Postcards from Ulysses

I have seen reference to Gavito as the “philosopher of tango.”  I think it is true in the truest sense: in so far as he eschews mere philosophizing.  In the first video clip below, you can hear Gavito tell his students that he is NOT an historian, a psychologist, or a windbag.  It is so easy to be a windbag.  It is not so easy to dance–to really let Life express itself through you and to allow yourself to express something through Life.  He tells his students that teaching tango is not teaching philosophy.  Only because of this is he a great philosopher.  Real dancing IS a Love of Wisdom, a true Love that goes beyond mere philosophizing.  Without Love, you cannot dance, and the thing you Love with this Love is Wisdom, Emptiness, Compassion, Life.  A valuable lesson and warning for every dancer: no matter how sincere we are, no matter how UN-intellectual, the ego will still make ideas.  We will still pass judgements on ourselves, on our partners, on other dancers, on those who don’t dance, on those who don’t like our politics, on those who don’t think the same way we do.  We will still try to do our idea of tango.  To become mindful of this is not psychotherapy in the mundane sense.  It is instead a genuine possibility to heal our suffering.  So Gavito is also the great psychotherapist of tango.  Authentic dancing is as good as, if not better than, equivalent time spent with an analyst or therapist.  Anyone want to put together a study?  It should be studied.  Intuition tells me they will confirm this hypothesis: tango lessons can do as much good as therapy.

Related to this is another important lesson from Gavito the philosopher and psychologist: don’t DO tango.  When you watch Gavito dance, you see glorious moments of non-doing.  In the brief opening sequence to the “Tango y Nada Mas” clip (the first clip below), the non-doing shines.  In the second clip, “Tango Is Non-doing,” the focus is on non-doing with respect to emotional content in the dance.  He gives the exact Alexander Technique formulation for achieving non-doing and arriving at genuine emotional content: awareness, connection, and acceptance.  The Four Skills are the foundation of good tango because they are the foundation of all successful human action.  He brings attention to his partner, to the music, to the environment.  He remains connected to these.  He accepts what he is, what she is, and what the music does from moment to moment.

The Alexander Technique is the Philosophy of tango because, like Gavito, it eschews philosophizing.  One can speak of this or that ideal, but in the end, the Technique is about manifesting the ideal.  Every gesture reveals our Love of Wisdom and Life.  We can see it in how we dance, but also in how we sit in a chair.  A great dancer may not be concerned with how he sits in a chair, or how he speaks to his wife, or how he deals with a stranger on the street.  However, as great as his accomplishment on the dance floor may be, he is still missing something.  Some of Tango’s potential has escaped him.  By finding it, even magnificent dancing becomes better.  For the beginner, it just makes the road to mastery more peaceful, more joyful, and even a little easier.

Video Clip 1, “Tango y Nada Mas”

Video Clip 2, "Tango Is Non-doing" 

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The title for the book Postcards from Ulysses reflects the mythological dimension that it engages.  All of the ideas of the book are like postcards from the heroes who have gone before us, providing insight into what we need to do (or non-do) to achieve "success" in our own journey.  But the book also contains messages written by Ulysses to his son in the form of short letters.  He writes these from Egypt where the god Hermes has taken him to inquire into the nature of humanity.  These “postcards” allow for a more mercurial presentation of the core ideas of the book, and they are meant to engage the reader’s mind in a different way.  Ulysses has embodied insights into many of the principles presented in the book, and he expresses them in physical language.  The meeting of East and West is deepened in these postcards because Ulysses here becomes much more of a Buddha, speaking from insight gained through an intensive practice of mindfulness and meditation.

 
You can take a look at a summary of the book by clicking HERE.  There are selections from the postcards posted below.

