Stop Making Sense
We always seem to be trying to make sense out of reality. In truth, what we do is make reality out of our senses. Looking at a suitcase, if you assume that it is heavy and you go to pick it up, your assumption will dictate the amount of force you apply to lift it. If it turns out to be empty it will fly up in your hand; our assumption having directed your body to prepare for something heavy. It's a self-fufilling prophesy: we anticipate that the suitcase will be heavy and then we create the feeling in our body that corresponds to the effort required to lift that heaviness.
This is delusive thinking. We deluded ourselves into thinking that the suitcase was heavy and then we acted as if that was true. At the center of all this is our kinesthetic sense. We project a kinesthetic image of how a heavy suitcase will feel and then we counter that heaviness by creating a sensation in our body that corresponds to our idea of what strength feels like. It is only when the suitcase flies up into the air that we realize that we have misjudged the situation.
All habits of movement are based upon assumptions and therefore are, to a greater or lesser extent, misjudgments. No matter how many times you have done an activity, each time will be different. You may have taken thousands of steps but the next step you take will be unique and will require a different use of yourself. The miracle of our psycho-physical mechanism is that it is fully capable of adapting to the changing demands of the activities we are engaged in if we can just get out of our own way. What gets in the way is our habitual assumptions about what needs to happen at a particular moment. These assumptions manifest as sensations. These assumptions are illusions about the requirements of the task and our ability to respond to those requirements. The agent of this deception is our sense of feeling.
No matter how finely tuned your kinesthetic appreciation is, it suffers from three major inadequacies: It is never absolute, it is not objective and it is always a picture of the past. When you touch something hot, your senses don't give you an absolute reading of the temperature but rather a comparitive one. Hot actually means hotter. It's a reference to another event in the recent or distant past or to an imagined future. Your senses are not objective because we tend to divide sensation into pleasure and pain, good and bad, familiar and unfamiliar etc. and then seek out the pleasurable, the good and the familiar avoiding their opposites. This avoidance is particularly dangerous with regard to the unfamiliar.
Perhaps the limitation of sense perception that is most difficult to grasp is its lack of timeliness. Despite the fact that you feel something now, what you are feeling is actually something that has already happened. Although the gap between an event and your feeling it is small, the information you get from your senses, no matter how accurate, can't affect that event because it has already happened. This becomes apparent with regard to movement. Feeling the movement is the last thing that happens. First we have to have the intention to move, then we actually move and finally our kinesthetic sense tells us that we have moved.
Alexander said this about feeling: "When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won't want to use it." There is a form of guidance that is much more trustworthy than feeling. A "means whereby" you can prevent your habits before they actually happen rather than trying to fix them after they have occured. Alexander called it inhibition. Marjorie Barstow called it "constructive thinking" or "just a little bit of nothing" I call it Noticing and it is real easy to do, but first you have to be willing to stop making sense.
This is delusive thinking. We deluded ourselves into thinking that the suitcase was heavy and then we acted as if that was true. At the center of all this is our kinesthetic sense. We project a kinesthetic image of how a heavy suitcase will feel and then we counter that heaviness by creating a sensation in our body that corresponds to our idea of what strength feels like. It is only when the suitcase flies up into the air that we realize that we have misjudged the situation.
All habits of movement are based upon assumptions and therefore are, to a greater or lesser extent, misjudgments. No matter how many times you have done an activity, each time will be different. You may have taken thousands of steps but the next step you take will be unique and will require a different use of yourself. The miracle of our psycho-physical mechanism is that it is fully capable of adapting to the changing demands of the activities we are engaged in if we can just get out of our own way. What gets in the way is our habitual assumptions about what needs to happen at a particular moment. These assumptions manifest as sensations. These assumptions are illusions about the requirements of the task and our ability to respond to those requirements. The agent of this deception is our sense of feeling.
No matter how finely tuned your kinesthetic appreciation is, it suffers from three major inadequacies: It is never absolute, it is not objective and it is always a picture of the past. When you touch something hot, your senses don't give you an absolute reading of the temperature but rather a comparitive one. Hot actually means hotter. It's a reference to another event in the recent or distant past or to an imagined future. Your senses are not objective because we tend to divide sensation into pleasure and pain, good and bad, familiar and unfamiliar etc. and then seek out the pleasurable, the good and the familiar avoiding their opposites. This avoidance is particularly dangerous with regard to the unfamiliar.
Perhaps the limitation of sense perception that is most difficult to grasp is its lack of timeliness. Despite the fact that you feel something now, what you are feeling is actually something that has already happened. Although the gap between an event and your feeling it is small, the information you get from your senses, no matter how accurate, can't affect that event because it has already happened. This becomes apparent with regard to movement. Feeling the movement is the last thing that happens. First we have to have the intention to move, then we actually move and finally our kinesthetic sense tells us that we have moved.
Alexander said this about feeling: "When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won't want to use it." There is a form of guidance that is much more trustworthy than feeling. A "means whereby" you can prevent your habits before they actually happen rather than trying to fix them after they have occured. Alexander called it inhibition. Marjorie Barstow called it "constructive thinking" or "just a little bit of nothing" I call it Noticing and it is real easy to do, but first you have to be willing to stop making sense.
posted by Mio Morales at 10/08/2006 04:24:00 PM
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