Welcome to a new series of podcasts based upon the teachings of Russell A. Smith, a man who discovered an objective and accelerated way to awaken higher consciousness, the seats of conscience, pure reason and impartiality. Russell’s work expands upon the Fourth Way teachings of George I. Gurdjieff, and deciphers much of what Gurdjieff left behind. 

In this series, we play extracts of recordings of Russell teaching his classes. This episode is where he covers the subjects of “Essence and Personality.”

A question was raised as to the distinction between essence and being, particularly in the context of Cosmic Secrets where the major oscillation and minor oscillations coexist as points of existence.

In the cards diagram, the simplest formulation of essence and personality is essence are the red suits and personality is the black suits. Essence we were born with. All of our instinctive center is an essence. Everything in that center, we didn't have to do anything to acquire.

You didn't have to do anything at all to learn how to look, how to see, how to smell, how to hear, how to beat your heart, how to digest food. That was all in essence. You were born with those things. You didn't need to do anything with them. In the emotional center, you had the affinity for your mother's voice. Maybe after hearing her talk to you in the room, maybe recognized her face. All of our emotions are in essence. We didn't have to do anything to have some part of us that can see the meaning in the world.

What does this mean? In personality, we had to acquire everything. In the black suits, we had to learn how to walk, how to crawl, how to grab, learn how to move our mouth and form words like mountain. We had to do it all. In the intellectual center, we had to figure it all out intellectually.

What does that mean? It means don't stick that paper clip in the electric socket ever again.

In the black suits, we have to acquire it all. In the red suits, we were born with it. To me, that's the simplest division in essence and personality.

Now, when we study oscillations, yes. The essence center of the red suits is going to emulate around a Mi. We go from me up to Fa and from Mi down to Fa, which is from the three of diamonds up to the ten of diamonds. Most of the diamond suits in that first model of essence, minor oscillation. The major oscillation is around the show, and it goes down to the Fa, which is the end of the instinctive center, the beginning of the moving center, up to the Fa.

That center, which I think is the queen of diamond clubs. Two-thirds of the black suit, apart from the king, is in the major oscillation. In the minor oscillation of diamonds, it's the queen and king that are in the essence. In the major oscillation of clubs, it's the jack and queen that are in the personality.

That's a good model of what's living in me and so. It's that way in the me and so for diamonds and clubs. It's that way in me and so for hearts and fades, and it's that way at the me and so for higher emotion and higher mental, which is still mostly the guys on the left, the red cards, are of the essence. The guys on the right, the black cards, are of the personality, but then it goes further into smaller scales. When we get into smaller scales, even though we said essence was red cards, hey, there's those in Mi’s in that diamonds as well, of which those will be majors and Mi’s will be minors, so I guess maybe there's some little bit of a personality in red cards as well when we start to get into the smaller things.

But it's easier to look at the model in its figure scale and says red, what we're born with is essence and black, what we have to acquire is personality. That's the easiest division. Then as far as being is concerned, the simplest formulation for being that I know of from my work is simply being is the totality of what you are, taking everything together.

So, okay, you're a brilliant man and you know how to do physics and calculus and you can do incredible things, but you can't bring your umbrella when it rains, you forget. So, the being of you takes into consideration that you're not very good in that part as well. That's the totality of your state. And so, Gurdjieff  made a lot of emphasis about the totality and a great athlete who has, who's overweight or things of that nature to show that the totality of what he is, is referencing his being, where then when we look at what he has totally made off of, then we find the simplest division, it goes back to essence and personality, his red suits and his black suits, but then it can become confusing because there's inner, inner, inner octaves. And so, now we get down into majors and minors and those scales as well. And so, we have black cards, which are in personality, they'll have majors and minors, kind of like essence and personality, because they're majors and minors, but essence and personality really means what you're born with versus what you're given.

Look at the instinctive center, what is that, essence or personality? Essence.

How about the moving center? Is that essence or personality? Personality.

What about the red suits of hearts? What is that essence or personality? Essence.

What about the black suit of clubs? What is that essence or personality? Essence.

What about the higher emotional center? That's essence.

What about the higher mental center? That's personality.

And now I'm done. I know the difference between essence and personality. But being is the totality of all of your manifestations taken together. And that's what the level of your being is. So, with just that simple model, I can have a pretty good understanding of it.

