VOLUME 1. Mobilizing the Self

Part 1. Orienting the Self

III TECHNIQUE OF AWARENESS EXPERIMENT

EXPERIMENT 5: Remembering

The four experiments of the preceding group were intended to increase and sharpen your contact with your environment. Probably they have seemed to have little to do with personal problems of any sort. If sot we agree that we have not so far dealt directly with the "inner conflicts of your mind," but rather with improving the orientation of your receptors—mostly, your exteroceptors—so that you might gain heightened awareness of where you are. We hope that you have by this time realized and will not merely give lip-service to what we now state: You and your environment are not independent entities, but together you constitute a functioning, mutually influencing, total system. Without your environment you—your feelings, thoughts, tendencies to action—would not organize, concentrate, and have direction; on the other hand, without you as a living, differentiated organization of awareness, your environment would be, for you, non-existent. Your sense of the unitary interfunctioning of you and your environment is contact, and the process of contacting is the forming and sharpening of the figure/ ground contrast, which is, as we have seen, the work of spontaneous attention and mounting excitement. For you as a living being contact is, then, ultimate reality.

In touching, smelling and tasting the sense of contacting is fairly well preserved for most persons. With the more distant senses of seeing and hearing, however, most modern people feel that they are being invaded by external stimuli—that what they see and hear is imposed on them willy-nilly from the outside—and they respond more or less according to the pattern of the "defensive reflexes." Such behavior is a symptom of paranoid projection, a matter which we shall discuss later on. What people in general are only dimly, if at all, aware of is that their seeing and hearing is a reaching out, an active stretching toward whatever is interesting and likely to fulfill their needs. With such awareness blacked out they feel that the environment attacks them—rather than its being, as must be the case for all healthy organisms, the other way around. Therefore, since their needs must obviously be satisfied by and in the environment they, without being aware of it, want the environment to attack them! To put this another way, for it is an exceedingly difficult point for modern man to understand and accept, the organism and its supporting world must be in intimate contact for growth, development and life; but if—and this is what we shall have to prove—the organism, by virtue of fears and trepidations acquired in previous functioning, does not dare to initiate and take responsibility for the necessary contacts, then, since they must occur for life to go on, the initiative and responsibility are thrust upon the environment. Persons differ with respect to what part of the environment they expect to do this work. It may be, for instance, “my folks,” “the government,” “society,” or “God.” Such agencies are supposed to “supply me with what I need” or else “make me do what I ought to do.”

At this point many of you, we know, are objecting. For instance, to say that a person experiencing what he sees and hears as imposed upon him by the environment thereby manifests a symptom of paranoid projection is certainly to use strong language. Genuine exceptions immediately present themselves. On occasion the environment does attack and, were this not the case, the healthy defenses of the organism—which we wish to strengthen and supply with more effective weapons—would be superfluous.

With respect to one's most intimate sense, proprioception— the feeling of one's own movements—people tend to be aware of and to accept only what is supplied by deliberately instituted movements—that is, what they do “on purpose.” Their spontaneous muscular interactions with gravity, with solidity, and with much else besides, are performed without awareness.

What must be reacquired is the realization that it is you who are seeing, hearing, moving, and that it is you who are focused on the objects, whether they be interesting or dull, desirable or hostile, beautiful, ugly or plain, So long as you take your environment as something “given” or foisted on you and, at best, to be “put up with,” you tend to perpetuate its present undesirable aspects. This holds especially for your close-up environment, but also to some degree for what is more remote and “public.” Consider the importance of this, for instance, in the civic question of the layout of streets; if people regarded such environment as their concern and their environment, we would soon have better cities. Only the attitude of, “Welli at any rate, I can't do anything about it,” this helpless (?) acquiescence in the status quo staves off the necessary destruction and reconstruction.

The basic barrier to full, healthy experiencing is the tendency to accept as one's own only what one does deliberately—that is, “on purpose.” Of all one's other actions one tends to be studiously unaware. Thus, modern man isolates his “will” from both his organism and his environment and talks about “will power” as if this were something that he somehow ought to be able to invoke in a fashion that would transcend the limitations of flesh and worldly circumstance. So, to increase the area of your awareness, begin now to attend to your spontaneous self and try to get the feeling of the difference between your deliberate and your spontaneous functioning.

When you first attempt the following experiment, you will be unable to distinguish true awareness from introspection, and you will probably conclude that we intend for you to introspect; however, this is not the case. Awareness is the spontaneous sensing of what arises in you—of what you are doing, feeling, planning; introspection, in contrast, is a deliberate turning of attention to these activities in an evaluating correcting, controlling, interfering way, which often, by the very attention paid them, modifies or prevents their appearance in awareness. Habitual introspection is pathological; occasional introspection, as practiced by psychologist or poet, can be a useful technique but is very difficult.

Awareness is like the glow of a coal which comes from its own combustion; what is given by introspection is like the light reflected from an object when flashlight is turned on it. In awareness a process is taking place in the coal (the total organism); in introspection the process occurs in the director of the flashlight (a split-off and highly opinionated part of the organism which we shall call the deliberate ego). When you have a toothache. You are aware of it without introspection, 'but you may also, of course, introspect it—bite down on the sore tooth, wiggle it with your fingers, or, deliberately neglecting it, force attention stoically away from it.

In this awareness experiment let your attention move about freely and allow the figure/ground to form. Previous experiments were limited largely to exteroception—the experiences given by receptors at the surface of the body, such as those for vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch—but now we are going to add the experiencing of the “body” and “mind,” which is given by proprioception and for which the receptors are in the muscles, joints and tendons. At first you will almost surely merely introspect these self-feelings—and block them. When you do, attend precisely to such blockages (resistances) and the conflicts—opposition of forces—-of which they are a part.

Our technique of awareness may strike you as being a variant of Yoga. It is, but its goal is different. In the West we have for centuries devoted ourselves mainly to exteroception of the “external world,” while the Indians have turned the other way to heightened awareness of “body” and self. We want to surmount this dichotomy altogether. The Indian tries to overcome suffering and conflict by deadening sensation and thus insulating himself from the “environment.” Let us, on the other hand, not be afraid to enliven feeling and response to stimulation and stir up such conflict as may be necessary in order in the end to achieve a unitary functioning of the whole man. Our emphasis is on self-awareness, not because this is the ultimate attainment of living (though it is a good thing), but because this is where most of us are handicapped. Whatever lies beyond this one finds out for oneself in one's own creative adjustments, when one has available the awareness and the energy to make creative adjustments.

Select place where you will not be disturbed by intruders. Sit or lie comfortably in an easy chair or on a couch or bed which is, preferably, not too soft. Do not try to relax, although, if relaxation comes spontaneously, do not try to prevent it.

Forced relaxation is as unsound as forced concentration, The muscular tensions which prevent relaxation constitute important parts of the very resistances that we want to attend to, so we must not drive them out of the picture to begin with. As you proceed with the experiment you will find that in some respects you spontaneously relax further, but you will also begin to notice how you are preventing relaxation—for instance, by holding your breath or clutching the sides of the couch with your hands. Sometimes, when you notice a tension, you will relax it; at other times you will be taken with a strong anxious discomforts an inability to be comfortable at all, and an imperious need to get up and terminate the experiment. Notice these things and the precise points where they arise.

When we say, "Do not relax," this is to prevent your attempting the impossible. Forced relaxation can be achieved sometimes in one or more places but only at the price of tightening up somewhere else. At this stage in our experiments, it is possible to become aware of resistances to relaxing but not possible to bring about general relaxation of tensions. Unless we emphasize this, you would very likely tackle the impossible—and be resigned in advance to failure. Our society frequently demands the impossible from us. Without the growth, training, or experience necessary for acquisition of many socially esteemed qualities, we are told to be strong, to have will power, to be kind, forgiving and patient. Since such requirements are so insistently and universally pressed upon us, we feel that they must make sense—consequently, we force ourselves to go through what we think would be the appropriate motions!

In the first experiment we noted that, while it is pathological to live in the past or future, it is healthy, from the vantage-point of the present to remember past occurrences and to plan for future events. We now present instructions for an experiment designed to strengthen your ability to remember:

Select some memory which is not too distant or difficult; for example, in fantasy revisit the house of a friend. Close your eyes. What do you actually see? The door—somebody opening it? Furniture? Other people? Do not try to ferret out what is in your “mind”— what you think ought to be there—but simply keep going back to the remembered place and noticing what is there.

It is a basic tendency of the organism to complete any situation or transaction which for it is unfinished; therefore, if you stick to the selected memory-context, the figure/ground will form quite without your deliberate intervention. Above all, do not think or reason like this: “There must have been chairs. Where were they?" Simply see. Use the technique of the last experiment—detailed abstraction—on what you fantasy. Treat the images as if they were present here-and-now to your senses. Very soon forgotten details will appear of themselves. But you will also quickly come upon resistances—for example, the annoying feeling of just not quite being able to catch sight of something that you know is there or to say what seems to be on the tip of your tongue. Again, do not force yourself. See if you can leave that item alone. It may appear before long in a sudden flash. However, some items needed to fill out the scene will not present themselves because your resistances are too strong; others will not be remembered because they never were of sufficient interest to be included in the figure which you experienced in this situation in the first place.

