Glossary
- Ahura Mazda: Antares, Lord of our galaxy; God as recognised by Zoroaster.
- Balanced state: the three centres developed to equal degrees and working in harmony.
- Body kesdjan (GT): vessel of the spirit; property of man No. 4.
- Brains: centres.
- Centres, three (GT): Gurdjieff believed man to have three centres or brains. The moving-instinctive-sex centre is situated from the back of the head down the spine to the coccyx; the emotional centre in the solar plexus; the intellectual centre in the head. The higher intellectual and emotional centres are accessible to a man No. 5.
- Conscious labours and intentional suffering (GT): undertaking by man who is awake to suffer voluntarily and knowingly – to act, rather than simply react to negative forces.
- Ego: the idea we have of ourselves, which is usually that we are a body.
- Essence (hereditary): mind and body characteristics inherited from grandparents; (deep) characteristics carried over from life to life.
- Forces (three): the active or proposing; the passive or denying; the neutralising or reconciling.
- Formatory apparatus (GT): the shallow memory banks, the frontal brain in the head.
- Guide to conscience: the mediator between God and man within each person.
- Goaffadh bird: the experiment in consciousness on Earth previous to man; also djinns, spirits.
- Gurdjieff, Georges Ivanovitch (1877-1949): the exponent of a system for the harmonious development of man.
- Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927): Sufi teacher who gave out the Message to the West.
- His Endlessness (GT): the Absolute, the Creator of everything existing.
- Ibn’Arabi, Shaikh (1165-1240): Sufi scholar and theologian.
- Inner considering (GT): indulging in negative emotions such as self-pity, resentment.
- Inner dialogue: associative thinking, usually with negative connotations.
- Law of seven (GT): the cyclic law, exemplified by seven-day week or musical tonic solfah.
- Law of three (GT): the creative law, necessitating a positive, negative and neutralising force.
- Magnetic centre (GT): the seed of the soul; man No. 1, 2 or 3 is able to progress from this stage of spiritual growth to the second stage of acquiring a soul.
- Man No. 1 (GT): instinctive man (dominated by moving-instinctive-sex brain).
- Man No. 2 (GT): emotional man (dominated by emotional brain).
- Man No. 3 (GT): intellectual man (dominated by intellectual brain).
- Man No. 4 (GT): man with spirit developed to body kesdjan; the aim is to have brains balanced correctly at this stage.
- Man No. 5 (GT): balanced man with spirit developed to mental body.
- Man No. 6 (GT): balanced man with beginning of real individualisation.
- Man No. 7 (GT): perfected man.
- Mantra: repetition of God’s name or invocation.
- Mental body (GT): the fourth degree of spiritual growth, property of man No. 5.
- Moon, feeding (GT): Gurdjieff believed that involuntary suffering on Earth served to help the evolution of the Moon.
- Name, name part: the three centres working in harmony in a person instead of only one centre or the body and ego.
- Pairs of opposites: the active and passive elements in opposition, lacking the third (reconciling) force.
- Polarity: the relative positions of the active and passive forces.
- Ramakrishna: a Hindu saint and guru to many, who lived and taught in Madras in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
- Ramnam: the chanting of God’s name, first outwardly aloud, later silently, inwardly.
- Separation, making: stepping back into a higher, observing part which can draw on the third force.
- Third force blind: being trapped in the pairs of opposites without recourse to reconciling force.
- Vehicle of consciousness: a three-brained being with possibility of spiritual development.
- Work, the: manifestation of third force which instructs endeavours of vehicle of consciousness aspiring to become conscious.