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     Aiden O’Shea is not the first poet to see poetry as a spiritual path.  A strong tradition exists in Japan, for instance, in which the Way of Poetry is seen as the Way of the Buddha.  O’Shea holds a deep respect for Japanese culture, including a great admiration for Hakuin.  Consequently, he harbors a concern for a problem Hakuin discovered.  Hakuin had quite a talent for calligraphy, but as a young man he saw a display of calligraphy that startled him.  He felt strongly that the masters who produced the works he saw had some deep insight into the nature of reality which he had yet to attain.  He promptly threw away his calligraphy materials and did not pick up a brush for 30 years.  By that point, sometime after he turned 50, he had attained the deepest insight promised by the mytho-poetic example of the Buddha himself.  His subsequent works are considered profound masterpieces.
    O’Shea freely admits that, like the young Hakuin, he lacks significant insight into the nature of reality.  Why shouldn’t he throw away his pen and burn his many journals full of insignificant poetic musings?  Why should we bother to read this book of poetry?  O’Shea advocates naive art (not “naive” in the most common sense of the term, but “naive” strictly referring to art produced without fundamental insight into the nature of self and world) first and foremost on the grounds that poetry works as a Way independently of the poet.  Some of the points he makes intersect with those made by T.S. Eliot, who noted that a poet may be immoral, boring, or foolish, while his poems may nonetheless exhibit an astounding radiance and depth of insight.  Likewise, Anne Sexton mentioned that her psychotherapist thought her poems exhibited insights which she had not yet consciously realized.  How do such things happen?  A common way of framing an answer goes something like this: by means of Inspiration, the poet visits the place where the mystic lives.  This strikes me as not quite right.  It seems to me that, somehow or other, the poet has his anchor cast over a place where drops of Bliss rise to the surface of the waters like drops of oil trickling slowly from a deep ocean crevasse.  The in the mind of the mystic, the crevasse has opened wide.  It has swallowed him, and he has swallowed it.  
    One can, like Hakuin, decide to go through that “process” first.  Though this impossible swallowing is uncaused, certain kinds of discipline seem to make it more likely.  Other sorts of discipline, or a relative lack thereof, allow one to go on riding the waves of Inspiration, tasting those drops of Bliss, and then coming back to the shore, in most cases with only the poem itself retaining any traces of wisdom.  O’Shea has chosen a third option: to follow art as a spiritual discipline that makes way for the impossible uncaused swallowing of the ocean and the source of Bliss.
    For the reader, any of these choices can offer great boons, even the latter two.  O’Shea sees language as a completely natural phenomenon, likening it to fruit growing on trees.  Even a relatively young tree has within it the potential to offer rich, delicious, and nurturing fruit.  As the poet matures, his fruit becomes more vigorous, more complex, more expressive of its terroir, and ever more nurturing–especially if that important insight into the nature of things pokes into his consciousness with increasing clarity.  
    O’Shea views his poetry as a record of his work toward insight, something like a poetic phenomenology of the process of transcendence which can delight the reader as reader and as seeker, and which, as it proceeds, offers greater and greater potential to spark insight into and appreciation for this very life.  Because of the nature of the aesthetic, that potential begins with the first authentic poem the poet allows to emerge.  If genuine Inspiration germinates the poem, it carries the potential for spiritual sustenance.  In point of fact, O’Shea thinks that Poetry writes poetry, hence one facet of his conception of Poetry in Search of the Way.  I would put the matter this way: the poet cannot work on the poem, but only on himself.  By working on himself, he allows something to work through him.  This is also what ultimately works on him.  To let poetry work on the poet makes poetry a Way.  It leads to Poetry's writing of poems, Life shining Light on Life.  And it means that experience comes to the poet, confirming the self of the poet, rather than the self of the poet going out to confirm experience and the objects of experience.  Even brilliant poets can miss how this works, and though their best work emerges in spite of it, their development as human beings still suffers.  
    Poetry in Search of the Way also means that poetry as a path involves contemplation and careful, compassionate observation.  It requires a meditation practice carried out as part and parcel of the Work, which may mean meditating in the stereotypical sense, but more importantly signifies doing the Work of poetry as a spiritual practice.  In meditation one searches oneself out.  This is not self-help or getting to know oneself as popularly understood and practiced.  Rather, it is a very rigorous and often uncomfortable movement into the Unknown.  The ox-herding pictures describe this process well.  One seeks what cannot be sought and finds what cannot be found, but one nonetheless begins by searching, and one never stops the process of observation to which searching gives birth.
    Poetry in Search of the Way also suggests that poetry must have its ceremonial dimension.  In the East we find the Way of tea, the Way of archery, the Way of calligraphy, and so on, strictly ritualized into rigorous, disciplined ceremonies.  Likewise the poet who wishes to allow poetry to work on him as a path to realization must establish rigorous, disciplined ceremonies for the making and reading of poems.  O’Shea unabashedly stole this conception from Ontological Realism, a literary movement which argues, among other things, that contemporary artists should establish their own artistic ceremony as a way to cultivate insight and originality.  This goes beyond the superstitions of writing at the same time every day, wearing the same pair of sweat pants, and using the same type of pen.  Such habits simply point toward the deeper spiritual currents which the artist as human being often fails to touch.  One must deliberately approach poetic action as Way.  O’Shea thinks of his work as Ontological Realist in spirit, and he has tried in the creation of these poems to allow poetry itself to define its Way, and to allow that Way to work on the poet and his readers.  One must take care not to reduce Ontological Realism to a poetics of mindfulness, or a conscious-conscientious poetics.  In doing so one might successfully capture much of the energy of this non-movement, but one also performs an action quite antithetical to Ontological Realism: one reduces it.  It then becomes a poetics of differance, a view of it which belies the fact that its mindful movements, when executed gracefully, neither differ nor defer.
    As I said, the reduction captures much of the energy of Ontological Realism, and it is accurate to a degree.  But its accuracy depends on what kind of Will goes into a text.  If the text has been tempered by a Will to a System, it has a great deal in its margins, a great deal of difference, with a great deal deferred.  Ontological Realism, on the other hand, does not seek to systematize–it seeks to quicken.  It seeks to present and precipitate authentic impulse, spontaneous experience, a standing within the now-not-now of Life.  The means (a means without Will–i.e., a means that involves non-doing) by which Ontological Realism tries to accomplish its awakenings involves a carefully self-designed religion of the aesthetic.  The poet, in this case O’Shea, follows his own poetic Way, his own strict and rigorous discipline, the repetition of which can help him attain spontaneity, insight, and creative artistic embodiment of experience, embodiment seen by us in every gesture, on and off the page.  Although ultimately self-created, the poet's Way nonetheless retains unbroken fidelity to the wisdom traditions.
