Forever Becoming: Alexander

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Digging Deeper

The way we deal with problems is like the way we deal with weeds.

Cut the weed above ground level and it will grow again. Get it by the roots and it will trouble you no longer!

Like the roots of a particularly tricky weed, the ultimate causes of our problems are often deeply buried.

Some of us may like weeds, but for those of us who don't, when we look at a weed we see a problem. But most of the time we aren't seeing the whole problem.

Unless we get on our hands and knees and do a bit of digging then we will only ever see part of the picture. The bit that's right there in our face, spoiling our lovely neat garden!

But its those roots that we really need to be looking for. Because it is only by tackling them that we will be properly rid of our problem.

Now, let us take an everyday example and see how it fits into our weed analogy:

We develop a pain in our leg. How do we deal with it? A common approach would be to start with the closest problem or symptom and work from there.

1. We take pain killers to numb the pain.

This is like cutting the weed just above soil level. Its gone! For now ...

2. We do therapeutic exercises to treat the leg and stop the pain.

This is like pulling out the weed but leaving its roots behind. Again, our problem seems to be sorted ...

3. We examine what it was that caused the leg to become dysfunctional in the first place and make a change in our lifestyle in order to stop the problem from re-occurring (for example; perhaps the pain came from how we were sitting. So then we learn how to sit in a more healthy way, or we cut down on the amount of sitting that we do).

Finally we've done what we should have done all along! Our weed is gone for good, and no trace remains.

These root problems cause most of the smaller surface level problems, those that we all encounter on a regular basis. The weed grows above soil where we can see it because it has roots sustaining it out of sight beneath the ground. And yet we will often overlook the real problems simply because we cannot see them. We are so concerned with the fact that this horrible looking weed is ruining our garden, that we don't spend the time to dig a little deeper. If we have something that is in our face, demanding our attention, then we are likely to attend to this rather than something that is more distant, or unseen.

That's if we are lazy gardeners. If we are good gardeners then we always spend the time. Because time spent is actually time saved in the long run.

As a society we are lazy gardeners, constantly attacking problems at surface level.

This is because we want immediate results. We want to see something for our money. We don't want to have to get on our knees and get our hands dirty.

We can see this approach everywhere.

Football managers are hired and fired in quick succession. Alex Ferguson said recently that, had he been a manager today, he would have been fired before he had the chance to show what he was truly capable of. Few are given the chance that Ferguson had, to settle in to a club. To be able to make mistakes and to grow and learn. Ferguson was given the chance to mature into the great manager that he is today.

We see it also in politics. Politicians know that their time in the limelight is limited. And so few will be inclined to dig deep and offer effective - deep - solutions to the problems that face us. It may be that any lasting solution could take decades to produce any fruit worthy of notice. People whose careers rely on the superficial ebb and flow of public opinion cannot afford to wait this long. They need immediate results, because their jobs depend on it.

Bust the drug lords and they will be replaced. Bust the politicians and they will be replaced. Bust the bankers and they will be replaced. The weed will grow back unless you get to its roots.

We must dig deeper!

When we tackle a problem at a deeper level may not yield quick results. Pain killers will take away the pain immediately. But learning a new way to sit may cause us more pain to begin with.

Look around you. It won't take you long to see this approach in action. Bad gardeners everywhere.

Ask yourself: do I really want to get better? Do I really want to see these problems solved? Do I really want a solution?

If the answer is yes, then we must be prepared to get our hands dirty, sweat a little, and dig deeper.

Now it is clear that such a method of diagnosis and treatment differs fundamentally in principle from orthodox medical methods, whereby definite local symptoms are traced back to specific disorders which are diagnosed as the cause of the trouble and then treated specifically.

[...] by this method specific symptoms may be and often are eliminated, but since

(1) specific symptoms are never found apart from wrong functioning,

(2) the wrong functioning associated with such symptoms is always, in my experience, associated with wrong use of the mechanisms of the organism,

(3) by such methods nothing will have been done to improve this wrong use,

conditions will be left within the organism which, if allowed to develop unchecked, will tend to lower the standard of functioning generally, and it will then be only a matter of time before the trouble - either the original disorder, or, as frequently happens, some more serious trouble - will manifest itself.

