1980 Toronto Workshop Transcript

Table of contents :

Day 1 — October 4
Lecture: Learning and the ability to choose
ATM: On back, rolling the head with the hands (part 1)
ATM: Rolling the arms
ATM: Head through the gate, then circling the lower arm

Day 2 — October 5
ATM: On the back, head through the gate and hand under heel (part 1)
Lecture: Koizumi
ATM: Head through the gate, hand under the heel (part 2)
ATM: Head through the gate, hand under the heel (part 3)
ATM: Turning to sit from standing

Day 3 — October 6
ATM: Head through the gate (part 4)
ATM: Head through the gate, see-saw breathing
ATM: Rolling the head with the hands (part 2)

Day 4 — October 7
ATM: Rocking the pelvis
ATM: Pelvic clock (part 1)
Lecture (embedded): On intelligence and the history of human beings, language, lying
ATM: Pelvic clock (part 2)
ATM: Pelvic clock, sitting and rolling the head

Day 5 — October 8
ATM: Sitting between the heels
ATM: Sitting on the feet, rolling and headstand
Lecture (embedded) The healthiest of the lot
Lecture (embedded) On aggression and violence
ATM: Baby rolls
ATM: Prone, head through the gate, rolling to sit

Citation preview

Awareness Through Movement® Workshop Toronto, Canada • October 4--8, 1980

MOSHE FELDENKRAIS

Edited ·by Elaine Yoder Transcribed by Lila Hurwitz

Published by Feldenkrais® Resources 830 Bancroft Way, Suite 112 Berkeley, CA 94710 510-540-7600 800-765-1907 [email protected],www.feldenkrais-resources.com ©2002 FeldenkraisResources, all rights reserved Unauthorized Duplication of this material is a violation of Federal Law.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Day l / October 4 1 ·

Lecture: Learning and the ability to choose

13

ATM: On back, rolling the head with the hands, part 1

19

ATM: Rolling the arms

25

ATM: Head through the gate, then circling the lower arm

Day 2. / October 5 36

ATM: On back, head through the gate and hand under heel, part 1

49

Lecture: Koizumi

51 ·

ATM: Head through the gate, hand under the heel, part 2

54

ATM: Head through the gate, hand under the heel, part 3

63

ATM:Turning to sit from standing

Day 3 / October 6 66

ATM: Head through the gate, part 4

73

ATM: Head through the gate, see-saw breathing

88

ATM: Rolling the head with the hands, part 2

Day 4 / October 7 102

ATM: Rocking the pelvis

110

ATM: Pelvic clock

112

Lecture: (embedded) On intelligence and the history of human beings, language, lying

119 128

. A TM: Pelvic clock, part 2 ATM: Pelvic clock, sitting and rolling the head

Day S / October 8 133

ATM: Sitting between the heels

143

ATM: Sitting on the feet, rolling and headstand

145

Lecture: (embedded) The healthiest of the lot

150

Lecture: (embedded) On aggression and violence

153

ATM: Baby rolls .

160

ATM: Prone, head through the gate, rolling to sit

ATM WORKSHOP• TORONTO 4 OCTOBER 1980 DAY 1

Day 1 4 October 1980

Lecture:

Learning and the ability to choose We will begin from the beginning, but I don't know where it is. Really. You can start from about two-and-a-half billion years c).go.And we can start from ourselves when we were born. You start maybe with nothing, or only one thing, or with a Chinese proverb, which says a funny thing: When I hear, I forget; when I see, I remember; and when I do, I understand. In other words, when we don't do a thing, we don't understand it. Somebody who has never painted cannot understand what it is to make a picture. He makes for himself an idea of painting. Or somebody who has never composed music, doesn't know how to compose music. Or somebody who has never done research in science, believes that the scientist knows what he's going to do, and then he does and then he gets it. If we did it like that, nobody would ever know anything at all, because that would be just repeating the thing you know. Usually very great scientists start and they don't know what's going to come out, and while working they discover something interesting. And that's called research. Actually, most of the second--rate, fifth-rate research is done in that way-that you know you don't like eggs, and then you go and prove that eggs are no good for you [laughter]. You see? And other people know that bran is good for you, then they make experiments that show you if you eat bran you go to the toilet every day [laughter]. So, that is not research, that is selfmasturbation; Really. And it's not something idle. Now, we're going to do something in order to understand. What I'm proposing is a different way of looking at yourself and at the world. But, that's high talking, of course--how do you look differently at yourself? You look differently at yourself if you find out that what you believe to be true about yourself is not true. Therefore, the most important human endeavor for doing this-ever since the world exists, all the clever teachers of humanity, all the great minds of humanity, have always said that "know thyself" is the most important thing. Now, if you ask me, I always thought I knew myself, and everybody else thinks, "What do you mean, what is there to know about me? That's what I am." And then you find out that it's not true at all. Anybody who has done psychoanalysis certainly found that the things he believed or she believed turned out not to be true. For instance, I like this person for that and that. I believe that I like him because he's like that-then I find out that I like him because he is just the opposite of my mother who I hate [laughter]. Or something not as simple as that, but that's how it works. Now we want to find out how we're we wired in, and what we know a.bout ourselves which is true, and what we could do to ourselves to be happier in life, to do better for ourselves. Now, when I look at people here, I look at funny things: There is one person who sits with the feet like that. The one behind her, exactly the same thing. Here, there are some people who have done yoga and sit in a funny sort of way [lauglzter] with open hip joints, over-extended hip joints, and the back is like that. If I live long enough and she lives long enough, she'll be my patient for correcting her back. She'll have trouble. TlzouglzIndians by the millions sit like that and many of them don't have problems. The

first time I met Ida Rolf-that was many years ago, she's dead now-people were there sitting in the lotus position. She said, these are the people who provide my bread and . butter. Because with them I have the biggest trouble; they don't understand. They tlzink · they are doing the right thing, and actually make something wrong. Now, this is one of the things to understand: There is not a thing that is right, is good, and which has only good, and there·is no such thing which is only bad. The lotus position has a lot of advantages, but it has a lot of inconveni1ence, especially for people who haven't been sitting like that from the day they were born, and they didn't see everybody else sitting like that from the day they were born. Therefore, they arrive there, and they must stretch ligaments, stretch muscles, and actually do things like that, many of them actually getting knee pains before they learn to do that. Therefore, that's not learning, and therefore, bodies like that are not properly organized; though they sit very nicely in the lotus position. ou would think that if somebody so supple that they can open the legs and put them o the floor like that-she is all over, a body as supple as that You will see when we wo k that in many respects she is inferior to the people who can't sit in the lotus position at all. And I have nothing against her, I don't know her; it is a general rule. I have ha many yoga teachers who came to a group and in the group they were the worst. And, n fact, they gave up their yoga. Miriam [Pfeffer], if you know her, she was a yoga te cher for about 15 years. She doesn't do it anymore. Not because yoga is bad, that she was wrong, but she found something better, and therefore she gave it up. But she erself practiced it for 15 years and was a teacher. And she once brought to me a yogi, a uru from South Africa, a very intelligent man, really, a nice guy, and he came, and Ital ed about the lotus position, and he got up and said, "Look, I am a teacher for 30 year ; I corroborate that what you said is absolutely true." And I said the same sort of thing s I'm saying now. He said that he found that many of the white people who learn yoga at a later age of their life do riot benefit and do not get what the yogi gets when he does ·t, which is normal. But then what is the reme y? I believe, actually, that there is no reason why you shouldn't sit in the lotus position Except that you have to know what you are doing. What do I mean to know what you are doing, to find out, how do you sit in the lotus the rest of you? What do you think, what do you position? I mean, what happens feel, why do you do it? Why did ou torture yourself and extend your ligaments to the. point of being able to do it? Now I say if you stop doing it for six months, you'll find that you can't do it again. Obvio sly, you can't do it only bEicause you keep on doing the habitual thing and make you self go like that. I'm not preaching to give up the yoga position, the lotus-in fact, you'l see that what we propose for you to decide whether it's good or bad, is only where it' good and bad for you. Not for any other reason-it's not good for me, it's not good fo anybody-except for you. Is it good for you? Now, not be compulsive. Because com What do you mean-you sit in all the time. Then it's a compulsi it's not human, it's machine-like. computer that you can get form made the computer, and therefo lack of choice. Of course, you kn 2

w do you know whether it's good for you? It must ulsiveness is always that you do it for lack of choice. e yoga position everywhere? It doesn't matter what, e thing; you can't sit any other way, In other words, It can be a marvelous machine, it can be the best IBM ney. It's still a machine. There's still somebody who , it's not human, it's machine-like. It's compulsive for w that compulsion is a bad word. If you're

ATM WORKSHOP • TORONTO 4 OCTOBER 1980 DAY 1

compulsive you have to go to a psychiatrist [laughter].You have to go to an analyst and do something about yourself to stop being compulsive. Now, the next thing is this: How do you stop being compulsive? You must have the ability to choose. And that's a human prerogative. No machine can choose. No machine can choose who will buy it, but every man can choose which machine he buys. So there's a free choice that the man has and the machine hasn't. No Rolls Royce ever chose the proprietor, you see? But everybody who had the money to buy a Rolls Royce and wanted it for his own prestige or for some other reason bought it. Therefore there is free choice like that. Now how do you get free choice, how do we get free choice? Actually, it's not a question of free choice, it's a bad word, "free choice." It should be the ability to choose.Not the freedom of the choice, but the ability to choose. Because when you have free choice, you won't know what to choose. You shouldn't be free. You should have the ability to choose and you should choose something that is in the interest: of your wellbeing. That's free choice. Now, any action can be compulsive, for lac],the left. Slower still. Then you will see what happens, how the head, and the shoulders, and the shoulder blade, and the chest must get, and will get softer, because in the brain, the pattern of moving is removed, those permanent contractions, these permanent excitations of cells doing the same thing without ever changing, which makes the back bad, .which makes the discal hernias and all those things like that. Of course, it's not the only thing that makes a discal hernia, there are . other causes. It even may be hereditary, but very rarely. Watch what you have to do with the pelvis in order to be able to do it, and what you have to do with your head and chest. When does the head start to move, when you're already on the side with your knees? What does start to move first, the pelvis or the shoulders? Where is the most weight, in your feet or your hands? What presses hard on the floor, the feet or the hands? Some are not clear about it, and some are. YQU can see the quality of the movement of those who feel their feet, who feel their hands, and distribute the weight equally. Those movements begin to look like a dancer's, they begin to look nic~. Nice to everybody who looks at them. Doesn't matter what his taste is. 10

1

11

72

And note, if you wait half a minute, you can feel that the muscles reorganize themselves because from the motor cortex come

ATMWORKSHOP• TORONTO 5 OCTOBER1980 DA_.Y 3

impulses that are different from the usual. Therefore, the entire tonus of the body is reorganized. The members lie differently. The small of the back lies differently. The chest lies differently, and the breathing is different. The feeling in the face and the eyes is different, in the shoulders, in the legs. Everything is slightly different, and we become quite clearly aware of that ..You feel taller, flatter, wider. 12 Roll to your side, and get to the standing position. When you stand, just observe what you feel there. You will find that the small of the back is differently organized from your usual, and only when you ·come back will you see what the difference is. Slowly walk around. Observe yourself, feel. Do you feel smaller, taller, heavier, nimbler, older? Do you like to be like that, or not? Would you please walk backwards, without turning? Do you get taller when you walk backwards? Now walk forward again. Walk backwards again. See what you do with your hands when you walk backwards. Do you get taller or smaller? And the clavicles, where are they in space relative to yourself? Now, those ,-vho have been with me before know already that every hour we break for a few minutes, just to break the monotony of learning so that we can go with a fresh start and really learn, otherwise we jqst get into a rut. ATM Head through the gate, see-saw breathing 1

Can you lie on your back again? This time, put both hands . overhead, and the legs straight down, just opened a little bit, lying comfortably on the floor. Spread them a little bit, naturally, which changes with your nature. Now, put your hands on the floor like before, both legs straight, and slightly spread and at ease. Now very slowly, just move your shoulders and your head, with the legs straight like that, rtot bent. And twist everything you want, until you can move the back of your head underneath the right gate, underneath the right elbow, and then tum ove:r to the other side, move the back of the head to the other gate. Slowly. Slowly move your chest and everything you need. No, leave your legs lying open. Thaf s right. No, you're moving your pelvis and your head is not moving anymore. Move the chest, and the head, and the arms, and the pelvis. And of course, the back cannot move without the pelvis ..Don't lie on your right side with the pe:lvis. Otherwise you would have done it before. Spread your legs and use your shoulders and head, and don't get there at once. If you get there at once you can't do it but in the way in which you are accustomed, and it means it's not learning. That's exercising; don't exercise. Don't lift your spine unnecessarily.

73

Make smaller-movements until your nervous system appreciates that what you're doing now is cuckoo. Slowly, you will feel that there is a way of doing it, and you can do it and some are already doing it. Otherwise, if it were inhuman, nobody would ever do it from the start properly. Slowly. Anybody who achieves it straight-away like that, you can guarantee it's not good enough. It's not good. If you achieve, it must be wrong. Because we are taught all our life to achieve and not to attend to how we do it. We are ready to-kill ourselves in order to achieve it. You are ready to suffer any pain in order to achieve it, to be the first to do it. Therefore, be the last to do it Be the last. Don't lie on your right side nor on your left side. That's right,. slowly move, find where you have to move. I left you with the legs straight so that you have to use the chest and the shoulders properly, better than before. Slowly. You can move your entire body,. but only if it is necessary, not just to achieve anything. As it's necessary to achieve that movement elegantly. That means, with the least effort possible, and that will happen less and less while you do it, if you do it slowly. If you do it fast, it will be more and more painful, that's all. Slowly. You see, if you go slowly like that, the shoulders, the clavicles, the ribs will deform on the right side, more and differently than on the left, and if you allow that, the. breathing will take place, which means the diaphragm will work, you will work, and the whole will organize itself better and better. Then when you use your legs, yoti will find, "Ooh! That feels nice." But if you do it with tremendous effort now, just achieve the damn thing, then when you do it with the legs it will-require the same effort. · No difference. Anybody who has real pain should only do it mentally, or not do it at all, represent themselves the movement and do it when they have a chance of recovery. If you keep on irritating and irritating thejoint~ it irritates and swells and it's more painful, and it will never heal. Just like if you have a wound, and every day whatever part is healed you open it again. Tfo:?nin a few weeks' time, you will get a wound that never heals anymore. You will have to put[ ...] or something like that to kill the dead cells that do not regenerate anymore, and get back to healthy meat that can heal. You have to burn it with[ ...], which is mercury, or something like that, or actually with fire. Otherwise, if you open the wound that heals, a dozen, twenty, thirty times,. it stops healing. Slowly, keep on doing it gently, and observe each time how, when you turn to the right, for instance, or to the left, the elbow stands much better. The elbow under which the head rolls is the one that stands properly. Can you feel, it stands in such a way that you could actually put two, three, four hundred weights on it, and you will feel nothing? Now, note when you do that whether you hold your breath. Hold it if you feel like it. And then note; when the head goes underneath the gate, do you breathe out, or breathe in? How should we do it? Should we breathe in or should we breathe out? When the head goes underneath there, will you breathe in or breathe out?

2

74

Now, would you please stay with the head underneath the right elbow. The back of the head underneath thieright elbow, and stay there. If it's not quite, it doesn't m~tter. Stay wherever you can without the help of your legs. Now, why not spread your hands more? Maybe if you spread your hands it would work. Of course, it

ATM WORKSHOP• TORONTO 5 OCTOBER 1980 DAY 3

does matter. Now, slowly, you have the head underneath the right elbow. Would you please stay like that, and now, pull your stomach in and lift your chest, widen your chest, and then do it the other way around: push the lower abdomen out like if you were pregnant, below the navel, between the navel and the pubis, push it out, and see, when you do that, do you breathe in or breathe out? Now, would you please lie there until you can push the abdomen forward and breathe out. Slowly, and then do it until you can push the abdomen out and breathe in. But go slowly, because it's unfamiliar; you will never do it if you try to dio it straight-away. You will do it; it won't work, that's all. Slowly. Push the abdomen· out and then, of course, now when you push the abdomen out you will breathe out. Do it a few times breathing out, and then, of course, breathe in doing the same thing. And now, slowly see whether you can widen your chest and lift your chest so that the distance between the spine and the sternum is bigger, and is informally thicker. The chest and the spine go away from each other. You have to do something with yourself in order to do that. Watch what it does to your hands and to your head. ,:)

..

·:::>

Now slowly lie on your back, slowly. Then you will feel that there is a difference between the right side and the left side, the right arm and the left arm. The right arm stands better than the left. Take it down, stretch out, and just feel what's happening.