With respect to visual memory, persons vary from those who “have none” to those who, like Goethe, have an eidetic (photo-graphic) memory. Eidetic memory is “infantile.” You had it as a child and perhaps animals have it. Few of us preserve this ability to re-view situations in such vividness, with figure and ground easily shifting. The conventional demands of our “education” that we abstract only useful objects and verbal knowledge from situations which are full of life so suppress the eidetic power that most of us experience it only in dreaming.

Like any other asset, eidetic memory can be used well, as it was by Goethe, or misused, as in the case of a patient who could read off whole pages remembered with photographic exactness and thus pass examinations on material he had not in any way understood or assimilated (a case of perfect introjection).

If you at present have little or no visual memory—the ability to see vividly “in your mind’s eye—this probably because you have erected a of words and thoughts between yourself and your environment. Your world is not genuinely experienced, but is contacted only to the extent necessary to activate your previously acquired systems of abstractions. Intellect has superseded alive participation. We shall come later to a valuable experiment on acquiring ability to live in a non-verbal region, a situation of internal silence. Meantime you must proceed as if you were in fact visualizing. While you will for the most part experience merely the shadows of the events you try to remember, now and then you are likely to get a brief flash of vision.

The resistance is largely tension of the muscles of the eyes, as in staring. It may help to close your eyes and pretend that you are asleep. Though often you will then actually fall asleep, you may be able with practice to hold to the borderline between sleep and waking, the state in which the so-called hypnagogic images appear. When they occur, these will be of a schizophrenic, incoherent sort; but tolerate them—for they do not mean that you are going crazy —and do not pooh-pooh them because of their senselessness. They can be a bridge to the recovery of your ability to visualize and remember.

The same sort of training can be applied to the auditory and other senses. Notice your resistance in trying to recall the voices of people. If you fail altogether in this, you can be sure that you never really listen to other people when they speak. Perhaps you are preoccupied with what you are going to say when you get the chance, or perhaps there was more dislike of the speaker than you realized.

Smells, tastes, and movements are not so easy to re-experience in this vivid way, which amounts to a kind of healthy hallucinating. But if you can re-experience any of them, you will discover that these close senses are charged with emotion. Emotion is a unifying gestalt of exteroceptions and proprioceptions, as we shall consider in more detail later. Seeing and hearing, because they are “distant” senses, can with relative case be disconnected from alive participation with the “body” and become feelingless—except in our responses to painting and music, which tend to get through our muscular blocking. Taste and smell, which are “closet” senses, may retain feeling-tone—although the dead palate and the stopped-up nose are quite common resistances.

Now do a memory experiment as before, but this time, instead of stressing merely vision, attempt to integrate as many senses as possible—not only what you saw, but also what you heard, smelled, tasted, touched, felt in your movements—and try also to recapture the emotional tone that went with the experience.

Do you avoid recalling any particular person? Do you notice that you can remember inanimate objects, or photographs of people, but not the persons themselves? Do your remembered situations remain static, or is there movement? Is there drama—motivation—in the scene? Do you get quick glimpses only, or can you follow up the details without losing the whole? Do the images tend to recede or become hazy?

In sampling a few reactions to this experiment we start with one which may serve as a reminder that the “proof of potency” is the most self-defeating of all resistances:

“I find no difficulty in the assigned task, I can remember with perfect clarity: scenes, events, situations, people, both recent and remote. I notice no particular tensions or blocks in memory flow.”

In their recall-experiences some individuals found that, while they had highly developed imagery of a visual sort, they were almost totally lacking in auditory imagery. For others it was the other way around.

“The remembering experiment was the most fruitful of any so far, since it provided me with a dramatic insight into a shortcoming. I had been rather smug in my feeling that I was already master of what was involved in figure/ground, concentration, actuality, and so on, with the result that when I tried this experiment the result was all the more shocking.

“I've always known that my ability to see and, in memory, to re-see, is exceptionally good, but didn't know the extent to which it dominated my awareness and perhaps—alas and alak! —compensated for what I was deficient in. On occasion, since I’m a fine arts enthusiast, I've remarked to friends, 'Fine arts are for me what music is for other people.' By this I implied that most people are blind to visual figure/ground relations but appreciative of auditory figure/grounds, as witness the difficulty encountered by modern abstractionistic painters in getting their work accepted by a public blind to visual figure/ground. What I didn’t know was that I myself was practically deaf to auditory figure/ground.

“The naked truth is that in the remembering experiment I was utterly incapable of recalling an auditory experience. Since then I've been listening extra hard—and I'm just beginning to realize for instance, that there's something more to dancing than a mere shuffling of the feet.”

Many report difficulty in re-seeing what is animate and moving, and a number, unable to remember color, visualize only in black and white. Photographs of persons may be remembered when the persons themselves are not. In many cases the simple survey involved in this experiment and the discovery that something was missing in one’s own private life which other people possessed initiated the corrective measures of giving more interest and attention to the under-aware sense.

“Before I read the instructions and discussion for this experiment I somehow had always thought that to talk about images was just a kind of figure of speech. I guess I thought that all we remembered was a result of what we had verbalized. I'm beginning to have a little success now, with some hazy images and occasionally a fairly clear memory-flash. Oddly enough, it’s easier for me to remember voices than memory-pictures.”

The personal significance of the event recalled affected, of course, the vividness of the memory. For instance:

“Voices either did not come through at all or they came through with such penetrating realism I became almost scared. These were the voices of my mother and my step-father. When I heard them, my mind began to drift and sleepiness came over me.”

Another report contained the following:

“I found it much easier and relaxing to remember good occurrences than bad ones. One thing I recalled produced an automatic movement of my legs. It involved a situation where I had to jump back quickly or be cut by a broken beer bottle. I surprised myself to see that in the recall I had almost relived the happening. I realized that the speeded breathing and heartbeat were associated with this.”

As last personal statement we quote the following:

“With the auditory tests I must report absolute failure. I was horrifed to discover that I could nor even recollect my parents' voices. I think that I have an average ear, and I am very quick to notice accents and peculiarities of pattern in a voice. But I found it impossible to recall them unless I did so within a few minutes of the person's departure. Any attempt to recall them as much as a day later met with failure.

“I have refrained above from mentioning the one attempt when I did manage to hear a voice. Previously I had recalled only pleasant scenes. This time I deliberately set out to recall an unpleasant one. At first I was unsuccessful, but width perseverance I was able to remember it. It suddenly returned to my mind with extraordinary clarity. It seemed to me that I had recaptured it down to the minutest detail. Then I seemed to hear a voice. It was that of the man I had intended to marry. The impression was very fleeting, and I was suddenly seized with a restlessness which made further work on it impossible.”

EXPERIMENT 6: Sharpening the Body-Sense

Our strategy for developing self-awareness is to extend in every direction the areas of present awareness. To do this, we must bring to your attention parts of your experience which you would prefer to stay away from and not accept as your own. Gradually there will emerge whole systems of blockages which constitute your accustomed strategy of resistance to awareness. When you are able to recognize them in your behavior, we shall turn to direct concentration on them in their specific forms and attempt to rechannel the energy with which these blockages are charged into the constructive functioning of your organism.

Our present group of experiments is concerned with undirected awareness, as opposed to the directed awareness which will come later. The following general instructions are for setting up the appropriate context:

(1) Maintain the sense of actuality—the sense that your awareness exists now and here. (2) Try to realize that you are living the acting it, observing it, suffering it, resisting it. (3) Attend to and follow up all experiences, the “internal” as well as the “external,” the abstract as well as the concrete, those that tend toward the past as well as those that tend toward the future, those that you “wish,” those that you “ought,” those that simply “are,” those that you deliberately produce and those that seem to occur spontaneously. (4) With regard to every experience without exception, verbalize: “Now I am aware that . . .”

From the philosophical point of view this is a training in phenomenology: the realization that your sequence of thoughts, your surface experience—whatever else it is and whatever it stands for— is first of all something that exists in its own right. Even if something is “only” a “wish,” it is something—namely, the event itself of wishing. It is, therefore, as real as anything else.

As long as you are awake, you are at every moment aware of something. When absent-minded or in a trance-state, awareness is very dim; the figure/grounds do not develop and the processes involved—vision, fantasy, or whatever—-do not precipitate strong experiences in the form of memories, wishes, plans, actions. Many persons live in a permanent trance so far as non-verbal experience is concerned, and since nearly all that they are aware of is a tremendous amount of verbal thinking, they take such verbalizing as being nearly the whole extent of reality.

Insofar as this applies to you—and it does apply to all of us in varying degrees—you are aware, at least, of this verbal existence and also have, perhaps, a dim sense that this is not all there is. Very much of what you are only dimly aware and almost unaware can be brought into awareness by giving it the requisite amount of attention and interest-—so that a gestalt can be formed that is strong enough to precipitate an experience. It is true, of course, that there are the “repressed contents” as well as those objects which we cannot bring to awareness simply by “attending to what is not there”—but these we shall take up when we attempt to dissolve the blocks to awareness.

To verbalize, “Now I am aware . . .” with every experience is similar to Freudian free-association, which also is intended to loosen habitual modes of experiencing and to make available, as indicated by one's ability to verbalize it, experience characteristically unnoticed and unfelt. But free-association loses the context of actuality and often becomes free dissociation, or a means of by-passing what is important and practical in solving present problems. Furthermore, free-association generally restricts itself to “ideas,” “thoughts,” “mental processes.” Our attempt, in contrast, is to recover all experiences concomitantly—whether they be physical or mental, sensory, emotional, or verbal—for it is in the unitary functioning of “body,” “mind,” and “environment” (these are all abstractions) that the lively figure/ground emerges.