    Minor White represents a great example of this making-into-a-ceremony.  When he taught photography workshops the textbooks had “nothing to do with photography.”  According to John Daido Loori Roshi, who studied with White, you would find yourself reading Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery and Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons.  You would also find yourself waking up at four in the morning to go through movements with a modern dance instructor.  Daido Roshi explains that making a picture of a tree meant approaching the tree with reverence and asking its permission to make the picture.  One might sit in front of the tree, meditating for many minutes, perhaps many hours, and one might get up having no idea whether or not one actually remembered to release the shutter and capture an image.  One would also realize that it didn’t matter.  The thing that really mattered had happened.  The photo was an afterthought, a nice consequence, but quite nonessential.
    Archery presents another fine example.  Anyone can pick up a bow and shoot it.  And, as Loori and the other students would have found out by reading Herrigel, a Westerner can certainly figure out how to hit the target with a Japanese bow.  But some Master made archery into a ceremony.  The student learns to approach the shooting area, string the bow, nock an arrow, draw the bow, and release it in a strictly prescribed manner.  Since the student must relinquish the goal of hitting the target, the ritual has nothing to do with archery.  It has to do with joining Life, joining Life’s energy, its rhythm, its breathing, and its rich intelligence.  Thus it has nothing to do with anything else but archery–and so archery becomes a Way.  As does poetry.  And in this art of poetry, just as in archery, one does not aim at targets, one does not point at things and try to hit them with words.  One could say in fact that this poetry does not refer in the standard sense.  It simply is.  It arises as an outward manifestation of inner events, like flowers blossoming on a bush, or fruit ripening on a tree.  
    That is what the student of this discipline would like to see anyway.  In the beginning, it occurs as rarely as the occurrence in archery of allowing a good shot to happen.  And note, to emphasize the point again, one can be a Master of archery without consistently hitting the target, though hitting the target seems to happen quite often for most Masters.  This relates to another idea one finds in Ontological Realism, one which helps explain the nature and role of discipline envisioned by it.  O’Shea believes that, as a criterion of Mastery, every true Master must transcend his discipline.  Having transcended it, the Master will not necessarily abandon it.
    Perhaps only a true Master can establish a new discipline that will work for large numbers of people.  However, given the rapid pace of change, many contemporary artists will find already established disciplines lacking in some way or other.  For some poets, iambic pentameter is as good as dead; haiku belongs to the Japanese, some of whom may find it outdated; abstract expressionism is a moment in time many painters care not to relive; surrealism did what it could do; and so on (note, of course, that many of our Western disciplines were likely founded by people who had limited, if any, sustained insight into the true nature of self and reality).  We have nothing firm on which to stand.  The old myths are–old.  We can no longer relate to the Bible in the same way people did two thousand years ago.  We need new mythologies, new ceremonies, new disciplines of art that stay completely in tune with contemporary life, its rapid pace, and its pressing challenges.  Perhaps in the future we will share a common center again.  If we are to survive as a species, that future may have to come quickly.  The point of following poetry as Way is to find that center, and allow it to guide the creation of a new age of humanity, the age of the Sustainable Human.  What the full mythology of sustainability will look like, no one can tell for certain.  Perhaps it will make room for the structure in the Grail legend that Joseph Campbell so admired: the Knights of the Round Table enter the forest at the spot least traveled and most dark.  We each walk our own way of the Way, our own Te in relation to the Tao.  
    One may say that we need to give up mythologies altogether and simply pursue Truth.  Generally speaking, O’Shea rejects the notion of poetry as a path to Truth and the Meaning of Life.  In this respect his work differs very significantly from the philosophical poetry of Laura Riding Jackson, to take a well known and talented example.  She ran into the problem that, from a certain rationalistic point of view, beauty and truth seem antithetical.  So much so that she gave up writing poetry.  But this problem exists only if you think, for instance, that the ritual of archery should orient itself to the target, to hitting the target. ;In which case you would also think the Master could not possibly transcend the discipline, since that would mean transcending the target, which makes no sense from such a rationalistic perspective.  According to this limited vision the discipline of poetry aims at something, and it has a clear and distinct goal (hear, “clear and distinct ideas,” separation of body and mind, etc): a judgement of Life, an uncovering and weighing of its Meaning, an analysis of its Truth and Falsity.  But for O’Shea, the discipline serves only as an aid to joining with Life, to standing up within it (innerstanding).  Having joined with Life, it naturally follows that one has transcended the rituals that supported you, because they do not stand outside of Life . . . they count as a very small piece of it, smaller even than you.
    O’Shea looks to poetry for neither truth nor meaning in the common sense.  He looks to it for experience.  But not experience as knowledge, rather, experience as a quickening of the body-mind, a movement into the unknown.  He asks poetry to help him live a human life and die a human death in a more-than-human world.  He follows the Way of poetry in order to see–beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity, and even beyond beauty and ugliness.  In this respect he represents a good example of an Artistic Socrates, a rational-romantic figure conjured up by Nietzsche over a century ago and looked upon today by certain philosophers, eccentric ones, as a (forgivable) graven image of ethical heroism.  
    In this enjoyable volume of poems, O’Shea provides us with moments of very accomplished philosophical argumentation, and he demonstrates a potential to do better philosophy than many academic philosophers will ever do–beautiful philosophy that charms the ear and awakens the spirit rather than grating the ear and putting the spirit soundly to sleep (anyone remember Philosophy 101?).  This record of a poet on the Way to Wisdom, and of Poetry in Search of that Way, should stand as an example for all lovers of Wisdom, all readers of prose, fiction, and poetry.  It serves as an example for writers, too: from those writing “serious” works to those keeping personal journals that will never see the light of publication.  We can all take up this poet’s challenge to ceremonialize the acts of reading and writing, whatever we may read or write, so that these very human endeavors, these sophisticated body-mind activities, can help lead us into an authentic experience of human life and an insight into the complete flowingness of this remarkable existence.