4

Now very slowly, put your hands again on the floor, and move again, doing the same movements,. only watch what else. Is it more comfortable to move the head underneath the righ't elbow? Just see whether it's easier to do, and whether it's better, more comfortable to do. And whether the head rolls a little bit :ntore back. Now, stay like that again, more or less in that position. Now, make the chest wider, thicker, the abdomen in, and then the other way around: push the abdomen out and flatten the chest. Do that without concern for the breathing. You can breathe in and do that, and you can breathe out, move the chest and the abdomen as a see-saw, as · two plates of balance, up and down, up and down. Widen the chest and draw in the stomach, and then push out the lower abdomen and flatten the stomach. Do that a few times.

5

Lie on your back again, and rest a little. Rest a little; you will have enough work, don't worry. Note what happens in our body when we pay attention while we do something. Can you see, it's more effecti_vethan just doing?

6

And now, gently, put both hands over your head again, and think, don't do it, think of doing the same thing to the left. Don't do it, just imagine yourself turning. You had the ex1perience of how to do it on one side, you will now turn and put the back of your head underneath your left elbow, and think of doing it, i_magine it in your self, with your kinesthetic sense, or listen to yourself, or see it

75

with your mind's eye. Organize yourself so that you can do it as soon as you decide to do it, that you tum your chest, shoulders, in such a way that the back of the head will go underneath the left elbow with ease, as you have learned from the other side organize that. That's right. Imagine that you do it. And then think of yourself with the back of the head underneath your left elbow. Feel, sense what happens in your back, in your breathing. Now slowly do it, really, a little bit. Tum to your right and put your head a little bit back. Don't do it perfectly, just what is comfortable and stay like that. Put your head back enough so that it feels easy to stay like that. 8 Imagine that you push your abdomen out and breathe out. Two, three times only. Imagine that you draw your abdomen in and lift · the chest. And the other way around: you flatten your chest and push the abdomen out. Imagine that, feel which parts of the self are not actually involved, and which work too hard. Slowly. Now, actually do the see-saw movement a few times, which means 9 the chest is being heaved and flattened in after, with the abdomen. The abdomen is pushed out, the chest is flalttened, and the other way.around like a pair of scales, or like a see-saw movement ... chest flattening, abdomen out and the other way around. Then do it wHh breathing and see what happens. When do you breathe in, when the chest widens, or when the stomach is full? And now, see whether you could breathe and do that alternating movement faster than the breathing. Just let it out normally, iin the normal rate, and· you can se_ethat you can flatten the chest, or widen the chest, or draw in the abdomen, or push it out, and in fact there is a very slight influence on your breathing. All of the contortions that we do when breathing, we widen our chest, and that is futile. It actually has nothing to do with breathing.

7

10 · Stop it. lie on your back. Sit up gently, or lean on your elbows so that you can see me. Now see, I _ . widen my chest, like for breathing in, and I will do just the opposite, breathe out. To ma~e sure that I breathe out, listen [whistles]. You see? You can widen your chest and breathe out, since it's not the widening of the chest that is essential to breathing in. And of course you can empty the chest and breathe out, we know that [whistling]. But I am widening the chest and breathing out [whistling], and I assure you that I'm not built differently from you, and you, and that you can do it, too. _Inother w~rds, when you want to learn real breathing-you can see ail the contortions that people teach you to breathe-and you have to do it to open · the door or the window [breathes loudly], and you have to do it one, two, three, four ... it's just bunk, it's incorrect. You can breathe like that. But that is only one of 10 different ways of breathing. Therefore, people who. want to correct their breathing by doing that, do it a lifetime. You won't find a guru who doesn't do it all his life. Therefore, and other people who learn by the guru, certainly do it all their life, or they are bored and stop it. But, therefore, 76

ATM WORKSHOP• TORONTO 5 OCTOBER 198() DAY 3

their breathing is actually never good-because multiplication tables and I know it.

I stopped learning the

Once my breathing is good, why should I go on doing [snorts]? What's the object? What's the object of doing it? But if you keep on doing it, you're all of a sudden not satisfied. It shows you that it's never good, and it couldn't be good because it's breathing in a most awkward way, like somebody taught you to breathe. Suppose somebody taught you how to love, and you did it by the instructions? You will see what would happen [laughter].Try and see. You will find yourself doing it wrong, as with the breathing, most people feel they can't breathe properly. Should we do something about breathing? We touch any other function we do, you'll find that we find ourselves as badly off as with the breathing. Then there are the other funrty things that are wrong in all the teaching of breathing, in all the books of physiology, in all the teachers of breathing,, even Professor Fisher, one of the world's experts wrote a book like that-actually, I lectured in Germany and he was present there, too. It was actually,[ ...] something congress of that, congress for breathing. I argued against the whole congress, all of them, showing that the way they're teaching now; they're not human. They didn't do it in the end. I can show you, I have about 50 letters of the people, and people there on the spot, admitted that they had something to change, that they were wrong. They were doing exercise, and exercise means that you don't know what you're doing. · You believe that if you do a thing wrongly a hundred times, a thousand times, it will get better. No! It won't! If you are intelligent and do it, look, go slowly, and find out that what you do is less comfortable, more comfortable, than you will do it. But if you know that you must suffer because of an exercise, that you are no good, you have to do it and you are forced to do it, then you'll never be good. You will do breathing all your life, breathing exercises, and you'll never breathe properly. Properly means good for yourself. Now, I want to see other funny things that people don't understand. Even the books don't understand, and the people who know something about breathing don''t understand, because they have learned it from one another. They do research, and the object is to find · how publish a paper, but not to get better breathing for every one of us. It should be different for you than for me. It should be your breathing, notmy breathing. My breathing is good for me, but not for you. Just like my food is good for me and not for you. My smoking is good for me and not for you {laughter]. Now, you want to see some funny things about breathing? I'll shm·v you. Listen, I will breathe out for the next half-hour [lauglzter],never breathe in. What do you think of that? [exhalesforcefully] And now, look how my chest full of air can talk. I didn't take in any air, I didn't do any breathing. Now, [exhales forcefully], and then [whistles],I have plenty of air. Why do you have to breathe in if you cannot breathe in? Breathe out and you have plenty of air. How do you do that? Now look [exhalesforcefully], and then, I cam, say ... [demonstrates 111ove111e11tJ [laughter].How is it? Do you believe that I'm so different from you, that my father was a genius and taught me quite differently, and my mother bore me differently? And therefore, you see, I have a funny sort of brain, and do / exhales forc~fully], and I talk. How do I do that? You try, maybe you have it, too. 77

[laughterJ Try! Don't breathe in, just breathe out and see whether you can talk after that. Stop it, and talk, and see whether you can. Don't breathe in, and see whether you have enough air. In fact, you have more air than by breathing in. How come? How come the whole world doesn't do it? It works with you, too, so your father was a genius, too [laughter].Not the father, but that part of it at least. The part that made you, and made me, and made it so that we can now, at a moment's notice, breathe out violently and have plenty of air. You see what sort of clever instrument your father had? [laughterJ Yeah. Can you do it,· too? Woo hoo! Wonderful! Now, please lie down on your back again. Can you see, we have plenty things to1earn about breathing, which everybody knows? Everybody knows the wrong thing because we have been taught to do it for a different reason. Not for our personal improvement. Everything is done in order that we should fit into some hole for somebody's need. Which is an important thing, and we should do that, too. But there is no need for us should give up our personal growth just because we have to work for others. Is that a reason for giving up your own self?

tl

12

Now would you please put both knees up; bend your knees, and put your feet at a proper distance from yourself. Now 'stretch your arms overhead on the floor. That's right. And slowly tilt your knees to the right and tum until you can put the back of your head underneath your left elbow. Stretch your arms overhead; don't put the hands standing, stretch the arms overhead on the floor. Move gently with your knees to the right until your head goes underneath your left arm. The back of the head. Do if gently, slowly, many times, until the head goes back underneath your left arm. That's right. And now, of course, slowlly tum the other way around. Slowly tum the other way around, !tilt the knees to the left and move the back of the head underneath your right arm.

Can you see that there is actually a question of how you put the anns? It doesn't matter whether they stand or not. There's still something not happening in the chest, and in the upper part of the spine, and the clavicles, and the shoulder blades. You can see, they just don't do the job. And of course, if they don't do the job that means that you are not doing your job. In fact, you don't use your nervous system as well as it is structured and functions, but you abuse it. That's only because we don't care for our own comfort. Now, care for that at least a few minutes. Do it comfortably, do it slowly, until you find that the system is clear about how to do it so that it's comfortable to do, and you will find that to your astonishment, it is actually becoming comfortable to do. And when it becomes comfortable to do, it becomes also elegant, which means the effort that you do is turned entirely into movement, not into internal friction. Not into self-masturbation, not into willpower. It's turned into movement, and when it turns into movement, you'll find that it's the most efficient movement, the most efficient use of the nervous system, of the muscles, of the spine, and of the entire self. The more we act that way, the easier and the more confident we become of ourselves, because we become

78

ATM WORKSHOP • TORONTO 5 OCTOBER 1980 DAY 3

aesthetically satisfied. I find, "Look, I'm not doing as badly as I thought I could do this. I'm actually not so good and not so bad. I am actually myself, and I do it well enough), And anybody that doesn't like it, let him go and hang himself. But I am interested in me getting easier and better, and it's not his business."

13

Now, would you stop a little, and now put your hands as you did before, standing on either side of the head. And just see for yourself, whether the hands are more comfortable.

Now spread your feet comfortably, and you see, some people I have to remind six times, put them comfortably. They put them either too narrowly or too wide-not for their comfort. It's one of the most difficult things, to make people care for their own way of being. They're only being what they are; it's habitual for them. In other words, they do things like everybody else, like they should be doing. They decorate their house as it should be decorated, and most of the time they have chairs that you can't sit on. They look nice, and you can buy other ones to save next year.

14

All right, slowly, would you please use both liegs, bend your knees and put your feet on the floor, and [... ] to those who don't do it, so that those who do it will know that they have already dorie it. [laughter] Yeah, it's a joke, but some haven't heard it yet. Now, so slowly, put your hands, and do it now with the entire self: legs, chest, ribs, pelvis. Just watch, with what do you start? Do you start with the pelvis or with the head? You tilt your legs to the left, straight to the left. What is starting the movement, the pelvis or the head?

15

Now, would you please stop it, and start the right shoulder and the hip moving away from the floor simultaneously, as one piece. You tilt your legs to the left but the right side lifts off the floor as one piece. If it lifts off the floor as one piece you can't go much further, because afterwards they change. If you go back you will find that it doesn't go down as one piece, but the shoulders first, and therefore it's not as one piece. If you don't know whether it's one piece, if you don't know that it is, 1 can see from here that it isn't, and you don't know it. You should have been with me 10 years ago, and you'll have to stay with me another 50 years before .you lean1, because you're not paying attention to your own needs. Pay attention to your own needs, and then you don't need me, you don't need anybody. Slowly. If you think of moving them together, only you can know whether you moved them together or not, nobody else. It's not I that will show you that you are wrong. You should find out whether you are wrong. And slowly, move the shoulder and the pelvis together. Then you will find that you can't go a lot. If you go a lot, then you won't go together. If you go back, you'll find that they don't touch the floor · together. If you go back, do you find that one of them touches first? You may be sure that it was like that also when you got up. That the other part went first. Go back and see, can you touch the floor with the shoulder blade and the hip joint at the same time? Yes. Of course you can, provided you know what you're doing. That's right. Move one side as if it were pushed through with a skewer to the

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pelvis, to the hip joint, and the should~r blade; you can't move one without the other. The skewer should be your intention. Slowly. 16 Now move the same thing to the right, but also that amount of movement that you can do having everything together; Slowly. Together, so that you come back together, too, and go to the floor with those things together. 17 Now slowly, start with the shoulders first. Uegin to move the shoulders and the head first, and make sure that the pelvis doesn't move. Head and shoulders. Can you see that it is not as easy? Obviously, when we do that, we do something else. Shoulders and head and chest, of course, go together, and you do the movement like that. But I can see, somebody has tu.med the pelvis on their side, now what's the difference? You doit once, and whatever I say, you do the same thing. If whatever is said and done is done the same way, you won't differentiate it, and you'll learn you'll be of inferior quality. You will convince yourself that you are no good. In other words, your aesthetic self-confidence will never occur properly. You should find that each time you are doing better, and if you don't, then you carinot grow·confident and be sure that you are right. You'll have to obey other people's instructions. And that we have done all our life; that's enough. 18 Slowly, now, would you please not move your shouldei:s at all, but move the pelvis first, right and left, tilting the legs, and see. That's right. You don't have to lift the pelvis off the floor; don't lift it. You don't have to lift it; it's enough to tilt it. In other words, you can see, even before we did move with the pelvis first, that there's something in the eyes that moves with the ]legs. Pay attention and you will see. When you think of the pelvis, you will see that your eyes tum to the right. If your legs tilt to the right, the eyes actually move to the right. Now, when you think of moving the ·pelvis to the left, you will feel your eyes tilting to the leJftand the head ever so slightly, just enough for the eyes to move. 19 Now, would you please tilt your legs to the right, and move the eyes to the left, to the extreme left. · You'll be astonished that something happens in the shoulder-s that didn't happen before. In other words, the shoulders become more amenable, and the spine. Some sort of twist is originated, which shows you where it was never used in that way. In other words, there are some vertebrae in the spine and some ribs that do not know:how to move, one relative to the other, because you never do that. Therefore, they're undifferentiated and go together, arid are a cause of trouble in the shoulder blades, and all other sorts of inconveniences. 20

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Now, roll to the other side, and move the eyes to the other side. That means, if you tilt your knees to the left, the eyes move to the right. And then when the legs move to the right, knees move to the right, the eyes move in the other direction.

ATM WORKSHOP • TORONTO 5 OCTOBER l 980 DAY 3

Now, that's enough. Would you please just lie on your back, stretch out, and see how the small of the back lies on the floor. Those who have been here before will find that it lies differently from the . usual, and not so close to the floor in the lumbar region as on other occasions. 22 So would you please put both hands behind your head, join the fingers together behind the head, and bend both knees. And very, very slowly, lift the head a little bit, the feet apart, not together. Lift your head gently a little bit, slowly. Breathe out while you do that, flatten your chest, and lower the head, and do it again. Now, very, very slowly, move your left elbow and the head to your right as if you were going to sit up on the right side, but tilt the knees the other way. Tilt the knees the other way, and lift your left elbow outside your right knee, with the head and both elbows, of course. Gently: Only as much as it goes~ That's right, slowly. Try again, and do the same movement again, and again. No other movement, the same thing, on this side. Then see, why on earth doesn't the right shoulder blade and the right side of the chest lift itself a little bit better? Don't force it. It's not a question of lying on the side; you're . lying on your back. And your left elbow goes over to your right side outside the right thigh, nothing else. Slowly. The legs tilt the other way, of course. Don't do it! Don't suc~eed. If you succeed, you will just make pain where it shouldn't be. Slowly. It's a question of learning how to do it, because none of you can do it, actually. You'll find that the perso)J.who has trouble with his back, this he can do quite nicely. How come? 21

