Robert S. de Ropp
Book
The Master Game by
Robert S. de Ropp
Quotes
"The essence nature of the Brahmin is an urge to know the truth...the true
Brahmin pursues truth at all costs and will not permit considerations of comfort
or convenience to stand in his way. His most outstanding characteristic is his
objectivity, his ability to rise above the dust of the arena, to resist the
hypnotising effects of words and the blind passion of cults, political or
religious."---Robert S. de Ropp (The Master Game p134)
“The four "seats of intelligence" loosely described as the intellectual, emotional, moving and instinctive centers are neither harmoniously nor fully developed in the man who exists only in the third state of consciousness. A person may have a brilliant intellectual center and yet be an emotional moron. Or he may be well developed emotionally and yet have a moving center so inept that he can barely tie his own shoelaces. What Sheldon implies in the above quotation and what G. Gurdjieff taught throughout his colorful career is that man does not and cannot attain his full spiritual stature by developing only one kind of intelligence. He must, if he is to grow harmoniously, develop all four.”---Robert S. De Ropp (The Master Game p. 143,4)
“The four "seats of intelligence" loosely described as the intellectual, emotional, moving and instinctive centers are neither harmoniously nor fully developed in the man who exists only in the third state of consciousness. A person may have a brilliant intellectual center and yet be an emotional moron. Or he may be well developed emotionally and yet have a moving center so inept that he can barely tie his own shoelaces. What Sheldon implies in the above quotation and what G. Gurdjieff taught throughout his colorful career is that man does not and cannot attain his full spiritual stature by developing only one kind of intelligence. He must, if he is to grow harmoniously, develop all four.”---Robert S. De Ropp (The Master Game p. 143,4)
True education involves every aspect of man's being, his instinctive, motor, emotional and intellectual functions. What passes for education in our universities and centers of "advanced learning" is a lopsided affair in which all the emphasis is placed on stuffing the intellectual center with facts, in much the same way as a computer is stuffed with information by feeding it "bits" in the form of punched cards which it duly stores in one form or another and can retrieve on demand.
So "fact stuffing" is a travesty
of education. Even the more rigorous training in observation, experimentation,
analysis of results which the contemporary scientist receives in the laboratory
still leaves a man stranger to himself. It does not enable him to understand
the laws of his own being, the limitations imposed by his type, the nature of
the forces and energies at work within him, the possibilities available to him
in the form of other modes of consciousness. To realize these things he needs a
very different form of education, one designed to develop all the parts of his
being, and not merely to increase his store of "bits" (in the information
sense) or to strengthen his purely intellectual capacities.
William Sheldon, commenting on
this subject in The Varieties of Human Temperament, observes that there
are several kinds of intelligence. He lists symbolic and intellectual
intelligence, somatic and manipulative intelligence, imaginative intelligence,
affectional intelligence, social and sexual intelligence, economic intelligence,
aesthetic intelligence, time orientational or religious intelligence,
topographical or spatial intelligence.
The levels of these different kinds of intelligence vary
with type and with the way in which the three components of temperament —viscerotonia,
somatotonia, cerebrotonia—blend and integrate with one another. "It may be that
the most generally intelligent person is he who most successfully carries and
integrates a heavy endowment in more than one component, possibly in all
three.”---Robert S. De Ropp (The Master Game p. 143,4)