated with the "Mental Body" or the Highest Being Body of the Soul in Beelzebub's Tales) is even more remote and works with a more rarefied energy - Hydrogen 6. It speaks in symbols, silence, and sudden illuminations. Gurdjieff claimed that this center—often dormant for a man’s entire life—communicates truths too subtle, potent and integrative for ordinary thought to process, and connection with it is possible only through the higher emotional center (ISM, p. 195). Without preparation, a man touches it and falls into unconsciousness. The circuits of the lower centres (ordinary thinking, emotional, moving) overload.

And yet Paul boldly proclaims:

“We have the mind of Christ.” (1 Cor. 2:16)

This is not metaphor. This is ontological fact: those being conformed to Christ through conscious transformation begin to participate in the noetic structure of the Logos. The nous is reactivated. Divine thought begins to think in and through the renewed human vessel.

“Be transformed by the renewal of your mind (nous), so that you may discern what is the will of God.” (Rom. 12:2)

Discernment is not guesswork. It’s the ability to perceive reality directly—what Gurdjieff called objective consciousness. But to get there, all centers must be purified, harmonized, and integrated. There must be what Gurdjieff called a permanent center of gravity—an “I” capable of uniting all parts of the fragmented soul.

This is the work of the Spirit. But it demands participation.

The Trinitarian Blueprint: From Animal to Angel

Both Christ and Gurdjieff understood that the true Christian path is not moral improvement or theological accuracy. It is ontological metamorphosis. Man is not born with a soul; he is born with the potential to form one. Or as Paul puts it:

“The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven... Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” (1 Cor. 15:47–49)

Christ is not merely a redeemer; He is the pattern for a new kind of human. A Fourth Way human. A tripartite, trinitarian, awakened being.

Gurdjieff called it the man with four bodies—physical, astral, mental, and causal (Beelzebub's Tales' gradations of "Higher Being Bodies"). Paul called it being "conformed to the image of the Son" (Rom. 8:29). Either way, it is not automatic. It is theosis through struggle, grace, and active surrender—through conscious labours and intentional suffering. It is the wiring of the temple being reconnected so that divine electricity can once again flow through man.

The Gospel for the Higher Centres

When Jesus said, “Unless a man be born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God,” (John 3:3) He was speaking directly to the higher centers. Not as an abstraction, but as biological-spiritual fact.

Without a new birth—a reactivation of the deeper faculties of perception—man remains in the tomb of his personality, endlessly talking about God while blind to His reality.

The Kingdom is not coming with signs to be observed. It is within you. But you must be rewired to see it.

Gurdjieff’s system is not a rival gospel. It is an X-ray of the anthropology presupposed by the Gospel of Christ. It maps the terrain the Scriptures describe.

Christ is the Lord of the higher centers. The Spirit is their fuel. And the Cross is the only path through which the fragments of the soul are reunited.

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20)

That, my friends, is what it would mean to live from the higher centres.