Now, if I break it down into majors and minors, well, in the biggest scale, yeah, minors are the red from the big Mi's and the suits. And personality are so's from the black guys. The bottom story is Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do. And Mi is in the Queen of Diamonds, and So is in the Jack of Spades.

So, okay, now we have red and black. But when I go into the parts and parts and parts, I'm dealing with majors and minors that are both in red and in black. So, it gets harder to see that. So, I don't know if I'd want to say majors and minors is to catch all for what essence and personality are. Better saying essence is red. Personality is our black. The left side of the card diagram is essence. Right side is personality. And the total manifestation of you is not referring to essence or personality. That's called what you are. That's a reference of being

A question was then asked about the distinction between essence as innate and personality as acquired, but there's confusion about whether essence can also grow and acquire meaning, particularly in the emotional center, as illustrated by the story of the ground squirrel and the hawk.

We have instinctive and emotional centers. So, you were born with those. That is, you had the ability to taste but you hadn't tasted anything yet. So, you have filled up the instinctive center by learning different tastes or encountering different sensations. It has the potential to do all those but it's in the moving center where things get responsive to those sensations. That sensation is hot for your hand away. That sensation of look up to see the hawk doesn't need anything until the hawk tries to catch you. Then it's recorded and goes to the intellectual center and provides a database of recorded meaning that you then orient yourself around.

You know, when I tell the story of the fish up at the front pond, I caught one day and my God, I bring bass with a short lead and he jumped and he broke the line right at the hook, had a rubber worm in his mouth with a hook in it. Oh my God, he was jumping out of the water throwing his head back and forth saying, “Oh my God, I've got this thing in my mouth,” and of course he broke the line, and I felt so sorry. So, I got another lure, and it was on another pole, and I threw it on the other side of the pond trying to put it under a tree. I caught a branch of the tree. You'll figure it out. Now he almost made it, oh Jeez. So, my Daddy showed me the best way to get a snag out is just to grab the line, and pull real hard, instead of the pole, pull on the line. So, I reached out and grabbed the line, pulled it back, the tree fell in the red in the first game, and all of a sudden, “Boo!” It let go of the lure and it came zinging at my head. And I ducked and it went past my head and landed on the other side of the pond on the other side of the dock. So okay, I'm winding in all the loose line around to where that lure was, and I noticed it's moving. It's moving that way. Oh my God. So, I set the hook, and I got a fish and I land him. It's the same bass. I caught the same bass. He's still got the rubber worm in his mouth, and now he's got the lure and this was within 60 seconds. Now, why in the hell didn't that bass learn the difference? Because he doesn't have the intellectual center. He just has the lower story, which is sensation triggers movements. It doesn't, is unable to say any meaning and then be registered and recorded.

So, don't put essence as something that learns things. That's repository in the intellectual center. Essence is just our ability to assign meaning. Instinctive is just our ability to sense. It's too bad the moth flies into the flame. It triggers the movement. There's no realization that that's hot stuff and you keep getting closer, it's going to burn you.

So, the essence centers, you didn't learn how to see any better from the day you were born. You just learned to see different things. You didn't learn to digest any better from the day you were born. You just learned how to digest different things. So, it's not as if we're building essence, it was there. We were given that. Yet we walked and run and jumped and climbed. Those are all in personality and those are the things we'd acquire. But you didn't acquire any new kind of ability to smell. It's always been there. You just have learned to smell different things.

Essence, we don't develop. We really don't develop essence. We just expand it. I never tasted calf's brains before. Now I have, so okay. But that ability to taste was in my essence when I was born. It just knew things I acquire. But all my movements I got to learn.

They did a really good show on children and gave them a cup of juice and little kids, three, four years old. They put a big rubber bug in the cup of juice. The little kid that's three or four years old picked up that cup and he drank the juice, and he paid no attention to the little bug. But then get a little older. I forget the ages they actually did this, but a little older. At a certain age, it was kind of universal. Every kid who was given the juice glass, who had the big rubber bug in it, would go, “Ugh! There’s a bug, there’s a bug in my cup! Ugh!” And so the guy would reach in and pull the bug out. And now the bug was gone. The kid was happy. The bug wasn't in there. He could now drink the juice. And they all acted that way.

