Welcome to my blog which is in danger of becoming a testament to the foolishness of ambition rather than the record of unfolding authorial success that it was meant to be. Since I began this journal even the two pieces of my work that have received attention, the novel, Sad Sam, and the article about Spirituality, have failed to actually see the light of day and there appears to be nothing on the horizon. I’d give up, but if you give up the small hope that makes you make an effort, then what do you do?
This week I have spent four days writing an essay (for my partner) called ‘Teaching Collocations with high-frequency delexical verbs to Intermediate Students’. I’ve turned my mind to tedious things before but I’d like to congratulate myself on this particular effort which I crafted out of the DELTA handbook and whatever internet resources I could find which included studies from Japan, Germany, Australia, China, Lithuania, Bangladesh, Poland, Turkey and Greece. Over the years I’ve turned my unutilised intelligence to a number of essay subjects on behalf of various children and partners and in addition to my legitimate qualifications I should claim degrees in Latin American Studies, Family Therapy, and Creative Music Technology. Consistent in all my encounters with other people’s degrees is the lack of clarity in instruction. For all the spelling out and deliberate use of precise language, the student isn’t quite clear what to do and the teaching support appears to be lacking. In the end it is a matter of being able to play an academic game, rather than being an excellent therapist, historian, musician, thanatologist or teacher, which seems to matter.
In place of having anything concrete to report, I’m going to focus on empty space and first, the ‘feel-it’ exercises on the Avatar Course of Harry Palmer which, if you were a regular reader, you would know to be of reoccurring interest to me, not least because Harry Palmer doesn’t want them taught to you by an unauthorised teacher to such an extent that he may take that teacher to court, as he did Eldon Braun.
I don’t know Mr Braun personally, nor what the truth of his relationship with Avatar was. Undoubtedly he produced his own (not very good) version of the Avatar Materials and this led to an absurd court case in Florida in which a judge tried to decide which techniques and words were common currency and which were uniquely Harry’s. The truth must be that none of it is uniquely Harry’s but the way he has packaged it is extremely original and, in my opinion, effective in a way that Braun’s course simply isn’t.
One of the main and most crucial techniques in Avatar is the series of ‘Feel-it’ exercises which Braun (based on Heinlein) calls ‘grokking’. In both systems you begin by grokking inanimate objects, then animate ones, then people. According to Braun, ‘Observe inanimate objects one at a time. Just observe whatever it is, and decide to get the essential feeling of it. Try to become it. After a short time, move to something else.’ Palmer put is like this; 1) Observe some object, location or space that interests you. Observe it carefully for a few seconds. 2) Define the object by observing its periphery, edge or limits. Identify with it and feel it.
When doing an Avatar Course, one may spend a number of days doing varieties of the feel-it exercises. ‘For example, if you are identifying with a stone, feels its weight bearing down on the earth as your weight, feels its exposed surfaces as your surfaces, feel its density as your density, transform the stone into you the stone,’ says the instruction helpfully. But how do you actually do it? The Florida judge says; ‘It appears that the unprotected idea is to live life with feeling instead of thinking about everything that occurs or every path to take,’ and ‘Braun copied Palmer’s advice to students for approaching this exercise.’ What is obvious is that the judge never actually tried the exercises because if he had, and if he had grasped the essence of the exercise, he would have had to agree that the experience is uncopyrightable because it is simply a description of what we do all the time anyway. It took me many days of trying to feel like a stone for me to realise this; days of frustration and expectation as I kept hoping that any moment I’d somehow turn into a tree or be able to converse with dogs. Much of this time I was doing the course with a man called Clive and each time we’d meet we’d moan about how we couldn’t ‘do’ the exercise. Then we’d go back to our ‘master’ with various stories of our experience and then he’d send us out again for another couple of hours.
Somewhere along the line, there was a turning point, neither dramatic nor revelatory. I was sitting in a pub pretending to be a door, as you do, when the door moved and for the slightest nano-second I ‘felt’ that I was being moved. From then on I decided I could ‘do’ the exercise and my master seemed to agree. Of course I’ve no idea if I’m really ‘doing the right thing’ but this recognition of the feelingness of perception seems crucially important. (And also an excellent reminder that it is the engaging in the doing of the exercise, rather than the preconceived benefit of doing it, that one should remember.)
This week I came across an excellent work called the ‘New Spanda Karikas’ by Peter Wilberg. Here he talks here about perceiving a tree:
If you look at a tree and regard it as a mere illuminated object for your eyes, that it one thing –an ordinary visual experience. But if you now attend, with your whole body, to your awareness of seeing the tree, then you will begin to sense it as well as see it – and to see and sense something quite invisible to your eyes.
You will sense your entire body surface becoming ‘all eye’.
What you see with your eyes you will also begin to subtly sense within the aware inwardness of your whole body.
What you begin to sense and experience will not be the tree as a mere ‘object of consciousness’ but those qualities of awareness that manifest as the tree and shape its consciousness.
Now if Harry had told me to do that, I’d still be trying.
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