Performing Vitalism

April 20th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The activity of theatrical performance (acting, dance, live art etc.) is theorised primarily in terms of anthropology (Schechner, 1976, 1990, 1993) and cultural studies. These approaches are valuable and robust, although they do leave a void at the centre of the practice. What is absent is a comprehensive theorisation of the subjective ontology of the performer herself.

Hayes, P. J. (1979). The Naive Physics Manifesto. Expert Systems in the Microelectronic Age. D. Michie. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Schechner, R. (1993). The future of ritual: writings on culture and performance. London; New York, Routledge.

Schechner, R. and W. Appel (1990). By means of performance: intercultural studies of theatre and ritual. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.

Schechner, R. and M. Schuman (1976). Ritual, play, and performance: readings in the social sciences/theatre. New York, Seabury Press.

Posted in Conference Abstract, Energy, Essence, Exercises, Hayes, Pat, Naive Physics, Performance, Schechner, Richard | No Comments »

‘Mind at Play’ Workshop

April 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

This is the description of a workshop that I am thinking of attending, (although a date hasn’t actually been given of when it will be held). If it happens, and if I hear about it in time, and if I decide to go along, and if I can find the room it is being held in, I’ll report back.

There has long been a tradition in arts training, particularly training in the performing arts, of physical and mental exercises designed not to lead to any particular outcome but to produce a certain desired state in the performer or artist. These ‘warm-up’ exercises often take the form of games and play-like activity. In fact it is occasionally overtly stated that to be an artist one needs to learn to ‘play’ like a child. This suggests that there is a particular mental state found in play behaviour which is desirable for the creative process to be fully engaged in. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has identified and written extensively on a mode of cognition which he refers to as ‘flow’, again associated with certain types of focussed play, but also found in individuals who are able to fully absorb themselves into an activity of any kind. As with the above terms, the flow state corresponds to a loss of ego boundaries, a complete identification with the action, and often an unproblematic sense of mastery or control. Research has also been carried out on a similar condition found in athletes during certain peak experiences of sport activity. This subjective state, which is known colloquially amongst athletes as being ‘in the zone’ seems to correlate closely to a state in which the brainwave patterns become much simpler than at other times and adopt what is called the alpha wave state. There seems to be a further correlation in athletes between the adoption of this alpha wave state and the achievement of maximum potential. This cluster of terms and activities; play, flow, the alpha-wave state, and being ‘in the zone’, clearly refer to a family of closely related states which have particular relevance for the achievement of optimal performance in all areas, including theatre and creative arts. This workshop will introduce a range of techniques which will allow participants to experience these states.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, HarperPerennial.

Posted in Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Exercises, Neuroscience, Play, Story | No Comments »

Sport and Spirituality

May 2nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Abstract:

This review suggests that the concept of spirituality should be considered seriously within sport psychology research and consultancy. Four key areas are addressed: how spirituality may be reconciled into the athlete-centered model; the integration of spirituality and religious observances into mental skills training (MST); the relationship between spirituality and positive psychological states such as flow and peak experiences; and the role of spirituality in counseling. Recent work has acknowledged the importance of spirituality in consultancy work (Ravizza, 2002a) and religious beliefs and rituals for some athletes (Czech & Burke, in press). Despite extensive study in psychology, research of spirituality in sport psychology has been slow to emerge. Some of the reasons for this are discussed and suggestions made in relation to how this important concept can be integrated into research and consultancy work. Future research and theoretical work should focus on both performance enhancement and life-skills development.

WATSON, N. J. & NESTI, M. (2005) The Role of Spitituality is Sport Psychology Consulting: An Analysis adn Integrative Review of Literature. Journal of Applied Sports Psychology, 228 - 239.

Posted in Exercises, Spirituality, Sport, Training | No Comments »

The Flow of Space

May 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie

I went to a workshop last week which I said I would report back on, but I’ve just realised that I never did so here is a description of one of the exercises.

Hold a rock in your hand.

Hold you hand out to the side and feel the rock in the following ways.

1. Imagine the rock has a force inside it (call it weight). Feel the force striving to get to the ground. The rock is almost alive and is pushing against your palm its its desire to return to its natural resting place on the earth.
2. Imagine the rock is being pulled toward the earth by a force (call it gravity). The pull of the Earth is like a magnet acting on the rock, and you can feel this attractive force through your hand.
3. Imagine you are standing in a shower; a shower not of rain, call it space. You can feel the space flowing down on you from above, an etheric downpour acting on every part of your body. The rain of space cascades onto the rock and pushes it toward the earth, and only the upward pressure of your hand holds the rock steady against the flood.

Each of these different interpretations of the feeling of holding a rock in your hand is subtly different. Hold onto the last interpretation.

Posted in Energy, Exercises, Rock, Story | No Comments »

Language and Being: Centred

May 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie

An aim of much artistic, performative practice, as well as spiritual practices which promise ‘enlightenment’, is to go beyond (or before) conceptualisation and fully experience what the senses offer, with minimum filtration and organisation by the rational mind. Artists know this principle in the maxim ‘draw what you see, not what you know’, and in the field of theology, Rahner refers to this as ‘unthematic experience’ and associates it with a non-objective contact with the divine. An important aspect of realising this aim is to fully occupy the space and time that one is in; avoiding distributing one’s consciousness by thinking of the past or the future, or smearing that consciousness across space by imagining oneself to be anywhere else but exactly here, precisely now. The common term for this full occupation of personal space and time is presence, or being centred.

A significant obstacle to overcome in any attempt to be centred is the inevitable decentering of oneself that happens in much language use. We refer to ‘ourselves’, as if those ’selves’ were some object that we possessed and that was in some way outside of us. We nominate ourselves as an object in our sentences, even when we use ‘I’. This usage, and the conception that goes along with it, inevitably places us at a remove from the centre of our own experience. We talk, and think, of ourselves from a position that is eccentric. If our aim is to claim the centre with all of the sensual subjective power that comes with that claim, then we need to watch our language.

The following exercises are highly recommended.

• Exercise One: Avoid using the following words. I, me, myself.
• Exercise Two: Shut the fuck up.

Posted in Centre, Enlightenment, Exercises, Performance, Presence, Rahner, Karl, Spirituality, Training | No Comments »

Human Physics and Being at the Centre

May 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

I have found some notes that I made at one of the workshops I got to, although I don’t honestly remember much about it (truth be told, I’m not absolutely sure I actually went to it, but I have the notes so I suppose I must have).

Stand in the middle of a field, or on a hilltop, and look around.
Forget for a moment everything that you have been taught about space, everything that you know about your place in the world, lose your hard won objectivity for a moment, and trust only in the evidence of your senses.