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If you move to your left, should the legs remain like that, or would you like to move them? Is that what you have claimed in your yoga, tai chi, whatever you do, judo, Feldenkrais, Rolfing, anything you did? Is that what it did to you, to have your legs and the pelvis dead as they are now? Surely. How long do you expect to live until you realize who you are? Are you your legs or not? When I cut off your leg, are you without a leg, or is one leg without a leg? I believe that if I am amputated, I am legless. The other leg doesn't care a hoot. Therefore it's not my body that cares whether I am legless. I care that I want not to be legless, and so you. Therefore, it's you. Would you please see, what can you do when you t:urn your shoulders right and left? Could your pelvis do something so the knees move a little bit one way or the other? Or is there no connection between your pelvis and your head? Is there, or isn't there? Is it you, or isn't it you?· Now, would you please move your pelvis, move your knees, go slowly, move to the left, which means, the left shoulder back and the right shoulder fonvard, and keep on doing it and see what would happen if by any mishap you move your pelvis so that the left knee touches the floor and the right one gets up. And now see, do your shoulders already turn better? If they don't, don't do it. Now slowly, that's right. Would you please move the pelvis, the shoulders? And who says that that was the limit? What about turning more or less, and which 81

way? What about turning and putting both knees to one side? One and the other. Do the shoulders turn more or less? And if so, why do they turn more? How do they tum more? Is it because you use yourselfinstead of using yourself as a body? Now, is that the limit? Come on, do it gently, slowly, bend your knees and tun1 both knees to one side, and see how much your shoulders turn, and your head. By the way, when you do that, why is the head still hanging like that? Is it your head or somebody else's? No, don't do any funny nonsense. Just see if the shoulders, when they move right and left, would let the head roll so that the right heel goes to lie on the right shoulder. Btit don't do it in one go, because that would be destroying ycmr neck. Slowly. Move to the right, tilt both legs one way, and see what happens to the head when the shoulders go like that, and you let your head go ·where it will go. Does it turn in the opposite direction of your turning, or in the direction you turn? If you turn, don't turn your shoulders. Now you are not turning your shoulders anymore, therefore that goes in that direction. In other words, you don't'know what you are doing. Didn't I tell you at the beginning? We know ourselves, we find that in five seconds you'll realize that we don't really know ourselves. Now, you are to wiggling, you're becoming supple now, but you're not doing what I asked y1.::m do. And you're feet are together, they are cuckoo. Now, would you please tilt ·· your legs, both of them, to one side, and the shoulders at the same time, and see where the head goes and let the head go where it does. Now, does the head go · with the knees or with the shoulders? The head rolls to one side; does it rolJ to the side that the knees are bent, or lower to the floor, or the opposite? Did you know that before? And if it comes, how come some people do it the other way? Which is the other way? Which is the right way for you, not for me? Which is the right way? When you turn both knees try to do it to one side slowly many times, until you know what you are doing, then you will know what you want to do. Otherwise what you want to do doesn't work. Now, you should know that you are not paralyzed, you are not paralyzed, the young lady there with the black socks, you're not paralyzed, but you're doing what you think you should be doing, not what you feel. It's not right. You doing what you should do correctly, and that's very bad for you, not for me. Because you are young and supple, yet you're doing what you should do. Would you please do what you feel you · should do, not what somebody told you, or what you think. Just do what you feel you should do. Now, change over to the other direction. Now see, where does the head go? Some people ... Now, would you please stop a minute. Only you stay and you stay, and you peoplelook at them from behind; it doesn't matter, just watch. The thing is, I must tell you first, that when I pick on people it's not because I know him or know her, or have something against you or something for you. You're all the same to me---.:-notexactly,because some people I like better from the first moment I see them. So, but, what I'm doing now is not trying to do any harm to you. On the contrary, I'm trying to find out how come three intelligent people lie there, having heard the same thing, and you see the difference. Would you please keep on doing the same thing we said up until now? Now, look. First, see whether you can see what's happening, what's the difference? No, you're not doing what you did before. Ah, tlznf'swhat 23

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you did before. Can you see that if you doll't know what you're doing, you can't even do the same thing again? Keep on doing what you did before. And you 're not doing what you did before, either. Do exactly what you did before. Otherwise there's no point in other people looking at you. l[want to find out whether they can see the difference. Keep on doing that exactly; don't talk, you have nothing to say. It's not bad, it's not good; it's a question of learning. Now look, watch, and see. Both turn the shoulders, both tum the legs. Look what his head does, look what his head does. Don't do anything with the head that is different from before. Look. Now look at his head. Don't do it, now you're moving into the shoulders. All right, now look there, they're two ways of doing it. There are actually more, but most people do the compulsive thing; the only thing, for lack of choice. Now, what is the lack of choice in that? Look, he moves the legs to the right when his head moves to the left,, and look, keep on doing it, look, the shoulders, look, the right shoulder goes forward, the left backwards, the knees roll to the left, the head tilted to the right. Can you see that? Now, this gentleman does the same thing. He's leaning on his hand, turns the shoulders, his head hangs in the middle, and doesn't move. Why? How? Can you see what happens, what's the difference? Can you feel that you are holding your legs together as if it were the instructi.on to hold them together, and he doesn't? Now, leave your legs ... Can you see, I know what he thinks about his legs, and that he doesn't? How come? That's what I'm saying; we don't kri.ow ourselves. Now you will see-hold your legs, but don't press your adductors together.Do what you did before. Look, his head tilts to the other side. If you didn't learn what he's doing, that in fact, he was squeezing his legs without knowing-. therefore, "Know thyself" is not a thing that is simple. You can look at yourself and you think, "I know myself," but unless you do what? Now slowly, keep on making it softer, tum your shoulders really, and · look, look, his head begins to tilt to the other side. Now go on and do it, and see, many of you did it like that, and with many it didn't move. By the way,. you, gentleman, you try, you didn't move the other way with your head. Go ahead, do it again. Now, you can see a funny thing. You will see 150 people, and you'll see what he did and what he did. Now you go and do it; he did the other way with his head, come on. Slowly, let me see. Now, find out why he doesn't work with him, in the opposite direction. Now come on, do it. You see that he does. You see? His left shoulder's back and the head goes to the other side. How come? Is he sillier, or more intelligent than the others? I think it has nothing to do with his intelligence. In fact, it is because he's intelligent, because he has been thinking and decided what to do, but. doesn't act by his kinesthetic feeling, and doesn't feel the necessity of what to do in order to really feel comfortable, and you can't do it unless you have free choice. In other words, would you please sit up, and you, too, and you do as you did before. You saw what he did. Come on, do it as he did before. And you, please, you saw what he did. Let's just see that. That's right:, that's marvelous. He has now two choices: he can go forward; he has a stick, he can go in first gear, in second gear, in third gear. He can do as he did, he can do as lze did. Now look what you did. You had your legs together and your shoulders were like that, but 83

your head was hanging in the middle and didn't move. Therefore, look, moving the pelvis moves a little bit the shoulders. You are not really aware of you doing it, but you let your body dictate for you what you should do. Now, look at him, and see, that's what you were doing. Would you please do the same thing again? You will see, that in fact, human intelligence is extraordinary. Once you see something better and you'll feel it better for one instant, you can't do the thing you did before. You don't know how. In other words, the learning is instantaneous, provided you realize the difference. In other words, you differentiate, you are able to do, you have a choice; Now look, now he has a choice. Look, now he does it the way you did it. Now his head rolls with the shoulders, not with the legs, the legs go to the left or to the right, and the head · · goes to the left. Now did he decide to do that? Or does it work like that because you are constructed like that, that the body tends to be balanced, or somehow, that the legs go to the right, if you ... Would you please go the opposite way? Go with the legs and the head the same direction. That's.right. What do you feel now? Now look. Can you see, he has to make the decision to do it. But watch, your head goes more with the right ear on the right shoulder, and then do the other side. He goes better to the left and better to the right. Look, now, go and do the same thing as you did before. In other words, look, he differentiates now. He has a pelvis and legs and shoulders. At one instance, he internally, in his own representation of his own self-image, kinesthetically, without thinking, he felt that moving the way we asked him to, the kind of thing we said, f~lt to him like moving that way. That's right. In other words, look, ·the head can tilt with the shoulders, and can tilt with the pelvis, with the legs, which means the legs go to the left, the head goes to the right. Now the legs go to the right, and then the head goes the opposite direction. In other words, the head goes with the shoulders. The shoulders move now, and look, the head moves with the shoulders. Stop moving your legs and move the shoulders alone and let the head go the way it did, and then you will understand what I'm talking about. Move the right shoulder back, that's right, and then the left shoulder back Move the shoulders, really, forward and back, and let the head go. That's right. Can you see? The head goes to roll on the forward shoulder, not on the backward shoulder. Look, on the forward shoulder. So the head moves with the shoulders, can you see? Now, would you please move the head with the legs? Move the legs to the right and let the head move to the right. When the legs go to the right, move to the right. That's it. Now it goes on the backward should.er, on the shoulder that goes back. That's what.you did, actually. Now, slowly, look. In other words, if he differentiates the movement of the head and the eyes, once with the shoulders, one with the legs, he will find that he is capable now of doing the way he wants it. Now, would you please leave it alone and do it the way you feel like doing it. Then you will find that you don't have to hold your legs together either. Open them. Open the knees. And now tilt to the right. Tilt your head and everything to the right. Go to the right. Is that to the right? Actually that's going to 'the left. Look, put your pelvis to the right and legs to the right. Everything to the right. That's right, now who said that that's a funny thing. Can't you move your left knee more to the right? Go on, move it more to the right. More so. And tun1 your shoulders, and see where-why can't you put it on the floor? That's right. And 84

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there, can you turn your head now and twist your shoulders? No, go in the same direction. Open your eyes and see, can you look to the right? That's right. How far can you go? Look at that Suddenly look how much movement he can do that he diidn't have before. Now, would you please come back to the middle and turn over to the other side. That's right, and keep on doing it, and let your entire self look, move your leg, and your thing, and your head, and open your eyes, and turn and lift your head, go on. And what about turning, that's right, what about leaving your headl... look! Leaving your head }:langingback. Now, tum your legs and your body and everything to the right, with your legs, with your entire self, and then everything to the right, and then keep on turning the head. Go with the head, with your left heel, on your left heel, on your left shoulder., left heel on your left shoulder, slowly. Then, keep on making a full circle with your head, that's right. . Then go on doing it in the opposite direction, turn your entire body. In other words, you can see, there is a richness of ability. Now, you lie down and tell me what it feels like now. Lie down and feel what it feels like. Is the floor aware that you are longer? Does the floor know th~t the small of theback is now not conbracted and that it touches the floor like it never did yo·µr life? You could do it only by lifting your head and legs. Now the small of the back lies. What do you think of that? And, did you know yourself before? [to student] Now, did you know yourself before? Would you please sit up now. Would you please, he imitated you before, would you imitate him? Anything you saw, you couldn't imitate the whole lot; it's too difficult. Anything that strikes your imagination that you saw. Now, tilt your legs and see what . happens with your head. Now, tilt your head; you moved it, you didn't tilt it. That's right, that's excellent. Now, can you see·that the pe.i;sonlearns practically instantaneously, provided he knows what he's doing. If he doesn't know what he's doing how can he change? If I don't knowing what I'm doing, how can I change? In other words, look, if I am[ ... ] like that, how could I do something else? I'm always like that. That's my character. I'm[ ...], that's how I-am. Therefore[ ...] sit down, sit down, don't walk; it's not good for you. Just [demonstrating]sit, sit. That's my character. I am like that. Now I know what I am doing, and therefore I can change it, but if I don't_ know what i·am·doing-there are many people like that here, who keep on walking like that all their lives, like this. And some of them walk like that [demonstrating]all their lives. And some walk like that [demonstrating]Ilaughter] or that. Now, can you see, if you don't know what you are doing, you can't do what you want? And the way of doing it, you can see that unless you use movement, movement,to find out how you move, you will never know what you are doing. You could do it also with music. You could do it with breathing. You could do it with yoga. But they're all limited, you can't teac:heverybody to do music. You can't teach everybody to do mathematics. You can't get everybody. Their life is so organized that already now, they can't do what you want. And by the way, we will get on to that too-that unlless you really go to those things that you really wanted all your life and didn't achieve, so long as you don't do that you won't be healthy anyway. You'll be only wires and machines. All of us are like that; it's not only you. Everybody, me included. We 85

are like that. Therefore, why movement? Because movement is general and without movement there is no life, and if I have acquired a kind of characteristic movement, if my movements are always like that, or my movements are always like Mohammed Ali's, telling you ta ta ta ta ta, yesterday he was beaten, yeah? And he's an extraordinary boxer. But, you know how he talks. Actually, I believe that he talks like that intentionally, that he's a very intelligent man. He has made himself a figure like that, and he gets all the idiots to talk about him. Everybody's talking, the way he talks is enough to erase everybody's[ ...], a man talking like that, the way he does. Therefore he does publicity in the most perfect American way, extraordinary. And that's why he gets for being beaten, he probably got about eight million dollars for that. That means it's good work. All right, would you now finish and see that in fact, all of us can move practically instantaneously. Provided we know what we are doing, so that we can do what we want. If you don't do that, you can't. It's the easiest, the most common denominator that can be taught to anybody, because everybody is obliged to move. When you find out how you move and what you do, you find that you actually learn about yourself more than by anything else. Because you think, "I'm like that and [demonstrating] I must be like that." Look at your mouth now. I also can make a mouth like that. By the way, I don't know whether you know, I've worked with many famous and important people and nonimportant... one of them was the late President of Israel. And if you look at the pictures; if you find a picture of him now-he is dead-he had [demonstrating}. It was a marvelous thing; a very intelligent and excellent man, a learned man. But he went like that [demonstrating]. His own looked like that; yours is not like that, but something different. But, yeah, if you're smiling, it's nice. You move, yes, now you have a nice mouth. He came to me, it was at the end of his life, he was an old man, who came with all his paraphernalia, being a president. He had some trouble with himself. He had pain in the neck. And I told him, "Why do you hold your mouth like that?" [laughter] And he says, "What do you mean? I always hold my mouth like that. You can see pictures ever since I've known myself like that." I say, "Yeah, that's why I'm asking, because now it came the tilme to change it, otherwise your pain in the neck will be continuous." He said, "Why, what does it have to do with the pain in the neck? I says, "Look, now if I did it, [demonstrating] I can't move the neck at all, because my chin is ... And he says, "But how can I do it; I am like that." So I say, "You know what you are doing? Would you please see whether you could lick your lower lip with your tongue? Put your tongue out and lick the lower lip." So that he gets wet outside. "And then stop, and go to the mirror, and see what happened to your lip. Now I tell you, put your tongue in and don't do anything. Just put your tongue in." And he looked in the mirror, and he didn't recognize himself. He didn't hold the lip like that {demonstrating]. So a character that persisted in his life ever since he knew himself, and you can see pictures of him, when he was an author, he was a writer, he was all sorts of things-wherever you have a picture he held it like that [demonstrating]-and at the end of his life, two years before his death, he learned to undo it. Therefore, [demonstrating] the head became free again, not like a piece of steel. And then obviously, he had arthritis in the neck, because if a joint doesn't move, what happens to the joint that doesn't move? If you put a cast on 11

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the arm because it's broken here, if you keep it six weeks like that, afterwards you need physical therapy to do something with it. If you kept it six months like that, or a year, nobody would ever bring ·you back into movement. The whole joint would disappear. Because joints live only, there.is no blood vessel in the joint. Therefore, a joint that is not moving has deposits of things, and the cartilage gets rough, and then when the two bones join together, there is nothing you can do. It will remain like that forever. There are some yoga people who show, dervishes, who want to show that the spirit is stronger, the will is stronger than the body, so they hold it like that [demonstrating]and sit on a pillow for a year:Then, for the rest of their lives, that arm is like that; they can't do anything with it: That's how they groan after . retraining them, give me some lessons, see I have the willpower. Can you see? I have willpower, therefore, give me some [demonstrating] because I can't take·it without her giving. Now you see, w:illpower is a distracting sort of thing. But skill, it should be. Willpower in.the sense that we use, is extraordinarily distracting. If you learn you have to think. The greatest willpower that you know, the people who have impressed the world with their willpower-Napoleon, Charles XII of Sweden, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Mussolini-,_ all of ~em died.an unnatural death that destroyed more people than you can think of. Every one of them. Whatever did they achieve with their willpower? They died unnatural deaths, destroyed milliqns of people, and that's all they did with their willpower. Willpower is used like that instead of acquiring the skill to do, the way of using yourself so that you can be efficient, learn where does your head want to go, move you if you want to move, feel nice about yourself. And why feel nice about yourself? Because, you see, in proper action, in learning to act, if you use movement to learn to recognize, know yourself, then you'll find that first you think it's impossible to do that, practically impossible to do. Then it becomes easy, then it becomes comfortable, and then, when it's comfortable it becomes elegant, because you learn not to generate useless effort to do nothing. Everything you did actually turned into movement. Therefore, it's elegant, and it feels elegant. Once you feel elegant like that, you feel aesthetically satisfied. You have a respect for yourself, you say, look, "Oh, I'm not so bad, I'm not such a silly ass as I thought I was. And I feel nice about it." And this is a most important thing. We are going to do some work. It is essential that you should eat as early as you can and have at least thre~quarters of an hour between the food and what you're going to do. You may not realize, but there are some movements that if you do them, you'll find that you're getting nauseated and feel unwell, and you wouldn't know, you'll think there's something wrong with you. And in fact, with a full stomach, you lie on the floor and twiddle yourself in a way which you shouldn't. So have at least three-quarters of an hour between the food and starting again. In other words, we wouldn't like to waste a lot of tim·e,·but eat as soon as you can, and have three-quarters of an hour after, and we'll say about two hours from now. So go and eat now, quickly. ATM

