Another obstacle to awareness is habit and routine. Both habit and routine are extremely valuable. They permit us to save a great deal of time and to do unimportant things—inasmuch as anything is unimportant—rapidly and efficiently. But they are also extremely dangerous. If we become the victims of our habits and our routines we tend to react to them in terms of something which we learned in the past instead of reacting to them as they are here and now.
Ideally we should somehow make the best of both worlds, and this is always the moral we get down to. We have to be sufficiently aware of the newness and uniqueness of every event here and now to be able to react appropriately and spontaneously to it. At the same time, we have to be sufficiently aware of the unique event’s resemblance to past events to permit our past experience to help us be more efficient in coping with the immediate experience. But in all too many cases we find that our reliance on habit, on words and on concepts, tends to blind us to the immediate reality in front of us. It would be a very good thing if in all education children were trained to realize the importance both of habit and of non-habit, although how exactly this is to be done, I don’t know.
Let us now consider some of the positive ways in which perceptual awareness can be increased. Here I shall mention a book which I think is well worth reading; its thesis is not novel, as I shall show in a few minutes (it goes back thousands of years), but it is rather novel in the present context where we have forgotten a great many important things. The book is Gestalt Therapy by Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman. Their method of dealing with neurotic problems is essentially to teach people to be aware—this is the beginning of their therapy—and they prescribe courses in becoming aware of external events. They suggest for example that we should make up sentences which begin ‘Here and now, I perceive’ (whatever it may be) ‘the light in my eyes, these shining objects in front of me, this red thing, this yellow paper, various aches and pains which I may have,’ and so on.
Such extraordinarily simple and apparently childish exercises in awareness are extremely helpful in bringing us out of our absurd preoccupation with the past and the future, with daydreaming, and with pleasant or unpleasant memories, which occupies so much of our time and energy—in short, in bringing us out of this morass of non-actuality into present time and into the possibility at least of reacting realistically and appropriately to what is happening. These authors specify a number of other exercises, such as shifting the focus of attention towards an awareness of objects in relation to their background (seeing how things in the background, which are relatively dim, come forward when you pay attention to them and how what was the foreground then becomes a side object or a background). They speak of the importance of becoming acutely aware of events within the body and events going on in the mind. In general the whole process is a thoroughgoing training in the basic perceptual awareness which we need in order to exercise all the other functions of the mind-body.
This work of the Gestalt therapists is by no means new in our century. A remarkable Swiss psychotherapist, Dr Roger Vittoz, who died in 1925—I remember hearing of his methods at the time, I never saw him—was extremely successful in dealing with neurosis. As far as one can gather, he was a great deal more successful than the psychoanalysts; his method was essentially to train his patients to become aware of seemingly the most trivial actions (because no action is fully trivial).
It was a process of becoming aware and learning how to use will and how to be conscious of whatever is being done. When Vittoz died, his method was completely neglected. This is one of the tragic things which are constantly happening in the history of ideas: excellent ideas are brought forth and acted upon, but for various sociological reasons they are often totally forgotten for a long period. Vittoz’s ideas didn’t happen to fit in with the psychological notions current at the time. People preferred the much more complicated and rarefied methods of psychoanalysis to his rather straightforward and simple approach, even though it apparently happened to be very successful, according to all accounts.
What is extremely interesting is that both Vittoz and the Gestalt therapists are actually reviving procedures which were current in various systems of Oriental philosophy and psychology one or two thousand years ago. This business of being acutely aware of everything within and without is a standard procedure in the Buddhist, Tantric, and Zen psychology. There is a text, for example, which is introduced by a dialogue between Shiva, the great god, and his wife, Parvati. Parvati asks Shiva the secret of her profound consciousness—the consciousness of Tat twam asi, of the Thou Art That, the consciousness that the Atman is identical with the Brahman.
Shiva proceeds to give her a list of 118 exercises in awareness which he says are all extremely helpful towards achieving this ultimate consciousness. They are exercises in awareness in every life situation, from eating one’s dinner to sneezing, from going to sleep to making love to having dreams to daydreaming. It is the most comprehensive series of exercises in consciousness that I know of, and it is very curious to find that this immensely valuable psychological discovery has been allowed to remain as some sort of vague Oriental superstition which we haven’t bothered about. Now, after so many years, it is coming to the surface and will prove to be of very great value.
Let me touch on another technique of awareness, one in which John Dewey was greatly interested. I refer to the technique developed by F. M. Alexander (who died at the age of 80) for becoming aware of the proper posture—the proper relationship between the neck and the trunk above all—which permits the best possible functioning of the psychophysical organism. Dewey, who had studied the technique with Alexander, wrote introductions to three of Alexander’s books; in one of these introductions he says quite definitely that he regards this technique as being to education what education is to life in general, that it is the thing which gives education the possibility of really doing some good.
Yet among the hundreds of thousands of educators who have followed Dewey, virtually none, so far as I know, paid any attention to this method of training the mind-body which Dewey regarded as of primary importance in education; it has been allowed simply to fall away, and so far as I know, there is only one school in the United States where it is applied to the education of children. This, then, is another example of what is quite clearly a very important idea, recognized by a first-rank philosopher as being of immense practical and theoretical significance, allowed to lapse because it just doesn’t happen to be in with the current academic views of the time.
Now let me go on with some of the other ways of training the mind-body. A very important form of training is clearly the training of the imagination. Here I recommend Herbert Read’s Education Through Art, in which he talks of the possibility of training children’s imagination in such a way that they may retain the remarkable faculty of eidetic imagery, which most children seem to have, in later life. Generally intense power of visualization disappears about the time of puberty, but there seems to be no reason why it shouldn’t be preserved and remain a source of enjoyment and of intellectual benefit to human beings, even in their adult phase. In Gestalt Therapy, too, many interesting exercises in the use of imagination are prescribed to pry the mind loose from its old bad habits of thinking and feeling. I can’t go into them here, but they are well worth looking at. They do help to pull us out of this illusion of a sort of bogus personality, which we create by means of our bad habits.
It seems now to be quite clear that any development of awareness must go hand in hand with the development of our knowledge of language and concepts. If we are going to be aware of our direct experience, we must also be aware of the relationship between direct experience and the world of symbols and language and concepts in which we live. We are like icebergs. We float in immediate reality, but we project into the winds of doctrine in so far as we rise
