Binary

Excerpted from The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness by Robert S. de Ropp, ©2003:

In the Gurdjieffian system, the labeling part of the intellectual brain was called the “formatory center,” concerning which P. D. Ouspensky frequently stated that “it could only count up to two.” This is the chief characteristic of that form of defective mentation called “formatory thinking.” Formatory thinking has played, now plays and is likely to play in the future a large and disastrous role in the life of mankind. This form of “thinking in absolutes” generates human conflicts because it creates opposing systems and represents one as totally good, the other as totally evil.

The current pair of opposites, “Capitalist versus Communist,” is as good an example of this division as was the equally disastrous duad, “Catholic versus Protestant,” that so preoccupied our ancestors and lured them into one of the most disastrous conflicts of all times (the Thirty Years War). The emotion-loaded words of the present age – “Communist,” “Imperialist,” “saboteur,” “Fascist,” “Marxist” – carry political overtones. Those which haunted our ancestors – “heretic,” “witch,” “the Devil,” “Papist,” “unbeliever” – carried religious ones. Both have justified hideous doings, the record of which is sufficient to convince any impartial student that something is terribly amiss in the psyche of man. Only a “fallen being” or a very badly constructed one could allow itself to be so deluded by shadows of its own creating.