Spiritual Practicality

Spiritual Practicality

The aim in meditation, or the goal of mysticism, is to stop the ego’s incessant internal dialogue to allow awareness of the great stillness behind the ego, i.e. the Overself.  Such an awareness of the Overself would be the state of supreme joy and happiness and a realisation of reality.

All of the foregoing, however, may be of little or no interest to the individual who regards himself as a man of the world and who likes to deal with the practical things in life.  For him spirituality and mysticism are for people who drift around in an unreal world with their heads in the clouds: people who deal with speculative philosophy and are full of fancy, pie-in-the-sky theories that have no bearing on the real world of practical affairs and the tangible things of everyday living.

There exists, however, a fundamental aspect of practical life that the worldly wayfarer may not have come across.  This fundamental is THE USE OF THE SELF, as expounded by F.M Alexander.   I will not give here a full explanation of his process of CONSTRUCTIVE CONSCIOUS CONTROL, but suffice it to say that it deals with – through the power of thinking – the co-ordinated use of the body as a mechanism; deals with the how of doing any task in life. My aim is to show here that a similar state of stillness and activity as described above in spirituality and mysticism exists also at the practical level.

Alexander’s greatest discovery in his quest to make positive change in himself was inhibition, a point of stillness between stimulus and response.  He recognised that the vast majority of us suffer from misuse of the psycho-physical self.  This misuse was caused by our end-gaining approach to problems, projects and practical affairs.  He saw that – because of our too-quick reactions to the stimuli of everyday living –  we had caused the balanced, co-ordinated use of the mind and body to go wrong and as a result of this the organism was deteriorating much more quickly than it should – in posture, movement and health. He could also see that all direct attempts at changing maladjusted habits in the individual were largely ineffective. 

Inhibition is the point of stillness, the gap between stimulus and response and the gateway to fundamental change.  It is a vital function of the nervous system, co-equal with excitation.  We can get into this gap and give ourselves the opportunity to stop our habitual reactions to stimuli, and adopt a conscious, co-ordinated way of using the organism, chiefly by attending to the integrity of the head-neck-back relationship, which has been misaligned by the universal habits of stiffening the neck, pulling the head back and down and shortening and narrowing the back.

After inhibiting a reaction to any stimulus, we can consider the next step, which is the how, the co-ordinated means, of doing any task.  This is done in particular by giving conscious direction to the primary control of the body – the head-neck-back relationship – by consciously directing the neck to be free, the head to go forward and up and the back to lengthen and widen.  Other directions can be given to other parts of the organism as necessary to bring about mechanically appropriate ways of moving it.

Conscious direction, then, is the dynamic, kinetic, energising power of thinking that is applied to the self after stopping in the point of stillness – inhibition – and with this combination of stillness and action the individual can re-educate the whole neuro-muscular system.  This leads in time to dynamic, constructive, conscious control in the use of the self.  Inhibition followed by direction is the combination that is Alexander’s indirect process of effecting real, fundamental change in the individual.

The parallels with mysticism and spirituality are summed up below:

Thus, the spiritual quest and the practical affairs of life can be brought into harmony.

This article was first published in Rock ‘N’ Ruminations by Daniel McGowan. You can download the PDF of this book for free here:  FREE DOWNLOAD