Volume 5, Number 2, March 2006

Quote From Moshe: “This kind of learning, such as you will achieve if you try and follow me is also the kind of learning produced by Awareness Through Movement lessons where the accent is put not on which movement you deal with but on how you direct yourself doing it.” The Elusive Obvious, p. 36

Adam Cole’s Novel, Myth of Magic, Renewed!

About five years ago my novel, The Myth of Magic, went on sale. Last year I took it off the market and revised it. Now, after seventeen years of work, Myth of Magic, the complete novel, is finally ready! You can read the first seven pages of it at https://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=28978

The Question Is

Last time I talked about the way in which I’m able to use my eyesight as a kind of gauge for determining where the rest of my awareness is. That’s a very useful skill and I encourage everyone to find out what their own gauge is. But there’s another side to this process that may be even more important.

As I detailed in my last newsletter, I find myself looking around and noticing the quality of my vision, whether I can see far away clearly, whether both my eyes are in focus together, whether I’m using one eye more than another, and so forth. Sometimes, however, this heightened vigilance fails to generate improvement, which causes frustration and generally does me no good at all.

So what’s the solution? If this strategy doesn’t work, why did I detail it at all? Well, slow down. Don’t get mad. I didn’t give you the whole picture.

It’s funny I should put it that way. Here we are talking about visualization and I’m describing something to you as if it were a picture, something you’d see with your eyes. In fact, a “big picture.”

Where did that expression come from? I can give you some idea. Have you ever seen the poster for the movie Ray? It boasts a profile of Jamie Fox as Ray Charles giving his characteristic halleluiah smile. The picture is composed of a number of shapes that, all together, look like Ray Charles. You’ve seen this style of illustration many times. The shapes by themselves are meaningless and only look like a picture when you put them together. Many illustrations are done this way.

It’s not hard to put them together because our minds are so hungry for meaning. It’s more difficult to see the poster as a bunch of blobs than as Ray Charles’ profile, even though on a literal level there’s very little one-to-one correspondence of drawing-to-facial features. We know and like the shape of a face, especially his face, so much that we dive right into it. If you wanted to see the blots, you could cut a little square out of the middle of it, say over the bridge of the nose. If you looked at that piece by itself, without a context and without knowing where it came from, you’d just see a shape. You wouldn’t be able to ascribe meaning to it.

Even photographs play this trick on us. We see an image in a photograph when all we’re really looking at is a bunch of differently colored dots. Same with the television. Only three colors of dots there: red, green and blue. Take a magnifying glass up to it and that’s all you’ll see. Step back and you’re hard pressed to make those dots out. In fact, our desire to wrest meaning from an abstract idea is so strong that if I took a piece of white paper and put three dots on it, you’d see a triangle. Give it a try.

Our minds are supposed to work this way. Whenever we can take a meaning from something, it’s because we’re able to perceive the big picture. Not just the dots, not just the blobs.

So if you’re walking through the park and you’re gauging the ability of your eyes to see well and nothing’s happening, how are you missing the big picture? How are you failing to get meaning from the information you’re perceiving?

In the realm of human learning, as opposed to simple data recognition, in order to perceive the big picture we have to go a level of consciousness higher than simply asking what we perceive. What we perceive in this case is a bunch of “information:” My left eye is blurrier than my right, or My throat is sore. Those pieces of data, as meaningful as we think they are, turn out to be nothing but colored dots. Because we’re looking at them so closely and are unable to recognize their true meaning, we’re putting meaning into them, associating them with our failures or our inadequacies or our frustrations.

But how do we back up? What’s the real big picture?

In Feldenkrais lessons we’re asked to observe ourselves while we move, or while we undertake a function of some kind. Many people become quite preoccupied with the fulfillment of the instructor’s request and spend the whole lesson furious that they flop when they roll to the side instead of making a smooth transition. These people will have to recognize how they are approaching the work before they can begin to learn.

Other people will follow the instructions to the letter, will enter a trance of sorts and will experience the great change that the lesson can provide. They will be delighted and will take their new selves into the world, only to find that after a week or so they’re back to their old selves. They don’t know how they improved to begin with because they remained at the level of the details. It was as if they traced each blot exactly and formed a complete picture, but never really paid any attention to the process.

The common thread in these stories, and the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this issue, is that it’s not enough to observe yourself. Not enough to notice one eye is blurrier than the other, or that your heart is beating faster today, or that your limp is back.

In order for this information to mean anything, you have to ask yourself how you’re looking at these details. You have to observe yourself observing!

Like this: You’re walking through the park. You look around to gauge the quality of your vision. You notice one eye is blurrier than the other. Now you ask yourself, “How am I deciding what’s good vision and what’s bad vision today? Am I in a hurry to improve? Is it really important that I see clearly, or can I simply notice that one eye is different from the other? Is it possible for me to separate what is from what I want?” You’re asking yourself not just what you’re noticing, but how you’re noticing it.

It’s only when you assess the context of your observations that the information takes its proper place in the big picture. That’s when you’re nervous system can make use of all the things you’re observing. It’s a pleasant state and many wonderful things happen in it.

In your Feldenkrais lessons, listen to the questions the practitioner is asking you, questions that you might have dismissed or never even noticed. “How do you lift your head off the floor.” The practitioner is not trying to tell you how you should be doing something, not saying, “Are you lifting your head off the floor correctly,” but is rather asking you to become curious about what you do. Such curiosity will serve you well in the context of a lesson, and also in the larger world of human problems.