[F. Matthias Alexander]
The Use of the Self, p.94

No method of 'cure' can be accepted as effective or scientific, if, in the process of removing certain selected symptoms, other symptoms have been left untouched and if new, unwished-for symptoms have appeared.

[...] If a defect is recognised in the use of a part, and an attempt is made to correct this defect by changing the use of the part without bringing about at the same time a corresponding change in the use of the other parts, the habitual working balance in the use of the whole will be disturbed.

[...] if the change in the use of a part is made in the face of impending factors in the use of other parts (as happens in any specific method of treatment employed to correct a defect in a part), the working balance between the use of that part and the use of all the other parts will be so thrown out of gear that the use of other parts will be adversely affected in their turn, and new defects in the use of these parts developed.

[F. Matthias Alexander]
The Use of the Self, p.76-8

[...] in cases where disease has been previously diagnosed in any of the organs or systems, I have found that the faulty functioning which this implies is always associated with an unsatisfactory manner of use throughout the organism.

This goes to show that an unsatisfactory manner of use, by interfering with general functioning, constitutes a predisposing cause of disorder and disease, and that anyone who makes a diagnosis and prescribes treatment, without finding out how much of the trouble present has arisen from this interference and how much from other causes, is leaving untouched a predisposing cause of disorder and disease.

For this reason I make the following claim:

[...] No diagnosis of a case can be said to be complete, unless the medical adviser gives consideration to the influence exerted upon the patient, not only by the immediate cause of the trouble (say, a germ invader), but also by the interference with functioning which is always associated with habitual wrong use of the mechanisms and helps lower the patient's resistance to the point where the germ invader gets its opportunity.

[F. Matthias Alexander]
The Use of the Self, p.87-8

Learning of the die-off of the estuary, I myself felt the impulse to find the culprit, to find someone to hate and something to blame.

I wish solving our problems were that easy! If we could identify one thing as THE cause, the solution would be so much more accessible.

But what is comfortable is not always true. What if the cause is a thousand interrelated things that implicate all of us and how we live? What if it is something so all-encompassing and so intertwined with life as we know it, that when we glimpse its enormity we know not what to do?

That moment of humble, powerless unknowing where the sadness of an ongoing loss washes through us and we cannot escape into facile solutioneering, is a powerful and necessary moment.

It has the power to reach into us deeply enough to wipe away frozen ways of seeing and ingrained patterns of response. It gives us fresh eyes, and it loosens the tentacles of fear that hold us in normality. The ready solution is like a narcotic, diverting attention from the pain without healing the wound.

[Charles Eisenstein]
'Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy'

I have come to realize that this model, which is based on the strategy of finding the "cause" and then developing the best "solution" to eradicate it, never asks an essential question: "what might the unwanted teen pregnancy epidemic be telling us about our society, ourselves, the community in which the teens live, about the teens themselves?" Without asking this question I sense that we can never really come to terms with the dilemma of unwanted teen pregnancy.

Until we hear what it is trying to say, it will keep saying it in this or other ways, despite all our prevention efforts.

Unknowingly the model serves to hide, and even deny, the essence of the dilemma. Most tragically, the structures and actions of these programs proposed by this model inhibit us from becoming aware of and fully experiencing the reality of who and what we are as a society.

What we do not realize is that our strategy of attempting to 'eradicate' the problem without listening into what it is telling us cuts us off from experiencing soul.

[Matthew Green]
As quoted in 'On Returning to the Soul of the World: Archetypal Psychology and Cultural/Ecological Work', p. 11

NOVA: Returning to your costumed career, why did you quit?

VEIDT: There were a number of reasons, but I suppose basically it boiled down to my increasing uncertainty about the role of the costumed hero in the seventies. What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?

Yes, I’ve busted drug rings and been accused of being an establishment pawn for doing so… that happened a lot in the sixties. I’ve also uncovered plots by breakaway extremist factions within the Pentagon, for example the plot to release some unpleasantly specific diseases upon the population of Africa, the exposure of which led to the New Frontiersman denouncing me as a “Puppet of Peking” on the strength of my youthful travels through the East.

I guess I’ve just reached a point where I’ve started to wonder whether all the grandstanding and fighting individual evils does much good for the world as a whole.

