In Gurdjieff’s deeper teachings, the "body" category is split into two distinct parts, giving us four lower centers that manage our everyday lives. Beyond these lie two higher centers, which are fully formed and constantly functioning, but are usually inaccessible to ordinary people because we lack the inner quiet and structural development to connect with them.

The Four Lower Centers

These centers govern ordinary human life and operate largely on autopilot.

1. The Intellectual Center: Located conceptually in the head, this is the center of logic, reasoning, analysis, and word-based thinking. It is the slowest of all the centers. Its job is to process information by comparing, dividing, and categorizing.

2. The Emotional Center: Located conceptually in the chest or solar plexus, it governs our feelings, passions, and motivations. It operates entirely on subjective preferences: "I like" or "I dislike." It reacts much faster than the intellectual center.

3. The Motor Center: This center governs all learned movements and voluntary physical habits. Walking, typing, driving a car, and dancing are all functions of the motor center. You use the slow intellectual center to learn a physical skill initially, but once mastered, the motor center takes over because it can execute actions in real-time.

4. The Instinctual Center: This controls the body's innate, involuntary biological functions. It manages things you never had to learn: the five senses, digestion, the beating of your heart, pulling your hand away from a hot stove, and regulating blood flow.

The Higher Centers

According to Gurdjieff, humanity is in a state of "waking sleep," meaning we are entirely run by the mechanical reactions of the four lower centers. However, we also possess two higher centers. Their "voices" are simply drowned out by the noise, negativity, and slow speed of the lower centers.

The Higher Emotional Center

This center is associated with what Gurdjieff called the "Astral Body." It enables sustained states of true self-consciousness and deep, objective feelings.

Unlike our lower emotional center—which is erratic, easily offended, and dominated by negative emotions—the higher emotional center experiences pure, unconditional love and profound empathy. It does not replace the lower emotional center; it is an entirely separate faculty that must be awakened.

The Higher Intellectual Center

This is the highest level of human functioning, associated with the "Mental Body". It operates at an unfathomably fast speed and enables objective consciousness—the ability to see the universe and reality exactly as they are, without the distorting filters of human ego, language, or subjective beliefs.

• Direct, Instant Knowing: While the lower intellectual center learns slowly by breaking things down and agonizing over logic, the higher intellectual center operates through immediate, holistic comprehension. It grasps the complete truth of a situation or a universal law in an instant.

• Mystical Flashes: Ordinary people only ever experience the higher intellectual center in rare, accidental flashes—often during moments of intense shock, near-death experiences, or deep meditation. These flashes feel like sudden epiphanies that are impossible to put into words, simply because ordinary language belongs to the slow, lower intellectual center.

• Accessing it: You cannot access the Higher Intellectual Center directly from your normal, everyday state. Gurdjieff taught that the lower intellectual center is completely incapable of understanding the higher intellectual center. 

My journey into the sciences started with mathematics. I loved it because the connections and solutions seemed to naturally reveal themselves to me, like a beautifully intricate puzzle waiting to be solved. Because I found such pure, engaging joy in solving these puzzles, I flew through the standard school curriculum. My teachers noticed this deep affinity early on, kindly sharing with my parents that they saw a big potential in how my mind grasped these concepts. I was selected into a performance programme, diving into advanced topics and training diligently for competitions and the mathemathics olympiad. 

Then I discovered physics, and that became, by far, my greatest academic love. I had a profound intuition for it. Whether exploring mechanics, optics, thermodynamics, or my favourite: electromagnetism, I didn't just memorize rules. I could simply sense how the physical world worked. This was the difference, the clear link with lived experience. The complex mathematics involved was never a hurdle. Because of my earlier training, math effortlessly transformed into just a vocabulary, the language used to express the universe, the life described by the physics world. I soon started my performance training in this area too and I attended many competitions and earned many awards along the way.  

I also pursued performance in chemistry, but only for a year. Even if I did achieve the top position, life has a funny way of making us choose our paths: the national chemistry olympiad landed on the exact same week as the physics one. I had to make a choice, and I chose to follow my greatest love, leaving chemistry behind.

But the true reward of these competitions was the world they opened up. Qualifying for nationals meant traveling the country and constantly crossing paths with a brilliant, tight-knit cohort of 'regulars'. Through one of these awards, and through our mutual love of the blue colour at the time :)) I found one of my best friends - now a PhD working @ Google as AI Fwd Deplyed Eng (I love her so much and I'm so proud of her I had to name drop). Even my very first trip abroad, to Greece, was a prize from an international math competition.