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Rolling the head with the hands, part 2 Remember what we did with the head and the eyes this morning? Lying now, close your eyes. And first think, can you remember anything that happened this morning? Can you recall any of the things that were said and in what light? What's the thing that you · remember best, the thing that you rememb1er just now? What did we say? What did we talk about? For instance, can you remember what we started with? Can you remember what sort of learnings there are? Can you recall anything we said about action, that it is important, that it should be in the proper space, without orientation. Actually, in speaking, you would speak out now to tell what a good action is, but in fact, when we act, we take conservation space anyway, because we never do just excite ourselves, and do all sorts of funny movements. In other words, if you do something, it must be oriented towards something, and must be at a certain time and with some kind of intention. So an act cannot be without these components. There's no use talking about it. It is actually like that. But once . you sit there to learn, somehow you forget it, we forget and therefore, we are not there, we can't do what we're here for, because it doesn't conned itself. Now, what else did we say? I'm trying just to find out how clever we are, to remember without writing down. You will see, it's actually futile, you do remember. What else did we say? Can anybody recall something I didn't mention yet? What's the difference between academic learning and ordinary, the kind of learning thatis person-to-person, the growth of the person, the development of the person. What's the difference between them? Learning is connected with a kind of decision you can make. You can do it and you can not do it if you like. And you can learn medicine first and then become a writer. You can begin by making a business and then go study medicine. In other words, it has nothing to do with time. In fact, to help a little bit, academic learning is a social organization. It couldn't happen to one person. It happens to a society that needs doctors, accountants, lawyers, architects, financial bankers, cobblers, car drivers, machine makers. Any sort of thing. Therefore, the entire academic learning is only meant as a social kind of organization, on fitting people to a . social kind of life. It's not concerned at all with what you want. It's concerned with what society needs, that you should, and therefore, it's a question whether you should. And if it's a war, you should go and kill yourself, or be ready to be .killed. But you should. · Of course; in your personal life, you wouldn't like to be killed just for somebody else's safety. So you can see that the social learning idea we're talking about, if you think a little bit about it, how could you not remember that? There's such a wide diffe:r:encebetween the two. The other one is a thing that everybody learns to do, in its proper time, pace after pace, and can never change: as ,,ve said-didn't we say?-you can't skate before you can walk. So you can't start skating before walking, but when you're growing up you can do financial theory before computer theory, and you can do electricity after you have done mechanics. And you do it the other way around, and you can do anything you like. In other words, it is a social need, fitting you, me, anybody, into a kind of thing that the society needs. Therefore, it's not only for you to decide, actually, 1

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whether you want to be an architect or not. Society needs architects. Therefore, [...] and scholarships and schools and[ ...] all over the place for architecture. And therefore, if architects are not necessary, but you need mechanics, then you will see what will happen. I could you tell a funny story from France in the last two years. Archaeology-and if anybody knows Rue de St. Jacques near the Rue de la Curie; there is an establishment, a very old one, an extraordinary one, which deals with archaeology, L'Institute D' Archaeologie. Ever since the revolution, that establishment has existed, and every year so many people have finished and learned archaeology. It turned out that two years ago the French government decided to close the establishment for three years and not accept new students in archaeology. Then the war strikes, and all sorts of things, and the people who are in the middle of their learning were interrupted and waited for three years more. And you know what the French .government did it for? They said, look, archaeology, you can't be a private person and an archaeologist. You have to dig, you have to stand being with others, and being with somebody is essential and important for the humanity, for the nation. We have more archaeologists than we can afford money to provide to do archaeology. If we now let you finish . archaeology, or we accept new students, they will finish and they'll be worthless, nothlng to .do then. They'll be archaeologists anq. we will have to provide them . with a living. How, if there is no archaeological work going on? There~ore, we closed the damn thing for your sake. And then the other one said, look, you are free people. If you want to do archaeology, that's your business. Now, can you see what academic learning is? If you look at it properly, you will see the difference, the intellectual learning, the things that you don't need. Who'll teach you the thing that you need for the purpose? Now, would you please think of the difference between the two learnings that we talked about. There is learning that must be done in order. Do I have to repeat it again or do we remember it already? Now, would you think of that a minute, I would advise you if you can, while you are listening, while you hear, if you have somebody at home that you like-maybe a child, maybe a father, maybe a mother, maybe a beloved woman, maybe a beloved man-you think, that when you hear something that interests you here, or that makes you think. ... What do you think of it? If you think now, that you're going to tell them what you have experienced this morning, it will establish how well you will remember it next year. Much better than writing it down on a piece of paper. Now, what else did you hear? Can you think of something I didn't mention yet? Can you think of something you heard and you didn't like? Can you think of another thing that was new to you? Then you will see, there is no question, you have actually much better memory than you know. All of us have · better memory than we know. It's orily we are involved in a kind of thing that makes us be as we should be, and of course as you should be. Nobody expects you to know anything. Take notes and read them, and answer the teacher like that, and answer it in the same way. If you answer it in another way you won't pass anyway. So, that's academic learning to you. Of course, it has great advantages, too, for the society. If you fit to the standards that that society needs,

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you may earn a living with your thing, too. And even be appreciated. But you can waste a lifetime of learning and running all over, and get nowhere. All right, now, would you please lie again, and close your eyes and 2 feel. Can you remember what we did, in sitting, turning, what did you do with the eyes? Would you please put your right hand behind your head, and the 3 left hand on the forehead, and lift your head a tiny bit on the floor like that with the hands, and see if you can turn the head right and left with both hands. Gently. Not much, no, not much! A little, as _ little as you can. But lift it, so that both hancis work, not one. Can you move the head with the right hand, and make a small movement? Why a small movements? Because with a big movement, you're holding your breath, and if you do this properly, you won't hold your legs as you hold them now. Some hold them willingly, but others do it as if it's their body; they wouldn'tlike to do it but their body has to do it. So, you treat the body as if it were a public lavatory with a door. You bang it; it's not your door. Would you please take care of yourself and see whether it's comfortable to do in the way you like? Maybe you should · change the way you're lying. By the way, you saw yourself in the morning, that_at the end when you moved, the two people here in front, could you see that they were·moving much better than at the beginning? How? What happened to them? They, instead of moving one part of themselves, they suddenly realized that these parts are part of themselves. Therefore, they move the legs, and the knees, and the head, and . the shoulders, and everything. Then they became human. Slowly, lift the head and move it right and left. Then note, is the chest not interfering with it? Suppose the chest were more supple, the spine were more supple, the sternum were more supple. Wouldn't it be easier to tum the head like that? And, do you hold your breath? How are the hands gliding over the head? Do they hold the head, or what?

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Would you please change your hands and do the same thing. Is it the same thing when you have the right hand on your forehead as the left? Does it feel the same? Does it move the same way? Would you please bend, all of you, your knees. The majority have ·already done so, but some still have their legs straight. Bend your knees, put your feet on the floor. That's right. And now hold the head on the top like that, with eyes, nose turned to the ceiling and · don't move it all. It remains frozen. The head remains frozen like that. Now, tilt your knees right and left, with your pelvis, and see-no, don't move your head at all. Freeze it. Now, freeze your head, which means no movement right or left at all. Now, can you feel, up to where do you feel your legs moving? Which part of your self moves the legs to the right and to the left? What moves them right and left? With which part do you move, moving right and left like that? Can you feel the movement of twisting the pelvis right

ATM WORKSHOP• TORONTO 5 OCTOBER 1980 DAY 3

and left? Now think, do you move towards the floor with your feet when you tum the knees right and left? Or don't you? 6

Would you please lift the feet off the floor, and of course, do it naturally. What do I mean by naturally? Don't do any awkward, cockeyed sort of movement. Just bend your knees. Why do you have to hold your legs together? Leave them. Now lift your legs so that the feet are not on the floor. Bend them comfortably. Bend them the way you feel comfortable. If it's difficult, support one leg with the other. If it's difficult.

[skip in tape]

When you make that heave of lifting the knees off the floor as some do, is the head moving, are the elbows moving, or are the elbows frozen together with the head? Freeze them and see. That will dictate a different sort of use of the rest of the body. Slowly, right and left.

Should the knees be apart, or both of them together? Try. Join the knees together and go right and left, and see :how, and where you go. No, hold them together, otherwise you wouldn't know. Hold them together, and go right and left. No, together! You opened your knees, you there, with the green legs. Keep your-no, they are still apart. Tighten them, in your im,agination, tie them with a string together, and see how it goes now. 7

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Now, open your knees as wide as you can without tearing you apart. Open them. And don't hold the feet together; just open your knees. And pull them gently, not fast, just watch what you're doing. Just tilt them right and left, and see. How does it feel now? Can you see that in order to tilt the knees, you must lift the pelvis? The knees by themselves are helpless. to move. Because otherwise, how could they move? They are inserted in the hip joints, and if the hip joint doesn't move, how could the leg move? Therefore, there is motion in the hip joint. How?

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Now would you please put your feet on the floor. And see, when you put your feet on the floor, do you actually breathe, or don't breathe like you did before? Try again. Lift your legs like that and see, do you breathe while you lift the legs, or breathe afterwards? Slowly, hold your hands on your head as before, otherwise it's nothing. Now, put the knees together, and thEifeet on the floor, and now lift it, and see, what do you do with yourself? Can the head remain motionless with that, or is it actually moving? Could you? It's moving, not even right and left, but moving up and down, yeah? Now, up to where is it moving?

10 Now, would you please put yourself at ease, put the feet on the floor the way you like, spread your knees. Now roll the head with your right hand, and lift the head off the floor, so that the left hand is not touching the floor, and roll the head. Is it different from before? And if so, how did it become different? How did it change? 91

Change your hands and see. Is it different to move the head? Is it . lighter or heavier? Stiffer or less stiff? Can you breathe while you move your head like that? 12 Now suppose I ask you to roll on the right side to sit up, provided you never let go your head with your hands.. Could you do it? Just see. Could you sit up without letting go of your head? No, without letting go of the head at all. Now try it again. Look what sort of queer movements people do. How should it be, what's naturalfor doing that? How is it human to do that? Now you're falling, could you do it, oh, terrible! Come here and sit up, let's see again. Yeah, some of course will do that. By the way, if the thing I am teaching were a completely unnatural, idiotic, turned-out theory of my own, it would be useless to learn. It's only because whatever I propose to do in a large group of people, there are some who do it like that, ·as if they have learned it all their life before, and some, for whom it feels completely out of this world, futile. Now let's see. Can you feel... now, what happens to those people who try, and_try, and then afterwards they beginto feel it's better? What do they do to make it better? Nobody showed you how to do it, and some of you find it yourselves, and some can't do it. Now, what makes you feel better after you do it the few times that you try, and th_en you feel better. When does it occur to be better? What actually has to happen to make it feel better? [to student] Is that the best way for yqu to do it? 11

Now, would you please stop a minute and just have a look. [observing student] Can you see, it's something fun? Look, that left foot, look how intelligent that footis, look. Where did thi3-tfoot get its intelligence, if not from his brain? Surely, it's not his body that does it, he does it. And by the way, you could do it even better now. Keep on doing it. Think, stop, slowly, now wait, your left leg, how should it move? That's right, keep on turning the head, that's right. Now you stop. Why is that quality better than the other? What's different? And how come he does it so? You know what he's doing? He is doing the movement like a person who does an intentional movement, and an intentional movement means that you are doing it, not your leg, not your toes, not your body, not your sex, not nothing that's in your buttocks, you, your entire self. That means, also, your appreciation of the world around yourself. Otherwise you wouldn't know. And therefore the legs have to do with, what? You can't make one leg not move. Look, don't move that leg, and go on. Keep it stiff like that and see w~at happens now. Look. Now, he didn't keep it stiff because if you did ... Try again, sit up now, and sitting, when you go down, keep that leg stiff, in the hip joint, in the knee, in the foot, go on lie down. Keep on · . turning your head. Now, surely, if the leg is stiff, it should lift. Come on, go on; doit. Move your head, slowly. You're not turning, now keep the leg stiff, lift it, because, that's right. All right, can you see, he has no control of himself. Why? Because he has no way of doing what he intends that he wants. Because that leg is not cooperating in his brain with his intention of getting up. Look, if I want to get up and I keep that leg that way, how will I get up? Unless I am an acrobat and I have a quality of being able to put the leg that way, or bend myself in such a way that I get up. Otherwise, how will I get up? Would

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I get up on this side or on the other side? Because I want to get up on the other · side when I have the leg like that. Could you do it? Nobody could do it. On this side I could manage, but on the other I am impossible. In other words, when you do something, if you neglect any part of yourselves, the movement becomes · cockeyed. You can still achieve it, but with an amount of useless work done in a way that is incredible. By the way, you'll try that and you'll do that in a minute, and see the amount of work that person does when it's an intentional movement. When it's an intentional movement, look what happens? If my head is lifted intentionally, then I can go slowly, I can continue, can go back and do any other thing. That's an intentional movement. And an intentional movement like that must be throughout the body. It's impossible to make an intentional movement; my head must go back; otherwise I couldn't go slowly. If you put a needle there, so that I can't go back, how could I not lift the head without going away from the needle? Therefore, in fact, I am moving my entire self to do that. If I'm moving my entire self, I do it in that way. Now look,. an intentional movement is what is moving to · that trajectory.

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You canchange the speed from nothing, from that [observing stude1Lf]. It would take a quarter of an hour to get there without stopping. And stop, go back, do it forward, continue, do something else. Then I will show you that if he uses his legs, that shows you that is all of the person that is conscious of himself, he knows, he has learned ... Would you please do it again? Tum, and now, do it to the best of your ability. That means, do it badly. That's right, look. That leg must lift, in other words he wouldn't be able to shake the head. Look, if I want to get up and do that, [demonstrating], I hold my breath and can't get up. If I want to get up and keep on doing that, I must get up in a funny way.. And actually, I can then talk, and do it, and breathe, and sit, and do it again. I don't stop at all. And you think it's only for the head? It's not important, but the way you get up is very important. For you. You saw in the morning how I got up. As you get up, do as he did, go down, look,. tum and then stop. Then [splat] as if somebody pulled out that chair, what would happen? He would fall and break his neck. Now if I do that and somebody brings the chair out, I wouldn't feel a thing, I would never fall. And if you think that that is the only thing-you're doing when you do that-you can see, it's very funny, you can do it with the knees. You get up, and you'll find, would I get up if I move my knees? And then, if I move only the knees, why not leave the pelvis out? In other words, you find that unless you have a complete image of . yourself, and you use yourself, that you are doing [demonstrating] [laughter}, and you can do it as well a!:;you want. If you don't know that, you can only do itas it happens. Your leg has then the say. Your leg dictates how you get up, not you. Now, it's of course a way of talking, because whether you do it well or not it's still you who are doing it. You're just using yourself very badly. In other words, you have never actually given yourself the justice, having a marvelous nervous system, and using it as if it were a piece of junk. You've only got those things which are necessary to other people, that they tell you that you should do. That you learned. But the things which are useful to you [...].

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Therefore, you can see, you can move your head, or you can actually, move any damn thing you want, and keep on doing anything you want, and that is in every one of you. In every human being. We can learn it much faster than we think. In fact, you will learn it so quickly that you will be astonished that you can do it so quickly. Which shows you that the way in which we are[ ...] in such a way that we show, think of marvelous sort of things-the unique thing in the world, the human nervous system, which is the most perfect, advanced kind of nervous system that exists on earth. Where are the animals with such a nervous system? No other animals have a nervous system that alllows them to have the ability to learn a language. It comes without any connection at all; and the connections that we make to that personal experience of a little child between the birth and the second year-nobody knows how we learn it, except that you pay attention to what? Doeshe pay attention? He just hears, but does he listen? And yet:you find that the brain is wired in and then he can speak that language fluently as anybody else. How does it do that? And that means you have an extraordinary machine like that. An enormous and excellent nervous system. And we don't use it. We use it in the most awkward way possible. For ourselves. For society, we do actually what the society wants of us. Well, if you want to be a useful thing'to everybody else and not to yourself, keep on doing it. I think actually that a society c;iepenc;ison the individuals that make up that society. For instance, a society of zebras remains a society of zebras. A society of second-rate human beings remains a society of second-rate human beings. A society of actually decent human beings is a better society than a society of indecent human beings. What do you think of that? therefore, a society of human beings who are actually capable of doing intentional movement would · never go to war, because the great majority of people that I have met never wanted a war: I've never seen one. I've been to five, six wars in my life. I never met one who said, "I want the war." Never, not one. Yet in my lifetime at least two hundred million people were killed in wars. None of them wanted to be killed, nor wanted the war at all. So then who did it? What's an intentional movement? What sort of society is that? Tell me. Now obviously, as we are organized like that, there are reason~ where you should actually sacrifice yourself for all the community~ the society in which you live. But then, what happens with the other society, from the other side? The same thing. Then what do they do, both of them? Are they human beings or have they got some idiotic ideas about themselves? What do you think? Have you ever seen a society of zebras dividing in two parts and one fighting the other to extermination? [lauglzter] Or even of donkeys? Or silly asses? Have you seen that done, except in human beings? .