The greatest barrier to this is one's tendency to interfere with and thus falsify the unitary flow of experience by holding back (“censoring”) or by forcing. Since our interest lies not in recovering some particular item like a childhood incident but in extending and increasing integrated functioning, we have no need to force expression of anything—for example, embarrassing material—any more than we try to force relaxation. Forcing oneself to do anything could not take place unless there simultaneously existed the counter-tendency to hold back, and the latter, as the opposed force, is just as genuinely you and worthy of consideration as the forcing. To grind ahead despite resistances—by-passing embarrassment, for instance, by being brazen—is as inefficient and wearing as to drive a car with the brakes set. Our approach is to attain first a realization that behind the embarrassment and holding back there is a concealed conflict which does not appear in awareness now because it would produce too much anxiety. It is sufficient at this point simply to note carefully any evidences of such conflicts.

“Now I am aware . . . “ applied to all your experiences will, unless yours is a very conscientious, obsessional character (in which case you will nullify the experiment by some other means), lead invariably to your wandering off into daydreaming, “thinking,” reminiscing, or anticipating. As you deviate thus from the experiment you will lose awareness that you are now doing so, and you will wake in chagrin that such a simple task should be so hard to perform. Don't expect at the start to be able to carry on for more than a few minutes without slipping. But come back again and until you get the again to verbalizing, “Now I am aware . . .” until you get the feeling that “I,” “now,” and the object of awareness constitute a unified experience.

So, stick to this formula and, further, keep to the surface and the obvious. Do not try to become aware of the extraordinary and arcane. Do not guess at interpretations of the “unconscious.” Remain solidly with what is. Without preconceptions, without models of any sort, without an official road-map of whatever kind, come to yourself. In doing this you get the chance to identify yourself with what is your spontaneous experience in addition to your customary identification with deliberate—”on purpose”—actions. The aim is to extend the boundary of what you accept as yourself to include all organic activities. By slowly but persistently doing this, you will gradually become able to do without effort much that was previously impossible no matter how great the effort.

So we proceed in such a simple fashion as this: “Now I am aware thar I am lying on the couch. Now I am aware of the wish to do the awareness-experiment. Now I am aware of hesitating, of asking myself what to do first. Now I am aware that the radio is playing in the next room. That reminds me . . . No, am aware that I meant to listen to that program. I am aware that I have stopped myself from wandering. Now I feel lost again. I am remembering the advice to stick to the surface. Now am aware that I am lying with my legs crossed. I am aware that I have a pain in the back. I am aware of wishing to change my position. Now I am doing that,” etc.

Notice that processes are going on and that you are involved in and concerned with these processes. To realize such continuous involvement is extremely difficult, and most persons escape by accepting as their own—by identifying themselves with—only those processes which are deliberate. But bit by bit you are to take increasing responsibility for all your experience (we do not mean blame for it! )—including your blocks and symptoms—and gradually to acquire both free acceptance and control of yourself. The notion that “thoughts” on their own initiative and without any help from you “enter your mind” must give place to the insight that you are thinking the thoughts. At present it is sufficient to notice that thoughts are not like objects floating in space, but that they are processes which have some temporal span.

Now, still accepting and identifying yourself with all your awareness, begin to differentiate as follows:

Try first to attend mainly to external events—sights, sounds, smells—but without suppressing other experiences. Then, in sharp contrast, concentrate on internal processes—images, physical sensations, muscular tensions, emotions, thinking. Then, one by one, differentiate these various internal processes, by concentrating as exclusively as you can, on images, then on muscular tensions, etc. Follow these through, as previously, by detailed recognition of the different objects or activities and, if possible, of whatever moving dramatic scene they may be components.

The rest of this experiment and the following two are devoted to helping you to differentiate “body,” “emotions” and “thinking.”

Almost all persons in our society have lost the proprioception of large areas of their body. The loss was not accidental. It was, when it occurred, the only means of suppressing intolerable conflict. The issues which were then at stake, if now gradually reintroduced into awareness, can be worked through on a basis which actually resolves and puts an end to the conflict. Then what was lost—one's power to manipulate himself and his environment in various constructive ways, to enjoy feelings and satisfactions now beyond the bounds of awareness can be restored through remobilizing what are now “missing” parts of the organism. The following is to start you along this road:

Concentrate on your “body” sensation as a whole. Let your attention wander through every part of your body. How much of yourself can you feel? To what degree and with what accuracy and clarity does your body—and thus you—exist? Notice pains, aches and twinges ordinarily ignored. What muscular tensions can you feel? Attending to them, permit them to continue and do not attempt prematurely to relax them. Try to shape their precise limits. Notice your skin sensations. Can you feel your body as a whole? Can you feel where your head is in relation to your torso? Where are your genitals? Where is your chest? Your limbs?

If you believe that you have had complete success with the above experiment, you are almost certainly mistaken. Most persons, lacking adequate proprioception of parts of their body, substitute in place of this visualization or theory. For instance, they know where their legs are and so picture them there. This is not feeling them there! With a picture of your legs or a map of your body you can deliberately walk, run or kick after a fashion; but for free unforced, spontaneous functioning of these parts you need felt-contact with your legs themselves. This you must get directly from proprioception of their tensions and tendencies to movement. To the extent that there is discrepancy between the verbal concept of the self and the felt awareness of the self—and it exists to some degree in practically everyone—this is neurosis. So notice the difference as you slip from one to the other, and do not deceive yourself that you actually feel more than you do. It is helpful to verbalize somewhat as follows: “Now I am aware of a tightness in my chest—but now I am visualizing the relation of my throat and chest—and now I merely know that I want to vomit.”

Experimenting in body-awareness is universally difficult and awakens resistance and anxiety. But it is profoundly important and worth spending many, many hours in doing—in moderate doses! Not only is it the basis for dissolving the “motor armor” (muscular tensions in which resistances are anchored) but it is also the means of curing all the psychosomatic ailments. Miracle-cures which are reported—such as the dissolving of an acute neurotic symptom within a few minutes—will seem natural to you once you feel the bodily structure of such symptoms. The neurotic personality creates its symptoms by unaware manipulation of muscles. Unfortunately, however, the neurotic personality cannot grasp that here symptom is figure and personality is ground—that this is a symptom/personality instance of the figure/ground of experience. He has lost contact with the ground of personality and only the symptom is in awareness. To the extent that this applies to you, much reintegration will be necessary before you clearly sense what you yourself are doing, how you are doing it, and why you are doing it. But this and later experiments in body-awareness, if seriously performed, take you directly on your way. What is important now is not to “succeed,” but simply to go ahead sincerely and without straining. If you take the attitude that you “ought” to be able to do whatever is put before you, you will at once limit what you may become aware of to what you now already know and expect. As much as you can, be accepting, experimental and curious—for what you discover about yourself in this way is fascinating and vitalizing knowledge! So, once again:

Walk, talk or sit down; be aware of the proprioceptive details without in any way interfering with them.

Do not be dismayed when you find this very difficult. You are so habituated to superficial “corrections” of your posture or way of speaking or whatever, that you find it nearly impossible to go ahead walking in a way that is “wrong” or speaking “in a bad tone,” even though you fully realize that any quick, deliberate readjustment will be as ineffective and ephemeral as most New Year's resolutions. And, in fact, your notion of what is the “right” way is likely to be unsound, since based perhaps on an incorrect military norm or on some actor's voice.

In doing this experiment you may suddenly become aware that you are divided into a nagger and a person nagged at. If so, notice this as vividly as you can. If possible, feel yourself in each role—as nagger and as “naggee.” Finally:

As you sit or lie comfortably, aware of different body-sensations and motions (breathing, clutching. contracting the stomach, etc.), see if you can notice any combinations or structures—things that seem to go together and form a pattern—among the various tensions, aches, and sensations. Notice that frequently you stop breathing and hold your breath. Do any tensions in the arms or fingers or contractions of the stomach and genitals scent to go with this? Or is there a relationship between holding your breath and straining your ears? Or between holding your breath and certain skin sensations? What combinations can you discover?

Since difficulty in doing the body-awareness experiment is reported by almost everyone, We begin our citation of various personal reactions with several which are exceptions:

“Concerning awareness of bodily sensations, I was apparently able to do what was asked for. My general reaction to it all was, ‘So What’”

This type of reaction we have previously commented on as “the proof of potency.” It can take the form, as here, of doing the experiment and being finished with it—before one has actually started!

“When I concentrate on the body, I become aware of insignificant twinges and aches, particularly in the extremities, which I do not usually notice in the normal flood of ongoing activity.”

We question the term “insignificant.” Anything may be evaluated as insignificant if one does not permit it to develop and reveal its significance. The wish to regard these phenomena as insignificant —and therefore not a matter of concern and responsibility—is readily understood. One can also understand resistance which rationalizes itself as precaution against becoming hypochondriacal:

”Since early childhood I have been sickly, and I have been taught and have taught myself to disregard my bodily aches and pains. I’ve played around with this experiment a little bit, and I’ve been able to feel, slightly, my body and all its quirks and tensions. That’s as far as I'm going to take it, for, after spending my earlier years ‘unlearning’ my body, I'm leery of allowing its aches and twists to take too much of my mind's attention.”