Those evils are just symptoms of an overall sickness of the human spirit, and I don’t believe you can cure a disease by suppressing its symptoms. That whole Contac-400 approach to our society’s problems, I despair of it. It doesn’t work.

[Alan Moore]
Watchmen, Chap. XI

Currently we attempt to treat the numerous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberalism’s liberty, but not the deeper sources of those symptoms, the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commitments.

While most commentators regard our current crises - whether understood morally or economically - as a technical problem to be solved with better policy, our most thoughtful citizens must consider whether these crises are the foreshocks of a more systemic quake ahead.

[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.42

A very clever chap once said that if an ancestor of long ago would visit us today, what would he become astonished at: the skill of our dentists or the rottenness of our teeth?

This is a very neat way of putting it; it shows we cannot reject, we have to be grateful for the skill of our dentists, because of the rottenness of our teeth. This is a mutual escalation: our teeth are still more rotten, and we are still more grateful for the dentists.

A nonviolent approach to it would put the best of human intelligence into resolving the question Why are our teeth so rotten?

[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 54

Deep Code

First Principles

Sailing the Turbulent Seas

Closed           -            Open
Certainty                         -                      Uncertainty
Solid               -                       Liquid
Known                        -                       Unknown
Actuality                           -                       Potentiality
Rest -    Motion
Attach - Detach
Being    - Becoming
Control                            -                       Chaos
Fragile -                       Resilient

Come!
Come from the safety of your castle,
there's somewhere else for you to be...

Come!
Come lose your self in the forest,
and sink it in the sea ...

In narratology and comparative mythology, the monomyth, or the hero's journey, is the common template of a broad category of tales that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, and in a decisive crisis wins a victory, and then comes home changed or transformed.

The concept was introduced in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell, who described the basic narrative pattern as follows:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man

'Hero's journey'

< --------------------- 0 ---------------------- >

There is nothing, neutral point, ground zero. And then there is something, which is always a departure from zero, in one direction or another.

Things have a tendency to remain the same, to (appear to) be balanced. In order for a thing to change it must go through a period of unrest, a transformation. This may be a great disturbance.

The hardest thing is always transitioning from one balance to another. For example, when my leg was injured it was always most painful when I going from being still to moving. Once I'd grown accustomed to either state it was fine; only the transition was painful. Getting out of bed/getting into bed. It's fine once you're out, fine once you're in.

We see this pattern everywhere. In sports, for instance, in order to raise our level of fitness we must push ourselves beyond current boundaries, or "overload" as it is known by weight lifters. Overloading involves placing the body under stress, giving it something it is not used to in order to adjust its norms. After a period of transformation we reach a new balance, a new level of fitness.

It is the same with stretching: our muscles will have a default length, which is really the length that our day-to-day activities (our environment) require them to be. In order to lengthen them we must continually stretch them - i.e. engage in new activities that require them to be a longer length. If we keep up these new activities - if our stretching becomes part of our day-to-day routine - then our muscles will remain at this new length. As soon as we stop stretching, our muscles will adapt to the new circumstances: they will shorten.

Stretching is like Acting. If our default mode is primarily selfish, then in order to counteract this we must "stretch" regularly - in other words, we must make a conscious effort to be unselfish.

We must understand what our default is. Default seems to be defined by environment. We can see strength as our ability to stray from our default, in other words our ability to Act or change. Through Acting we come to know our weaknesses; these are like ceilings on our ambitions, or boundaries beyond which we cannot stray.

In order to reach a new destination, you must be prepared to sail the turbulent seas.

Conscious stretching and Acting is only necessary outside the bounds of a structured community. It is the action of a responsible individual. Within a structured community, we stretch and act automatically without knowing that this is what we are doing. In other words, we are constantly stretched to the right length in order to function in harmony with our surroundings. The necessities of this kind of life demand as much. Currently the individual must Act because he is not contained within a harmonious community, and he must carry various ideals within himself.

There is currently little motivation to Act or to stretch. We live in such comfort that we may not see the necessity of staying in good shape, either physically or ethically. There are supports that will catch us when we fall and that will prevent us from having to feel the consequences of our ill-health. We have devices that keep the body comfortable and that prevent it from having to exert itself; and we have devices that prevent us from having to be ethically responsible and that remove us from the outcomes of our ethical indiscipline.