This early drive to understand the world's logic naturally led me to a Polytechnic University. Building on a foundation of mathematics and physics, I focused on the core mechanics of technology, tackling disciplines like Algorithm Design, Electrical Engineering, Systems Theory, and Computer Networks. I learned to bridge the gap between abstract theory and physical hardware. Ultimately, I earned my Engineering degree in Computer Science, specializing in Computer Systems Architecture.

I started my work in this field very close to the academic sector, working as a systems admin for an independent college.

Then I became fascinated with the financial industry and 'the mathematics of money'. I spent the majority of my career in this sector, working for major global banks like Deutsche Bank and The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. I was mainly in their anti-financial crime and risk departments, creating software to help compute the risk of complex types of transactions or to prevent frauds, money laundering, etc.. And if I wasn't directly working for a bank, I was working for companies that built software for advanced financial computations. 

At some point, I started to pivot from my pure engineering contributions into leadership positions. Being certified in one of the most popular delivery methodologies, I helped companies with transitioning their ways of working into more effective, people centric and adaptive processes. 

For a brief period I changed sector to the gaming industry. And finally, in the last few years, I have been overseeing projects focusing on the reliability of Adobe's identity systems, and leading a ground-up re-architecture of the core identity platform to proactively future-proof their infrastructure.

This highly logical, structured path formed the bedrock of my intellect. 

Yet, running completely parallel to this rigorous scientific trajectory was an entirely different exploration of the unseen.

This exploration started in my early school years, with my fascination on Nostradamus and with diligent, self-taught practice in ‘astral projection’. I would practice every night before going to sleep, getting out of my body and moving around the house. Then, after all this practice ‘somehow’ I started to have lucid dreams. (Now I know why and in my school our teacher explained us how this works and how training your etheric body helps you have lucid dreams) And I would play around in the dreamworld. I remember I was fascinated with the ability to fly around and change the weather. 

This curiosity evolved when I met a friend who had learned to read tea leaves from his grandmother. Our conversations evolved and we shared and a deeper interest in the spirit world. 

In the next years I started to learn astrology, what a big fascination this was. And then, around the age of 17, I was gifted my first tarot deck. With them I learned how to make tiny rituals on bonding with your deck. 

My path then led me to explore Gene Keys, Human Design which I studied diligently, and I still do. 

I also found family constellations. I worked with 4 very talented facilitators for many years, all having their unique gifts. 

I got initiated and practiced many energetic systems like Shamballa, Karuna, Order of Melchizedek and many others. 

I got the invitation be part of the initial party of a very interesting initiative, that later expanded to other cohorts. We were a group of just six people, hand-picked by the founder of the initiative, gathering for regular seminars focusing on expanding on our energetic abilities and working together towards achieving higher goals. It was here that I deepened my work with crystals, sigils, dragons, folklore magic, and much more.

As my personal practice i followed the spirit in many areas: i did past life regressions, cranio sacral therapy, tai chi, qi gong, yoga, emotional and karmic acupuncture therapy. 

I diligently studied christianity but in the later discovered gnostic gospels. There I found that the many layers of interpretations and translations were fewer than in the canonical gospels. This way I was able to dig less to get closer to the core Truth they aimed to convey.

For a period of time I also studied mythology, Indian Gods and Greek Gods, always keeping the lens of this understanding : they are archetypes and metaphors of existence, and not taking things literally but in a deeper essence level, will always bring out new understanding.

At some point I discovered a beautiful practice: Biodanza. I loved this one so much and for sure did too less of it then what its merits were.

I also followed the psychology route. Starting with my personal therapy, then taking a Yale course in psychology. I also got certified as a trainer in Process Communication Model (a methodology with roots in Transactional Analysis that decodes human structure to its building blocks in terms of personality, psychological motivation, communication styles, leadership style and even reaction under stress with such an amazing accuracy that it was used by NASA for building its teams from the early 1977.)

I learned Chinese Metaphisycs: BaZi, QiMen, Feng Shui, Date selection, Yi Jing. Now I am in the last year of Acupuncture School, and i am learning Traditional Chinese Medicine as well. 

And I left this one for last, but only to end it on a very important note. About 10 years ago I found my teacher, spiritual guide and shaman Alexander Northern Deer. And since then I am part of his school : World of Wisdom and Spiritual Adventure. Here I have learned about the ancient wisdom in Siberian shamanic traditions in its purest and 'down to earth' translation - interestingly enough, I later discovered I have genealogical roots in ancient Siberia. With this school I have traveled the world and discovered a different type of travel, the one meant to awaken you. The amount of things I learned here far exceeds the character limit I get right now, so I will honour this part of my journey in a different series. 

For now let’s get back to our ‘intellect’ discussion.