If it were our ultimate intention to acquaint you with the present malfunctioning of your organism and then to go off and leave you high and dry with no further effective course of action, this man's position would be unassailable. What we have tried to stress is that this is preliminary work, designed to give you better orientation with respect to your organism-environment situation as it now exists. Specifically, in this experiment, the aim is to have you explore the chronic, “meaningless” tensions which exist within your body. Once you yourself genuinely feel the need to change it on the basis of such direct awareness of the situation, then it becomes practical to present corrective procedures.

In doing the experiment many did experience vividly the splitting of their personalities into a nagger and a person nagged.

“I found that when I was aware of talking, sitting, or walking, I was forever trying to correct or readjust what I was doing.”

A few were able to identify themselves a little more strongly with the “naggee”—take his side for once—than was their ordinary practice:

“Rather than finding it difficult to avoid correcting my posture and speech, I found it wonderfully exhilarating! I was able to ignore that part of me which was nagging about correctness.”

We come now to several statements from persons who were rather astonished and disturbed by what they found going on in their bodies:

“In the beginning my feelings about this experiment were uncomplimentary in the extreme. It was about three weeks before I got any results. I then suddenly became aware of muscular tensions. All at once it seemed to me that I was a mass of knotted muscle. In fact, even as I write about it, it feels as though parrs of me are in knots. The most severe tensions seem to be in the small of the back, the back of the neck and in the upper part of the legs. I also noticed that as I did these experiments my mind would focus itself on a small irritation or pain and then, as I became increasingly aware of this minor irritation my whole consciousness would become directed toward it, obscuring every other part of my body. These tensions made me that resistances and tensions are part the same thing—or maybe are the same thing! I have some insight into the reason for some of the tension, but so far have had no success in relaxing it to any degree.”

The “insight” spoken of here is largely of the verbal and theoretical type which, while it may be perfectly correct so far as it goes, does not in itself contain the felt-significance which is prerequisite to genuine relaxation of the tension.

“Normally—that is, before I let my attention wander through my body"—I was aware of my body sensations merely as a general hum, a kind of poorly defined sense of general vitality and warmth. However, the attempt to subdivide this into component sensations was a source of genuine amazement. I became aware of a series of tensions in various parts of my body: knees and lower thighs as I sit in a chair; the region of the diaphragm; the eyes, shoulders and dorsal neck region. This discovery was quite astonishing to me. It was almost as if my feeling had entered a foreign body with tensions, rigidities, and pressures entirely different from mine. Almost immediately upon discovery I was able to relax these tensions. This, in turn, caused me to be aware of a sense of looseness and even elation; a very sudden freedom, pleasure and readiness for anything to come. Aside from these pleasurable sensations I was not aware of any emotions, anxieties, fears, connected with these tensions and their relaxation. In addition, despite the fact that I had become aware of the existence of these tensions and succeeded in relaxing them, they invariably returned, and later sessions repeated this discovery-relaxation-satisfaction cycle.”

The elated relaxation attained by this person is by no means to be sneered at. It is comparable to the effects of massage or the training in "progressive relaxation" given by Edmund Jacobson. What is missing is the final resolution of the conflicts producing the tensions. As stated, “they invariably returned.” However, since they yielded so readily, the conflicts involved in these particular tensions were presumably superficial, and, had the tensions been concentrated upon instead of being prematurely and repeatedly relaxed, they might fairly quickly have yielded up their meaning and been disposed of once and for all.

“The sense-of-body experiment was quite dramatic. With little trouble I was able to capture tensions of the abdominal muscles. It was very frightening at first. Leg and arm tensions came through clearly, as did a stiffness and tension of the upper jaw above the back teeth. It was very strong. like an intense toothache, but without pain. The only other time I can remember experiencing it was at a chug-a-lug beer party just before I got sick. Along with this tension was a tension of the neck muscles which made me feel as if I were going to be sick, I wonder if there is any connection.”

There is! What was present in both instances was the beginnings of, and the resistance to, the vomiting-reflex.

“There is an extreme tendency to get this exercise. Sleep overcomes me frequently. I notice a rigidity in my neck and jaw, I observe my respiration and find myself taking exaggeratedly deep breaths to assure my ability to breathe completely. I have some ability to visualize the relationship of parts of the body, but generally have to contract my muscles to continue the exercise. Throughout this experiment my jaw and neck are rigid, legs are tense, my fingers partially relaxed and back slightly arched.”

Instead of being as generalized as this, the holding-back tensions may seem highly focal, as in the following:

“I was doing the awareness of internal muscular tensions on a train, and I was therefore seated the first time I did it. Since then I’ve tried this particular phase lying down, standing still, and even when walking, but can't vouch for the correctness of all findings after the first one, for what noticed then was 'to me so surprising that now whenever I try to see if that tension is still there, I invariably find it, The point is, though, how do I know that my very concentration on it is not what's calling it up?

“Here's what happened: I was feeling around my insides when I finally got around to the region of my rectum, and there I noticed what seemed to me a silly tension. something of which I felt completely unaware before. There I was sitting with the muscles of my rectum as tightly clenched as possible.

“It was as if I was holding my breath with the lower part of my colon, if that analogy makes any sense. I called this tension silly because when I examined myself I found that I didn’t feel like defecating, but there I sat with the sphincters just about as tense as if I did. Corresponding with this found a tension band extending across my belly in the region of my navel not so strong, it seemed, as that of the rectum.

“Since then, while I'm lying down, I suddenly switch over to my rectal muscles to see if they're tight. and sure enough, they are! I don’t deliberately lie down to test this tension (for then I’d surely find it there) but rather look for it when I find myself on the bed, etc. At other times, when I'm sitting, don't set out to find it, but just switch over to it from whatever else doing. I always find it now. This might be purely natural, physical tension. one that should be there, but, at any rate, I've never noticed it before.”

This particular tension is well known. As much as a generation or so ago Ferenczi spoke of it as the very "manometer of resistance." It is present in all who are chronically constipated, and its release puts an end to this psychosomatic symptom.

“When I read the sentence: 'Notice the pains and aches that you ordinarily ignore', I thought that, quite on the contrary, it is when you have pains that you start being aware of the aching part; however, I was later surprised to find that when deliberately paying attention to the way I was sitting I first of all noticed a pain in the under part of the knee—which, it seemed, had been there before al—though I was really unaware of it.”

The above points up a verbal difficulty. To speak of a pain of which one is unaware sounds like a contradiction in terms; to be exact we need to speak of some unaware condition which, if it becomes aware, does so as the experience of pain.

“A much better way of achieving body-awareness would be to prescribe exercise and sports.”

Athletes are not outstanding for body-awareness, but gymnastics, dancing, and other activities which emphasize balance and coordination do tend to keep alive or even to revive body-awareness. Similar aids are massage, an electric vibrator, soaking in the bathtub, and applying a hot water bottle to areas of tension.

“I find suddenly I have nothing to do with my arms. I am aware of awkwardly crossing them on my chest. I put them in my pockets. I am aware of being uncomfortable. I keep shifting around and I'm suddenly aware of feeling confused. I get up almost immediately and walk about. My wife calls me for dinner and I am glad to leave the experiment.”

When attention centers in this fashion on parts of the body, but none of the behavior which you then produce gives satisfaction and ends the restlessness, these various abortive behaviors may sometimes be correctly construed as distractions designed to prevent your becoming aware of what it really is that you want to do with these parts of your body.

“Even in reading about this experiment I found myself conscious of rigid muscle tensions (especially in my extremities), and I was constantly holding my breath during intensive efforts of concentration. All of this occurred despite my interest in the material involved.”

Shall we say that here, despite the interest, there is apprehensiveness and some tendency to run away?

“My thoughts suddenly stop. I find myself slightly clenching my fists now. My chest seems to be building up as if to make me yell something. I can't think what, even when I try.”

The yell broke surface a month later in the form of an effective “telling off” of the fiancée's meddling parents!

“On certain parts of my body there was merely the feeling of blankness or dullness. I knew that the ‘middle of my back’ was there, but yet I couldn't feel it. Then an extremely ludicrous group of sensations occurred. Whenever I couldn't contact the ‘middle of my back,’ I immediately experienced some unusual sensations and twinges in the areas surrounding the uncontacted area. It felt extremely unusual, as if there were a void in one part of my body—a blank, insensitive spot which couldn't be felt.”

Others experienced blank spots between head and torso—that is, they had no felt-neck—or toes, genitals, stomach, etc.

Some reported that after working on this experiment they were fatigued. Others reported a terminal feeling of exhilaration. Some reported fatigue on the first attempts, exhilaration on later ones, Where the latter occurred, it was usually after some “meaningless” tension had become invested with significance.

“After repeatedly tracing out this same pattern—neck particularly stiff, lower lip strained out and protruding heavy breathing— I found there were certain situations I could recall that seemed automatically to bring on this whole business. These were all situations where I had to hold in resentment. The clearest instance came when I was going over my notes preliminary to typing this up. At the same time that I found myself breaking into a broad grin. I was aware that I'd been having this particular pattern of tensions and-— again all at the same time—I was aware of how put-upon and martyred I was feeling about having to do these experiments and report on them. It seemed that the resentment toward you had finally arrived! After that, when I've done the body-awareness experiment for any period of time I've ended up feeling, not all pooped-out the way I did at firsts but sort of refreshed and pulled-together.”