Our default, as defined by our environment, is imbalanced, unhealthy. It is in poor shape, both physically and ethically. The individual who decides to depart from this default - who begins to stretch and Act in order to 'get fit' - will be fighting an tough battle, and may have to fight it alone. In departing from the general default - from the general requirements of his environment, his culture - he becomes an aberration; an obsessive; a misguided fool; a curious novelty. It is much easier to maintain a level of fitness if we are surrounded by others who are also striving to remain at this same level, or to reach higher.

Society sets the default. If the individual is displeased with this default then he must depart from the conventions of the society. He will be at odds with many "normal" things. If we live in an ethically excellent community - in other words, a community that is in balance with itself and with its environment - then we need no longer stretch and Act because our default will be sufficient. This is why the traditional community required little stretching or Acting. The traditional community hovered around the "0", the point of balance. The individual did not need to strive for excellency, this was a communal undertaking, a communal default.

Hormesis is when a bit of a harmful substance, or stressor, in the right dose or with the right intensity, stimulates the organism and makes it better, stronger, healthier, and prepared for a stronger dose the next exposure. That's the reason we go to the gym, engage in intermittent fasting, or caloric deprivation, or overcompensate for challenges by getting tougher.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
'Hormesis Is Redundancy'

Hormesis, on the social scale, means “letting people experience some, not too much, stress, to wake them up a bit.

Hormesis can be likened to what Evans and Read call “endangerment” of agents in social systems which “is productive of life, individually and collectively”. Erik Hollnagel and David D. Woods also note the need to provoke complex systems in their epilogue to Resilience Engineering movement’s first publication: “Resilience requires a constant sense of unease that prevents complacency”.

This exact formulation also connects the resilience discourse with High Reliability Organization theory, as formulated by Karl Weick et.al, with its emphasis on chronic unease, fear of complacency, and attentiveness to weak signals.

[Rasmus Dahlberg]
'Resilience and Complexity: Conjoining the Discourses of Two Contested Concepts'

This process of directing energy out of familiar into new and unfamiliar paths, as a means of changing the manner of reacting to stimuli, implies of necessity an ever-increasing ability on the part of both teacher and pupil to 'pass from the known to the unknown'; it is therefore a process which is true to the principle involved in all human growth and development.

[F. Matthias Alexander]
The Use of the Self, p.85

[...] creative thought must always contain a random component.

The exploratory processes - the endless trial and error of mental progress - can achieve the new only by embarking upon pathways randomly presented, some of which when tried are somehow selected for something like survival.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 200

[...] a major revision of one’s construct system can threaten with immediate change, or chaos, or anxiety.

Thus it often seems better to extort confirmation of one’s anticipations – and therefore of the system that produced them – rather than to risk the utter confusion of those moments of transition.

[George Kelly]
'The threat of aggression', in Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly, p. 283

Peterson: That structure - verse, chorus, verse, chorus - out of what did that originate?

Andreyev: That’s an extremely old form. There are baroque forms, such as the Rondo or the Ritornello that have a similar form, where you alternate one fixed element that keeps returning the same way, and a secondary element that gives you a certain degree of relief [and] contrast with the preceding element.

Peterson: That’s a chaos/order interplay […] Why the three chord structure?

Andreyev: A three chord structure is the bare minimum you need in order to have any kind of harmonic tension. In tonal music you have a very simple and effective polarity between what’s called the tonic and dominant degrees, and that’s something that basically structured the entire classical period, and the baroque period as well to a degree.

[…] it’s a way of setting up an extremely rudimentary story. You start with a region that is established, that you have as your home base, and then you modulate to a different harmonic region; and through this process of modulating, you move from your home base to somewhere else. And that creates a tension, a nostalgia, and a need for resolution.

Peterson: One thing that made me think about, is the proclivity for small children to do that, with their mother in particular. The space around the mother is defined as home territory, partly because mother is familiar, but also partly because if something goes wrong and mother is there, mother can fix it. So there’s a zone around the child when the mother is there, where there is access to immediate resources that will fill in where the child’s skills are lacking.

And then what the child will do after obtaining sufficient comfort from being in the presence of mom, is to go out far enough into the world, driven by their curiosity […] to discover new information and extend their skills by pushing against the unknown. And when they either get tired, or when they go out far enough so that negative emotion as a consequence of threat predominates, they run back to their mother.