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An Excerpt from the introduction to the forthcoming book, Postcards from Ulysses.

You can read a summary of the book by clicking HERE.

 
    As we will see in Chapter 8, the history of humankind contains a long list of people calling for radical change.  Corruption, inequity, deforestation, terrorism, and various forms of immorality and ignorance have served as humanity’s consorts for thousands of years.  The nature of our problems presents nothing new.  Yet, people are still tempted to shout, “We need a revolution!”  Human history has worn out this potentially stirring mantra, leaving it threadbare and faded.  Can we restore its texture and color?  Perhaps so, if we can gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of revolution and radical change.  It might help to consider the icon of revolution in Western culture: the Copernican Revolution.(1)  
    Prior to 1543, most Westerners attempted to explain what they saw in the heavens by trying to figure out how the sun, moon, and planets moved.  They assumed the Earth was fixed and did not affect what they saw in the sky.  Of course, they held an incorrect view.  This resulted in discrepancies between the ideal expressed in their model and the reality confirmed by observation.  The solution most people pursued involved adding layers of complexity to the model, mainly in the form of epicycles.  “Epicycle” can be loosely translated as “a circle on top of a circle.”  The planets were thought to be in orbit within their orbits.  When that didn’t fix the discrepancies, the planets were put in orbits within orbits within orbits.  And so on.  
    The whole project was called “saving appearances,” or “saving the phenomena.”  Supposedly scientific minds were willing to add all sorts of nonsense to their view of nature in order to get it to fit the phenomena they observed.  These minds directed all of their rational energy to changing what they thought was happening “out there” to fit the basic premise of the model “in here.”   They did this because they assumed the cause of what they saw had to BE “out there.”
    Then Copernicus entered the scene.  He argued that Earth motion might be the key to understanding these phenomena, and by allowing for it he found that he could produce a simpler and more accurate model.  This was a genuine revolution.  The sun was placed at the center of the system, and the Earth was seen as a moving body, influencing everything in our experience of the heavens.  In this model, WE were the cause of the appearances.  The observer and the observed became one.
    Almost 500 years later, we find ourselves in a similar situation, psychologically speaking.  All of us can take note of data that conflict with the idea that we live in very civilized times.  We can observe striking discrepancies between our ideals and current events.  We profess peace, justice, liberty, general welfare, and love even for our enemy, but we can look into the phenomena and notice perturbations that do not find easy justification.  Of course, scientific and rationally minded people conscientiously add complexity to the ideals, modifying them to keep up appearances.  There are reasons why we cannot make general welfare a central concern, reasons why we must have inequity, and reasons why those people do not deserve love from us.  
    The revolutionary import of the Copernican view has a spiritual and psychological character that may help us in understanding our situation.  These dimensions of revolution have also appeared in several other critical cases worth considering.  A strong empirical tendency runs through all of them.  That is to say, we are not trying to fantasize what our relationship to the world could be, but to look, to use empirical methods to discover the nature of our situatedness, to turn our gaze toward ourselves, sometimes deeply, to see how we are situated in Life.  Here we get a hint of the most significant meaning of revolution: an understanding of our relationship to Life, typically the kind that turns back on ourselves.  In this sense, one could say that all empirical discoveries have to do with the structure of human experience.  
    Some people see this as a placard at the gateway to nihilism or postmodern despair.  I see it as an indication that, metaphorically speaking, archaeology is the queen of the sciences.  In our most sincere inquiry, we excavate the human soul.  In philosophy and physics, psychology and sociology, art and religion, we dig up the structure of human experience and examine it using every means.
    Revolutions happen when we make surprising discoveries about our structure and how it plugs into the living circuitry of the Cosmos.  What we think of as happening to us, or as happening “out there,” turns out to relate directly to our structure and how we connect to the world at any given moment.  As mentioned above, there have been several other important revolutions, in both the hard and the soft sciences.  To further refine our understanding of revolution, it will prove useful to distill them like moonshine and take a few quick shots.
    The so-called hard sciences saw at least two more significant revolutions after Copernicus.(2)  One of them came with Einstein, who said that the motion of the observer can even affect space and time.  Next came Bohr and Heisenberg.  They went so far as to say the observer can affect the structure of matter: look one way and you get particleness, look another way and you get waveness.  With quantum physics the Cosmos appears quite strange, and one might say the heart of the strangeness is non-locality.  There exists completely WITH here.  The relationship between observer and observed is carried to an almost mystical climax.
    Mysticism is actually a fascinating source of revolutionary discoveries.  This, too, is an empirical domain, perhaps classifiable as a soft science, though of the most radical kind.  Revolution is the heart of mystical practice.  The mystic wants only to understand his own structure, all the way down to its interconnection with the ultimate structures of existence.  Often this entails a relationship with a personal divinity, but this is not a requirement.  Either way, the nature of one’s being is probed, and one comes to understand the structure of human experience in its essential character.