As a final example, we quote the following:

“After many repetitions I was successful in the proprioceptive experiment, although there were many resistances. I plan to carry on with this, for already I have noted some benefits, I have succeeded in a limited way in making contact with most parts of my body and I now find it very pleasant to do sot although at first it disturbed me. I find that the wisest procedure is to do it more frequently and for shorter periods of time than I first attempted. Becoming aware of my muscular tensions was a most alarming experience at first. There were so many of them, that my first impression was "Boy, am I a mess!" But further awareness has made them much less alarming, and, though I am making no conscious effort to relax the tensions, I now find contacting them almost pleasant. The main tensions I felt were in the muscles of the arms, legs, across the chest, the back of the neck, the jaw, across the temples, and a tension in the solar plexus, which I believe to be in the region of the diaphragm. In my last proprioceptive work-out I concentrated particularly on my stomach, and I am convinced that I made strong contact with it, felt a connection between certain activities there and the muscle tensions in my diaphragm across my chest, and, strangely enough, across my temples.”

EXPERIMENT 7: Experiencing the Continuity of Emotion

The first experiments centered on exteroception, the basis of your awareness of the "external world." Then, in the experiment immediately preceding this, the focus was on proprioception, which affords awareness of your actions and tendencies to action. Such separate stress on “outer” and “inner” was, however, merely preliminary, for each of these is but an abstraction from your whole experience, which includes both. In the present experiment we ask that you give special emphasis to neither but instead try to be aware of the gestalt that forms when you no longer insist on assigning separate, independent existence to “inner” and “outer.”

When the deliberate dichotomy between “external world” and “body” is not made, what you then experience is the organism environment field—the differentiated unity which comprises you-in-your-world. This ever-changing gestalt is never neutral but is of vital concern to you, for it is, actually, your life in the process of being lived. Its concernfulness, importance, relevance to your welfare is omnipresent. Experiencing the organism/environment field under the aspect of value is what constitutes emotion.

By such a definition emotion is a continuous process, since every instant of one's life carries in some degree a feeling-tone of pleasantness or unpleasantness. However, because in modern man this continuity of emotional experience is, for the most part, suppressed from awareness, emotion is regarded as a kind of periodic upheaval, which occurs unaccountably in one's behavior on those very occasions when one would most like to “exercise control?” Such eruptions-—which are so of course, to be dreaded and guarded against. Whenever possible, one endeavors to stay out of situations which might bring them about.

Most students of behavior, while apparently going along with the notion that the term “emotion” should apply only to such volcanic instances, are fully cognizant of other phenomena which are highly similar though less violent. These are usually referred to as “feelings,” and scholarly attempts to give a full account of this area repeatedly adopt the “Feelings and Emotions.” We believe that this practice attempts to break in half what actually is a continuum. What determines the place of a given emotional experience on this continuum depends upon the extent to which the organism's concern in experiencing the organism/environment gestalt has emerged from ground into figure.

Emotions considered as the organism's direct evaluative experience of the organism/environment field, is not mediated by thoughts and verbal judgments, but is immediate. As such, it is a crucial regulator of action, for it not only furnishes the basis of awareness of what is important but it also energizes appropriate action, or, if this is not at once available, it energizes and directs the search for it.

In primitive undifferentiated form emotion is simply excitement, the heightened metabolic activity and increased energy mobilization which is the organism's response to experiencing novel or stimulating situations. In the newborn this response is massive and relatively undirected. Then, as the child gradually differentiates the parts of its world—the constellations of events which confront it jointly from within and without on various occasions—it correspondingly differentiates its early, global excitement into selective, situationally-polarized excitements. These acquire names as specific emotions.

Emotions per se are not vague and diffuse, but are just as sharply differentiated in structure and function as is the person who experiences them. If a person experiences his emotions as confused and crude, then these terms apply also to him. From this it follows that emotions in themselves are not something to be rid of on such trumped-up charges as being impediments to clear thought and action. On the contrary, they are not only essential as energy—regulators in the organism/environment field but they are also unique deliveries of experience which have no substitute—they are the way we become aware of our concerns, and, therefore, of what we are and what the world is.

This function of emotion is grossly maligned in our society. As stated previously, it is regarded as arising only in crises, and even then only if the person “loses control of himself” and “gets emotional.” Calmness is prized as the very antithesis of emotion, and people strive to appear “cool, calm, and collected.” Yet calmness is not without emotional tone, for it is born of the directly evaluative experiencing of this particular situation as one which can be effectively handled, or, at the other extreme, as one about which nothing can be done. It is the fluid, open-ended situation, where one feels that he has much at stake and where his own actions may swing the balance, that is truly exciting. To affect calmness in such a situation is a “front,” achieved by suppressing manifestations of concern. To fool others in this way may be worthwhile if they are enemies, but to fool yourself is to mistake yourself for a foe and to deny yourself awareness of “what's up.”

Certain “negative feelings” are customarily denied emotional significance. Yet such things as frigidity and boredom, for instance, are actually very strong feelings—they are not mere absence of feeling! One feels ice as surely as one feels fire. Numbness—the absence of feeling where feeling is expected—is, paradoxically, an overpoweringly strong feeling, so strong that it is soon excluded from awareness. That is why, in these experiments, it is so difficult to seek out blind-spots and restore sensitivity.

Because of the discomfort which they produce in grown-ups who are working hard to squelch awareness of their own emotions, the emotions of children are not permitted to undergo natural development and differentiation. What the “adults” do not guess and bitterly resist having revealed to them is that their impatience in getting the child to “control his emotions” is rooted squarely in the fact that in their own childhood, too, “the authorities” had this same warped apprehensive attitude toward emotion. They themselves, since they were never allowed on the basis of unforced experience to differentiate adequately and thus outgrow childish emotionality, to a large extent never did. They merely suppressed it—and are still doing it! When the child behaves spontaneously, it stirs the same latent tendencies in the grown-ups and threatens the precariously maintained “maturity” of their own conduct. As a consequence, the child, too, must be coerced as quickly as possible into the suppression of strong feeling and into putting on once and for all the false-face of conventional “self-control?”

This is largely achieved by emphasizing the “external world” and its demands as reality, while the promptings of organismic needs, as made aware by proprioception, are, to a great extent, pooh-poohed as being “only in the mind.” The child “adjusts” to this unremitting pressure by dulling his body-sense and then devoting to the “external world” whatever interest he can still whip up.

This whole crusade for “control of the emotions” is, of course, itself emotionally grounded, and it is prosecuted in a most emotional fashion. It does not fail to get results, but the results achieved are not those which were offered in justification of the program. It does not eliminate “undesirable” emotions from the person, for it cannot repeal the way nature designed organisms to function. What it does succeed in doing is to complicate further the already intricate organism/environment field by setting up a great number of situations which, unless avoided, are immensely emotion-arousing!

For instance, if a “properly-trained” person should, in certain types of situations, “lose control of himself” and spontaneously discharge what he has been bottling up, then this becomes situation which gives rise to such intensely painful emotions as shame, chagrin, humiliation, self-contempt, embarrassment, disgust, etc. To forestall recurrence of such a demoralizing experience, he will tighten up his self-control to a still more suffocating degree of constriction.

This constitutes whatever apparent success one may have in “getting over being emotional.” What happens is that certain emotions, before they can get far in organizing action, or perhaps even get into awareness, are stifled and immobilized by the counter-emotions which they arouse, with the whole resulting deadlock more or less effectively excluded from awareness. To become aware of this unattractive set-up within one’s own personality brings back painful conflict, turmoil, anxiety and “dangerous” excitement. But, unless one is willing to accept this as the existing state of affairs, it is relatively immune to modification and hopelessly self-perpetuating.

In the present experiment we ask nothing heroic of you, but merely that you make a first approach to increased awareness of your emotions. If you have not made yourself too insensitive to your bodily posture and functioning, perhaps you can, by means of the following instructions, demonstrate to yourself that emotion is, as we have stated, the concernful experiencing of extero- and proprioception in combination.

Attempt to mobilize some particular pattern of body-action. For instance, tighten and loosen the jaw, clench the fists, begin to gasp. You may find that this tends to arouse a dim emotion—in this case frustrated anger. Now, if to this experience you are able to add the further experience—a fantasy, perhaps—of some person or thing in the environment which frustrates you, the emotion will flare up in full force and clarity.

Conversely, when in the presence of some frustrating person or thing, you may notice that you do not feel the emotion unless or until you accept as yours the corresponding body-actions; that is, it is in the clenching of the fists, the excited breathing, and so on, that you begin to feel the anger.

The celebrated James-Lange theory of emotion as a reaction to bodily movements—for instance, running away gives rise to fear or weeping gives rise to sorrow—is half right. What needs to be added is that the bodily actions or condition are also a relevant orientation to, and a potential manipulation of the environment; for example, it is not just running, but running away, running away from something, running away from something dangerous, that constitutes the situation of fear.

It is only in the recognition of your emotions that you can be aware, as a biological organism, either of what you are up against in the environment or of what special opportunities are at the moment presented. It is only if you acknowledge and accept your longing for someone or something—the assessment of the strength of your urge to seek out this person or thing as you confront the distance or obstacles that separate you—that you obtain orientation for appropriate action. It is only if you acknowledge and accept your grief—the sense of despair and not knowing where to turn as you confront the loss of someone or something of great concern to you—that you can weep and say good-bye. It is only if you acknowledge and accept your anger feeling the posture of attack as you confront persons or things which frustrate you, that you can mobilize your energies effectively for surmounting these obstacles in your path.