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[ to student] All right, now would you please show them that that is actually a voluntary movement? Look, in other words, it is voluntary in the sen~e that you can stop it anywhere. Stop, keep on turning the head, stop. Now, continue. Go back. Continue. Now stop. Continue. Stop. Continue. You see? That's an intentional movement. A reflex movement is all or nothing. Yeah? All reflex movements are all or nothing. They are not graded. In other words, if I light a big torch into your eyes, the pupils will contract without you having any say in it.Jt's a reflex movement. It's yes or no. If your reflexes are abolished, that means there is something wrong with the nervous system; it won't work. Then

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that's a primitive movement. By the way, could you learn to write without having intentional movement? Becoming slowly, gradually, automatic so that you could do it fast? But then try to learn Chinese and you will see you have to go slow again until you learn it. When you can learn slowly you can go fast and be an expert in Chinese writing, which by the way is not a very useful thing to do. There are only about 4,000 letters. And every one of them is more complicated than any one of the letters that we write. So? . 13

Would you please sit up. Sit up. Would you please put your right hand behind your head, and the left hand on the forehead, and twiddle your head right and lefl Slowly. Now keep on doing · that-that's the most important thing, the rest is unimportant, yeah-and slowly do that, and.see whether you couldn't get U:pon your feet. In any sort of way, but without stopping. Make sure that · you haven't stopped.

I won't control you; I can't control every one of you. Now, can you see, most of you, when you put the knee on the floor, and one foot to the floor in getting up, you have stopped breathing, not only moving the head. [to student I Now, why are you stopped? It is impossible-look, if you feel that, you don't . realize what I'm telling you. You don't know how badly you are using yourself. If I do that [demonstrating],look, and I go there arid there, and then, I do tliis, a second, that's called stopping. [laughterJDid you know ~at? And most of you, you put the foot on the floor, getting up, you stop breathing and stcip turning; f to student) You did. Because I saw your chest stiffening. It'~ not that I pretend that you didn't. He can take a picture of it and you will see that you actually stop. But at the same time, I am not astonished; you will learn it in less than anybody can expect, in a few seconds. Because you have actually extraordinary brains, you just don't know how to use them. You don't know how to use them because in · life we learn what we should do, not what we can do. Not what we want to do. · And as you learn what you should do, how can you feel good about it? Therefore, you do what some people ask you to do, what the parents ask you to do, the teachers, and you gain your living by that, by abiding by the parents' wish to do as they ask you to do. And the teachers the same thing. You keep on turning your head and sit down, and you all watch and see. No, she's not different from anybody else~You'll sit down without stopping turning the head. By the way, you don't tum the head now. You don't turn the head. All of you, put your hand behind, and see what you're doing actually. Are you turning the head? Look, look, watch and see. [to student) You please, keep on doing it. Is she turning the head?· Not at all; the head is motionless. Look, your head is stiff and not changing at all. What she turns is the lumbar spine at the bottom, she turns the whole body as one piece. Look, she's not turning the head an iota. Not anything. And ~fyou think that only she does it, take a picture and let them see afterwards who did it properly. [laughter) You know what it is, it's actually, you'll find that most people do not realize what they are doing. As they don't 14

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know what they are doing, they can't do what they want. I believe that you are intelligent enough to learn it in half a minute, the difference. Let us see what happens. Look what most people do. Most of you hold the hands there, and then, look, [demonstrating] turn this and that. [laughter) If you do that, is that what you would do with a cap, take it like that and turn it? Then what would, who would tum? The top. Now look, that's the top turning. Now if you look on the side where you're not familiar, then you will see, what am I doing? Can you see here, there's no movement at all? Tµe movement is in the legs and the hips like that. Is it not? Now, doit again, and you will see, that's what you were doing. Do what I did just n:ow, and turn, and you will see that you are turning actually in the pelvis and the legs, and the head is not moving at all. Relative to your body, the head is not moving at all. Can you feel it now? Of course. And I say, when you become aware of what you are doing, there's no difficulty in doing any damn thing. But if you don't know what you are doing, how can you do what you want? With all of us, you don't know what you are doing, that's why you can't do what you want .. Now, look at that, look what happens now. We want to roll the head. Roll it means doing that [demonstrating], isn't it? There is a change of the generator there and the generator there. They are never on the same spot, on both things. On the rolled thil'.1-gs an:d on the rolling thing-the thing that rolls it and the thirig that is rolled, correct? That's rolling. That's what a wheel_does on the floor, it rolls. Therefore, it's never in the same spot, neither toud1es the floor·on the same spot, nor on-the wheel. Therefore, if you roll on a normal street or something, the . wheel changes position and each movement is touching on the floor at a different time, and the wheel at a different point. That's why we advance. But if you go into the mud or into sand, and the wheel cannot change but rotates on itself, then the wheel rotates but you don't advance, because you don't roll anymore. Now watch, now what happens when I do this, look [demonstrating]. . Now, watch what I do. Look at me from behind. Now look, the heel, everything is straight like that.The headrotates, the head rolls; doesn't it? Now, I stop, and do what you did, that's what you did. The head didn't roll at all. Come on, try it. You will find that it's not so easy unless you think. .. and why isn't it easy? What's the difficulty? In fact, it isn't difficult. Many people learn it in one go. Now look-except he does it correctly with the_left hand and not correctly with the right one. Why? Look at this gentleman there: he still turns everything except the head. Look. How could he do it... if he doesn't know what he's doing, how could he do what he wants? Tell me. I believe there is not a human being who can't learn that quickly. And by the way, you will see when you do that, what happens. You suddenly find that after 30 years of experience, you have a body, and nervous system, and motor cortex, and muscles, and bones, and you are unable to do a·movement as simple as possible, that you should be able and you can't do it. Then there comes somebody who shows you how to mobilize yourself and relate to yourself, and you learn it within a few minutes. Then what is it? Is it because you're asleep, or your nervous system is better, because that nervous system was a piece of junk. Instead of using it, you use it as if it were the tail of an ass. Therefore, look what happens. You know what happens? It happens like 96

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this; a funny sort of thing, why you can't realize why you have the difficulty. Look, in most of the things, we are undifferentiated. As grown up people, we are cuckoo. We have, look, I have a head, my head, my muscles, my shoulders and my hands, about 70 different muscles, and all I do---and you, all your life-group them all together in one direction all the time. Most of the time, you see, I want to shave, I take both hands and [demonstrating], I will read a book, I take both hands, and look, the head and the shoulders go together. I can do any damn thing ... and you would think that the head, and the shoulders, and the arms are unable to separate. Yet, take any woman, take any man, and see what happens · when she has to fry something, and take out of the hands some pepper and she's afraid that the damn thing will him over, boil over. She is able to take it there, with the hands like that [demonstrating]. And she does it. So she can do it, but she doesn't know that this can be a generalized thing, and that normally in life she actually doesn't do it. In other words, any one of us has the ability but doesn't use it. Consider a man who has to take a piece of tube and make a screw out of it, and therefore he has 1wo damn things. One that turns the thing and the other one, the cutter, has to go forward, slow, then the rotation of the thing. Therefore you see, he does this [demonstrating] both different directions, and he turns and says, "What did you say?" and tal~ to his pals, and there's nothing to it. Yet here, when you have · · to do thatt nobody can do it. And you will find that many of you are academicians, and learned, and university educated, and yet you have nothing that you can do with yourself, anything that you really want. Now, let's see why it is. It's because i:t's undifferentiated. It's not that you don't have it; you have it but you were never properly educated. Nobody knows anything about it. And nobody's interested in you being a real person-only you are interested. All the others are interested that you should be a good daughter, a good wife, a good secretary, a good anything. You should be, you see. There's only one person that's interested in what you are, and it is you. Therefore, know · that. Now, look what happens. I put, let's say, the right hand in front of me, and it's easy. The hand goes together with the eyes, with my pelvis, everything in the same direction, and I find no difficulty. Plop plop.That's what I do. Everybody can do that, because it's undifferentiated; you don't need a brain for that. Ifs all 70 muscles going the same direction-the eyes, the head, everything, as if you were a clumsy little idiotic thing. We put the other hand behind, then comes the trouble. It's something against the grain, because this time when I push the head to the right, my eyes and head go to the left. Look, I take the head to the right, the eyes go ... you try and see. It actually goes in the opposite direction of what you're doing. That's right, very good. Now put the left hand behind you, you will see it's the same thing. That's right, it goes in the opposite direction of your movement, of your intention. Can you see, and then you'll see, look what you're doing now. Look what he's doing now-come on, do it. Look, he's actually rolling his head. Can you see? He's not rolling his ass now, he's rolling his head. Can you see? Now put your left hand in front of your head, and do it and you will see. That's right, now you're rolling your head ... so, he has learned. Who is there who can't learn it? Any one of you, in two minutes. Go

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ahead and see. If you move your right hand behind, and get that solved, that the hand turns the head in the opposite direction, and then put the other hand on the front, then you will find there is no difficulty rolling the head. Can you feel now that your head is rolling, not your back? Now, what about... now, it's a challenge, so therefore you should not succeed. Now go ahead. Turn with the right hand behind. First get that, gently. Can you see that that was the difficulty? That's the difficulty in all the brains who can't do it. That's right. You can't do it fast, but it takes about a half a minute to learn. That's right. That's excellent. Now put your left hand in front and keep on doing the same thing. Now, do it as you did before, twist your entire body and not the head. That's right, now do again the other one. Slowly, slowly,, it's unfamiliar, and you will do the wrong thing again because you don't think. That's right, put your hand there again. That's marvelous. What's the difference? The difference is that she has now the human ability of making a choice and doing it the way she wants. Before she did it like an IBM computer, a good one, but a cuckoo computer. You can buy the computer, the computer cannot buy you; we said that this morning. Therefore, you should buy computers, make computers, the computers should not make you. All right? Now you can see, she now has a choice of doing that same thing in two different ways. You remember, we said we need a third way before it's really good. Then she will have the choice, and therefore if she wants, she will do it one way, if she wants she will do it the other way. Otherwise, you can see, a grown up intelligent girJ cannot move the head the way she wants. Neither the hand. In fact, she moves the ass when she thinks she moves the head. What do you think of that? [laughter] Surely that's indecent. 15

Would you please move with one hand behind you, and actually get the experience that the fingers ·are undifferentiated.

It means we haven't done it justice. We took an extraordinary, marvelous human nervous system and used it as if it were a second-rate IBM computer, not a first-rate. That's right. By the way, can you feel that that's completely different? Marvelous. And my contention is that all human beings are more intelligent than they are. They are intelligent more than they are-what does it mean? In other words, they are potentially more intelligent, and they are actually grown up and they are educated in such a way that their intelligence has remained latent, hidden, in themselves. Therefore they use themselves as if they were second-rate human beings. 16

Now, would you please do it with. the othet· hand behind. That's right.

Now, by the way, when you stop you can see, in fact, this is not superior to any other thing. You can do it that way, you can do it even another way, I've seen some people when they're trying to do that, they do that [demonstrating], and they don't realize that they do that [laughter]. You're laughing; I think it's ridiculous, but it's not funny. It's not funny to see a grown-up person unable to repeat that. And then he thinks that he does this. And he can't even distinguish between the three things. 17

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Now, would you please do the three things yourself now. Hold on, look, hold the head like that, the head stays when you move your

ATM WORKSHOP• TORONTO 5 OCTOBER 1980 DAY 3

hands. Move your hands. Now, look, hold your hands and move the head. Hold ·the hands in space and move the head. I told you, you want three choices. You do the same thing in three, four ways, and you'll see the difference. Now, there, now you move this, you move the head [demonstrating]. Hold the hand and the head together and don't move the head at all, move something else instead. And then of course, move the damn thing like that, and roll it. Roll the head alone now. Move one hand, take one hand behind and move the head, and feel that you move the head in the opposite direction. Only one hand behind, and see that, turn the head with your hand. But see, these are minor things. Unimportant. And of course, they are unimportant, as far as the fitness of ourselves in the society, they're secondary things. They are extreme! y important because some of us are in the society, in the kind of place that we are, that we are a round peg in a square hole. What do you mean by that? It means we can't do the thing that we have to do properly. And we gt>there, and we stay there, and there comes another guy, and within three months he's[ ...], and then.he goes up and becomes Undersecretary of State, and then he is MacNamara or somebody else altogether, and you started with him together, and you still are there doing the same rubbish. So, even in-the society,· you have to get the person who can use himself. To show you a very clear example of what we mean by undifferentiated, and the difference it makes in dividing humanity into two different classes is, if you watch, you have a prehensile movement, with the thumb a,nd the other fingers that we can do. {demonstrating]One, two, tlzree,four,_five,and that way we can count. Apes can only hold it like that, and therefore they can't count. You see, the thumb is there, it's not prehensile. Therefore they can't do that. Now, don't you see, when we are going with our fingers and doing the things we did with them, then we find that in order to hold a spoon or something we have to do that, and the pen. We learn from childbirth to use our hands, and then you find we have a use for the thumb. Every time you want a piece of food, is it the left sitde, is it the right side, is this the smooth side or not, you have to use your finger and your thumb, and you get to learn that, you learn like that. You also find that somehow, you learn also to feel the[ ...], it's called actually the recular, because you do that and then you take it like that. {laughter] You see the thumb is the recular. It means the thing with which you clean your ears. A recular, that's the name in science for that finger, in medicine, in anatomy, it's a recular, you see? And that, of course, is the index, and of course you can do that, you see, the index and the finger become very nimble. And then this is the medius, the middle finger. You can do a lot of things with it. But what's the use of this idiotic finger? It's nowhere. What do you do with it? You write and you don't need it, in buttoning yourself you don't need it, in counting money you don't need it. When do you need it? Therefore, you know what it is? It's an idiotic finger, the least differentiated finger. And then you call itthe ring finger, because you can then put a ring on it, and unite two useless fingers for the rest of their lives. {lnuglztcrl Therefore, it's the ring finger. Now, this is the joke of the thing. But in fact, there's something much more serious in that, and that is differentiation with the thing you know.

all

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[skip in tape]

Would you please listen, you can do the same thing, do it slm,vly so that you can realize how much real movement is necessary to get up-practically nothing. It's too much, it's too much, it's not as good as before. Go less. Go a little bit back, and sit up. Don't sit up already! No, it's too much. You have to move your legs. If you don't move your legs you're straining your back. If you don't bend your knees, if you don't lift them and you don't bend them, you're straining your back. Now, you want to see it, look at that lawyer. He is no good, but he does it marvelously. [laughter] That's it, look, he bends his knees, can yqu see, straightens his knees and bends them: Straightens and bends them. And when? Only he knows when to do that. That's lovely. Too much, too much, too hard. A little better, a little gentler. That's right, that's good enough, stop it. You shouldn't do more, because if you do more, it will be painful. Now slowly, would you please sit and change over your hands. Open your knees, open your feet, and roll only back as much as you can and come back immediately. Slowly. And see that it's comfortable. Why are you straining? Can't you lift your legs a bit? Look at that lawyer. That's right, and bend your knees now, that's it [laughter]. That'slovely, bend your knees. You must bend your heels towards your buttocks. That's right, bend your knees. 19 All right now, stop it, lie on your back and see what Hfeels like now, the small of the back. It lies on the floor as if you're raising the floor to the small of the back. That's actually what a child who came with his mother to Tel Aviv[ ...] Alexander Yanai, I got it from him. I asked hirri to lie like that, and he said, "Mother, the floor comes up to my back." And I found that an extraordinary clever saying, so I'm using it now. It's a boy of about six, he said, "Mother, you see, the floors are rising up to my back." Feel what it feels like to have reduced, eliminated, the latent strain in the small of the back, in all the extensors of the back. What's that? Extensors of the back: the anti-gravity muscles. What are they? Maybe we'll see tomorrow what it is. Now gradually, yoµ'll remember, we got up before on one side. I remember the side; you probably remember. Some of you turned to the other side. 20 Let everyone get up, roll to the side, the other side of what you did before. That's right. There's somebody who did it, that's lovely. Can you see? That guy before rolled to the other side, differently from everybody. That's right. And now, with my blind eyes I saw it. Get up1 g~t up. Just have a look around amdsee what it feels like. Are you smaller? Do you feel downhearted, depressed, you can't breathe, and in fact, everything is painful, and life is so dull, and there's not enough light, and it's cold and it's miserable, and Canada is a dirty country, and the Jews are dirty Jews [lauglzte1'], and Poles are dirty Poles, and the Indians are dirtier than the other? It's such a miserable sort of life that you may even smile with it. Because you feel better; that's all that's important. [applause] 18

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ATM WORKSHOP• TORONTO 5 OCTOBER 1980 DAY 3

[skip in tape]

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Day4 '7 October 1980

ATM (in progress) Rocking the pelvis 1

Now move both feet like that to your 1ight. Slide them to your right. And back again to the middle, and slide them to your right. How much are they sliding to the right? The legs are open, the knees are open, you're not holding the soles together. Open your knees. H you can't, if you have artificial hip joints, don't open them. But if they are normal hip joints, open them. Move to the right. How much do you move to the right, without twisting yourself? Move to the right. How much? Don't turn your face to the right, move the pelvis to ithe right H you move your face and . yourself, you can move five times around yourself. You' re turning your face again. Now go to the left. Move right and left until you find your middle.