This centrality is an integral element of the folk physics of subjectivity. A first person account of being-in-the-world.

So there you are then.

Posted in Centre, Exercises, Space, Story | No Comments »

A Folk Physics of Presence

June 15th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Presence is a feature of performance, particularly theatre performance, which is notoriously difficult to define, and appallingly difficult to teach. As a quality it is instantly recognisable, yet seems to be additional to simple technique or skill. In fact presence is what distinguishes an excellent performance from a display of skill. In some ways presence is analogous to the condition in sport of being ‘in the zone’, in which the athlete has an unproblematic sense of mastery, which shows itself as peak performance on the field. It is an article of faith in many sports that at the peak of the profession skills and technique are a necessary but insufficient factor, what wins or loses is the mindset of the athlete on the day. It is the athlete that is in the zone, that is most ‘present’ that wins.

The challenge facing the teaching of presence is to identify the mindset of those who do have presence and reproduce it in a training regime.

Many actor training systems attempt this through physical and mental exercise routines which are intended to have certain specific effects on the actor. Some of these effects are simply physical, the actor becomes more supple, more in control of their posture and gestures etc. In addition, however, some of these training techniques seem to be intended to subtly alter the mindset of the performer, particularly the subjectively experienced relationship of the actor to the wider world in which they feel themselves to be lodged.

The body of knowledge, or ’science’, which articulates this subjective relationship between actor and world is not quite the same as the science of the objectively real world studied by the rational sciences. The physical laws that the actor must internalise (to the point where they become embodied common sense, much as gravity becomes embodied common sense to us all), are more akin to a kind of ‘naive’ or ‘folk physics’.

Posted in Acting, Exercises, Naive Physics, Performance, Presence, Training | No Comments »

Attention Physics

June 19th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Attracting attention is a physical response to an environmental or social situation. In certain situations it is necessary, if not evolutionarily adaptive, to be able to call attention to oneself; when drowning for example, or in an attempt to attract a sexual partner or advertise one’s prowess in a particular field. Whilst this might obviously entail gross motor actions in a deliberate attempt to attract attention (shouting, broad movements etc), it is inevitable that other, more subtle, behaviours also exist for the management of attention. These behaviours include such minimal and largely unconscious proprioceptive actions as eye gaze direction, length of pauses in speech, syncopation of physical and vocal patterns, etc. Given that such fine-grained behaviour is usually beyond the reach of conscious control, it is likely that these are better controlled through the adopting of an overall mental ‘attitude’, and using this attitude or mindset to organise proprioception. The succesful organisation of proprioception around an attitude of attractiveness results in the physical manifestation of ‘presence’.

In order to develop the ability to attract attention in this way, and to develop presence, it may be necessary to learn techniques for the subtle orientation of the physical body such that the necessary attitude is produced. It is likely that such techniques would take the form of holistic exercises intended to allow the embodiment of such an attitude and its realization through the control mechanisms of the proprioceptive senses.

Posted in Attention, Embodiment, Exercises, Presence, Proprioception, Training | No Comments »

The Body as a Vehicle of Telepresence

June 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It has been demonstrated that the sense of being present within a virtually simulated environment, a phenomena usually referred to as telepresence, correlates with the ability to effectively carry out a task in that environment. That is, the more one feels present the better one performs.(1) Given this, it may be useful to consider the unaugmented human body not as integrated with psyche but rather as a vehicle for the psyche to occupy. In this understanding, the psyche becomes ‘telepresent’ through its immersion in the environment and sensorium of the body. A performer working with this conception of the relationship between mind and body should be able to better understand the need for presence, as well as being able to interpret exercises and information for the enhancement of that presence (a term which is often shrouded in mysticism) in terms of an immersive somatosensory experience. The radical Cartesian dualism that this implies is distinctly unfashionable (although it is an axiom of ‘human science’ and apparently a ‘human universal’) but may prove useful in explaining and potentially enhancing the sense of presence which, in theatrical performance contexts, correlates with the carrying out of tasks which increase charisma and the ability to attract attention.

1. Welch, Robert B. - How Can We Determine if the Sense of Presence Affects Task Performance? Presence, October 1999, Vol. 8, No. 5, Pages 574-577

Posted in Charisma, Dualism, Exercises, Performance, Presence, Telepresence, Training, Welch, Robert B. | No Comments »

Spirituality and Actor Training

August 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie

“This paper intends to show that conservatory theatre teachers and acting teachers in specific are using the techniques and ethos of Taoism, Zen and First Nations spirituality in their studios. I will suggest what they are ‘borrowing’ and why they are doing it, whether they are conscious of this borrowing or not.”

FORSYTHE, J. (2004) Spirituality and Actor Training. Journal of Religion and Theatre, 3, 24 - 36.

Posted in Acting, Exercises, Spirituality, Theatre, Training | No Comments »

Full Attention (workshop)

August 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Workshop Exercise:

One person was selected/volunteered to be the centre of attention and the rest were designated as ‘audience’ or ‘viewers’. The volunteer took up a position centre stage and the following instruction was given.
To the volunteer - your job is to look at each person in the audience. Make eye contact with everyone.
To the audience - keep looking at the ‘performer’. If you feel you have not been looked at for around 5 seconds put your hand in the air.
This went on for a little while with hands going up and the performer getting slightly better at looking around. Then part 2:
To the volunteer - look at each person in the audience, but this time really look. No mechanical methods of pointing your eyes in the general direction of people. You have to really look and really see.
To the audience - keep looking at the ‘performer’. If you feel you have been looked at but have not been ’seen’ put your hand in the air.
This produced a significantly different result, but pretty stressful. Exercise 3 involved the recuiting of another volunteer who stayed in the audience but who everyone, including the ‘performer’ were asked to look at. Volunteer number 2 looked at the ground. Continues:
“To the audience and volunteer 1 (the ‘performer’) - look at this person. Make sure they are exactly in the centre of your field of vision, right in the middle of what you can see. Relax. Just look. I want you to notice several things about this person. Firstly I want you to see where they are. They are right in the centre of their world and everthing in the whole world is around them. Above, below, to the left, to the right, they are central. See how clear they are, and how well they occupy that position. Look at them and keep looking at them, and notice how, a little way away from them, the world starts to blur and become indistinct, the colours fade and then there is nothing. They are the most important thing and they hold it all together. Secondly, I want you to notice how alone they look. They are at the centre of all experience, and there is nothing and no-one with them. They are doing it all on their own. See how alone they look. They are in the centre and they are alone. Lastly, keep looking at them and keep seeing how central they are, and keep seeing how alone they are, and also look, see how beautiful they are. Every line and mark and colour and small movement is exactly as it should be. There is nothing out of place and is perfect in every way. See how they are, at the absolute centre, totally alone, perfectly beautiful.”
To volunteer number 2 - look up and see volunteer number 1.
To volunteer number 1 - see this person, really see this person.