And then they got a little older. And now they go, “Oh! There’s a thing that’s right in there!” And the guy would reach in and take it out and they'd go, “I'm not drinking that juice. That thing is in there.” They started to have an idea of contamination that has been contaminated. Even though it's been removed, it still was in there. But that's always been in the potential of our instinctive centers and our emotional centers. It's just the moving and intellectual centers that record the data. So, the meaning stimulates that. But if I have drank something with a, you know, that was this color, and got sick from it, then I'll remember and record that red berries aren't good to eat, and frogs that have red on them, or yellow on them, can kill you. So, then I have a repository of data that now lets me orient instead of just at the moment of experiencing the thing in the glass, but I now have that registered in the future to draw upon that database. And so, I don't have to assign the meaning at the moment every time, but I can look to the database and say, “Oh, that sounds like a hawk!” It's really just a car alarm, but I'm running.

Some people are born with a lot more taste buds on their tongue than you have, and they make good wine-tasters because they have that innate ability. Some are born and they’re seven feet tall, and they're better basketball players, and the guy that's only five feet tall, he better be a jockey. So that's in essence, but that doesn't mean that a little short guy couldn't be a good basketball player. If he developed and learned how to kick, pass, and throw and shoot, he might make a great point guard, not so tall to jump out of the basket, but short people can still play.

But that would be divisions of essence that would certainly give people certain advantages in life because of things that are given in essence, but that doesn't preclude that only basketball players can be seven feet tall because short guys can probably be learning to shoot three pointers all day long, and every basketball team in the world would want them even though they're only five-two.

Some people have a little bit different development of eyes, or maybe more nerves in their olfactory where they can pick up more sense, or more taste bugs on their tongues, or their immune system is a little bit more developed, and that adds advantages. Certainly, so we're born with certainly different kinds of essences, which is, you know, in the genetics, just like the zebra whose neck was a little longer than the other zebra's, so he could reach out and get the leaves off the trees a little higher up, and so he had a better chance to survive because he had little advantage by essence. But he was born with that. That wasn't something, he didn't put his head into a crook in between a tree and pull on it to make it longer.

Next, clarification was asked concerning the discrepancy between workbooks talking about growing essence, and here where people are described as not actually growing essence when developing themselves.

You know, I'm just sorry for that, guys. A lot of the workbooks say a lot of things that weren't true because they were done by people that didn't have an objective way. You know, you've got to eat Gurdjieff salad, or do these movements, or do this or do that, you know, that they just got it wrong because they didn't understand, they didn't have Reason. And so, yeah, I'm sure a lot was told, to talk about developing essence, but if you really understand the model, you're born with that. I mean, how have your eyes gotten better? You know, is your sense of smell any more developed than it was when you were born? No. You might have learned to record more data by what you smelled, but that then went into the intellectual center and said, “Ooh, that smells like urine, ooh, that smells like a skunk.” You have a piece of data, but the ability for your nose to work, a little old four-year-old encountering a skunk would probably go “Euuurgh!” just as much as a 50-year-old would because he can smell that terrible smell just as much as the old guy can. So, in essence, we have this ability. There's nothing new to make it work. My heart was beating when I was born. I had to do nothing to make it beat. There was no exercises, no development there.

It's all in the moving center that I had to develop, and then in the intellectual center I had to acquire a database of all the things that I had encountered, whether I encountered them through my instinctive essence, or whether I encountered them through my emotional essence, then they needed to be registered so I could orient myself better in life and, “Oh, I know the sound of that. Well, I know what that smells like. You guys better run. Oh, that smells like rain. We better get, you know, back to the car.” So, I mean, yeah, that ability to smell, and that ability to hear, and that ability to digest, and that ability to make cells, and that ability to run all my physiological processes, I didn't have to do an iota of work to have those function in me.

But all of my moving, whether it was learned how to eat with a fork and not get food all over my face, that had to all be acquired. Yeah, and so you probably weren't born being able to dribble a basketball, but you could acquire that in your moving center. But the ability to have a hand that could move up and down was in essence. But the development of that would be in the moving center.

A question was raised about “Polishing the Queens,” asking if it’s the case that the different parts of centers are not really being developed, but the amount of attention brought to them is.