2

And lie on your back, and rest a little.

3

Open your knees and join again the soles of your feet together. And this time, move your pelvis in such a way that the right thigh touches more or less the floor. That's right, and the other one, the left side touches the floor. Several times like that, gently move so that one thigh touches and then the other one. You'll find there is a differimce; one touches clearer, or sooner, or faster, or something like that, and the other one less. Keep on doing it until you can feel the difference, and slowly get rid of it, eliminate it. ·

4

Stop in the middle, and again move your feet, your heels nearer to yourself and away from yourself, until you find where it is, not away and not near. Many of you hold them too far away. Slowly. Far and near until you know wh.ere it's not far and not near. And now, stop it somewhere where it's just comfortable.

5

And now, rock your pelvis in the direction of the head and the feet, up and down. Rock the pelvis up and down. In other words, the pubic bone goes nearer to you and downwards. That's right, and you can begin with discrete movements. That means, one movement-don't lift your pelvis off the floor, it's not a question of lifting, don'lt lift! Rock! Don't lift the pelvis from the floor; it lies, you lie 0111the floor, don't lift. Just rock the pelvis. Slowly. Move the pelvis nea1rer to yourself. In other words, lift the coccyx off the floor, do it as if you want to see your sex. Then move it away from you until the coccyx, which means 1he tail bone, touches the floor.

In other words, the small of the back is lifted off the floor, the passage underneath the chest is bigger. When you move the pelvis with the coccyx dmvn, a small mouse could pass underneath your belt, and when you lift your coccyx, tilt your

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pelvis, you would crush a cockroach passing. [laughter] That's right. So between the two, between the cockroach and the mouse, keep on oscillating. [laughter] Now, if you are true to yourself, then when you do that movement, you will find that your head does a similar movement but smaller. In other words, when you lower the pelvis, when the coccyx touches the floor, the chin goes nearer to your sternum. And when you lift the coccyx, the head goes away from the sternum, the chin goes away from the sternum. Don't interfere with that, because the pelvis is connected to the head through the spine, and when you lie like that it's like a stick. Therefore if you pull the end of the stick down and up like you do when you tilt the pelvis with the coccyx down, the head lying and the cervical vertebrae being in the middle just under the chin., just opposite the ears, obviously the pull is such that the head rocks and the chin comes nearer when you put the coccyx closer to the floor. Therefore the head is tilted. Open your knees properly. If you don't open your knees properly, you are stiffening everything and therefore it doesn't work properly.

6

Now, would you please stop it, stretch your legs, and rest a little. And observe what happens with the cockroach there. Slowly, gradually, by the time we are halfway through, not only a cockroach, but a baby cockroach wouldn't be able to pass. I mentioned already the extensors or the antigravitational muscles. We have to explain what 01at means. Now they are lengthened properly to their fuUlength, therefore the small of the back can lie there without having to lift the pelvis with the legs, or press the chin down, or Hft the head, to make the small lthe back touch the floor.

of

7

Now would you please rejoin the soles of the feet like before, and keep on doing this same movement, rocking the pelvis up and down. Then note that also something happens to the knees-if you move your pelvis with the coccyx, the tailbone down to the floor, then watch, do the knees open or ~lose? When do they open? When the coccyx is pressed to the floor, or when the upper part of the pelvis is pressed to the floor, is the coccyx or the tailbone up? Now watch, while you rock your pelvis, the knees open a little bit and close a little bit, but find out, when do they open, when do they close? Will:hwhat movement?

8

Now you can, of course, rock the pelvis Hke that by pressing the floor with your feet. Would you please do that, press the floor-no, no, as they are-press the feet in order to rock the pelvis, up and down. Therefore, you press and the coccyx lifts, leaves the floor, lifts, and then when you pull the floor with your feet, the coccyx rocks the other way. Now keep on doing that, rocking with the feet.

9

Now would you stop using the feet, leave the feet lying passively on the floor, the knees passively on the floor,, and rock the pelvis, with what? Try and see. You can rock the pelvis without doing anything with the feet on the floor, and that's with the stomach and back muscles of the pelvis. And of course, when you do that, the rocking of the head becomes even clearer.

10

Now keep on rocking the pelvis like that, and til1tthe legs to the right so that the right thigh touches the floor. Slowly, keep on doing that, while rocking, and you'll find that something happens to the right side, where 103

it's clear you're doing something funny with the knee, with the thigh, with the hip joint. Keep on doing it several times. If you pull the stomach up and down, you'll feel that the knee actually goes a little bit nearer to yourself, and on the floor it goes away, gettin~; longer. The pelvis does not, but when you rock the pelvis, that's right, and the small of the back contracts, the muscles of the small of the back go, and the pelvis moves, the lower abdomen is up and the right knee goes away, lengthens and only then, it touches really well. Slowly, see whether you can rock your pelvis while putting the leg down and while lifting it. In other words, the leg remains in action all the tirne, up and down, while you rock the pelvis like before, only on one side. You will then observe that your chest behind, the right chest, the right side of the chest, and the left chest, left side, behave quite differently when you touch the floor, or when you don't touch the floor with your right thigh. When you touch the'floor, the left side is different-not only in that it lifts off the floor. One side is lifted, the left side is lifted off the floor, the small of the back and the ribs on the left lift, but besides that, the pulll makes it so that one side stretches, fans out, in the ribs differently from the other. 11 And now do the same thing on the left side. Now, I tell you that there is[ ...] movements and the way of using yourself while doing it, there is such a.difference of quality between one person and the other, it's remarkable. One person in front of me reminded me that I made a mistake, and my mistake was this: between doing it on the right side and the left side, you should have been left alone for a minute to find out what the right side movement did to you. Some people spontaneously do things like that; one in front of me did that, which is the right thing to do. You could see that any time we listen to ourselves w~le doing it, it's only then that the tonus of the side of the muscles concerned with the movement changes. In other words, in the brain itself and the cortex, changes occur that would not occur if we didn't stop, and feel, and sense, and think. Therefore, the right thing to do is after each one, stop. While doing it, of course, if you don't stop you don't even learn how to take care of yourself so that the learning is proper. But of course, you must understand that movements like that, whether it's this movement or any other movement, we move all the day long, all our life. The difference is that here something changes the tonus, something changes the one side from the other, and it's only noticeable because first you're lying, and the brain, the nervous system is removed from the kind of responseit would do when there is pressure on the feet, and pressure on all the joints, in the proprioceptive nerve endings, in all the joints and muscles, which evoke our standing automatically. There is no pressure on the sole of the foot, and no pressure on the joints, and no pressure on anything, no excitation of the proprio-, internal and external, -ceptive nerve endings that we have, especially, the proprioceptive nerve :endings-those that respond normally in such a way that we · stand, and we don't know what we do with our musculature to stand. But we stand. Now, these excitations of the nervous system are taken away while you are lying, from the soles of the feet, from the compression of the joints, in the spine, in the cervical part, in the dorsal part, lumbar part, the hipjoints, knees, ankles-everywhere, there is no compression. And therefore, all the impulses that come from the brain through the body for standing are eliminated, and if you stay for some time, they actually stop being 104

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produced. Therefore, the motor cortex can make new patterns because the old ones are not used. And therefore, some of them that we do without realizing, some will become clearer. And they stop by themselves, hence, the changes that occur. But if you don't pay attention to that, then you can keep on doing the movement on both sides, the change is symmetrical, and therefore, not obvious and not clear, and not distinguishable. Then we get up, we don't think about it at all, and therefore the movement is only effective in as much as it warms a bit the muscles and improves a little bit the circulation, and makes that kind of thing thatmovement does to all animals. But no animal would learn anything because he's unable to feel cautiously, intentionally, to realize that there is a difference between one side and the other. There is a difference. Therefore, the learning in animals exists, but it's infinitely smaller than the human being. What a human idiot can learn in a week, a dog needs five years of training. Or the same thing with a bear. Much less with an ape. Btit otherwise, the human brain is so superior that a mongoloid child is cleverer, most of the time, than most animals. There are, of course, many things that animals can do that we can't. Even from the point of view of functioning of the nervous system, because a mongoloid is not · a normal child, but a child with an injury, with a defect. So stretch out your legs, and actually note what it does to you, :whatit does to the head or anything else. Now, slowly, roll to one side, and sit up. And, again, sit, put the feet together, soles of the feet together, iean on your hands behind you, but lean, really, and then do the same rocking of the pelvis we did while lying. Slowly. Now watch, where ar~ the sitting bones, the thing we sit on, two ischiums? They are round like that, and there's pressure on the floor while we sit like that. When we rock the pelvis, the pressure on the ischiums should move forward and backward. That means you feel the pressure moving on the ischium, and therefore the pelvis rocking on the floor. But you can't rock the pelvis without actually changing the position of the pelvis relative to the spine. Because if you move forward, your stomach moves forward and the spine grows taller, and the head grows up-no; no, don't move the head, just don't turn your head, just do that-you grow taller because the spine grows out of the shoulders and the small of the back goes in, and therefore the spine becomes straighter, and therefore becomes longer. That's right, it reduces the curves in the lumbar region, slowly. Therefore you'll find that actually you feel like th~and of course the hands press on the floor, the shoulders can't move away, the rocking of the pelvis makes the spine grow. through the chest and you become taller, the top of the head is away from the floor. Now you go on doing that until you feel really the rocking of the pelvis, in other words, that the pressure on the floor and on the ischium on the floor, is moving. Now watch. When you push your abdomen forward and contract the anti-gravity extensors of the back, then you roll forward. That's right, keep on doing it, if you hold your breath the chest is stiff and the movement is reduced. That's right, if you watch well you will find that the chest moves away, the lower ribs move away from the elbows. If they don't move away from the elbows significantly, you're not rocking your pelvis. Like, for instance, a person: he is moving his pelvis in the skin on the floor. You're not rocking 13

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your pelvis, you're not rocking your pelvis. You're pushing it like he does. You actually sit on your buttocks which squash and you move inside like that on the floor. That's nothing; that's not rocking the pelvis. [ skip in tape]

Can you see? Your chest goes away from the elbows. And you see, the stomach goes forward and the pelvis rocks, and therefore, on the ischiurns, she can feel that the pressure goes on the ischiurn forward and backward. Can you feel it clearly? Of course she can. And then look at her. She can also feel that. But that's not that good when you rock the ... actually, this is extremely important to everybody. Much more than you know. In a minute I'll tell you a story, and then you'll understand. [ skip in tape] Slowly keep on doing it, until it rocks clearly. That's better, now, can you feel the difference? Now, make that movement a little bit nimbler. It's a simple movement, actually, and some of you do that movement many times in your life, and some never. [laughter] So you know what I'm talking about! But some don't. Can you see, some do the movement not by rocking the pelvis, but moving the entire self. Now, what's the difference? What's the difference? The difference is that in the low part of the pelvis, we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is concerned with every dilati_onand getting blood into the place fully, normally, by dilating the capillaries, dilating in the muscles, everything. You see? Artd that increases the feeling of warmth in the face and there is no erection in the world without that thing working. If you can't have the parasympathetic system you will find that there is complete flaccidity forever. Actually, that naturally might come with this story I wanted to tell you. I had a large class-not like this, small like that-but about 900 people a week, and in that place, there are of course young ones and old ones, religious people and not religious people, and all sorts of things. For very religious people, it is not right for a woman to put on slacks and sit next to a man and do funny movements like that. So many women, religious women, cannot do that, cannot allow themselves to do it. It's just contrary to their conscience; it feels like putting themselves naked. So I had a woman who had back trouble, from[ ...], which is a:religious community. Abouta year and a half she used to come to the class, just sit and watch other people doing it, never participating. And she was in terrible_trouble with her back, and she said that she looks and goes home and does it. Until one day, after a year and a half sitting there, I told her, "Look, in fact, you're already tr~~sgressing the law arid your consciousness: you watch these people half-naked, some with trousers, some without trousers, moving and doing funny · - movements like that. So you are there, you are transgressing it, yet you don't have the oenefit of it. [laughter] Come on and lie down for a minute. How long will you sit there like a silly ass?" So, she joined. And it so happened that one day we did th~t sort of thing,, and believe it or not, you can see that, religious or not, people are still intelligent. {laughter] You wonder, sometimes you would wonder if they are still intelligent. But there are. So, she came to me and told me, "God bless you.'·' I say, "Why?" She said, "You know what I did here made some difficulty I had all my life, which I never never told anybody, because my upbringing, my feeling doesn't allow me to talk about it, I couldn't tell it to my husband, either.And it makes such a change in my life, that I must tell you, that I can orily pray for God for you that you live long and do the same thing to many other people." Now, what did she talk about? Huh? Because-don't laugh, it's· 106

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not ridiculous, it's much more serious than you know. It turned out that in her relationship with her husband, she shouldn't bear to move. And she did like many Arab women do, just lie there like a piece of meat. Some man cannot do anything with a woman that doesn't do that. That's why many women never had full satisfaction. By the estimation of the experts of Johnson, others, a great majority, about fifty percent of women never have orgasm. And that's not always their fault. It's nobody's fault. It's the fault of the couple. It can't be the fault of one person when something goes wrong, when two people do it. Therefore, it's the way they connect to each other that is wrong. And you felt it yesterday here, that you have all the means of being aware of what the person next to you does, and how, and whether it's fast or slow; and you remember; actually, you did it innocently. I told you that, but now that you take care and realize without talking, without saying, the necessity, and the movement, and the speed, and the direction of the other person, I told you, you could make a big change in your life, if you use that to the person }ying next to you. But I didn't say lying to you, never did I. I said lying to mean bad, actually. And many may have got it without really knowing it. And therefore, the importance is greater in the ability to realize, sense, what you're doing, than when it's just exercises. 14

Now, would you please sit up, and do the same thing again.

And you see that this is an important thing, and you can see that the differences are, many people have never realized actually that this is a movement necessary for the mechanical urge called in-and-out. The in-and-out business needs the movement of the pelvis. And yet many people don't even know that they can do it. So you can imagine how important that is to them. Now, keep on doing it. Now you may not see, but I se~ some people, you have never done it in your life. Yetthey had what they called love. You can imagine what sort of love it is. And of course, luckily for us, it's not public; you don't know what other people do. You believe that it comes naturally, you know it very well. Well, it doesn't. It comes naturally ifwe were living like animals, elsewhere, it would come naturally. But we live in a society that restricts it, inhibits it, and we have an education and a childhood. We never see it done unless we're curious and look at the hole in the door, and see what Father and Mother do, or someithing. Otherwise we don't see it, but other animals see it. Therefore, there is less trouble with animals than with Man. Don't rock your head intentionally. The blond girl there: don't rock your head intentionally. You don't have to do it. 15. That's enough. Lie on your back, and see what this movement does to you.

In the small of the back, in the breathing. And of course in the legs, in the pelvis joiint. You will see when you get up afterwards, that you stand differently, because the entire musculature will change in tonus, and the relation between the pelvis and the . head, which means it won't be too much backwards, too much forwards. If you have a big bottom and you want not to be seen, and you pull it in, and then you draw your stomach in because you want to look elegant, you're certainly constipated. You're certainly constipated if you draw your stomach in all the time ..And your breathing is certainly not good. In other words, nothing should be drawn in or pushed out. We should just be like we are.

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Now, would you please roll to the other side olfwhat you did a minute ago, or two minutes ago, and sit up again. Put your hands behind you. Now, put the feet together, put your hands behind you. Rock the pelvis forward, pushing it forward and backward, the pelvis. But so that the left thigh and left knee touches the floor. The left thigh touches the floor, slowly. Keep on doing that until it touches it really properly.

