Constructive Awareness and Living Mentalism Conflation
AN APPRAISAL OF PAUL BRUNTON’S WRITINGS ON THE MECHANISMS OF THE ORGANISM AND THOSE OF FREDERICK MATTHIAS ALEXANDER
Both men write extensively on the history of the conscious evolution of the human being and the changes the body went through, and how the body has evolved up to the present day, so it is not necessary for me to deal with that history in any depth.
The main difference in the writings of each, is that P.B recommends the doing of certain specific, physical exercises, and of certain asanas of hatha yoga, and F.M.A does not, because too many of these specific exercises violate the natural and appropriate laws of movement of the body.
I will list certain Notes of P.B’s in the second half of Volume 4 – “THE BODY” – of his 16 Notebooks, and compare or conflate them with F.M’s writings in his 4 books, “MAN’S SUPREME INHERITANCE”, “CONSTRUCTIVE CONSCIOUS CONTROL,” “THE USE OF THE SELF”, and “THE UNIVERSAL CONSTANT IN LIVING”.
In his Notebook, Volume 4, The Body, on page 4 in the prefatory, P.B writes that
“some people may express surprise…….that any space at all…….should have been given to purely physical topics and exercises: surprise because the topics seem unrelated to the mystical and metaphysical ones of earlier books……..And it was no less a mystic than Ramana Maharshi himself who……. thought that some attention to physical extremes ought to be allied to the mental ones.”
“When Ramana Maharishee was stricken with cancer, his resident disciples were dismayed. When he died in agony, they were stunned.”
And in 20:75, P.B quoted Yogananda, who said,
“The presence of God cannot be felt while the darkness of overpowering disease prevails.” Yet Sri Ramana Maharshi, suffering from a fatal cancer, affirmed the contrary and declared the body to be nothing.”
I have been meaning to address this situation with Ramana’s cancer for many years, but I could not get to it because of the busy life I have had for such a long time. Relating the problem to the great sage’s use of himself, I now feel that I need to say that he is one of the worst examples of unco-ordinated use of his own body that I have seen of any of these spiritual leaders . As written above he thought the body was nothing.
I enclose two photos of Ramana, one as a young man, and one as an old man, sitting in a full lotus.
You can see from the folds in his abdomen, even as a young man, that his lumbar spine is slumping drastically, and his whole torso has collapsed down on itself. He is the same as an old man. If he sat around like this for many years, the pressure on his vital organs would be tremendous, and his breathing very restricted. This may have been the cause of his cancer. I wonder where his tumour showed up? The reason I wonder is because of what P.B wrote in his Notebook “HEALING OF THE SELF,” VOLUME 7, 97: 82 about Rosa Bailly.
“Rosa Bailly was born in France as a poetess. Quite late in life she became aware of certain radiations and found herself capable of healing sick people by using these radiations. Out of these experiences with patients she wrote a booklet entitled La Survie du Cancer (Victory over Cancer), but it is no longer in print and has never been translated. She died in the Pyrenees…………….What she regarded as her main contribution to the healing art was the discovery that cancer has its seat in the pithy marrow of the spine no matter where its tumour is…………..she explained that vital energy would pass from her to the patient. It is known that some of her cures were spectacular,…………etc.”
A big question about misuse and cancer. The pithy marrow in the spine that Rosa Bailly is referring to is the gel-like fluid called the nucleus pulposus that is inside each cartilaginous disc. Cartilage is the strongest material in the body.
Damage to the two lowest discs in the spine is one of the most common injuries in the world. This is caused by habitually sitting slumped in a “comfortable” armchair and doing things like bending the lumbar spine to touch the toes with the legs held straight, bending the lumbar spine to do gardening. Many people deny the spine, particularly the lumbar, its proper function by habitually slumping around, shortening it, and not allowing it to support the torso.
So the question is: Does this misuse of the spine cause many kinds of cancer nowadays in different parts of the body, because of its origin in the spine?
In his Notebook, Volume 4, The Body, on page 7 of the prefatory, P.B writes:
“A course of spiritual development which corrects the bad habits of the mind and purifies the feelings of the heart, but shows no interest in the habits and conditions of the physical body is based on a one-sided concept of man. It is unbalanced. How can it yield any other than an unbalanced and incomplete result? Whether the body is ignored or considered, life must still be lived in its entirety by all human beings. This includes spiritually seeking human beings, and their bodies are still with them whatever they do or fail to do.”
Is this the huge denial of the importance of good use of the body that Ramana Maharishee, and so many spiritual aspirants who follow him, make in their quest of the Overself?
And on page 10 of the prefatory P.B writes:
“The Quest has to be staged progressively, like all journeys. It begins with the body, which must be clean, disciplined and controlled. Philosophy cannot be dissociated from a proper use of the physical organism.………….. If the reformation of life, character, and consciousness begins with the body, it will have to improve the mind later.”