    As for other branches of study more commonly accepted as soft sciences, there was a tremendous revolution in the work of Jung and Freud.  Their discoveries unified the observer and the observed by revealing that we are our neuroses, we are our myths, and we are the problem of evil.  Just because you didn’t kill your father and sleep with your mother doesn’t mean you are free from the crisis.  Rather, something deep flows here, bubbling up not only as myth and magic, but as neurosis, violence, and self-destruction in all its forms.  Freud and Jung opened up the problem of evil such that, as one of their students said, it took conscience and courage to travel with them.(3)  We are the very things we criticize in this “culture” of ours, whether we are Christian conservatives, spiritual progressives, or any other breed you might imagine.  Hence the need for radical change.  Both sides must accept the problem of evil, accept what it is and how we can confront it: body-to-body, in our gestures, in our gaze.  We should let this inspire us.  If we know that we are our myths, we thereby acknowledge our heroic potential for confronting the social, psychological, and spiritual problems we face.
    One of the great consequences of the work of Freud and Jung is a Copernican displacement of the ego.  We behave as if the ego were central and unmoving.  We can call this the egocentric theory.  Just the way the geocentric theorists thought of the earth as a stationary center with everything orbiting around it, we behave as if Life orbits around our ego.  But the truth is that all our activities, including the ones that sustain the ego, orbit around an inner fire.  To get a fuller picture of the way we behave versus the way things are, we can mix cosmological metaphors a bit (blame it on a little too much moonshine).  Not only does the ego think of itself as the center, but it also behaves as if it were the prime mover.  The ego sends the energy of fear and desire into the bodies orbiting around it, and they go into whatever kind of motion it requires, even if it badly perturbs their natural orbits.  
    To give a simple example, let’s imagine we want to open a door.  Any fear or desire present in the ego is sent unconsciously to the hand and arm.  This could be low grade fear and desire (we simply desire to open the door), or somewhat higher grade fear and desire (we are running to answer the phone, which may turn out to be a call we are expecting from an attorney).  The system as a whole is not brought harmoniously to the action.  Rather, the ego, playing the part of prime mover, behaves as if hands and arms open doors.  This is incorrect.  Door opening is a complete coupling between organism and environment.  A whole person, in the field of space-time, a field filled with gravity and energy, approaches an object familiar but new.  It seems like the same old door, but is it?  The inner fire at the center of the organism is composed of silence and stillness, but also movement and music.  It maintains a harmony with everything orbiting around it.  A holistic system of hands, arms, feet, head, neck, breathing, thinking, and perceiving interacts with the whole of the universe as it interfaces with the door, the wall, the floor, gravity, the ringing telephone, and more.  This total response happens with or without the cooperation of the ego.  In the case of an egocentric theorist, it happens in a perturbed and unconscious way.  The neck tenses, the feet and legs grab, the breath is held.  All of it goes unnoticed.  Eventually the ego will wonder why the shoulder that used to obey has now become stiff every morning, or it will wonder what causes the headaches it gets, or why there is a terror alert in its city, or why the rainforests are burning away.     
    This brings us to another great revolutionary of the time of Freud and Jung, one who is far less known to most people: F.M. Alexander.  Alexander was a professional reciter, giving one-man shows of poems and Shakespearean monologues.  He began experiencing severe voice problems.  He went to physicians who prescribed various courses of treatment.  None worked.  Then he had a revolutionary thought: What if I am the voice trouble?  What if I am the problem?  Like Freud’s patients, or any other egocentric theorist, he had felt like a victim of his affliction.  It seemed like a foreign invader.  But, by means of painstaking observation using mirrors, he confirmed his suspicions.  He saw out that he was DOING things in the act of speaking which in turn led to voice trouble as one particular consequence among others.   He thus found himself in the midst of a revolution, and a rather far reaching one at that, because he saw the same problem manifesting in one way or another in virtually every person he observed.  Right now, you are doing things.  You are unaware of these misguided doings.  But they are the source of many, if not most, of your “problems.”  This doing can be thought of as the manifestation of your way of being, and Alexander’s discovery might be put this way: our way of being brings forth our experience.(4)  Not only that, but our way of being has serious consequences for us and for the world “out there,” sometimes in surprising ways.
    Alexander worked a lot with simple activities like sitting in a chair.  Such a straightforward context allows one to begin to achieve a vantage point to see one’s way of being, to see the relationship between the observer and the observed.  He also worked with more sophisticated activities, like riding a horse, acting on stage, or playing an instrument.  In playing the violin, one is being the note, because one’s way of being influences the being of the note.  One can either end up with repetitive stress injuries, or music that is divine and free.  Being the note is a being-with, an interbeing of composer, player, fellow players, the conductor, the audience, and the mystery that inspired the music and continues to inspire all players and listeners ready to receive it.  I have worked with performers and found, for instance, that applying Alexander’s principles to a singer can allow her to hit notes she hadn’t been able to hit before.  
    In working with animals one can get feedback as clear as one gets from one’s instrument or one’s audience.  I have worked with people engaged in riding therapy and have found that the application of Alexander’s discoveries is immediately reflected in the horse’s behavior.  Similarly, those familiar with the work of Cesar Milan (a.k.a. The Dog Whisperer) know that, while canine misbehavior seems like a problem “out there,” in the dog, the truth is that the way of being of the humans is the problem in every case.  You perceive seemingly loving humans.  You think them very unfortunate.  They are so nice, and yet they are cursed with this vicious animal as a pet.  Then you look much more carefully.  You begin to see that their way of being is out of tune.  They have turned a happy go lucky dog into a menace.  Within minute the dog will let all of this go.  This is astonishing evidence that our way of being has a direct influence on the more-than-human world.