That's lovely, that's right. You can see it must be lengthened and[ ...], in order to be able to contract the muscles of the back in one direction, on one side only. You will see that that increases the mobility in the lumbar region, the mobility of the spine, and the mobility of everything. Therefore, it's excellent. But the movement itself has nothing · ·· ·· in it. It's the ability to do it that's important

17 Now, draw your stomach in and turn to the other side. And do the same thing on the right side, pushing the abdomen out and in; that's right. If you rock the pelvis, the legs should go down, not up. If you don't stress it; · don't strain your leg~, keep them near you. [skip in tape]

Now would you please do it once on the right side, once on the left side. And then, see neatly, that's right, some of you do it already very nicely. But you can see the people who have experience-look, there, there's an Indian guy who does it as if he was doing it all his life. 18

19 Would you please stop a minute. Many of you do it very nice now all alone, but look here, you can see because he's in front. fto student] You do it, once on the right side. Look. Look how much movement there is in the pelvis, in the chest, and look in the shoulders. Look how much movement there is in the small of the back and all the extensors of the back, and look how 1thatpelvis moves. And look how harmoniously the thing goes from right to left. Have a look. Watch how much the pelvis rocks right and left, what he does to the hip joints. It is a proper human movement, and that's why people who have done it, and people who do it for the first time, actually achieve it at the same quality in a few minutes once they've got it. By the way, there is a woman who sits there, she saw what happens with a crippled person, what he can learn in one half:.hour, once you present it. She can tell you that it looks miraculous. And it is miraculous, not because I am a miracle maker, because the human species is a miraculous sort of thing. If you use it properly, you'll find that, crippled or not crippled, intelligence has the ability of reorganizing the self in order to have a comfortable and easy Hfe.· And the crippled child suffers more than you know-he may laugh, but he laughs, what the Jew·s call[ ...]. If you don't know what it means, it's a kind of laughter which helps him to overcome the inner feeling of insult and anguish which he has, or she. Therefore, when you help them to straighten the foot that doesn't work or something like that, you actually give that child something that nobody, with all the riches of Canada and America together, can: get. But you can get it within half an hour . by usi~g yourself properly, or with somebody who can help you to use yourself properly. Is that more or less correct, what I said? Now, that's another, we have seen it. 108

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And you know what a child like that says when he's only five, six years old? "I feel fancy." Eh? That's his way of expressing it. Now, what is it worth when a child says, "I · feel fancy"? Getting up in the morning, and says, "I feel fancy." Huh? To many people it brings tears in their eyes, and rightly so. 20

Now, would you please now lie down and see what this has done to you, to the small of the back. Stretch your legs so that you can actually see.

Now think, if you think now of a mouse getting through underneath your belt,· ot a cockroach, then you will see it gets closer and closer to the floor. In other words, a lot of unnecessary contractions and the formations of the spine and chest have a chance now of disappearing altogether. And at this moment with most of you, it's not there anymore. 21

Slowly, bend your feet and knees so as to touch the soles of the feet together. And now, lift yourself off the floor, but :not to sit, but to lean on your forearms and hands, halfway between lying and sitting. That's right. Now, if you put your elbows so that they support you well, not too far away and not too near forward and not too far backward, then you will find that the head will, with some people, come up so that it is like standing.

Some will find that you can stay like that for an hour, but some find that the head is a little bit backward, like with this lady. And the muscles i;ITestraining [demonstrating],"Ohh, I can't anymore." Look, slowly. 2:i Now would you please rock the pelvis forward and backward. That's right, that's good. Rockthe pelvis.

By the way, it's remarkable. Wherever I go,J find that the great majority of people have brains infinitely better than they know, infinitely better. And capable of learning quickly and nicely. That's right. Just take your elbows a little bit backwards, [to . . student] that's right, you'll feel better. Can you see? And they are a bit too wide, too. Not much, just a tiny bit,· that's right. Now, look, can you see that lady there finds it difficult to hold her head like that. It's difficult, it's painful like that. And why is it painful? Yeah, terrible, lie down and rest. Many of you find it painful. Many don't understand why it's painful. [To student] You see, your head rocks without you knowing it. It was something not quite[ ...] in your spine. _ · [skip in tape]

Lie down. There is no point watching her. It's not by training your willpower that your skill will increase. Your willpower will be bigger, and the trouble will be bigger, because you will train the difficulty and the willpower together, so you will have a stronger willpower and a stronger resistance. Lie down and rest a little. Now: we will proceed with this until everybody is as good as they can be today, not tomorrow. Not even this afternoon, just before we go for lunch. 23

24

Would you please roll on your side, get up, and see what it feels like now. We'll have a little break. Get up and see. Walk around and see what it feels like, whether you stand a little bit taller or lower, whether it's difficult. What does it feel like standing like that? Can you feel there is 109

something extraordinary? Your body is tense to go up to straighten itself, to have better posture. Now, you try it, do that. Push your stomach forward like you did, look. Then you can feel that's not right, because you spontaneously tense to become vertical. That's right. Can you feel the nice feeling of the body tending to go up, becoming taller and the legs free and the spine proper, moving properly? Look, and now move with your legs and feel. There's a lightness. Can you feel how gliding the gait is? [skip in tape]

Now, if you see anyb~dy, ask people to come in, because we'll start again.

ATM · Pelvic Clock 1

2

3

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All right, would you please now sit up. Join your feet together like before, lean on your hands behind. And then, imagine that you're sitting on a large dial of your father's clock, and that the 12 o'clock is in front. In front of you is 12 o'clock. So, of course behind it's 6, and to the right it's 3, and to the left it's 9. In other words, 12, 1, is clockwise, which would mean moving from the middle to your right, and behind. Now, imagine that you sit in a large dial like that, and move your pelvis. What we did up to now was 6, 12, 12, 6. If you roll forward it's 12 o'clock, and the pressure on the ischiums moves towards 12 o'clock, and when you draw your abdomen in, it goes towards 6 o'clock. So you make 12, 6, 12,, 6, 12, 6. Now would you please lie on the floor. And you can imagine that the dial lies now below your pelvis. Put your feet together as we did, and do a few movements of 12 and 6. 12 and 6; of course now the pelvis lies on the dial. Now, as you lie, when you do that, imagine a smaller dial lying behind your head on the floor. You will see that when you do 12 and 6 with the pelvis, the head does 12 and 6, too. You see? 12,, downwards, and 6, upwards. When the dials lie congruently, it means 12 o'clock in the direction of 12 o'clock, and 6 in the direction of 6. Then you see, the movement of the pelvis and the movement of the head are both 12 and 6 at the same time. See, if you move the coccyx down, the chin moves down, the head rocks, and at the dial there, the pressure behind the head goes downward just like it goes downward in the pelvis. 12 and 6, 6 and 12. Now, wh~n we tilt our knees, our pelvis, to the right, so the right side goes down-have a go at, put your right side down, pushing the pelvis, the pelvis is pushed forward, 12 o'clock. The movement of the pelvis is now not in 12 o'clock, but approximately at half past 2. Some may be at 3 o'clock, but some it may be 2 o'clock. But it is somewhere between these hours that they move the pelvis through, and if you note, you will see that the head does the same thing. If you turn, if you open your knees properly, and then tilt the pelvis so that you will make a movement in the

ATM WORKSHOP • TORONTO 7 OCTOBER J ()80 DAY 4

direction of the pelvis of about half past 2, you will see that the head does exactly the same thing. And if it doesn't do the same thing, you will find that it tends to do it, but you stop it. We can, of course, stop any movement like that. If you have your arms extended sideways, the head, of course, won't turn. The arms should be alongside your body. That's right, alongside-your body, near you, simpler. Then you will find that the movement to the right will move the head, too, a little bit to the right. 4

Move it to the left, move it right to the left, and you'll see that the head and the eyes tum a little bit to the left. Therefore, on a small scale, on a smaller dial, the head translates the movement of the pelvis, a~d the other way around. ·

5

Lie straight on your back, and move your head only. Move the chin away from the head, rock the head up and down, and you will see it's very hard to do it without rocking the pelvis. In fact, absolutely impossible to do. Lie straight on your back and move your head up and down, which means the chin away from you. Rock the head up and down, and you will see, you can't do it without rocking the pelvis. · Now, the legs must be open and then you will feel the rocking easier, otherwise the rocking of the pelvis is stopped by the legs in the hip joi:r:itsthat hold when the legs are straight. Can you see that it is actually hard to turn the head without the pelvis? And of course, now that you tum the p~lvis up and down like that, you will find your head really rocking. That's right. 6

Now, would you please lie like that, and open your knees, otherwise you can see, you contract the muscles that are connecting the legs to the pelvis, and therefore the pelvis doesn't do what you want. No matter how clever you are. Now slowly, lie like that, and this time, move your pelvis to 12 o'clock Move the coccyx, the tailbone to the floor, and then move it to 1 o'clock, the pressure to 1, and then to 2, and go back to 12. It's, of course, a movement in_an arc, because the dial is an arc, and also the pelvis moves around. Now, do it, 12, 1, 2, 3. That's right, and back again, 3, 2, 1. And then again. Open your knees, open your knees, that's right. Why do you close them? Not because you intend to close them. Because, as it is, your legs that way, your habit, of doing it has more say than your awareness, than your consciousness. Therefore, you keep on doing the habitual thing, as if it were a law. As if you, your character, was with the feet together, with the knees together. Your character is like that. Then you should know that character is an idiotic notion. It's made in order -to not allow people to enjoy life. They have a character like that. Therefore, they shouldn't be able to find out who they are, and they should remain as everybody knows them, as they know them. With their faults and their merits. But they shouldn't change. Actually,. we don't intend you to change, either. We want only to find out what we are really are, underneath the heap of junk that we have collected through our life. There is an Indian friend here, and he asked me, "How come, if we have such intelligent brains, how do we come to such incredibly faulty behavior, and improper doing?"

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You can keep on doing the movement, and adding an hour on each side while · you do that. Say you start 12, do it 1, 2, 3, 4, and then 4, 3, 2, 1, 11, 10, 9, 8. And you will see, actually, that we are not doing both sides the same way, Each time you go through that, you add another hour until you can go around one way and around the other way, clockwise and anti-clockwise, or counterclockwise. Now, and keep on doing it, while · I'm talking, and add an hour on each side at each alternation. Lecture: On intelligence, and the history of human beings, language, lying And, listen to the explanation why, with such marvelous brains, we are still irt quite a good mess. Everyone individually a little bit, and some of them more than a little bit, and as a society; as a human culture, we are wrong a great little bit. Now, it so happens first that we have actually made enormous progress from the time of 10,000, 12,000, or actually 15,000 years ago, which is the Stone Age, when the people have no tools. Before that, we dori't know anything of what the human species was, because they didn't have any effect on the outside more than their hands do. We can still find the things they built, but the primitive man, 15,000 years ago, being a wild human being without any sort of consciousness that we know today, they didn't even have stone tools. And therefore, nothing is found on earth to prove that there were human beings before, though there certainly were--the human species is probably over a million years old, but they were just simple animals, human animals. And they had a brain which was like all the other brains, but ours developed in the forebrain, developed faster than with any other animal. In other words, if you know a little bit about it, you'll find that even the apes, the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the gibbon, or the orangutan, all of them are born with a brain which weighs about 350 grams, and that's actually the brain with .. which a human being is born. 350 gram~. But by the time a human being dies, his brain weighs between 1,500 to 1,700 gram~. That means a kilogram and a half or more. If you look at it, it means it is at least five times the weight of the brain .at birth. Can you see that that is a brain meant for learning? Constructed for learning, while growing. And anthropoid apes, all of them are the most intelligent animals. We call them anthropoid because they're human-like animals. With them, they die with about 400-450 grams. In other words, their brain increases only by a few percentages, 10, 15, 20 percent on the outside. Therefore, they are already very intelligent and can learn a lot of things, tricks that other animals can't; very often they look human-like. They can already pick lice cleverly and they can do it actually to each other. No other animal picks lice on somebody else-only bites his own. But an anthropoid ape will do that to his pal, to his children, to his wife, he will go on picking lice out of them. You see, it's a great stride forward. Now, the human species, having a consciousness, and being such a unique sort of animal, having no claws of a tiger, having no running ability of a cheetah, having no nails as-animals actually have claws, terrible instruments,. and they can tear another animal's stomach into pieces. A weak animal in every sense, except an intelligent animal. Therefore, during the beginning of his life, he slowly found that he could use pieces of stone and pieces of wood, and found that there are some logs that he could sit on and roll down a slope, and slowly he said that the log is not necessary, he could cut it in narrow lengths and made wheels out of it. And gradually he found that fish bones could be used. Make a hole and take a cat tendon, cat gut, as we do still in surgery, and sew with that, some sort of pieces of leather, or just the skin, the hide of an animal, and 112

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then make themselves something under the foot that makes it easier to walk on pebbles. And gradually, gradually, he had an incredible superstition, believing that the thunder meant to destroy him. And it's dangerous; what could you do to stop it? You never know when it comes, and being a frightened animal with a slow-growing intelligence, he found that the world was full of terrible things. He didn't know why one day,the lightning struck his· children or his wife or himself, and then he didn't know anything. Many of the things that were around were dangerous and epidemics, and then suddenly, there was a drought, and there were no more berries to eat, and even those who tried to do something to make them grow, they found that in certain years there was nothing to eat at all, and they had to move. And to move was moving in a jungle, or moving to come to the sea, you had to know where to go. Can you see? Superstitions, epidemics, hunger, droughts, lightning, terrible things, floods. And especially diseases; people dying, not knowing why. Taking some food without knowing, onceyou eat it and it's marvelous, next time you die of it. Then you find, you take a berry like that, it's tastes sweet, you eat it, and you die. And then you didn't know whether it was because you were no good or because somebody had something against you. Thus they produced gods that were from heaven, and you can still see in the Greek mythology that there isn't a phenomenon on earth that wasn't a god. When people were getting more evolved and more intelligent and found that actually it was silly believing in pieces of wood, in totems. The world over. They began to believe in a single god. Then these people were persecuted, and they are still persecuted until today, because they found that lightning was not a god, and that any other thing was not a god. That God has no image ... but this was an extraordinary advancement. From the moment that the human consciousness woke up a little bit, until the Middle Ages, until the beginning of the Christian era, the past 2,000 years of misery, of epidemics, of trouble, of gods, of ignorance how to grow food, of ignorance at getting only a funny kind of food, and every time you did something wrong, everything went wrong. In other words, with such misery, people become superstitious, and are afraid of venturing into the world. You need some extraordinary human beings in advance of their life, like a Buddha; a Lao Tse, a Confucius, a Moses, a Christ later on, and then a Mohammed later on. Then you find that gradually, there were the Dark Ages, then the Middle Ages, where the superstition and belief in God made inquisitions and destruction, and put them in competition, with our inflation, and with war ... [skip in tape]

....terrorism, which they now do as well as anybody, or even a little better. Now, if you ask, how come we still remain a little bit cuckoo, it is not because our intelligence is insufficient. Because, 15,000 years of a culture which has considered the human being as faulty for any trouble that he had, that culture has performed miraculous teaching, · which made the person free of guilt-he could get free of guilt by confession, he could get free of guilt by repenting, he could do all sorts of things like that, provided he did as it was prescribed and fit for human beings to do. Therefore, of course, the learning was without books, there was no writing. In the ancient culture of human beings, writing is until today called alphabet. Alpha in Hebrew is alef, and the Greeks made alpha of that, and beta is bet in Hebrew, and alphabetwas a Hebrew invention of many, many years ago. And, of course, other people found ways of doing the same thing. They did it in such a different way, like the Chinese, who did it earlier than the Jews did the alphabet, but they did invent a whole concoction of letters. There are about 4,000 of them now, 113

each letter being a structure representing some sort of pattern of thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing. But they never had an alpha,a beta,which was a consonant, and Hebrew had actually put the vowels by little signs underneath or above. You can say or write "b," that's beta,that's "b." You put it with one dot underneath, then it's "bee," if you put it with a little line underneath it's ''baa," if you put it with a little line and another one right through, it's "baw," and if you put a point on top, it's "boy." If you look at that difficulty, look at the other alphabets, you can see that they didn't have the idea of doing that. This idea was originated in the Middle East. Others, the Chinese, are funny, they write the same things as the Japanese, and they can't pronounce it; it's not the same thing. When they show the letter designed in space, a Japanese can understand a Chinese man with no trouble. But when he says it, he may say one word, and the Japanese saw something else altogether. The same design is pronounced differently. Now what about the hieroglyphs? You can see that in every part, the human intelligence produced similar things.But until printing was invented, only a few hundred years ago, people had no books, you could only learn by listening to somebody telling, and you had to retain that by hearing. There was no other way of doing it. And therefore, people invented-you know what they invented? Carpets, tying up things. The knots were actually a language, and a storytelling, and people remembered, and can even now define carpets. The Aztecs in Mexico did the same thing. There were knots made in strings in a way where when you read, you could tell • the story of that king, or of the flood that happened or the epidemics, it was written there. And in Persian carpets as well, in the old ones, and in Tibet, you can find it in many things like that. There were different ways of writing,, starting like the Egyptians who did it in clay, in soft clay and hardening it, and other.people used to afterwards find the feathers or the wings of animals,· and wrote with that. Actually the bible cannot be written otherwise now. There is a tradition of not using steel or copper or metal because the idea is that they shed human blood. Therefore the scrolls in the synagogue can never be written with a metal piece; they are written with a feather, with a quill. . Now, that's your answer. Now, the way of learning, until printing was invented, until writing became general ... you know how many people could write in Athens when Aristotle lived there? How many people could write? There were 6,000 Athenians, free citizens, and 40,000 slaves. Now, the slaves never went to school. And the Athenians themselves, only a few could read and write, huh? But ther◄e was no printing stuff at all.