And on page 11:
“The body has been formed ultimately out of the Divine Substance, out of the same light waves from which the entire universe has been formed.”
And on page 12 of the prefatory
“The body is to be his servant, a willing and obedient servant. But it can carry out his bidding properly only if it is trained to do so.”
The surest way to train the body efficiently is by constructive conscious control of the individual, by the individual, as expounded by F.M Alexander. Unfortunately, his way of training is known as the Alexander Technique, it is not a technique at all. I prefer to call it CONSTRUCTIVE AWARENESS. The name, “Alexander Technique,” does not convey, or do justice to, his natural way of being and teaching the conscious, co-ordinated use of the mind and body, the use of the self.
In his Notebook, Volume 4, The Body, Page 20, Note 3, P.B writes:
“We use our minds and our bodies badly. And we do this through ignorance, through the lack of instruction on their proper use. The right use of the body and the correct provisions of its needs are arts to be learned. The civilised man is not born with them. He is the unfortunate hereditary victim of generations of faulty modern habits. There is a better way to use the bodily mechanism than the habitual one of most westerners.”
And on Page 20, Note 5:
“How many recognise truth when it deals with metaphysical and mystical subjects cannot recognise it when it deals with physical regimes? If we recognise why this should be so the answer is to be sought in the power of prevalent custom and inherited habit.”
The above quote may give the reader the impression that the so-called Alexander Technique (Constructive Awareness) deals only with the physical body. But it is firstly a re-education of the mind-body complex. One has to quicken the conscious mind and change the body into a new dynamic and co-ordinated way of being that will save the individual from being the slave of his negative, subconscious habits of thinking and doing. Misuse of the psycho-physical organism is rife throughout the world.
And on Page 21, Note 9:
“The physical body is each person’s responsibility. He has to live with it as well as live in it. The failure to care properly for it makes it complain.”
An example of not caring for it properly would be repeatedly bending the spine as an everyday habit instead of bending the hip, knee and ankle joints.
In his Notebook, Volume 4, The Body, Page 23, Note 23, P.B writes:
“The faulty use of the body is a consequence of the failure to bring both awareness and reflection into it. This is to be guarded against because civilised living has substituted artificial habits for the natural ones of the primitive.”
I don’t think primitive people would do one-armed push-ups as a natural exercise. These over-strenuous push-ups are very popular at the present time.
And on Page 23, Note 25, P.B writes:
“To deny any organ of the body its legitimate function is to deny harmony, co-ordination, total well-being to the body.”
Drinking too much alcohol is denying the liver its proper function, and, therefore, denying total well-being to the body.
And on Page 23, Note 27:
“The human being who tries to ignore his physical conditions…………. does not in the end usually succeed in doing so………….If cancer makes its appearance in that body as a result of his karma – which it mostly is – he is compelled to reckon with it.”
The modern man, especially he who stoops more and more as he gets older, should refer to the findings of Rosa Bailly given earlier. Beware of such a stoop! He may also benefit from taking lessons in constructive awareness to restore his spine to its optimal length.
And on Page 23, Note 28:
“This fleshly body, which ascetics have hated and saints have despised, is a holy temple. The divine Life-force is always latently present in it and aroused, can sweep through every cell, making it sacred.”
Medical science will continue to make slow progress in its attempts to cure modern maladies and disease if it does not bring the spiritual element into its methods of treatment.
And on Page 28, Note 66:
“What he is emotionally and mentally expresses itself to some extent in his body, in his face and even in the way he holds his body and carries himself, and still more remarkably in the very movements he makes. Some pioneer work in this research was done by westerners such as F. Matthias Alexander, Dr. Mensendieck and Gaston Mengel.”
Frederick Matthias Alexander should not be included in this functional exercise system, which was part of the physical culture movement of the early 1900’s. These exercises were solely therapeutic and dealt only with healing specific parts of the body.
In contrast F.M’ s method of constructive conscious control of the individual was first and foremost a general education of the use of the mind-body complex.
By successfully learning its procedures under the guidance of the teacher, the pupil (not the patient) received health benefits of many kinds.
The physical culture people did not use F.M’s indirect method of psycho-physical change, which involved inhibiting the dominance of harmful habits of thinking and doing in the everyday living of life. F.M never used specific exercises supposedly designed to improve certain parts of the body.
EXERCISE
In his Notebook, Volume 4, The Body, Page 91, Note 105, P.B writes:
“The physical yoga teachers rarely possess knowledge of physiology. They do not know the precise physiological effects of the breathing exercises and postures they prescribe upon muscles, organs and bones. This is why some of their pupils come to serious harm.”
