The three Centers of Knowing are body, mind, and heart. How are these different than our three Centers of Being, and how are they distinct yet a part of those three Being Centers?

Remember the Soul Center of being. It's like the sound system of the Being Centers. It's in our soul that these three Knowing Centers register. The three Centers of Knowing produce the data which manifests into the soul center. The soul is the place where the data surfaces, and is recognized. Think of it like the ear verses the sound. The sound is the raw data, the ear the thing that enables us to hear it, and the brain that which organizes it into meaning. This is how the three Centers of Knowing work with the three Centers of Being.

Our Knowing Centers provide data, which registers in the soul, which then is organized into meaning by our body and spirit.

What we think or feel is a manifestation of something, but not the thing itself. This is an important distinction. Understanding this will help us begin to recognize and re-order our personhood properly. The modern Western conceptualization of personhood is predominantly mind/body. We tend to over identity with our minds and bodies, and oversimplify our identity as a body with a mind. When we do this, we lose the proper order of our personhood and how we were intended to operate in it. What this can do is lead us to believe that we are our thoughts and feelings, and that our thoughts and feelings are directing our bodies. This can actually happen, when we allow it, because we have not developed the ability to sift through the data and discern what is worth keeping, and what to do with it. In this way we can become mindless, reacting to and through our thoughts and feelings without a good ability to identify the source and meaning of those, before we decide what to do about them. If we do not understand where our thoughts and emotions come from, and why, then we will not be able to discern what they mean.

Each of these three Knowing Centers have what we could call their own intelligence and emotion, IQ and EQ. All three have their own mind and their own kind of sensation. You operate with the body IQ all the time. It’s called habit memory, or muscle memory. You do not have to think (with your rational center) about so many things you do. You simply know how to do them. When you drive a car, ride a bike, write, draw, or any number of other learned movements, you do so without thinking, because your body remembers how to do it. The body also has its own feelings, expressed as physical sensations.

Your mind knowing center also has its intelligence and emotion. Here we can identify with thinking much more easily than feeling, but the mind can also feel. One of the strongest feelings you might encounter in your mind would be disorientation. But your mind experiences fear, stress, and many other feelings as well. They often easily translate into thoughts, but if you pay attention, you’ll recognize that there is an energy behind many thoughts, a kind of pressure, like a feeling. If you’ve ever suffered from obsessive thoughts, then you know what it’s like for the mind to be pressured by its own form of feeling.

Then there’s the heart knowing center, which has the opposite issue. We can readily identify with our heart’s feelings, but not as much our heart-thinking. Your heart has felt wisdom as well, as the phrase "listen to your heart" suggests.

Why are the three Knowing Centers important, and why should we learn to distinguish between all the data that comes through them? As we begin to recognize through which center data is coming, we can more readily understand the source of the data, what it means, and what to do with it.

When the heart is communicating something, it does so with a certain nuance for certain reasons. The heart center is in charge of our heart life, and mostly communicates to us concerning heart issues. The heart center will help us understand what’s going on with ours or others emotions, in order to address emotional issues, and grow into greater emotional health. The same is true with our minds and bodies.

It’s important, when data is coming in, to stop, recognize the source, and ask the three questions I’ve already mentioned earlier.

Those three questions are;

1. Where is this coming from

2. What does it mean

3. What should I do about it

When we start to get into the flow of this practice, we’ll start to grow in wisdom about ourselves, others, and the world around us. We will learn more about how we work, and why. That’s the point. The progress of personal transformation is fueled by becoming more engaged with ourselves. When we know ourselves better, we will be more comfortable with ourselves, more centered in ourselves, more content, less riled by others, and better able to relate to others on their terms. When we know ourselves better, we can focus more on knowing others, and less on ourselves. That's the goal of transformation, from selfishness to selflessness. Getting in tune with the distinct nuance of each Knowing Center will begin to help us do that. But it doesn't stop there.

Remember, these three Knowing Centers are just categories of data. They represent the way we receive raw information. The problem with the predominance of the mind/body, which can lead to the dimming of the other 4 Knowing and Being centers, is that we can become reacters to the data, instead of interpreters. We can get in a mode of assuming the data is real, right, and needing a reaction. Becoming aware of these three data Centers helps us to begin to sense things beyond the rational and physical, and to be fully engaged in every part of ourselves; body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit. As we grow in this ability, we find that we are living more from our center, and more fully engaged in the world around us. When this happens, we begin to understand on a deeper level who we are, and for what we were created.