The Link #23 - Letters to the Editor

While space to include articles and letters in The Link is naturally limited, the editors nonetheless appreciate hearing from as many readers as possible. Having said this, it has become a bit too much for us to engage in correspondence with everyone. We would therefore ask all correspondents to advise us, when writing, whether or not you would permit your letter, or extracts from it, to be published in a future issue of The Link; we would include your name, together possibly with your country, unless you specifically instruct us otherwise.

K’s Teachings and Scientific Research

First of all, I want to thank Carol Brandt for her work [an article by Carol appeared in the previous Link]. She brings in many important findings from the new research in neurology and psychology, such as the difficulty of adopting an ‘objective’ observation of our own behavior in situations of threat, the inaccessibility to cognitive understanding of suppressed negative past experiences that continue to affect our present action, and the body’s acquired evolutionary conditioning that is beyond conscious access or control. This research deserves all my respect but I would like to clarify a few of her statements and conclusions where I feel she is a bit off the mark.

She appears to mistake the cognitive approach for K’s observing of one’s own behavior. I don’t mean to say that I know what K means, but to me it is a mistake to think that ‘to observe’ in K terms means only a cognitive experience. It is also a cognitive experience but goes far beyond it. Psychology wasn’t able to catch up with K’s meaning of ‘observing’ until some twenty-five years ago when Eugene Gendlin, Ph.D., published his work Focusing. K, however, was pointing to the need of ‘observing one’s own behavior’ even before the 1929 dissolution of the Order of the Star in the East.

In his book, Gendlin points to “a kind of bodily awareness that profoundly influences our lives. So little attention has been paid to this mode of awareness that there are no ready-made words to describe it, and I have had to coin my own term: ‘felt sense’. A felt sense will shift if you approach it in the right way. It will change even as you are making contact with it. When your felt sense of a situation changes, you change — and, therefore, so does your life.” And he goes on to say that “a felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time —encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail.” (p.32)

He calls the ‘felt sense’ physical, but we can see by his own explanation that it encompasses physical experience, as sensation, and goes on to feelings and knowing and communicating in a ‘holistic’ way, not in the linear mode of the intellect. And, if one makes contact with it, change is what takes place.

Allow me to go into this ‘felt sense’ a bit more. Gendlin says: “Just choose one problem. Now, don’t go inside the problem as you usually would. Stand back from it and sense how it makes you feel in your body when you think of it as a whole just for a moment. Ask ‘what does this whole problem feel like?’ But don ’t answer it with words. Feel the problem whole, the sense of all that.” (p.53) It’s a way of making contact with the ‘felt sense’. Now,as a scientist and a psychologist, Gendlin is interested in methods and replications of experience. We are not concerned with that. I am just using Gendlin’s term to better illustrate what I think K means by observing oneself and the observation that takes place on account of the body’s intelligence and wisdom and the change that comes from that observation. Gendlin’s research actually shows it.

I don’t see that Carol is totally right when she says: “K also seemed to imply that conditioning (versus ‘intelligence’?) is some kind of habit you can break if you once observed without judgment your own behavior and its negative/dangerous consequences. If that is the proposal, then the problem here is the assumption that through cognition, one has the power to affect evolved physiological survival strategies that in fact bypass the cognitive function.... But I think what needs to be introduced into K thought at this point is an open-minded appraisal of the findings of modern research on the limits of self-observation — the psychological inhibitions (and prohibitions), the cognitive limitations, the neurodevelopmental limitations, and the evolutionary limitations.”