Psychotherapy has often been called “training of the emotions.” If it is to deserve this description, we can readily appreciate from the foregoing that it must employ a unitary method which concentrates both on orientation in the environment (analysis of the present situation, sensation, fantasy, memory) and on loosening the motor blocks of the “body.” Undue emphasis on either side can produce only pseudo-cures. The first puts too much weight on what is called “adjusting to reality,” which largely means complying more fully with the status quo as conceived and defended by “the authorities.” On the other hand, if the therapist works with the body alone, he may get the patient to simulate and express in the therapeutic session various feelings, but these, unfortunately will not match up with or will be actually irrelevant to what he experiences his situation to be when he is away from the therapists. Only if the “outer” and the “inner” can be harmonized and integrated can the patient ever be discharged as “cured.”

To sharpen your awareness of emotion, try the following:

Lie down and try to get the feel of your face. Can you feel your mouth? Your forehead? Eyes? Jaws? When you have acquired these feelings, ask, “What is the expression on my face?” Do not interfere, but simply permit the expression to persist. Concentrate on it and you will see how quickly it changes of itself. Within a minute you may feel a number of different moods.

So long as you are awake you are aware of something, and that something always carries an emotional tone of some sort. Anything which is a matter of complete indifference, lacking in concern for you—that is, devoid of emotion—simply does not set the figure/ground process in operation to an extent sufficient to enter into awareness.

It is all-important that you become aware of the continuity of your emotional experience. Once emotion is understood to be not a threat to rational control of your life but a guide which furnishes the only basis on which human existence can be ordered rationally, then the Way is open to the cultivation of continuous awareness of its wise promptings. To suppose that this would take extra time and attention is not correct. The analogy is crude but consider the case of the skilled driver of an automobile. For him to be continuously aware that his motor is running smoothly is no burden, for this is not the focus of attention. That the sound of the motor is part of the dynamic figure/ground of his driving, however, and that it is something with which he is concerned is indicated by the speed with which it becomes figure and claims more attention if it develops some slight& but significant, irregularity. Another driver—perhaps one who does not want to be bothered—will not hear the anomalous sound, or, if he does, will not recognize its meaning and will drive on for as long as he can, oblivious to the damage that may be occurring. To be continuously aware of emotion is possible only when you are willing to be aware of whatever is of genuine concern in your life, even if this be at variance with what others say or what you have previously told yourself.

Many people feel that their lives are empty when in fact they are merely bored and blocked from doing what would eliminate their boredom. Boredom is, though, a condition which can be rather easily tackled, so let us turn to its remedy.

In the experiment on concentration, we saw that boredom results when deliberate attention is paid to something uninteresting and resolutely withheld from what would fire one's interest and allow spontaneous formation of the figure/ground. Nature’s remedy is fatigue, the tendency to fall asleep or go into a trance where, once the deliberateness is relaxed, spontaneous interests can come to the fore as fantasies. If you will accept this as a natural process instead of fighting it, you can use the fantasies as a means of recognizing what it is that you would like to be doing. This is very simple when you are alone. Just close your eyes and permit a bit of dreaming. This will frequently precipitate a clear notion of what you want to do. In the company of others—where there are considerations of duty, keeping up appearances, trying not to hurt people’s feelings, fooling the boss, and so on—the situation is harder to handle. Even so, to admit to yourself that you are not interested may help you to find points of interest—if you cannot escape. But situations which chronically bore you you must either modify or abandon.

You have noticed how differently you feel when you are with different people One person bores you, another irritates you, one makes you feel stimulated and another depressed. You prefer, of course, whomever makes you feel at ease, happy, or important. In these reactions of yours there is often a considerable degree of “projection” (you are putting your own attitude into the other person and then saying that this person makes you feel thus and so) nevertheless, the following is often true: when you have a pronounced reaction to a particular person, it may be that person’s aware or unaware intention to produce this reaction in you. The melancholic may want to depress you, the fawner to inflate you, the tease to hurt you, the nagger to annoy you. Conversely, the animated person wants to interest you; the happy person wants to have you share his enjoyment. It is by developing sensitive awareness of one’s own reactions that one becomes a “good judge of personality.”

When one has overcome the tendency to project his own unwanted and disowned feelings and attitudes into other persons— that is, when he has come to respond to the other person rather than to himself as projected into the other person—he can detect when someone wants to drown him with words and facts, to hypnotize him with his monotonous voice, to put him off guard or bribe him with flattery, to depress him with whining and wailing. You can develop this helpful kind of intuition if you first ascertain just how you react to every person in your environment and then see whether or not your reaction is confirmed by his other behavior. In doing this you will also begin to make the separation between what is the projection of your own unaware tendencies and what is true intuition of the other person.

Imbalances of the personality are remedied, not by reining in and suppressing the hypertrophied but by concentrating on and lending additional weight and differentiation to the hypotrophied side. An overbalance of sensation is likely to produce hypochondria; of emotion, hysteria; of thinking, compulsion and frigid intellect. But such overbalances are always accompanied by under-balances in other spheres. The reestablishment of harmony and integration comes about through unblocking what is blocked. This previously impoverished side of the personality will then claim its due share of energy and attention and the hypotrophy will disappear.

Another experiment for becoming sensitive to your emotional experiences is the following:

Visit a gallery of paintings, preferably of wide variety. Take simply one quick look at each picture. What emotion, however faint, does it stir in you? If a storm is depicted, do you feel in yourself a corresponding turbulence? Do you quail a bit before the malevolence of that face? Do you feel annoyance at this garish splash of color? Whatever may be your quick impression of the painting, do not stay to make a dutiful inspection, but move on to the next. Notice the exquisite variety of emotional effects as you flash a glance at this canvas, then at that, and so on. If your response seems very faint and fleeting—or even just not there—do not take this as an unalterable state of affairs, but simply repeat this or similar experiments on other occasions.

If a gallery is not easily accessible use a book of reproductions.

The next experiment will be a genuine chore, for it asks you to seek awareness of emotions which we all prefer to avoid, the very ones we use to scare ourselves into self-control. Such unwanted emotions, however, must be brought to awareness and discharged before we become free again to enter situations where we have experienced them. Suppose that a man is afraid to speak in public because on one occasion when he tried it he “flopped” badly. Suppose that a girl is afraid to fall in love because once upon a time she was jilted. Suppose one is afraid to get angry because on a previous show-down with someone he was badly beaten. All of us have had numerous experiences which are now available to be conjured up to frighten us off from making fresh approaches to interesting situations where we have suffered mishaps in the past. These old experiences are “unfinished business,” which block us from undertaking attractive “new business.” You can begin to finish them by repeatedly re-experiencing them in fantasy. Each time you go through one of these painful episodes you will be able to recover additional details and to tolerate in awareness more and more of the blocked-off emotion which they contain.

In fantasy relive over and over again, each time trying to recover additional detail, experiences which have carried for you a strong emotional charge. What, for instance, is the most terrifying experience you can recall? Feel it through again just as it happened. And again. And again. Use the present tense.

Perhaps in the fantasy some words will come up, words which you or somebody else uttered on that occasion. Say them over and over aloud, listening to yourself say them, and feeling yourself forming and expressing them.

On what occasion were you most humiliated? Relive this repeatedly. As you do so, notice whether you tend to recall some still earlier experience of the same kind. If so, shift to it and work it through time after time.

Do the same for as many other kinds of emotional experience as you can find time for. Do you, for instance, have an unfinished grief situation? When someone dear to you died, were you able to cry? If not, can you do it now? Can you in fantasy stand beside the coffin and express farewell?

When were you most infuriated, most ashamed, embarrassed, guilty, etc.? Can you feel the emotion now? If not, can you feel what you do to block it?

In reporting reactions to the experiment of feeling their faces a number of students announce the discovery that theirs is a pokerface. Some express pride that they can cover up in this fashion— and say they have absolutely no intention of foregoing what they take to be the advantages of hiding behind a screen. Does this imply that they see all of their interpersonal relations as one never-ending game of poker? If, as they say, they don't take off the poker-face even in private, against whom, in this case, are they playing?

Almost all find it difficult to perform the experiment, as indicated in the following typical example:

“The emotion-awareness experiment has so far aroused too much resistance in to give significant results. The main resistances were a feeling of uncomfortableness and boredom. I was unable successfully either to locate my facial expression or to note whether or not it was changing. The only expression I did note was one in which my lower lip pressed upward and outward in relation to the upper one. This I related to impatient cynicism, when I am hearing something (usually in a business way) that I don't quite believe. At other times I noticed a frozen quality to my face. This disturbed me to the extent of making me stop the experiment as soon as I became too acutely conscious of it. I have also become aware of my face under the influence of anger. Once again I found awareness of this particular expression too disturbing to linger on for too protracted a time.”

Some stated their expression did not change, but remained rigid, while others said that it changed so rapidly and constantly they could not name it. Some said that just as soon as they labeled what they felt in their features they immediately recalled situations for which it was appropriate; while others said that the only way they could get any expression into their face was by first thinking of some emotional situation and then noting what happened in their facial muscles.

Discovery that their faces were relatively inexpressive gave some students new grounds for nagging themselves:

“I found, for the most part that my face did not seem very expressive and often felt rather oafish. My mouth was frequently open and my eyes squinted. Both are habits which I can break only if I maintain an awareness of how I use my face.