We have these centers, they have different parts. Some work automatically, so I'm taking attention. Some need attention drawn. Well, the world has been tamed. There's no lions and tigers, so we don't have to smell and listen and watch. If we understand, and this is what the Work didn't, what's higher centers are made of, nobody knew that until I came along, and said, “Look, they're just the lower centers working together. They're unified up here.”

Well, you have to have them functioning well. They need to have their best parts working in order to unify. Unfortunately, we don't use the best parts. We just use the mechanical parts. We become machines, and we become Jacks. Well, we don't have to smell because there's no danger out there. We don't have to learn how to use our moving center and get from here across the mountain through the swamp and the dirt and the puddles because there are sidewalks everywhere. So, because we don't have to use these higher parts of our centers, we don't.

So yes, I tell everybody, polish your centers. We need the best parts working if we want them to come together, unified, to produce this higher part. Like I said, in the Teaching Guide, you know, how men got the first Reason, but he tamed the Earth and down the road his kid didn't have to stand at the cave for 20 minutes before he went outside and smelled and watched and listened for danger. And the tree that had the fruit was growing right outside. He didn't have to use his moving center to go a half a while away to pick some fruit off the tree. It was right there. He didn't even have to even get his sister a piece when she said bring on the way. He said, get off your lazy house and get your own. And he stopped paying attention.

Now, maybe that's what the work meant when we have to, you know, develop our instinctive center. Maybe that was the idea that really we don't have to develop. We just need to use its best parts. We need to start using the higher parts of it because we've pushed it down into the Jacks, and we don't need to listen in here and watch and smell and taste anymore.

And so we don't use them because we're not forced to use them. So I, you know, put in models like maybe the kids would get up and they'd be cupboards that would lock and the breakfast would be behind the cupboards and the kid would have to learn to smell it. Learn how to listen for the snap, crackle, pop. Learn to pay attention to use the higher part of that center with attention, because if he opened the wrong door they would lock and he wouldn't get breakfast.  “You're going to make kids starve!” No, they’re not, don't worry.

And then I say their moving center, they'd be walking to school, and there'd be a slow zone with sensors that sense movement and sound. And the kids that have to learn to walk real slow and be real quiet and stealthy to make it through the slow zone, otherwise they'd be detected by one of the sensors, and spritzed with a little smell, or paint over some non, you know, indelible paint that would wash off to let them know that they didn't do the thing. Kids would love that! They'd want to run around and come back and go through it again. And they would start to use these higher parts of these centers because when they got to be mature and came up to the responsible age, their centers would need to unify, and since they were using them and developing them, they'd have the six cards they needed, and they'd have strong lower centers. And then it would be their natural moment in life to have them things unify and wake up.

But we stopped you in that a long time ago and fell back to just a bunch of Jacks, and so, yeah, I make people pick centers because it's not the centers that have to be developed, it's the utilization of the higher parts which have after feed from lack of use.

And again, I just spent a long time on Chapter 3, especially those kind of things, about the difference between essence and personality. That's in there, how we fell asleep and why we fell asleep, that's in there. And it's just because we stopped using our higher parts. In the essence centers, they're already there. We just don't use them. There's no need to listen and smell anymore because the world's been tamed. Back in the day, yeah, he didn't walk out into the world. It was full of dangerous animals that could eat you. You have to be very stealthy and careful. We don't do that anymore. But that doesn't mean we have to develop those essence centers.

Now, the moving centers, we did. We had to learn to climb trees to get out of danger. And, gosh, I don't know, in a few years down the road, we'll even have gym class anymore in schools. It's like, okay, we're just becoming obese society anyway. So, it's just the lack of use of the higher parts that is the downfall of man, because the other animals in the world never stopped using their higher parts. It's just Reason’s so damn powerful that it made it unnecessary to use the higher parts, because the yard's fenced, the door's locked, the windows are shut, we've got a 357 Magnum, we ain't got to listen and smell and use any of our centers. So, yeah, if you haven't reviewed recently Chapter 3, that's a good one to do.

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That concludes today’s podcast. Thank you for listening.

If you would like to learn more about Russell’s work on how to become objectively conscious, simply visit our website thedogteachings.com and acquire Russell Smith’s book, The Blueprint of Consciousness - An Accelerated Path to Awakening, which is also available as a PDF download.

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