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)