Repeat first exercise.

Posted in Attention, Centre, Exercises, Seeing | No Comments »

Language and Thought (workshop)

September 9th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It is well established that there is a close link between language and thought. It is also established that all languages are broadly similar in their organisation of the relationship between self and world. And while these is likely to be local variations in grammar, syntax, etc reflecting local concerns and experiences (the famous, and aprocryphal, 24 names for snow used by Inuits for example), there is considerably more similarity than difference. All languages, for example, distinguish objects from actions using nouns and verbs, this reflecting a common embodied experience of that world. Various models of the nature of this link have been postulated and also used to propose potential uses for this connection. For example, in the Sapir-Whorf model, thought is assumed to be organised and structured according to the culturally determined organisation of the language. The categories and architecture of thought, according to this theory, are considered not drawn from a universal human nature but from a highly variable cultural experience and the language which peoples use to communicate that experience. The implication of the Sapir-Whorf model is that thought itself could be reconstructed by a careful manipulation of language, and this concept has indeed been exploited in fictions such as the Newspeak of Orwell’s 1984 and in the attempts to produce political correctness by the strategic renaming of concepts which have negative connotations.

The Sapir-Whorf model has been extensively criticised, and it is clear now that the relationship of language and thought is not of this type; changes to cognition cannot simply be made by the renaming or excluding of words from the vocabulary. However, it is certainly possible to exploit the language-thought connection to gain conscious knowledge of one’s thought processes, processes which are often covert, and potentially to use this conscious knowledge in a therapeutic or training context. This type of exploitation also has something of a history, from Freudian psychoanalysis, with its techniques of ‘free-association’ and the concepts of the ‘Freudian Slip’, to the various modern cognitive therapies such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, NLP, Clean Language, etc.

Outside of a training/therapy context, there are various exercises one can carry out to establish for oneself how the organised modification of language affects one’s cognitive state. Using language in non-standard, overtly systematized ways, can have a noticable effect on how one feels, and possibly behaves. The following exercises are examples of such consciousness-modifying language modifications.

1. Avoid using the word ‘I’ for one week.
2. Suppress all use of pronouns apart from ‘I’ (refer to everything as ‘I’) for one week.
3. Avoid the use of nouns, indicate objects by using verbs for one week (as in ‘it is raining’).
4. Avoid the verb ‘to be’ for one week (this linguistic form is often referred to as ‘e-prime’)
5. Do not speak at all for one week.

Posted in Exercises, Language | No Comments »

Cosmology and Creativity

October 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The whole-hearted performance of any activity, including the smooth functioning of the creative intellect, is facilitated by the internalisation of a supportive cosmology or ‘big picture’ of the universe and one’s place within it.

Posted in Cosmology, Creativity, Exercises, Performance, Universe | No Comments »

Felt Knowledge

October 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Different forms of knowing correspond to different sensory modes: Objective ‘3rd person’ knowledge is associated with sight, whereas subjective ‘1st person’ knowledge is associated with touch and ‘feelings’. Knowledge that we regard as distinct from our selves and not part of our consciousness or being is metaphorically placed external to our bodies where it can be viewed dispassionately. Other knowledge, which we might regard as more ‘intimate’, is held close to the body where it is felt and embraced. This latter kind of ‘felt knowledge’ is not dissociated from one’s self and is experienced as a part of our being, a part of our ’subjectivity’. This difference in how knowledge is imagined, as distant and distinct or as upclose and personal, has implications for the use of imagery and the imagination in performance optimisation. Exercises which use the imagination to affect change in mental states often work better if the imagery used in not visual, but draws on one of the other senses, particularly the tactile and kinaesthetic. These latter forms of imagery do not objectify one’s experience and suggest a distinction between experience and experiencer, which visual imagery inevitable does.

Posted in Exercises, Feeling, Knowledge, Performance, Proprioception, Sense, Touch | No Comments »

Felt Knowledge (Exercise)

October 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

1. Shift the location of sensory awareness to different points in the body; feel oneself inside the foot, the chest, the arm, the head.
2. Distribute sensory awarness across two or more locations in the body and try to feel oneself balanced between those areas.
3. Feel sensory awareness moving through the space of the body.
4. Vary the scale of sensory awareness in the body, from a point to the entirety of the space occupied by the body.
5. Feel sensory awareness extending beyond the space of the body, into the space surrounding the body.
6. Vary the scale of sensory awareness of space outside of the body, from a point to the entirety of space outside of the body.
7. Feel sensory awareness of the space both inside and outside the body, the space permeates the inside and the outside of the body. Feel the entirety of space.

Posted in Attention, Exercises, Proprioception, Sense, Space | No Comments »

Where I’m Looking From

October 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Hold a mirror in front of your face. See the face in the mirror. See the eyes in the mirror. Imagine the eyes are your eyes. Imagine the eyes looking out of the mirror. See through the eyes in the mirror. Close your eyes. Imagine seeing through the eyes in the mirror. Move the mirror behind your head. Imagine the eyes that look out of the mirror are now the eyes that look out of your head. Open your eyes. See through the eyes in your head, and through the eyes in the mirror. Imagine your mind is a mirror.

Posted in Exercises, Mind, Mirror, Seeing | No Comments »

Presence is in the Details

November 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

‘Presence’ in performance (or the optimisation of that performance) corresponds to a set of behaviours which are finely detailed, multiple, and largely unconscious. In other words, the difference between a performance which has this quality and one which does not is a result of a large number of small nuances in the behaviour of the performer. These might include such physical behaviours as; eye gaze direction, length of pauses in speech, rhythm and timing of gestures, etc. The number, range, and subtlety of these nuances is such that they lie largely outside of the conscious awareness of both the performer and the audience.

Posted in Exercises, Performance, Presence | No Comments »

Attending to Attention

November 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Although attention can be visualise/conceived as an energy, for this exercise we are going to imagine it as corresponding with a spatial location, specifically the centre.

Select an object or person in the room.
Move your head and eyes such that that object is exactly in the centre of your field of vision.
Imagine that the object is at the centre of the world it occupies, just as it occupies the centre of your visual field.

The type of looking appropriate to this exercise is one of ‘attending’ or active waiting. Allow the object of your attention, the object occupying the centre of attention, to be pregnant with your waiting. Give attention to the object like a cat giving attention to a mousehole. Let nothing happen but the waiting.

