Postcards from Ulysses

 
    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.

4.  Note that this is not the same as the “law of attraction” which has you DO something, namely to think thoughts that will attract what you think you want.  We will make the distinction more clear in Chapter 3.

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.

6.  We will see that the actual center is Life, but we must take care to prevent oversimplification, and to make sure that we understand what that would mean (it means, for instance, a centerless center).  “Human flourishing” is a more pragmatic way to speak initially, as long as we always keep in mind what brought us to accept it, namely revolutionary insight into the nature of interbeing.

 

 

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.