“When excited, I found that my face was much more expressive. If I can control this I’m sure that I’ll be a more interesting person.”

This reflects the universal tendency to try to work on a symptom directly rather than on its underlying basis. To control the features deliberately is not expressiveness, but play-acting, and, unless one is a good actor, is likely to be just “making -faces.” In the training of actors it is recognized that one can play a stage role adequately only if one has had somewhat similar experiences in one’s personal life and can again sense effectively the facial expressions and other behavior which accompanied these experiences. In the Stanislavski method of training actors (as described, for instances in An Actor Prepares) great emphasis is laid on the cultivation of “sense-memory” and “affective-memory.” What we are after, however, is not to teach you to play stage-roles convincingly, but, rather, to act yourself!

EXPERIMENT 8: Verbalizing

To verbalize means “to put into words.” If we describe objects, scenes or activities, what we do is say their names along with other words which have to do with their arrangement, relationships, special properties, and so on. We verbalize what they are as based on seeing, hearing, or otherwise directly experiencing them. If we reason about them, we manipulate the sets of words that describe them. This may be without further direct experience, for, once anything is named, its name can for many purposes serve as proxy. Maneuvering names instead of the named objects may be tremendously labor-saving and efficient—as, for instance, in planning how to move a heavy piano. But note! Moving names around does not in and of itself actually move what is named.

Healthy verbalizing usually takes off from what is non-verbal— objects, conditions, the state of affairs—and terminates in the production of non-verbal effects. This is not to say that verbalization may not on occasion be useful when it is about what is already verbal—books, plays, what someone said—but this tendency to talk about talk is in our times a disease! When one fears contact with actuality—with flesh-and-blood people and with one’s own sensations and feelings—words are interposed as a screen both between the verbalizer and his environment and between the verbalizer and his own organism. The person attempts to live on words and then wonders vaguely why something is amiss!

In the “intellectual” there is this hypertrophy of verbalizing. He attempts in compulsive and obsessive ways to “be objective” about his personal experience—which largely means to theorize in words about himself and his world. Meanwhile, and by this very method, he avoids contact with the feeling, the drama, the actual situations. He lives the substitute life of words, isolated from the rest of his personality, contemptuous of the body, and concerned with the verbal victories of righteousness, arguing, making an impression, propagandizing, rationalizing—while the genuine problems of the organism go unattended.

But this word disease is not limited to the intellectual. It is universal. Partial awareness of the disorder leads people to write books bearing such titles as The Tyranny of Words, and the general effort of semantics in recent years has been to reconnect words to at least the environmental non-verbal reality by insisting that each word refer to a non-verbal something. Our experiments on actuality and abstraction have been in this direction. But the semanticists often use their precision with regard to the “things out there” to exhaust their time and attention and thus avoid getting around to the semantic problems of what is “in here.” They rarely mention the biology of language—its sensory-motor roots.

Our technique for exposing and becoming aware of the pathological aspects of verbalizing is, as with other functions, to regard it first of all as an existent activity. This applies whether the words are spoken aloud or whether they are “merely thought,” that is, occur as subvocal speech. Speaking aloud comes first—that is how a child is taught the language—but one can later put this publicly acquired language to private use as thinking. As such, in the integrated personality thinking is a useful, active instrumentality in handling the complex relationships of aware need, imagined means of fulfillment, and the overt behavior which makes concrete what has been imagined. Most adults, however, look upon thinking as independent and prior: “It is easy to think, but hard to express the thoughts.” This is due to a secondary block, one’s fear of how others will react to one’s thoughts if they are voiced. Once a person gets to speaking at a good pace, warms up to his subject, loses the fear of committing himself, and stops rehearsing his statements before uttering them, it becomes obvious that, when there is nothing to fear, speech and thought are identical.

In order to integrate our verbal and thinking existence, we must become aware of it. The means of orientation with regard to speaking is listening:

Listen to your own production of words in company. If you have an opportunity, have your voice recorded. You will be surprised, perhaps chagrined, at how it sounds. The more your concept of your self differs from your actual personality, the more unwilling you will be to recognize your voice as your own.

Next, recite aloud poem that you know, and once again listen to yourself. Do not interfere by trying to speak more loudly clearly, or expressively. Just repeat the recitation, however it comes, and listen until you can feel the integration of speaking and listening.

Next, recite the same poem internally—"in your mind.” By now it should be easy to hear yourself saying it. Also, in doing your ordinary reading listen to yourself reading subvocally. At first this will slow you up and make you impatient, but before long you will be able to listen as quickly as you can read—and the practice will vastly improve your memory by increasing your contact with the material read.

Finally begin to listen to your subvocal thinking. At first, when listened to, you as the internal speaker will go dumb, but after a while the babbling will start up again. You will hear incoherent “crazy” bits of sentences floating around. If this produces too great anxiety, talk to yourself deliberately a little: “I am now listening to myself I don't know what to think. I shall do the now-I-am-aware experiment silently. Yes, it sounds just as it did aloud. Now I have forgotten to listen...” etc.

Notice the modulation of your internal voice. Is it angry, wailing, complaining, bombastic? Do you harangue? Does your voice sound childish? Does it go on pedantically explaining matters in detail even after the meaning has been grasped?

Persist until you get the feeling of the integration—the going together, the belonging together—of listening and talking. This internal dialogue is what Socrates called the essence of thinking. If you can come to feel the functional unity of the talking and listening, your thinking will become much more expressive. At the same time the part of your thinking that is not expressing anything, that is simply like gears which whir around without meshing and pulling a load, will tend to disappear.

In your ordinary conversation and that of your companions, take note of the number and kind of supernumerary expressions: “don't you think?”; “right?”; “well”; “maybe”; “you know”; “I mean”—as well as meaningless grunts, all of which serve only to prevent the slightest amount of silence in the vocal flow. Once you have observed these face-savers and pleaders-for-attention, they will begin to vanish from your speech and leave it smoother and more to the point.

When you have mastered internal listening, proceed to the decisive step—the production of internal silence! This is very difficult. Most people cannot endure even external silence. Do not mistake internal silence for blankness, trance, cessation of “mind.” Only talking-and-listening are in abeyance—all other awareness persists.

Try to keep internally silent, to refrain from subvocal talking—-yet remain awake and aware. At first you will be able to do this for no more than a few seconds at a time, for the thinking will obsessively start up again. So, to begin with, be content simply to notice the difference between internal silence and talking, but let them alternate. An excellent way to do this is to coordinate them with your breathing. Try to be without words while you inhale. Then, on the exhalation, let whatever words have formed speak themselves subvocally. If you are alone, you will find it helpful to say the words in a way that is intermediate between vocal and subvocal—that is, whisper them. If you persist in your performance of this experiment, what you visualize will become brighter, your body-sensations more definite, your emotions clearer, for the attention and energy used up in pointless talking will now be invested in these simpler and more basic functions.

Poetry, the art of expressive resides in the ability to maintain silent awareness of need, image, feeling, memory, at the very time that the words are welling up, so that, instead of being banal stereotypes, the words when uttered are plastically adapted to a richly experienced figure. Such words express what had a nonverbal beginning.

Listen to and interpret your subvocal speaking—its rhythm, tone, catch-phrases. To whom are you speaking? For what purpose? Are you badgering and nagging? Cajoling? Do you turn the phrases as if you were holding back something, you know not what? Are you trying to impress? Is your thinking tentative and bewildered? Is it a bluff? Do you admire the way the words roll along? Is there always an audience?

Much of what you customarily feel as evaluation and moral judgment is your subvocal speaking in such internal dramatic situations. If you can stop the internal talking and maintain internal silence, you will arrive at a simpler appreciation of the facts and your reactions to them.

We shall now quote a few comments from students about this experiment on verbalizing. Most reported disappointment with the sound of their recorded voices, for it was higher, thinner, less forceful, and so on, than had been supposed; a few, however, were agreeably surprised. The significance of this experienced discrepancy was, in several cases, strongly disputed.

“That people’s conception-of-self differs from their actual personality I would agree, but inability to accept one’s recorded voice as one's own is no measure of this. What about the fact that the more one comes to hear one’s recorded voice the more one comes to recognize it as sounding like one’s own voice? Are we to gather that this would mean that one’s concept-of-self was coming to be more nearly like one’s actual personality? I think not!”

Although the above quotation concerns a relatively minor issue, let us briefly consider it. One can distort an indicator when it points to something that is unwelcome. If a man stepped on a scale to weigh himself, disliked the figure at which the pointer stopped, and then, to correct matters, bent the pointer, this would certainly not constitute a valid gain or loss in weight, but, provided he could in addition blot out awareness of the fact that he had worked directly on the indicator rather than on what it indicated, he could fool himself into believing that what he had disliked had now been corrected. If after the initial shock of hearing one’s recorded voice, one rationalizes about the differences in bone conduction of sound versus air conduction, the imperfections of the recording medium, etc., one can readily reconcile himself to the travesty which the recording instrument makes of what he still believes to be his true voice. Nevertheless, to come to accept one’s recorded voice as actually one’s own does, at least in some degree, bring closer together one’s self-conception and one’s actual personality.

Listening to subvocal speaking brought forth a variety of comments:

“There was a badgering quality to my subvocal tone. It seems as if Jim not really satisfied with things as they exist, and I'm forever at myself in an angry, snarling way.”

