Pantheon, Rome
photograph by the author
In understanding the three brains, we cannot have an understanding by thinking about them.
This may sound confusing, especially in regard to the thinking center, but as soon as we find ourselves invested in thinking, we are not having an understanding or knowing. We are one step removed from Being. Being does not involve just thinking; Being involves Being. And to be is not to think. In fact, real Being absolutely dispenses with thinking as we ordinarily experience it. It is entirely different; and only an extended experience with it — as opposed to a few brief flashes of insight – will bring that question home to an individual. Understanding this properly will lead to permanent changes in the psyche which can't be described here, but they definitely rearrange all of the furniture.
The way to understand how a function — how one of the brains — works is to be within it. I do not seek, for example, to have a connection with my sensations; there is simply a manifestation within sensation, and the sensation originates the manifestation and supports it; it has nothing to do with me thinking, "oh, I had better sense myself now." One cannot possibly put oneself within a function and then discover it. The function must become alive in its own right. This means that the brain of the body and the brain of the emotional center must awaken and become fully cooperative and supportive functions in their own right, in which I find myself dwelling — not parts that I see or experience as separated from myself and then try to recruit. This idea of recruitment is, in fact, entirely false, yet an enormous amount of what is called "work effort" circles around a center of gravity based on the idea of recruitment. If one truly wishes to experience life from within the three functions, abandoning the idea of recruiting them is the first step. As Jeanne de Salzmann points out, the first thing to do is to spend far more time seeing that you don't have this experience — not trying to get it.
This question of three brained existence is critical, because we are not human at all unless we have this. Each of our parts, left to itself, is dramatically deficient in terms of a complete understanding of what life is. The thinking center, in particular, runs wild in a thousand directions if it isn't tethered to right feeling and right physical sensation. Developing sound connections of this kind takes many years of inner work, none of which involve manipulation or doing exercises to toughen parts up. It involves a deeper and deeper seeing of the nature of Being; and it is only this penetration into the deeper realms that can knit the fabric together and create a whole piece of cloth.
Let me mention that no one really wants to do this kind of work; it is painful, and requires one to come up against the fact of one's own inhumanity again and again. I was examining this question during one of my early morning walks in the dark with the dog at the beginning of the week, and some shocking revelations occurred to me. I'll talk about them in the next piece.
May your soul be filled with light.