Its a microcosm of the hero’s journey, which is a journey from a safe and defined place out into the unknown, and then a return […] to stability.

[Jordan Peterson and Samuel Andreyev]
'Interview with Composer Samuel Andreyev'

Hero worship was an act of “true religious loyalty," the hero an embodiment of the spiritual exuberance and vitality that in Carlyle's idiom went by the name of wonder. The prototype of the hero was the prophet.

Carlyle's admiration for great men - Mohammed, Shakespeare, Cromwell, Frederick the Great - divided him further from those who counted on the weight of institutions, traditions, and social habits to provide continuity and discourage rash social experimentation.

Heroism was disruptive, in Carlyle's view. Its value lay precisely in its unsettling effect on habits and routine. It divided men and women more often than it brought them together.

Carlyle understood the dangers of hero worship more clearly than his critics have given him credit for. He understood that hero worship turned into idolatry when it attached itself not to the hero's insight but to his false claim of supernatural credentials.

At the same time, he praised the "indestructible reverence for heroism" as an important expression of the capacity for wonder and saw the modern disparagement of heroism, accordingly - far more freely expressed in our own day even than in his - as one of the more ominous among many ominous "signs of the times."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.232, 236

It’s all right for once, in the exuberance of youth, to celebrate mere vital excitement, la joie de vivre as a protest against humdrum solemnity. But to make it systematic, and oppose it, as an ideal and a duty, to the ordinary religious duties, is to pervert it altogether.

[William James]

Leading By Example

If a prisoner wants to free his companions in misfortune, he must first break out of his own chains. It's the only way to do it. You have to gain in strength to act appropriately.

The spiritual path begins with a period of retreat from the world, like a wounded deer looking for a solitary, peaceful spot to heal her wounds. Here, the wounds are those inflicted by ignorance.

To be able to help beings, there should no longer be any difference between what you teach and what you are. A beginner might feel an immense desire to help others, but generally doesn't ave sufficient spiritual maturity to be able to do so.

In the case of the lama I spent most time with, Khyentse Rinpoche, he spent some seventeen years in solitary retreat in his youth, interrupted only by visits to his teachers from time to time. Then, when he was thirty-five, his teacher told him, 'Now the time has come for you to transmit your knowledge and experience to others.'

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.154

[...] I must point out that would-be teachers of my work must be trained to put the principles and procedures of its technique into practice in the use of themselves in their daily activities before they attempt to teach others to do likewise.

Herein lies the difference between the proposed training and all other forms of training. For students may take courses of training in medicine, physiology, theology, law, philosophy, or anything else without the matter of the use of themselves being called into question. But in the training for this teaching a considerable amount of work must be done on the students individually so that they may learn to use themselves satisfactorily, and it is only when they have reached a given standard in the use of themselves that they will be given the opportunity for practical teaching experience.

A training in the satisfactory direction of the use of his own mechanisms is essential to the medical man's personal equipment [...]

[F. Matthias Alexander]
The Use of the Self, p.88, 117

Cree children play together hunting porcupine and in this way develop the skills and understanding needed for hunting larger and faster-moving animals. Later, a boy will travel with a hunter and watch how he moves through the snow looking for signs, setting traps, moving across great distances, and always knowing where he is.

In this learning, no one instructs or tells the child what to do; rather, the child watches and takes things in.

Then, one day, that child is allowed to go out alone and set traps, for the testing of a piece of knowledge is always done in private. And, finally, there will be some form of public acknowledgment that skills have been learned and that the young person has acquired new knowledge.

This system of learning was once common in the West. From barrel making to Renaissance painting, the apprentice system was the way most people learned their trades.

Dr. Ruth Dempsey, who is an educational researcher at the University of Ottawa, has told me that if an adult wishes to learn something new the most effective way is not to ask a professional teacher, but an expert in the field. Most experts have never analyzed their skills and knowledge and may not even be able to tell a person how they do a particular task, but by hanging around them a person will pick up their skills.

By contrast, a professional teacher analyzes, structures, and articulates knowledge in a series of programmed steps which, at least in Dempsey's opinion, appear to hamper the natural processes of learning.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.70, 73

Digging Deeper

Sailing the Turbulent Seas

Leading By Example

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