* * *

“I became aware that I was not merely speaking to myself, but it was as if I were delivering long sermons to an invisible congregation. Some of it was nonsensical—didn't hang together logically—but all of it was in the same aggressive, forcefully persuasive manner that I find I consider necessary to good public speaking. It was slow and very deliberate.”

The attempt to produce internal silence aroused the greatest interest and diversity of reports.

“I find it utterly impossible to develop what you call ‘internal silence.’ In fact, to be quite frank, I'm pretty sure that such a thing is impossible, and, if it’s really true that you get people reporting that they attain it. Are you quite sure they aren’t just pulling your leg?”

* * *

“I succeeded in maintaining internal silence for short intervals, but it was boring and a complete waste of time. This is a momentary, unnatural state of affairs because the thought intrudes that one must return to normal activity because there are things that have to be attended to and accomplished which are of interest and consequence.”

* * *

“In trying to achieve inner silence I feel my throat muscles getting so tense that I feel I have to stop this silly business or I’ll scream.”

* * *

“l found that keeping ‘internally silent’ made me very nervous and restless. After doing it for about three minutes I was nearly ready to jump out of the window. It reminded me of the child’s game of seeing who could stay under water longest.”

* * *

“The internal silence experiment is something I can’t take. It was as if I wasn’t breathing and I gasped for breath to be out of it. But I know it is this lack of internal silence that keeps me awake for a couple of hours every night after I go to bed; this inner voice keeps droning on and won’t stop.”

* * *

“I hadn’t really expected to be able to produce any complete silence and was all the more pleased, though puzzled, to see that after all it was possible and that it created a delightful, somehow complete feeling.”

* * *

“This is amazing! I can do it only for short stretches, but when I manage it, it is really wonderful, and what a relief from all that incessant internal jabbering!”

* * *

“I can't keep from talking with one or more inner voices at once. This silence that I’m after happens for a duration that I really can’t reckon but it is practically no time at all. Then what happens is that I start making notes on my mental scratch-pad—that is, I start rehearsing a competent description of when and why the silence breaks, and this, of course, constitutes a break in itself. For instance, first there’s silence. Then I notice the sound of rain and a label sneaks into the silence: rain. Mental scratch-pad makes note that the first thing to creep in was the name of something, and very soon the whole business deteriorates into my usual subvocal ranting.”

* * *

“I had no luck at all with internal silence until last Sunday when I was walking in the park with my husband. For a while I was not preoccupied with the usual ‘troubles’ which clutter up my ‘mind.’ Suddenly I pinched the poor man and exclaimed: ‘It happened!’ This, of course, ended the silence, but, for quite a while, without any thinking, I had been experiencing the landscape, the wind, the rhythm of walking, and other such things. If this is the experience of internal silence, to call it ‘wonderful’ is understatement.”

* * *

“The most exciting and difficult experiment was my attempts to produce inner silence. Most of the time I did not succeed, but on occasions when I did for a few seconds I was amazed at the result, which was a feeling of tremendous potential power and relaxation. Unfortunately, as soon as a few seconds had passed, I began to speak internally about this very success—which, of course, immediately sabotaged it.”

EXPERIMENT 9: Integrating Awareness

If you have seriously worked through the preceding experiments—on body-sensations, emotions and verbalizing—you may already begin to feel more alive and more spontaneously expressive. We hope you are gradually recognizing that much of the constant effort you supposed necessary to hold yourself together is actually unnecessary. You do not fall apart, go to pieces, or “act crazy,” if you let up on your deliberate holding back, forcing attention, constant “thinking” and active interference with the trends of your being. Instead, your experience begins to cohere and to organize into more meaningful wholes. This, in contrast with forced, deliberate, pseudo-integration, contrived and maintained by determined suppression of some behavior and effortful squeezing out of other responses, is genuine self-integration.

When you relinquish your determination to make your behavior fit the arbitrary, more or less fixed pattern that you have taken over from “the authorities,” aware need and spontaneous interest come to the surface and reveal to you what you are and what it is appropriate for you to do. This is your nature, the very core of your vitality. Energy and attention have gone into forcing yourself, because of a mistaken feeling of “oughtness,” along lines that run counter to your healthy interests. To the extent that you regain and redirect this energy, the areas of restored vitality will progressively increase. It is nature that cures—natura sanat. A wound heals or a bone knits by itself. There is nothing the physician can do but to clean the wound or set the bone. It is the same with your personality.

Every method ordinarily used in psychotherapy is, as single and isolated, relevant, but also inadequate. Since physical and social environment, body, emotion, thinking, speech, all exist in a unitary functioning which is the total organism/environment process, to give attention to any one of these components is appropriate for promoting personality integration. Those methods which abstract from the living unity one of these parts and concentrate on it more or less exclusively—for example, on the body-sensations and muscular-tensions, or on the interpersonal relationships, or on emotional training, or on semantics—should in the long run prove efficacious. Even if the method limits itself to a part, the effects tend to spread through the total unity of functioning. But it is reasonable to conclude that such partial methods, since they have the status of being merely abstractions from the concrete actuality, are in isolation not the essence of therapy, but only various approaches with therapeutic intent.

The danger in the use of any one of them exclusively is that the effects will not spread sufficiently to those areas which the particular method neglects. If any partial approach is pursued, in isolation from the others, the unaware resistance in other components of total functioning will increase to such a degree as either to make further progress in the selected approach impossible unless or until other kinds of material are admitted, or else to achieve a “cure” in terms of a newt arbitrary pattern. This will be whatever the “therapeutic authority” sets up as a model—for instance, the “spontaneous physical man,” or the “adjusted personality,” or the “psycho-person,” or what not. Since you are working with the concrete actuality and not merely with an abstracted version of yourself, fitting yourself to one of the Procrustean beds is not the maximum that you can achieve.

Have you thus far begun to develop a feeling for, and an acceptance of, the unitary functioning of the organism/environment field? Can you begin spontaneously, not just on the basis of verbal logic, to see, for instance, the interconnectedness of the human sciences—biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and so on—and, likewise, of the arts?

Our experiments so far have given special attention to various areas of your experience. Since these areas, when separately considered, are abstractions from your total functioning, let us now work on shifting from one area to another and note that, as you shift, your situation remains the same but that you express yourself differently, depending on which aspect of the situation receives your attention.

On the basis of whatever awareness you now have, try to form sentences that, with more or less adequacy, express the same situation successively in terms of the body, the feelings, the speech-habit the social relations. As an example: “I am clenching my jaw and tensing my fingers… In other words, I am angry, but not letting much of my anger express itself… In other words, my voice has a quivering edge but is soft and restrained… In other words, in our society the possibility of continued contact among persons depends on certain limitations of overt behavior.”

Each of these formulations is a relevant and essential insight into the living situation. Practice passing easily from one to another, for this will deepen and broaden your orientation with respect to where you are and what to do.

We quote a few excerpts from students’ reports to give some notion of the range of reactions to this experiment on shifting:

“My greatest disappointment with myself in the experiments is that I have thus far been unable to make spontaneous interrelations of the various functions… I have been able to reconstruct all my reactions to a given situation in retrospect, but never at the time they were occurring. I can only say that I have confidence that by continuing the experimenting I will eventually achieve the desired integration of function.”

* * *

“This so-called experiment is ridiculous! All this verbal ritualism contributes nothing. Awareness is too sharp, acute, and complex a thing to be expressed in these—quite likely fallacious—‘in other words’ sequences. To say one thing is not to say another. This is a hopeless technique for expressing different aspects or facets of the total awareness. It only distracts and corrupts.”

* * *

“Having worked through all the experiments so far I do feel a certain amount of self-integration and aliveness. It is a good feeling!”

* * *

“I feel I am just beginning to get a feeling of what’s really going on. I’m beginning to feel some sense of what it is to live as a part of the world… As far as being able to integrate the various areas is concerned, it will take a lot more work.”

* * *

“If the material were presented with more understanding of the difficulties of the layman and with a clearer presentation of just what is required, I think it would be more beneficial.”

* * *

“There must be something I’ve missed. I can’t feel an integrated awareness. It’s as though I don’t want to, as though were trying very hard to avoid it, to escape from it, not face it. Why, why, why?”

* * *

“I honestly think my experience begins to cohere in more meaningful wholes. As a matter of fact, there’s no doubt about it at all, but for some obscure reason I'm reluctant to admit that you’ve helped -me.”

* * *

“Recently several times felt the rare elation associated with a sudden functional unity, the elation of dawning awareness, and this sudden insight when it has come has made me all the more anxious to continue with these experiments. My original doubts about putting any trust in your procedures are gradually fading away.”

* * *

“This experiment was fascinating, partly because the results were so different from what I had expected after reading the instructions. After doing the previous experiments I thought that just putting them together would be simple. Actually, it took a lot of practice. But what I came up with was this; when you talk about shifting from one area to another, it’s not really a shift. For instance, when I formed sentences that would differentiate, say, the body-situation from the feeling-situation, I found that they are the same. The body, no less than the feelings and the speech-habit, is a part of something —it’s an integral part of functioning something. And when one is able to give his attention to the different aspects of the same situation, then all the aspects combine to produce the total felt-meaning of the situation. What you’ve done here, without saying so, is to give us the very same experiment as No. 4, only this time the unity to be differentiated instead of being a painting or a piece of music, is to be ourself.”