Posted in Attention, Centre, Exercises, Seeing, Space | No Comments »

Make Room (Exercise)

November 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Stand or sit in a place where you can watch something approach; a person, a vehicle, on object. See this thing in the distance and be conscious of the space it is taking up in your visual field. As it approaches observe the changes that you are making and that you are experiencing. As it grows larger feel yourself making room for it in your awareness. Feel yourself giving the object space, almost as if you are moving part of yourself aside to allow the object to exist more fully. Feel the space of your mind open to accommodate the object as it approaches. Let the object fill the open space of your mind.

Alternatively, instead of having the object approach your self, try the same cognitive process as you yourself approach an object. As you move toward the object of your attention feel your mind making more and more room for that object. Feel the contents of your mind moving aside; feel yourself moving aside, to open up a greater and greater space for the object. As you get close to the object let it fill the open space of your mind. Try it with a person. Try it with someone you love. Try it with someone you don’t love.

Posted in Attention, Exercises, Love, Space | No Comments »

Shared Skin

December 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Imagine that your skin is not a thin envelope of tissue holding your internal organs together, but is 15 ft thick. Its inner layers are close to the core of your body and you can feel the organs, vessels, and bones penetrating the skin. At this level it has the texture and consistency of meat. About 1ft out from your centre your skin is more glutinous, and there are organs here that migrate slowly through and around the body. Further out still the skin is runny like syrup, although there are currents within it which prevent it from dripping away completely and pooling on the floor. At this level your skin is permeable and subject to influences from outside. There may be currents flowing in your skin that are caused by a passing car, or another person moving close to you. There may even by objects and parts of objects protruding into your skin from the outside world. Further out still from your centre, and your skin is like water, like the aliens in The Abyss. It flows and forms eddies around you as you move and your thoughts and feelings appear as ripples in this liquid skin. Here there is considerable traffic with the outside world; objects float in your skin and the hands of lovers and friends splash in the waves. At its outermost level your skin is an evanescent gas, roiling and swirling amongst the atmospheres of the world. Here your skin mixes with the skin of everything else around you. The world appears in your shared skin.

Posted in Exercises, Liquid, Sense, Skin | No Comments »

Thinking from the Centre.

December 17th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Thinking from the centre.

• Sit comfortably in a chair and close your eyes.
• Imagine yourself sitting exactly as you are and where you are.
• Breathe.
• Place your consciousness at the front surface of your body.
• Breathe
• Place your consciousness at the back surface of your body.
• Breathe
• Place your consciousness at the left side of your body.
• Breathe
• Place your consciousness at the right side of your body.
• Breathe
• Be aware of the top of your head.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the soles of your feet.
• Breathe.

You have identified the dimensionality of the body in space.

• Be aware of the space in the room in front of your body.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space in the room behind your body.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space in the room to the left of your body.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space in the room the right of your body.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space in the room above your body, up to the ceiling.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the floor beneath your feet.\
• Breathe.

You have identified the dimensionality of the room you are in, and made a connection between this space and that of your body.

• Be aware of the space in front of your body that is beyond the room, all the way to the horizon.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space behind your body that is beyond the room, all the way to the horizon.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space to the left of your body that is beyond the room, all the way to the horizon.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space to the right of your body that is beyond the room, all the way to the horizon.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space above your body that is beyond the room, extending infinitely into space.
• Breathe.
• Be aware of the space beneath your body that is beyond the room, extending through the Earth, and infinitely into space.
• Breathe.

You have identified the dimensionality of all space, and made a connection between that space and your self.

Posted in Breath, Consciousness, Exercises, Space | No Comments »

Are you in Space?

February 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Exercises to test whether one is spatially located.

• Do objects in the distance move more slowly than objects close up?
• Are distant objects smaller than close objects?
• Does the apparent shape of objects, their geometry, change as you move around them, or as they move around you?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then you are a spatially located being.

Posted in Exercises, Space | No Comments »

From the Horizon to the Centre

May 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Look to a distant point on the horizon. Look straight at that point such that the point of focus is in the dead centre of your visual field. Give that point as much attention as possible. Bring your hands up and hold them out in front of you with arms extended forward. Place your palms together and hold the focus of your attention between the tips of your fingers. Keeping your attention central, move the point of your attention closer, away from the horizon and towards your self, moving your hands downward and keeping the point of focus between your fingers. You will trace a narrow line from the horizon to your feet. Take your time over this and give all your attention to the focal point. When you reach your feet (you will be looking down now, and you may be leaning over with your neck bent), place your attention at the tip of your toes. Gradually allow your attention to move up your body, taking in your feet, your ankles, your knees. As you move your attention upwards, let your hands separate so that they mark the limits of your body, the limits of your attention. Move slowly upwards past your thighs, hips, stomach and let your hands widen to mark the edges of your widening attentive gaze. Your body is occupying more and more of your visual field and it looms larger than almost anything else. As you give attention to the parts of your self that are above your chest try to mark the extent of that self with your hands. You will find your arms widening to their maximum extent, encompassing the entire visual field, as if your body was curving outward and upward. You may find that a strange reversal takes place at this point and the body/self which you have been measuring as an increasingly large object in the world suddenly becomes a frame which contains the world. The hands that have been marking the extent of your attention now mark the edges of the world and your attention, your self, is everywhere. The one point of attention on the horizon of your experience has seamlessly become the all of that experience.

It is significant that the all which you now attend to also contains the one that you began as. From one perspective you are clearly in the world, and central to it, yet from another perspective the world is also in you, totally and completely. This paradox can be resolved in the recognition that our consciousness is not characterised by the stasis of being this or that, here or there, somewhere or everywhere, but by its movement between one and the other, and its existence at every point between.

It is also significant that your journey began at a single arbitrary point on the horizon, and there are an infinity of such points. Each of these points, separate and distant, can be tracked back home to the everthing inside.

Posted in Centre, Exercises, Horizon | No Comments »

Centre of the Cosmos

May 29th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Stand still
Stand in the place where you live.
Imagine the centre of the Earth beneath your feet.
You are connected to that Centre.
Gravity pours through you toward that Centre.
Space flows down and around you toward that Centre.
All this is true
As you stand, imagine the Centre of the Earth, the Centre of Space
Moving upward through your feet and into your body.
Imagine the line connecting your centre to the Centre of the Earth contracting and shortening.
Place yourself at cosmic centre and draw cosmic centre into yourself.
Make yourself the Centre of the Cosmos.

Breathe.

Posted in Centre, Cosmology, Exercises, Space | No Comments »

Metaphorical Action and Character Development

July 2nd, 2007 Fred McVittie

There is an exercise taught in Philippe Gaulier’s mime school in Paris in which the participants line up against a wall and the workshop leader throws tennis balls at them. Inevitably those assailed by the balls attempt to protect themselves, throwing up their arms, cowering, covering their faces etc. At a certain point an instruction is given to ‘freeze’ and the participants must remain in whatever posture they have adopted during the onslaught. The instruction is then given to ‘feel’ the position that has been taken up: to note the position of arms, hands, fingers, and torso: to monitor the expression the face has taken up: to experience the tensions that have accumulated in muscles across the body. Once this internal observation has been carried out the instruction is to maintain this overall composition of the body but to begin to move it about: to walk around and try making gestures: possibly even to speak whilst maintaining this overall body gestalt. From this beginning exercise, (usually comedy) characters are then developed.

