The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Vision

This is my 14th, and last, post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 13 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

One of the final sections of The Stop is An Embodied Sight for the Sighted in which Appelbaum discusses how the sighted can learn to see as the blind do so that "vision can be informed by a consciousness greater than the intellect."

A training regime is required that would "remedy the habituated interference of intellect in the act of visually seeing" and involve "a reharmonization of functional aspects of person, intellect, feeling and body." This is the cultivation of the stop which includes "a process of resensitizing sight."  Appelbaum explains, "The momentuum of received visual learning must be arrested in order for a new (or renewed) function of sight to commence."

I believe that Gurdjieff would explain the process as our conditioning to see in a certain way - intellectually - must first be awared through observation. Then with the light of consciousness illuminating this habitual functioning, we have the possibility of changing it.

So first I become aware that I am always focusing my eyes and am not embodied. All of my attention is out there. I get the 'taste' of this. Then I try to soften my gaze so that rather than narrowly focusing the eyes, I include the peripheral vision. The taste of this is of allowing the world to come to me, rather than going out and grabbing it.

Appelbaum explains that once we are released from the strictly conceptual mode we are open to other influences. "What is seen then signifies the wider cosmos as it expresses itself through the visual field." Rather than valuing objects for the pleasure or utility that they offer me, I am open to experiencing their wider, deeper significance. The world ceases to be a reflection of my values, my preconceptions, my interests and "grows transparent with higher purpose….Returning to home in the body, we are returned to our place in an order of things, ever new, ever regenerating."

Amen!

Photo source: www.flickr.com/photos/notsogoodphotography/

Comments

[Ian]

That's a great exercise! Thanks for sharing Ann. I'd never realized how focusing creates an illusion of separation (the reach-out-and-grab-it that you mention).