    We can now state the point very clearly: The observer-observed relationship comes to interbeing.  In every case of genuine revolution, interbeing is revealed.  If we are to have a sustainability revolution, we will need to see that our experience with the environment relates to our structure and our way of being.  We will need to see that we come out of the structure of the planet and that we are intimately linked with that structure.  In short, we will need to see our interbeing with “everything on earth the compass round.”  We aren’t doing things to “nature,” we are doing things to ourselves.  The affliction known as terrorism is not happening to us.  Political unrest in Central America is not happening “out there.”  Famine and genocide in Africa are not merely external phenomena.  Violent and destructive corporate expansion in India, China, and South America is not perpetrated by someone else in a far away place.  We mustn’t make the egocentric error on an individual or a global,  socio-political level.  Adding epicycles didn’t change the movements of the planets.  Adding war, technology, and laws won’t change our dependance on the earth and on each other, and it won’t make us sustainable beings.  Only a revolution will make us sustainable, and we have to know how to bring one about, not by frenzy, argument, or complex legislation, but by beauty, wisdom, and compassion.
    Thus, when the threadbare call for revolution is made vibrant again, it presents a different demand.  On the observational side it says: WE are the inequity, WE are the violence, WE are the unhealthy and unsustainable ones.  On the progressive side, the side of action, it says: BE the mission, BE the message, let the end fall away and give yourself completely to the means.  To be truly revolutionary we must continue to break down the distinction between the observer and the observed, turning more attention to the revolutionaries themselves rather than policies and problems “out there.”  The focus of at least some of our progressive leaders must be passionately tuned to one thing: to help human beings become what they are.  If our lives, including our education and our jobs, do not facilitate our growth into sustainable beings in the deepest sense, then humanity itself cannot become sustainable.  This view is expressed in all the great philosophy, art, and religion of the world.  Today, even our cognitive scientists have joined this mighty chorus.  We needn’t feel idealistic about deciding to take a stand with wisdom.  Rather, it is the most scientific and spiritual thing to do.
    This revolution will relate to our values as well.  Once we see the nature of interbeing, we will also see how misguided it is to place the organizing principles of society OUTSIDE of ourselves, in a social version of egocentrism.  The inner fire that is our center must also be the center of our society.  One can view this inner fire from a spiritual, religious, or secular point of view.  In terms of public policy we could simply say that we must base our actions not on money but on human flourishing.  Corporations currently have one central concern: How much money can we make?  Since our society is market-based, this becomes the foundation of most of our actions.  We thus put ourselves in orbit around a false center, wheeling about in an egocentric, money-driven universe.(5) 
    The revolutionary insight is to see the nature of our interbeing, and to embrace a seemingly radical principle: instead of asking how much money we can make, we ask, Does this contribute to human flourishing?  That’s it.  A small shift, and a tremendous simplification (as we’ll see).  We wouldn’t give up markets any more than Copernicus gave up living on planet earth.  But the core principle would not be how much money we can make off of any given decision, product, or policy.  Instead, our central concern would be whether or not a given decision, product, or policy contributes to human flourishing.(6)  
    What we see in our time is a desperate attempt to “save the phenomena.”  Discrepancies between our ideals and reality are becoming frightening.  We will look at the many epicycles that have been proposed to keep up appearances.  We will also explore the simple Copernican plan already suggested.  Should we be surprised if the modern Church of the Corporation declares that the displacement of money from the center of our universe is contrary to the necessary dogma and scripture we are supposed to blindly accept?  We could never put beauty, wisdom, and compassion at the center of the universe, they will tell us, and the idea is heresy–possibly resulting from demonic possession (or too much moonshine).  Many of the other conclusions reached in these pages will seem radical as well.  But what counts as a radical suggestion?  It may seem obvious to some that we need radical change, but what does it mean?
    Radical change is the natural consequence of any genuine revolution.  Revolution means seeing the observer is the observed; radical means the shift you begin to make in daily living once you experience the revolution, even if you only achieved an intellectual understanding.  If the revolution is shallow in any way, your shift will be less radical–or nonexistent.  The more sincere and thorough the inquiry and realization, the greater the impetus to radical change.  In this case we would require a radical shift: this is a money-driven, propaganda-guided CULTURE that is unhealthy for the human spirit and deadly to human and more-than-human life.  Who will admit, I AM this?  And when they do, how will they body forth the insight?  This is a key issue, and it deepens to heroic proportions the notion of being the change our world requires. The mission of Postcards from Ulysses is to act as Galileo’s telescope, providing the perspective the reader needs to SEE the nature of his interbeing, and then to show him how to make the changes in his way of being that allow him to live his most important insights and his most precious ideals, whatever they may be.  As we will see, this kind of revolution and radical change is NOT of the October, 1917 variety.  It is guided by beauty, wisdom, and compassion, and it takes no sides.