What is interesting about this exercise is that is uses a simple physical action, the defending of oneself against a projectile, to ultimately construct a complex character, including the movement style and voice of that character, and it is worth considering how this process is functioning.

The construction of a dramatic character, even the most simple stereotype, is a multivalent activity, with many variables that must be considered and mastered for an effective result to be maintained. These variables include such telling details as eye-gaze direction, length of pauses in speech, movement of the chest during breathing, angle of the head, etc etc. and although these actions seem small and possibly insignificant, it is the overall effect of such actions which makes the difference between an excellent (or ‘convincing’) performance and one which is merely competent or worse. Obviously, the acquisition of conscious control over all of these minute details is beyond most of us, and such a ‘bottom-up’ approach would be a highly inefficient way of gaining mastery. Most acting techniques, and techniques for improving performances of all kinds, not only within acting, involve other approaches which might be called ‘top-down’.

The exercise noted above, in which the avoiding of tennis balls leads to the creation of character, is an example of a top-down technique. This exercise uses the body’s natural defensive instincts to simultaneously organise a vast collection of psychophysical behaviour. In addition to the movements of hands and arms to protect the face, when such a physical attack takes place there is also an integrated choreography of somatic responses taking in all levels of bodily action from jaw clenching to contraction of the anal sphincter, and utilising most of the affordances of the body. This degree of coordinated response could never be achieved using the bottom-up approach, the shear number of variables, and the relationship between these variables is too vast. Also, the coordination of all these tiny actions is dynamic, shifting moment by moment as the assault continues, but even in this shifting an overall coordination is maintained, the defensive posture is never dropped even while the person moves around. It is this finely tuned, intuitive coordination which is captured in the command to ‘freeze’. At that moment, and during the few seconds following when the participant checks over the position and attitude of their body, they are given access to the gestalt and to the organisation that their bodies have constructed naturally. They are then, hopefully, able to mobilise this gestalt in the conscious playing out of a character and the carrying out of intentional behaviour away from the wall and out of the firing line.

Posted in Exercises, Metaphor, Theatre | No Comments »

Empty the World into Yourself

July 3rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

The work of Korzybski on General Semantics is one source for the linguistic/psychological exercise referred to as ‘e-prime’. In e-prime one adopts a way of speaking in which the verb ‘to be’ is consciously suppressed, forcing one to use circumlocutions in order to express ideas and share observations which would otherwise use that verb. From personal experience, I can say that the long term adopting of this way of speaking does undoubtedly have an effect on thought and ultimately on worldview.

A possible interpretation of the reasons for the effectiveness of this strategy in offering alternative ways of being is that it contributes toward a breakdown of the habitual dualism which characterises modern thought and individual philosophy. Our routine existence is dominated by a sense, largely unspoken, that experience is divided into two parts, the object of that experience, which is detached, external and ‘over there’, and the subject of that experience,which is personal, hidden, and ‘inside’. This duality is often spoken of in terms of ’self’ and ‘other’, and is probably formed at a very early age. As Paul Bloom notes in ‘Descartes Baby’, we may all be ‘natural born dualists‘.

An aspect of the natural dualism which is so familiar to us is that, both conceptually and linguistically, we talk about the world in two different ways, one which is grounded in objective properties, and one which is grounded in subjective perceptions. When we are striving for a sense of objectivity we talk about the objects of the world in terms of the properties they possess independent of our perceptions. So for example we might say that the leaves of this tree are green, suggesting that there are some objects in the world, call them leaves, existing independently of ourselves, and these objects possess a property which we can identify as greenness. Alternatively, if we are not trying to achieve this objectivity we might say instead that the leaves on the tree appear green to me. This subtle difference relocates the property of greenness back where it belongs, inside the body of the perceiver. This relocation has been effected by the suppression of the verb ‘to be’ which is present in the first sentence but absent in the second. Being is transformed in ’seeming’.

The wholesale use of this technique eventually deprivileges the conceptual framework supporting dualism in favour of a monist understanding in which all experience, ‘external’ and ‘internal’, ‘over there’ and ‘in here’, is suffused with a single sense of active awareness.

This sense of awareness grounded in perception rather than in a putative set of objective properties also has implications for the self-perception of conscious awareness. When applied to an understanding of self one is obliged to interpret self-awareness not as an experience of human being but of human seeming.

Posted in Bloom, Paul, Dualism, Exercises, Korzybski, Alfred, Language | No Comments »

Stone in the Mind

July 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

Follow-up to this exercise.

Close your eyes and imagine you are holding a stone, but you are not holding a stone in your hand you are holding it in your mind. You might imagine it hovering in front of you. Wherever you are imagining holding the stone, move it so you are holding it inside of your head. Balance it there, between your ears, and imagine it still and firm inside your skull. Feel the weight of that stone inside of your head, and feel the effort you are having to exert to keep it in place.

Let us now repeat the previous exercise and try to interpret this sensation of weight and of effort in a number of different ways.

1. Imagine that the stone in your head is pressing down, resisting your efforts to raise it, because of the force of the space pouring down on it from above. Visualise the curve of space and the downward rush of the stone following that curve, rather like a leaf pushed over a waterfall, the force of the water above carrying it downward. Feel the force of the space above the stone carrying it downward, and feel your effort to resist pushing upward against this force.

2. Imagine that the stone in your head is drawn down, resisting your efforts to raise it, because of the attraction of the Earth below your feet. Visualise this attraction like the pull of a magnet against a bar of iron, the Earth pulling at the stone and drawing it down. Feel the attractive force, and feel your effort to resist this attraction.

3. Imagine that the stone in your head want to return to the Earth because it feels that the Earth is its natural place. Imagine the stone has an entelechy, an intention or desire to move in that direction and visualise that entelechy, that desire, as a kind of agency, almost as if the stone had a life of its own. Feel the pulling downwards of the stone as it tries to achieve its goal of moving toward the Earth, and feel your own effort to achieve your goal of keeping it where it is, inside your skull.