Another bad reason that pupils come to serious harm is adopting and persisting in sitting in a Full Lotus during meditation. This of course is not the teacher’s fault. Out of misplaced enthusiasm, the pupil is really pleased about reaching a point where he can manage to distort his knees and ankles, even though this position is causing him much pain. He does not seem to mind that the blood is being cut off to his legs. and his veins are under severe pressure. He persists in this position time after time until his veins become varicose. I knew someone personally who was in such a state. His veins were very prominent and his blood clots were black. They caused him sadness and depression as well as severe pain. He stuck stubbornly, however, to meditating in the Full Lotus in his quest to become enlightened.
And on Page 92, Note 110:
“The yoga of body control has a distinct and useful place in human life and constitutes a valuable system of practice. But when we hear exaggerated claims on its behalf, then it is time to remind its intemperate advocates that no amount of standing on their head will ever bring them into the realisation of God.”
In his Notebook, Volume 4, The Body, Page 92, Note 111:
“Consciousness of the Spirit is not obtained by contortion of the legs.”
And on page 92, Note 113:
“A modern Indian holy man, Schuckacharya, of the province of Guyerat, who died as recently as 1929, and who had thousands of followers who regarded him as a divine incarnation, told his disciples in one of his discourses: “Your guru has practised all of the hatha yoga asanas for quite a long time and it is his definite verdict that its all labour wasted, insofar as the ideal of self-realisation is concerned. In fact, the human mind is the home of all maladies; it is vulnerable at each end and it is necessary to purge it of all diseases and to stitch all leakages; if it is so, where is the earthly sense in wrestling with the muscles. The primary concern, therefore, is to treat the mind and not the body.”
The problem for this holy man is: You have to treat the body and the mind at the same time because, ultimately, they are both made of the same mental “stuff.”
Another problem with hatha yoga is as follows:
A beginner may be trying too hard to do the stretches, the asanas, that he sees the yogi in the book doing seemingly with ease. He aspires to emulate the yogi and proceeds to use too much force to to make the muscles longer and more supple. He probably does not know that muscles are very much alive and can contract very strongly against pulling. The tendons and the ligaments, however, can only do this passively. So as he pulls on the muscles under the impression that he is stretching them, the fact is that he is actually shortening them because of their ability to contract very strongly against being pulled.
If he continues in this way, the result is the very opposite to what he believes. The muscles will become permanently shortened, and the tendons and ligaments will be stretched beyond their elastic limit and become plastic – suffering from plastic deformation. This plastic deformation is commonly known as hypermobility.
I am a retired teacher of Constructive Awareness (Alexander Technique), and have helped many yogis and dancers who have suffered with this condition.
The danger of doing specific Western exercises can be tragic. For example, I read of a runner who was told by his coach his spine was not supple enough, and he should go and do 200 toe-touches, keeping his legs straight and bending his back. He damaged his lumbar spine so badly that a promising career was ended.
I wish to say something about the lack of the spiritual approach to F.M’s great work in the teaching nowadays in the Alexander world.
Here is the last paragraph of F.M’s in his book, “THE USE OF THE SELF”:
“If a technique which can be proved to do this for an individual were to made the basis of an educational plan, so that the growing generation could acquire a more valid criterion for self-judgement than is now possible with the prevailing condition of sensory misdirection of use, might not this lead in time to the substitution of reasoning reactions for those instinctive reactions which are manifested as prejudice, racial and otherwise, herd instinct, undue ‘self-determination’ and rivalry, etc., which, as we all deplore, have so far brought to nought our efforts to realise good will to all men and peace upon Earth. ?”
You can only make statements like this if you are spiritual.
He was a great man with a clear farsightedness of the potential and power of his technique to help all humanity.
He was the man who rediscovered “Naturalness.”
SYNOPSIS
So, to sum up: In this essay I have attempted to conflate some of Paul Brunton’s philosophy on The Quest of the Overself with some of Frederick Matthias Alexander’s philosophy on Constructive Conscious Control in the Use of the Self.
As I wrote at the beginning, both men write extensively on the history of the conscious evolution of the human being and the changes the body went through, and how the body has evolved up to the present day, so it is not necessary for me to deal with that history in any depth.
One very interesting difference in the philosophies of the 2 men is that F.M said the human being is a psycho-physical organism, whereas P.B stated that the human body is a mental construct. F.M’s belief, however, did not affect the power and brilliance of his teaching. P.B occasionally used the term “psycho-physical” for practical purposes in his equally powerful and brilliant writings.
Both men were geniuses and spiritual giants!
There is no need for me to say anything about how spiritual the Great Sage, Paul Brunton was. If you are interested in reading his books on philosophy, you can find him at Larson Publications, New York, U.S.A.
Frederick Matthias Alexander was also a very spiritual man. Sadly, the spiritual approach to his work is not taught by many Alexander Technique teachers. The scientific approach is favoured, but a scientist would have to go through the training of an Alexander Technique teacher, as well as many years of teaching, before he or she would have enough experience to evaluate the results of the scientific research. I will elaborate on this later.