NOTES:

1.  It is worth noting that this revolution was not a single moment, and Copernicus was not the only agent.  In some ways, we should admire Galileo even more, and we should remember that thinkers in Greece and India (perhaps other places as well) had suggested the concept as much as a millennium before Copernicus did.  Nonetheless, when Copernicus developed his ideas, the geocentric theory was considered fact in the scientific and religious doctrine of the time.

2.  It is valuable to remember Newton’s work as well, which might simply be seen as a continuation of the revolution begun with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.  The image of the apple “down here” united with the moon “up there” has stuck with us, and it deepens the sense of unity between the observer and the observed.

3.  See C.A. Meier’s interview in Matter of Heart: The Extraordinary Journey of C.G. Jung: “it took an enormous amount of moral courage to face these facts . . .”  This is true of many revolutions–the more so the closer they are to the heart of our being.

5.  Note that I am not making the simplistic claim that “money is the root of all evil.”  I am saying that a way of being that places money at its center is almost certain to create a great deal of unnecessary suffering.  Improper being might be the root of all evil, if you insist on that kind of word game.

Nickolas Knightly is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique offering private and group lessons, workshops, and lectures on the Technique.  He specializes in working with artists, dancers, spiritual practitioners, NGO's, and sustainable businesses.  He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Click HERE to go to the main website for more information.