Stay with the last interpretation, imagining that the stone inside your head has intention, an intention which you can feel as weight. Change the intention. Imagine that the stone inside your head has an intention not to move downward toward the Earth, as other stones do, but to move upward toward the sky, as birds, and smoke, and fire do. Feel the pull of the stone as it moves with the power of its intention away from the Earth. Feel your own effort to resist the pull and flight of the stone, your effort to hold it still within your skull. Once you have achieved this, give your stone other intentions, to move forward, backwards, to jump suddenly or sink slowly back. Each of these intentions must be resisted and the stone held still in your mind. Feel the effort of this resistance. If this is too easy, allow your stone to have the intention to change consistency, to desire to become soft and flexible, or brittle like glass, recognise in it the intention to flow like water or boil away into vapour, and each time find in yourself the ability to resist the intentions of the stone. Hold the stone in your head.

When you have done all this, imagine the stone floating out of your head and across the room. Imagine it coming to rest on a table top, or on the floor. Leave it there, with its agency, and its intentions and desires. Feel the absence of the effort you are not making.

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Feeling of Being – Exercise

August 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Take hold of piece of the skin of your arm between the thumb and finger of the opposite hand and squeeze until there is a moderate degree of pain. Make sure the pain is sufficiently strong that it is impossible to ignore, but not so strong that it makes all other thought impossible (you may wish to play with these parameters for a few moments to set the level appropriately). When you are satisfied with the level of pain, try the following attention exercises:

Give the pain as much attention as possible and ‘identify’ with the pain. Think to yourself ‘This pain is my strongest sensation and that sensation is my feeling of being. It is the tangible evidence of my existence. It is my existence in the world and the contents of my consciousness. I am the pain and the pain is my self’.

Give your attention to everything that is not the pain and identify as strongly as possible with whatever the pain is not. This may include other parts of the body, the chair, the room, the space in the room, the wider world outside, everyone, everything, and nothing that is not the pain. Think to yourself ‘That pain is only sensation and is not my being. I am the ground against which the pain is figured and the pain is tangible evidence for the existence of this ground. As a content of consciousness, the pain shows me to be the container of consciousness’.

Share you attention equally between the pain and that which the pain is not. Try to identify with both of these aspects of Being, the feeling and the absence of the feeling. Thing to yourself ‘That pain is myself and the absence of pain is myself. I am consciousness and the contents of consciousness’.

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The Fearless Circle of Pascal (exercise)

August 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

1. Place a person at the centre of your gaze.
2. Imagine a circle around that person’s feet, as if they are standing on a large dinner plate.
3. Make that circumference larger so they are standing at the centre of a circle that is the size of their outstretched arms, say 5 - 6 feet in diameter.
4. Make the circumference larger still, and keep enlarging it until the perimeter of the circle reaches the point where you are standing.
5. Imagine the circle around the person with yourself at a point on the periphery of that circle.
6. Enlarge that circle even more so that it extends beyond you and you are completely enclosed within it.
7. Widen the circle around the person until it extends beyond the room, beyond the local area you are in, right out to the horizon.
8. See the person standing at the centre of their world, a world which stretches away in all directions to the horizon, and see yourself in that world. Notice how close you are to the person.
9. Extend the circle around them beyond the horizon, and keep extending without end or boundary, concentrate on the action of extending the circle, not on any end point to this extension. Notice how close you are to the person.
10. Never stop.
11. Repeat this exercise with a thousand people.
12. Repeat this exercise with a rock, an animal, a tree, a star.
13. Repeat this exercise with the thing you love the most and the thing you most despise.
14. Never stop.

Posted in Centre, Exercises, Horizon, Space | No Comments »

Using Music to Listen to the Space (exercise)

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

• Use headphones (ideally in-ear type) to listen to a piece of music
• Keep the volume quite low so that you can still hear the ambient noise of the space you are in
• Listen the the music for a while
• Try to consciously not listen to the music, but pay attention to the sounds around you
• Give each sound you hear full attention and try to maintain that attention as long as possible
• Note how at the end of each act of attending, you go back to listening to the music
• The music is close by you, it may even be inside you
• When you return to listening to the music you are moving your thoughts closer to yourself
• The music is close to the centre of your world
• When you return to listening to the music you are moving your thoughts closer to the centre
• Listen to the space around you, and listen to the centre of space
• Listen as you move from the centre of space, to other places, then back to the centre

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Space of Mind (Exercise)

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

• Imagine the world and imagine your mind
• Imagine that your mind and the world are similar
• As the world is organised in space so your mind is organised in space
• The space of the world has three perceivable dimensions
• These are the dimensions of ‘in front/behind’, left/right’, ‘up/down’
• You (your body) are/is standing at the centre of the space of the world
• You (your body) are/is at the intersection of the three dimensions
• You (your body) are/is standing at the centre of the space of the mind
• You (your body) are/is is at the intersection of the three dimensions
• Close your eyes and observe your thoughts occupying the space of your mind
• Observe one thought which comes from close by: the sound of your breath, the beating of your heart, the feel of the chair that you are sitting on.
• Observe those thoughts which emerge from events around you: the sound of a bird, the feel of an itch, a smell of pine.
• After you observe each thought, return to the thought which was close by.
• These thoughts are in the space of your mind
• Observe those thoughts which emerge spontaneously: memories, fears, hopes, fantasies.
• After you observe each thought, return to the thought which was close by.
• These thoughts are also in the space of your mind

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Hide Behind Your Nose (exercise)

August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Close your left eye and with your right eye look to the left. You will notice a large dark object, close by your eyeball, taking up perhaps 59% of your visual field. This object is, of course, your nose. With very little effort of imagination you can experience you self as being located ‘behind’ this object (although not necessarily inside you head), peeping out from it as one might peep around a half-open door.

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Tiny Screwdriver (exercise)

August 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Imagine you are holding a tiny screwdriver between the fingers of your right hand. It is the kind of tool you would use to mend an expensive watch. The blade is small enough to fit the tiniest screw holding the balance spring. Or it could be used to tighten the circuit board inside a small tactical nuclear weapon. Feel the subtle pressure between the pads of thumb and forefinger, maybe adding the side of the index finger to steady your grip. This is a precision instrument which cannot be handled roughly. Try to imagine yourself using this screwdriver to make an adjustment, hold out your hand and mime the action of tightening the minute screw, barely visible to the naked eye, into place. Take care not to let the screwdriver head slip out of the slot in the screw and be sensitive to the resistance of the screw as it beds into the hole; you don’t want to over-tighten it and strip the threads. When the screw is fully in place hold the screwdriver still and steady, feeling the precise point in space where the work is taking place. Really, really, feel it.

Now look at what the rest of your body is doing. See the way you are holding your left hand; feel the tension in your shoulders, the poised stillness of your head and neck. Notice the way the muscles in your chest and abdomen are braced to support the tiny action, and how your legs are held steady, feet gripping the floor. Check your breathing and find how measured and shallow it is, and how your tongue is placed in a certain way. Your entire somatic system, from the muscles around your eyes to the last joints of your toes, has wrapped itself around this miniscule activity taking place at a contentless point just in front of the still fingers of your right hand. An entire integrated choreography of muscle, bone, breath, and mind.