Gendlin’s findings confirm that conditioning can be broken by the awareness of the ‘felt sense’. I am mentioning Gendlin here, but many other later researchers have gone beyond Gendlin and not only confirm his findings but go even deeper, seeing how by that mode of awareness the amygdala and the hippocampus (deep and old brain structures) change their relationship to the autonomic nervous system, altering the stimulus that flows between them in quantity and quality. Changing the activity of the autonomic system means that the glands, hormones, neurotransmitters and the ‘molecules of emotion’ (Candace Pert) also change their balance in the body, bringing about a totally different physiological condition not only in the nervous system but in the whole body, affecting the state of health and mind, the whole state of being of the person to the point of curing many diseases and bringing about the sense of ‘being wholeness’, ‘feeling at one with the universe’. And all that comes about not by a kind of fantasy, identification or belief, but rather when the whole movement is understood through focusing or staying with the ‘felt sense’ without any judgment or desire to change the situation. In this way, all the fantasies, identifications,beliefs and phantasms are dissolved and the void of existence is met with no choice.

Actually, it is not that, as Carol says, “an open-minded appraisal of the findings of modern research on the limits of self-observation” needs to be introduced into K’s thought, but just the other way round, i.e. that science needs to do its best to catch up with K’s observations. Thank goodness some scientists have been doing a good job, like Gendlin, Wilber, LeDoux, Pert, Joseph, Levine, Redpath, Chilton-Pearce and many others. Likewise it is not that K’s ‘followers’ need to continue the exploration where he left off but rather that science has to continue the exploration where it hasn’t yet been able to go.

Nowadays we see many people taking K’s thoughts into the academic world, doing Ph.D. research and theses based on K’s work, which is very good indeed, as it allows K’s findings to be contrasted with academic ones. That has been good, but not because this allows K’s work to continue, ‘to survive ’— it will anyway — but for the Academy’s sake, for it can be renewed by K’s teachings.

The body is the result of millions of years of biological metamorphosis, evolution and conditioning, as all Nature is. That can, and of course does, bring about limits. But that is not the problem; that is not what prevents us from ‘getting it’ (meaning ‘understanding and living the teachings’). The body is Nature in us; it isn ’t the body that fragments us, that separates us. The ‘me’ and all its derivations is what separates us from the rest of Nature, whereas mankind is not something apart from Nature.

Carol lays out the central issue: “Once the legitimacy of cognitive limitation is acknowledged the question then becomes how to proceed in light of it.” How, indeed, are we to proceed? Why has nobody ‘got it’? In order to clarify this point that all the ‘followers’, as she puts it, or ‘the non-disciples’ as put by Alan Watts, find so hard to understand, I would like, if I may, to bring in K’s own words. It’s a quote from The First and Last Freedom: “An American lady came to see me a couple of years ago, during the war. She said she had lost her son in Italy and that she had another son aged sixteen whom she wanted to save; so we talked the thing over. I suggested to her that to save her son she had to cease to be an American; she had to cease to be greedy, cease piling up wealth, seeking power, domination, and be morally simple — not merely simple in clothes, in outward things, but simple in her thoughts and feelings, in her relationships. She said, ‘That is too much. You are asking far too much. I cannot do it, because circumstances are too powerful for me to alter.’ Therefore she was responsible for the destruction of her son.” (pp.182–83)

What in us makes us behave like that lady? Isn’t it our conditioning, our beliefs, our fear, our desire for security, our greedy state of mind, our desire for power and domination? Can we observe that with our whole being, watch it, smell it, feel it out in a holistic way without judgment or avoidance? In other words, in the kind of ‘cognitive’ process that goes beyond all our limitations, even beyond cognition itself, because the limitation is ‘observed’ in the very ‘movement of observation’, that mode of awareness called by Gendlin the ‘felt sense’ of our situation? That lady reacted immediately, as we usually do, without even pausing to consider what K was proposing. And most of the time, when we decide to take seriously what K is pointing out in his teachings, we keep on thinking, talking, sharing opinions and creating exercises, dialogues and meetings about it, but hardly staying with the ‘felt sense’ of it in ourselves, not judging, comparing, denying, avoiding or running away from it. Being together with it, with no movement of thought, being present with all our limitations and gifts, without making of it an instrument of domination or manipulation of the situation for our own gratification. Can we do this?

Moacir Amaral
March 2003