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    Some broad shouldered thinker of the future will suggest that love is a desire for the beautiful.(1)  We could then suggest that good action is a desire to live beautifully.  Thus a reverent life, a life of good action, is an act of love, an expression of love–for Life.  
    We should concern ourselves not with what is right or wrong, but instead with what is beautiful, graceful, full of love.  Do our actions let the power of Life come through us like a brilliant light?  Rightness is less importance than reverence.  Not anything put on, like a mask, but a genuine feeling in the heart-mind.
    Telemachus, at every moment you can cast a loving glance on all that you see.  No one expects perfection of you, just honesty.  No one expects perfect awareness, just diligence.  No one expects perfect intensity of your effort, just extensive duration.(2)  Keep opening and saying Yes to Life.  We cannot preserve yesterday’s love.  It must emerge fresh and new at every moment.

NOTES:

1.  Ulysses is certainly thinking of Plato here.  The philosopher’s real name was Aristokles.  “Plato” is a nickname meaning “broad-shouldered.”

2.  Ulysses may be thinking of Nietzsche, who wrote that, “Not the intensity but the duration of great feelings makes great men.”

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“Krishna defeated the great serpent Kaliya by dancing on its head.  Just dancing.  And the murderous, poisonous, life-obscuring demon submitted to beauty, goodness, and truth.”      –Aiden O’Shea

    The history of tango is the history of everything.  The tigers of the mind prowl in jungles of tango rhythm, and the angels and devils of the soul do unspeakable things in the peaks and valleys of tango melodies.  The superstrings of the universe vibrate to an infinite tango, and the words of the gods are phrased in counts of eight.  Nothing we know would look the same without tango, because creation happened forward and backward from tango’s inception.  For instance, when there was no tango, color began with orange.  Red was invented for the tango dancer’s dress, for the blood of the men who dance with her, for her lips as she says, “Good night.”  Before then, wine looked like grape juice, Mars was the god of tantrums, and Nietzsche discovered the Will to Cower.  Before tango, the Apple of Knowledge tempted no appetites, and when it fell in Newton’s garden, it fell too lightly to inspire.  Without gravity, the universe began to vanish, until, suddenly, a tired immigrant bought a glass of whiskey in a brothel in Buenos Aires.  The energy of every atom in the Cosmos entered his innocent veins.  He was not drunk.  He was insane.  He grabbed a fellow ranch worker and started to dance to the music of a little trio of musicians playing in the corner of the room.  His friend was somewhat frightened.  The dance looked a bit like a fight, a bit like an ornamental display of power and grace meant to impress his favorite working girl.  Then everything changed.  Adam took a bite of the Fruit, and Buddha went and sat under the Tree.  An apple became a celestial body, and stardust became the seeds of humankind.  The curves of an integral calculus traced the sway of a dancing girl’s hips, and men of passion found themselves leaping on the moon.

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    What you want, Telemachus, is for all your actions to look like luck, not effort or even skill.  Just luck, grace, spontaneity, laughter.  I watched a god do battle with a great demon, and it looked like play, like a joke, like random joy.  What you want is for your every action to look and feel as if it had been done by one of the gods.  People watching should say, “He didn’t do that.  Surely some god came and helped him.”  And you also think, “How did I do that?  I must not have done that.  I must have let some god help me.” (1)

NOTES:

1.   Compare these words from the Gita:

“The man who has seen the truth
thinks, ‘I am not the doer’
at all times–when he sees, hears, touches,
when he smells, eats, walks, sleeps, breathes.”

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The Tango Principle is clearly illustrated in the story of Cook Ting told by Chuang-tzu:

    The king's cook was cutting up an ox.
    Out went a hand, down went a shoulder,
    he planted a foot, he pressed with a knee,
    the ox fell apart with a whisper,
    the bright cleaver murmured
    like a gentle breeze.
    Rhythm!  Timing!
    Like a sacred dance,
    like ancient music.
    
    "Good work!" the king exclaimed. "Your method is faultless!"
    "Method?" said the cook, laying aside his shining cleaver,
    "What I follow is beyond all method.
    
    "When I first began to cut up oxen
    I would see before me the whole ox, all in one mass.
    
    "After three years I no longer saw this mass.
    I saw the distinctions.
    
    "But now, I see nothing with the eye.  
    My whole being apprehends.
    My senses are idle.  The spirit is free
    to work, without a plan, following its own intelligence
    guided by the secret opening, the hidden space,
    my cleaver finds its own way.  I cut through no joint, chop no bone.
    
    "A good cook needs a new chopper once a year---he CUTS.
    A poor cook needs a new chopper once a month---he HACKS.
    
    "There are spaces in the joints; the blade is thin and keen:
    when this thinness finds that space, there is all the room you need!
    It goes like the wind!
    
    "True, there are sometimes tough joints.