Posted in Embodiment, Exercises, Training | No Comments »

Bordered in White

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Imagine that the border around your vision, which if you are aware of at all you probably experience as black, in not black but is white. Try to really ’see’ the bright whiteness of it all around you, extending in all directions (there may be ways to ‘prime’ this feeling by stand next to a bright light, or at the threshold of a brightly-lit room). Imagine the lightness and the whiteness extending backwards infinitely behind you.

Step 1. - experience the black void
Step 2. - Change the colour of the void from black to white

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The Self in the Other (exercise)

September 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Exercise A.

1. Stand back to back with a partner.

2. Feel the contact that is being made with the other person: the back, the head.

3. Point to yourself.

4. (Maybe) say “This is my self”

5. Say it again.

Exercise B.

1. Grasp your partner in an embrace.

2. Hold the person close and feel the contact that is being made with the other person: the face, the chest, the legs.

3. With one hand point at your self.

4. (Maybe) say “This is my self”.

5. Say it again.

With both exercises, repeat with other partners, moving around the room and finding yourself over and over again everywhere and in everyone.

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Threshold of the dark room (exercise)

September 24th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Stand at the threshold of a door which leads into a garden, a street, or into any open space, ideally on a day which is bright and sunny. Turn so your back is to the outside world and you are facing into the room. Position yourself so that you can just make out the door frame at the very edge of your peripheral vision, then move forward very slightly so that the door frame disappears and is replaced by the frame of your own eye-sockets. Stand perfectly still. You are looking out from a space which is infinitely vast, and filled with light.
Try to really ’see’ the bright whiteness of it all around,extending in all directions above, below, left, right. Imagine the lightness and the whiteness extending backwards to infinity behind you.

Posted in Exercises, Light, Space | No Comments »

The Royal We

October 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

An artifact of language that prevents us from feeling a unity larger than with the body we inhabit is the extended use we make of personal pronouns. Whenever we read a story, an item in the newspaper, or article on a website, we find the singularity of a unified viewpoint shattered into the ‘he said, she said’ of multiplicity. Imagine if every time we spoke for ourselves we spoke from a different part of our body, so that instead of the ‘I did this’ and ‘I think that’ of normal individual speech we said things like ‘arm did this’ and ‘neck thinks that’. Anyone listening to this kind of talk would quite rightly assume we were insane, or at the very least incoherent. When we speak as our individuated, ego-centric, body-bound selves we speak for and identify with the collective of our body parts and with all the vastly different mood states, beliefs, ideas, ideologies and histories in which we participate. This is so natural to us that we barely notice we are doing it. Even though our bodies and minds are disparate and sovereign to themselves we seem to have no difficulty in embracing them in a conceptual unity, a personal non-duality if you like, and referring to this chaotic gabbling horde as ‘I’.

When we turn our attention outward however, and try to see a larger unity, ideally identifying with that unity in some kind of enlightened state, then we keep coming across this basic duality of self and other. ‘Here I am’, our minds seem to be saying, ‘and there is everything else’. Even more, we break the ‘everything else’ into a ‘he’ over there, a ’she’ over there, and a whole flotilla of ‘its’ scattered across the landscape. Each of these diverse and diverting entities seems totally separate and alone, and any communion between them takes the form of a shouting across the gulf which separates them: semaphore and smoke signals lost in translation. Worse still, each of these islands seems to have its own currency and its own property rights; alongside me, and you, and him, and her, and it, there is a mine, and yours, and his, and hers, and its. The wealth of the world has been carved up and thrown to the dogs and suddenly no-one seems to have enough, and no-one is to blame because no-one is all there is. In place of no-one we should have no-many, and we cannot recognise no-many if we insist on ignoring the singular existence of One and getting the name wrong all the time.

A significant contribution to this breaking of self and world must be the habitual tendency we have to assign different speaking positions to the various parts of this large unity, making a kitchen sink drama out of a divine monologue. Try this simple exercise to hear the voice of the no-many, the One.

• Take a newspaper article or passage in a book
• Cross out all of the following words: I, you, he, she, it, they, and replace them with ‘we’
• Cross out all these words: mine, yours, hers, his, its, theirs, and replace them with ‘ours’.
• Read it again and hear how all the parts of the divine body have congregated into a unity.

You (we) are speaking and listening for everyone and everything in creation.

Posted in All, Enlightenment, Exercises, Language, Non-duality, One | No Comments »

Brightly Lit Space: Behind the Eyes (exercise)

October 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Fix your eyes on a point directly in front of where you are sitting. Without moving your point of focus, try to shift your attention and awareness to one or other side of your visual field. You will be able to detect movement and you will sense what is there but you will not be able to determine details or colour. Gradually move your awareness backward, away from the centre of your gaze, to the full extent of your peripheral vision. You may be aware of a darkness, or you may feel the existence of a point beyond which your awareness meets resistance, this is because we associate awareness with physical seeing, and since the movement of the eye is limited to the frame of the eye socket this association tends to carry over and affect how we use attentional awareness, even though the same physical limits do not apply. Try to continue the backward motion of the point of awareness into this darkness or beyond this imaginary limit. Move your visual awareness right back so that you are attending to the area behind your eyes. At this point, notice that you are no longer attending to a space that is in darkness, but a space that appears to be brightly lit, a light behind the eyes. If you give close attention to this space you may find that the light behind the eyes begins to take on form and colour, and as if waking from a dream, you may find you are looking at the world again. The room you are in is back, illuminated and radiant.

Posted in Enlightenment, Exercises, Light, Perception, Space | No Comments »

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend (exercise)

October 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

You are standing still and looking out through your own eyes at whatever the world is placing in front of you at this moment. Standing in a field is good, but anywhere will do. Without changing your position, try to change your interpretation of what you are looking at, or rather, where you are looking from. Try to imagine that you are standing at the edge of a space which is infinitely vast, and inexpressibly dark, and you are looking out of this space. The world in front of you is brightly lit, and everything in it is clear and visible and knowable. You can just make out the periphery of the dark space behind you at the edge of your vision, a blurred black border around your sight which extends outwards and backwards as far as your informed imagination can reach. Feel the darkness of the space behind you and alongside you.

Now turn around so that you are facing into the darkness that you felt a moment ago. See how bright the darkness is, and how much it contains. See how the stuff of the world extends into the dazzling dark, shrinking with distance, so that at the furthest extent of your vision everything is infinitesimally small, and how, beyond that point, all is a single blurred whole. Notice also, that in turning around you have created a new dark light space, bordered in black where your eyes meet the world. You may wish to turn back around to remind yourself how full of light and space and matter that place behind you really is. Turn again, and again. Wherever you turn you find yourself looking into the heart of the astounding darkness which surrounds you.

Now close you eyes and feel the darkness close over you and include you in its embrace. There is nothing to fear here. Hello darkness, my old friend.

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Empty Yourself – continued (exercise)

October 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

With eyes closed, feel yourself standing at a moment in time, in the stream of your passage through time. Behind you the road diminishes with distance into the darkness of the past and ahead of you it stretches into the future. Behind you is the moment you have just left, and you can feel each passing moment at it falls away behind, and looking further back you can make out all the moments of yesterday, last week, last year, right back to far distance of your childhood. See how the road behind narrows with perspective to a point at the far horizon behind you marking your first steps on this road. Extend you glance around this point if you can, into all of the cells and chemicals and patterns and love affairs and adaptive histories of all creation that have gone into the making of that first step. See the road behind you. This is your history as a great and glorious ribbon flowing like the tail of a kite, and without it you would not be flying as you are now. But know also that you are not the tail of that kite, and you are not that road, and you are not that history. Where you are is here and now, and as long as you can see the road behind you you can be sure that it is not you. Cherish it if you like, or at the very least learn from it, but also recognise that its place is out there, in the world, with everything else that is not you, not here inside the boundaries of your self.

Now turn your attention to the front. Your eyes are closed and in your mind the road continues ahead of you, into the blinding mirage of the future. Dazzling and welcoming, these are the days and years you will step into when you move forward on the way. Even now, as you stand or sit, you feel yourself gently drifting toward that light; each breath you take waits for you a moment ahead of you on the road and as you breath you can feel yourself moving forward to catch your breath. If you look carefully you may be able to anticipate each beat of your heart punctuating the road ahead like cat’s eyes glinting through tarmac. Lifting your gaze to take in more and more of the future, the details are lost in the heat haze but you have the sense that great and marvellous things are up ahead, as well as terrible things that could break your heart; some of these you will be able to avoid and some you will choose not to. There will be changes, and in the far distance, just beyond the horizon, nothing remains of this world and everything over there is fantastically new and unimaginably interesting. You are a willing pilgrim on this journey and cherish the future that you are falling toward as the gravity of time pushes you on. But even as you welcome the road ahead, know that the road is not you and is not part of you. The space that you are about to move through is not contained within you any more than the space behind. You are here and now and the boundaries of yourself are drawn on this side of the future.

Now that you have emptied the past and the future out of yourself, turn you attention to where you are standing right now. Arrayed around you are all those things that are not in the past or the future. These are the things that you have with you right now. The dark secrets that you keep hidden are with you, perhaps just beneath your feet, the habits and hopes and skills that you have, along with the pride you have in those skills; maybe these are tucked under your arm or wrapped around your waist like a carpenter’s belt. The ambitions for peace and enlightenment that you carry with you, and which maybe motivated you to begin this exercise, you maybe wear on your forehead. All these things are with you and serve you well, but know that they are not you. You were yourself before you had those skills and hopes and ambitions and you will still be you when they are gone. Your self will not vanish if your secrets become common knowledge and you will still be you whether you are in the most Stygian darkness or are flooded with the most divine light. Each of these attributes and possessions do not belong inside the boundary of your self, and you can throw them out of your self and into the embrace of the Everything where they belong.

You can allow Everything to move its boundaries closer, taking in your past and our future, absorbing your hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, the thoughts in your head and the words in your mouth, and when the only thing that is left is the finest, most central core of your being you can say once again, this core is not me. You can give over final permission for Everything to take the core of yourself into its arms. You, and I, and We, are infinitely small. We are a point. Around us spins the whole of Everything with nothing left out. We are consumed. We are nothing. Everything.

Posted in All, Centre, Exercises, Time | No Comments »

Suppression of the senses (including language)

October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

A significant part of conscious experience is provided by the senses, and much of the day to day work of the mind is concerned with the processing of the various impacts that are being made on our senses as we engage with the world around us. Consciousness can, or course, still operate when sensory awareness is lessened or removed, as for example, when we daydream. Total removal of all sensory input for protracted periods of time, a procedure referred to as sensory deprivation, forces consciousness to be constituted and structured solely from internal sources, and without ongoing continuous contact with the body’s sensorimotor system. Without the carrier frequency of bodily awareness, consciousness in S.D. Sometimes goes into free fall and can be psychically damaging. Limited forms of sensory removal however, have interesting and safe effects on consciousness, allowing for different forms of being to arise and potentially transform or otherwise positively affect the experiencer.

1.Visual Suppression – It is an often-quoted cliché that those who are unfortunately blind from birth develop ‘compensatory’ acuity in the other senses, a particularly discriminating sense of hearing for example. This effect, whilst not mitigating the inconvenience of blindness, is suggestive of a modification in consciousness. The ontology of hearing is not like that of sight, and a more discriminatory hearing sense is not an inferior replacement for seeing. A world which is predominantly auditory is significantly different from one which is mainly visual, and this difference, experienced as a shift in conscious awareness, is hinted at through the simple act of closing the eyes and keeping them closed.

2.Proprioceptive Suppression – Occasionally referred to as a ‘6th sense’, proprioception gives us information about the location of our body in space, the relationship between its parts, and information about motion, balance, stress etc. Partial suppression this channel of experience is as simple as sitting perfectly still in a comfortable, unstressed position. The effect of this simple technique are well known and are probably best described in the practices of ashkantaza, a zen mediation technique in which ’sitting zen’ with a stilled body results in a similar stillness of mind and a highly altered state of consciousness.

3.Suppression of Speech – Speech is not usually considered a sensory mode, however, it may be worth reflecting on this possibility for a moment. Although we tend to regard the senses as passive portals to the world, imagining that when we open our eyes and ears the world simply pours in, it has been shown conclusively that sensation is much more active and participatory than this. When we look out into the world we effectively probe for significance and stimulus, ignoring sights and sounds we judge to be irrelevant. Medieval philosophers regarded vision as a product of ’seeing rays’ which were emitted by the seer, rather like a spotlight, and whilst we now know that such rays are not actual, the spirit of these imaginary beams emitted by the eyes and contacting the material of the world is accurate. Seeing, like all of the senses, is active and participatory and ‘probing’. With this in mind, it may be useful to consider language use, speaking, as a type of sense. Using language we probe the world around us, asking questions, participating in conversations which elicit responses. Changes to the use of this language sense undoubtedly have a significant effect on consciousness. The total suppression of active language through simply declining so speak has a long tradition in religious and philosophical orders who use ‘vows of silence’ as part of their practice.

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