So, would you please rest a minute. In other words, the history of humans, the human species, is an extraordinary history of achievement, of improvement, of intelligence, skill, people inventing God knows what-from buttons, needles, how to make tissues, how to make shoes for themselves, how to make leather, how to paint their faces in all sorts of colors-· but, they were full of anxiety and fear.· And the way they learned to learn from each other and the way they taught children, what did they teach them 5,000 years ago? What did they teach them? The child, from the earliest life, learned to do something like his mother, like his father. And there was no health care, and children, you know, out of a thousand born, about 20 survived. Only 30 years ago, when the British came to Palestine, out of a thousand Bedouin children, 960 died. Today it's the other way around. In all the other villages, like in all Jewish places, ou.t of a thousand children born, only 40 die and 960 survive. 7

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So you can see that until the printing was made, until the reading became . general, the learning didn't work the same day that printing was invented-at that time, to buy a printed book you must have been a king or a count or a possessor of lands, exploiting hundreds of thousands of people like your slaves. Then you could afford to buy a book, have a bible decorated and printed by Guttenberg for you. Now, with that, the way of learning was done in a funny sort of way. What did they do? They used imitation. Therefore, there was a chap which was considered to be a teacher, and children sat around and he said, "All children, you say 'Ah!"' And then they say, "Ah." "Say 'Eee,"' and now of course they chanted, "Eee." Therefore, everything they learned, they learned by imitation, like an ape, like any animal that can be tamed. This learning developed like that, and then the learning in schools became a way of teaching. People became specialized and they had to learn-and, in fact, what did they teach them? Imitation, imitation, imitation. And then they were punished if they didn't imitate properly, eh? There _wasonly one way of education. Either punishing or giving it a lap of sugar. There· was no sugar, give them a carrot, there was no carrots, what did you give them? So the child gets something to put in his mouth, or kicked and beaten up for not doing the thing that he was told to do. In ·other words, you ~ill remember I told you at one time, the Chinese proverb would tell you how much you could talk about it. Saying that I hear and forget. Why hear and forget? You learn it by the eat. The great majority of people could only hear a story and repeat it. They learned everything by hearing. There was no writing in the school. Nobody knew. You couldn't teach heiroglyphics in a school, could you? There were three, four people in Egypt who could do it, who could write it. Maybe a·half a dozen all over the place~ And the same thing in every other thing. Even now, with the writing, there's still, if you recruit people to the army, you find about 10 percent of them can't read and write properly, and some can't read and write at all. And in other countries it's about 40 percent, and in the southeast Russia, it was SOpercent of the people couldn't read and write. In fact, when they recruited people to the army, they recruited them for seven years during the Nikolai, not the first, not the second, but [...] and the others. Even in Nikolai's time, it was seven years' military service. And you know how they trained the people? They were peasants. They knew everything, they were clever, intelligent people. But, they could not tell their right and left. Some of them didn't know what right and left was. So, when the corporals taught them to walk right and left,, the recruits, they would go and stand, and he says right, and one takes the left foot forward, the other one the right one. They wouldn't know their right from left. So they found an extraordinary thing that modem people, with their spectacles, would never be able to do. You know that there's hay and straw? Can you tell the difference; between hay and straw? If I showed you a bin of hay and a bin of straw, you wouldn't know. If you saw a heap of it then you might say that the color is a little different.Now, the peasant who grew up on the field, for him, hay and straw, you can see the difference a mile away. So, what would they do? They'd take one soldier, tie up · a bunch of hay to the arm, and to the other one, a bunch of straw. And [...] is straw in Russia, and hay,[ ...]. And therefore, the corporal would say, "Look," and one chap who has already studied seven years, and therefore he could already know what's right and left, the corporal would say,"[ ..,]," then the whole army went right and left. [ln11ghter1 Hay and straw, hay and straw. Can you see? A humanity like that, at the beginning of that century, there were 80 percent in Russia couldn't read and write and didn't know right from left, but they could tell hay from straw. That was in Russia, what was in 115

Afghanistan and in Africa? How in India where they have 100,000 dialects, even today? After they got rid of the British, in Parliament they still speak English, because all the delegates there haven't got a common language. Can you see? There was intelligence everywhere, trying to go through,_but tradition, fear, and 12, 15,000 years of disaster, of superstition, of fear, anxiety, not knowing why the child dies, not knowing how they die, not knowing why people perish without any reason, not understanding anything, the fear maintained their superstition, and maintained their ability. The things that they knew worked, they were trashing that, and kept on working until it came through, even through the seeing and remembering. Which means, the printed word, the book which came out when people started learning. But that didn't happen by itself; it took three centuries before there was in each country sorrie sort of elite who could read and write and read and write. But the whole world over, the ignorance was paramount. There was superstition and fear in every soul, ·and in every new thing-you wanted to change. You had to try to change agriculture, now, in a place, show them that you can grow rice and food 10 times better. You see, in the United Nations, there are 32 reports of billions of dollars spent trying to make African people self-sufficient in food. You just can't do it. And you know that you have to, if you want to teach a peasant to change-you go to the Middle East, and you'll see there is still-when I came to the Middle East I was 14 years old. I saw more intelligent, marvelous people with a piece of wood piled up.with strings, with the sticks, and this was the kind of thing that could plo:w the earth, it just grated it, or rubbed it. That's what he did; he made a little groove of about five centimeters or 10 centimeters, and you know who pulled it? A camel on one side and the wife on the other side. [laughter J I saw it myself. Hundreds of times for years. And you can even now find in the Middle East, there's a donkey and the wife pulling the plow, which is a piece of wood that just scratches the skin of the earth. • So I forgot, you asked why do we still have silly tricks in us? It's miraculous that we don't have more. Look how many silly tricks we do now with intelligence as ,,ve have it. Look how we grow up, how ~e are trained at school to do that. Nobody teaches us at school how to live. They teach us only tricks, how to be useful to the society, which is an important thing. Without that, even the development that we have wouldn't work. But nobody works at school intentionally to teach you how to live. What did you learn at school about how to live, except some silly tricks to read? Iri your own intelligence, your own ability of observation, from the learning, other things that you understood every word, did they tell you how to relate to other people? Except one idiotic thing: "Donit say a lie." Don't lie. All parents punish their children for lying. And I have never seen a parent not lying to the children. Therefore, the children don't believe them. And cyclically, they learn to lie to them, and they find that the parents don't know it, either. Now, if you want to have intelligent people, then from early childhood; the nearest person to you keeps on lying to you from the first moment you are born, and cheats you into things, tells you, "Don't lie." There is none of you can survive a day without lying. Can you? How could you?And it's actually lying that lies below all the love affairs that you know. That's why so many of them go wrong. To begin with, they need to lie to each other from the start Now, how could you know what is a lie if you don't know what the truth is? How do you know that you are lying? Sometimes we don't know when we are lying. Our culture is built like that; when you read it, and you touch each word, you can see that there is lying in the culture. 116

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Because 1thereis no such notion as truth. What is truth? How can you know whether you are lying or not if you don't know what is not a lie? Huh? In other words, you can see, these things persist in our culture today, and if you teach your children, you'll find you are lying to them, too. I remember one of the things that moved me, I left my parents at the age of 13. AU by myself, went to what was Palestine, from Russia, left my parents and went. I couldn't stay there. They were extraordinarily nice people, extraordinarily creative people, aind anybody who knows the kind of memory my mother left us, in books written, not literally, people telling me extraordinary things about her. She started painting at the age of 80 and by the age of 93, she had produced about 400 pictures for many exhibitions.[ ...] has one of their exhibitions of my mother. A very extraordinary woman. Yet, I couldn't stick it out. You know why?They told me, "You must tell the truth, never tell a lie." And from early childhood I was bloody sure that my father and mother ar.e the most honest, extraordinary people. They were, actually, very kind and very pious Jews, and they'd tell me, "Don't tell a lie, ifs a crime, you shouldn't tell a lie, tell the truth." So, I always told the truth. As far as I was concerned, until the age of five or six, I told the truth. [laughter J Then it came I was seven years old. And then the other chap, called David Cooperstein, who was a big magnate, beautifully dressed in a big fur coat with a black thing around it. He came in, he looked fo me God himself, really a nice man. My father obviously had some business with him. He was a very wealthy man and my father used to make charcoal out of wood. He probably destroyed more.wood than Canada has now.[laughter] He made the charcoal which was used for filtration of things,[ ...] and for ironing in the factories to make cloth. There was no electricity, there had to be the big irons, and therefore you needed a charcoal which didn't smoke, which didn't make things dirty and didn't produce gases that would kill the people in the factory, with 100 or 200 of them ironing the cloth as it comes out. So, this Cooperstein arrived, and of course he had a marvelous dinner and everybody was around him, and he sat at the head of the table and my father talked to him. I found it extraordinary; I was in admiration. The guy was a very handsome man, and a very clever sort of man. I could · hear that whatever he said, that was wisdom itself, that my father and mother, they were all elated. By the way, I am talking about my mother and father as if they were second-rate people; both my father and my mother were extraordinary, intelligent, and cultured people. So, that was that. I sat there, and, of course, told the truth. I was taught that you shouldn't eat from the knife because you could cut yourself; you eat with the fork. Myself, I already ate with a fork and knife properly-by the way,, not like the Americans do, cut everything, and then take the fork in the right hand and eat, like a primitive being [laughter ]-if I'd done th.altwhen I was seven years, my father would tell you, "How long do I have to teach you, are you foolish?" If you looked at the world, you would see that the French who know elegance, and the world over, take the fork in-your left hand and you cut the piece and take only that piece in your mouth, so that what is left can be used by somebody else. But in America, the kind of thing is plop plop plop plop, then you put the knife away, put in your mouth ... actually very primitive use of tools. And that shows you, actually, that America's only 200 years old. [laughter] Therefore, they haven't got yet the aristocracy that will teach them to eat like they eat all over the place. Or with the hands properly like some Bedouins or other people. See how they eat with their hand? It is extraordinary; if we tried to eat with our 117

hands like that you would need five handkerchiefs every five seconds. And you can see, when Arab children, Bedouin children, eat with their hands; it's so clean, it's so nice and so beautifully done, and nothing drips and nothing drops, even peas they can take with their hands. I saw a little child that I trained, and he is only two and a half years old, and he can't take peas with a fork-he takes with a fork, it falls off-so he takes the fork, takes the pea with the hand, puts it on the fork. [laughter] You see? Now, the lying. I sat there and was looking and looking at the fine man. I was admiring him, but then I said, "Look, he is an uneducated man. He is actually eating with ... and then he took the knife and licked it." To me, that was terrible. [laughter] He

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David?" I said, "Yes, but I also don't like him." He said, "What do you mean you don't like him? Why don't you like him?" "Look, he doesn't even know how to eat; he eats from the knife. He uses his knife in his mouth." Well, l was ticked off, and was punished for not having the sense that when an important guest is there, I tell things like that. My ticked me off and I was in anguish for a week. And when my father [asked I said], "But you told me I must tell the truth. When you ask me, what should I say, that I like him when I didn't? When Ith.ought he was[ ...]? You told me I have to tell the truth." It turned out you have to tell the truth when everybody agrees that you have to tell the truth. [laughter] B,utif you tell the truth as you know what true is, you are punished for that fucking thing. And that's how I found myself ever since. I.learned everything first to know; whether I'm lying or not. And then I found that I never knew I was lying before l found out what's the truth. And whenever I used the truth, I was always punished. Then I knew, that that was the truth. I knew that the truth [...]; when I lied, I was never punished, because nobody knew I was lying. Now, we all do that. And we were raised by cultures like that, all of you. All of us. And therefore, what's the wonder that we did not bring forth our abilities and our intelligence in a better way. It's remarkable, it's astonishing, that we are as good as we are. But our own culture, we should be bigger[ ...] than we are. We are not bad enough, and that shows only that I believe that for the majority of the human species today, [.. ,] with a better intelligence and actually better character, emotionally. If they were not afraid, if they didn't have the fear in their heart from childhood, they would never do what they do. There would never be such wars and such destruction as there is in our life. I have never seen a strong, healthy brute, who, when a baby comes and crawls on his foot, that he kicks him and kills him. Never seen one, though there were people like that, very highly cultured people. But normally, you will find that the stronger the person is and the weaker his opponent, the more generous he is. Animals are; they don't kill each other when they fight, very rarely. When one gives in, he is not touched anymore. If two wolves fight, or two dogs fight, you will see that the dog who gives in and lies arid opens his throat, is safe. And the winner goes away and doesn't touch him. All animals, most of them are like that. They don't kill. The only animal that kills his kin is the human being. And he does it because of fear. He fears the strong one. He fears the one who has power, because in the experience of the human species, the people who have power were wicked, and destroyed the others, and that was the experience, the history of the human species. That's why it's miraculous that we are as good and as intelligent as we are. But it's time to get rid of it, because we have better organization, we have better means, and that actually has to do with slavery, if you believe it or not. 118

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Let me leave you off now to go and have some food. Thank you. [break]

And by the way, you will feel it straight-away, if only you stc1-rtlike that.

ATM Pelvic clock, part 2 1

we had the feet put Would you please lie on your back. You rememb1:?r, together, like the soles of the feet together? Put them again together. And just for a second, remember we did the 12, 1, and then 12, 11, and 12, 1, 2, 12, 11, 10... _justwith one side ... Clockwise only. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, like that. . And of course, watch that your head makes a little circle behind the head. Complete the movement of the pelvis, once around. Listen to yourself. Feel, how do the different hours feel to you? They are not felt the same way.12 o'clock is different from 6 and different from 5, especially. 5 and 4 may not be the same as 7 and 8. Go slowly.

Now,I'd like to draw your attention specially. Go terribly slowly with the movement I am going to do, you are going to do now, because people who have some sort of asymmetry in the head or in the eyes may feel a crick and it will be very difficult. Though the movement is practically insignificant; yet, you can get very bad effects if you do it too fast. Do itsl~wly until you fi11dout how to do it. Would you kindly do the following thing: put your chin-you open your legs properly, that's right, don't press them open, just hold them open-slowly move your chin, but think how you move your chin, like if your chin was doing an arc of the circle..This me~ms, from the beginning you move it to the right or the left, going nearer to you and away from you while you move the head right and left. Now, move your chin near to your chest, and then very gently, very, very slowly, move the head, the chin, to the right away from you, and then feel what the head on the floor does. Then the same way, put it close to you when you come just opposite the sternum, and do it to the left, and then you will s,ee, look, some people can't do it both ways. Look, you're doing a different thing with your head now. Go slowly until the movement is really an oscillatory movement of an arc. Go slowly, because if you don't go slowly, you may hear creaking, troublesome shifting of the tendons behind the head and it may be terribly painful. By the way, by doing that really properly, you'll find some of you who have trouble with the jaw, and the ears, you'll find an improvement here and now. But, of course, it must be done first properly, and that cannot be done unless you do it many times until you feel a difference. Now, watch. Feel the head on the floor, how the head rolls when you have your chin on the left, and then go down and feel what it does on the right. Then you will see that there is a difference, and you coordinate the movement of the chin with the movement of the head behind. 2

119

Now, would you please watch. Sit up a second and see. Because we have so little time, some of you will go away even today. Therefore we haven't got the time to leave you the time to learn it for yourself, which is the most useful thing. You've done so up to now, and you'll do the rest. But this, you can waste or spend a half an hour before it gets right. And therefore, if you don't do it proper with the pelvis, you couldn't move · or somebody else couldn't, and then it moves. Look what happens: you go down {observing student]. Now, you can see that if you do that, can you see that the head also moves like that. But most people don't work. They go like this [demonstrating], they do this way, and then there. The head does something else. And of course, that side of the head may creak so that you feel a jolt in your neck because to do that, [de111011strati11g] the neck, the atlas, the axis, the two upper vertebras, the jaws and the ears must be open the same way, and the eyes, too. With spectacles you can get a crick, too. Because with :spectacles you don't behave properly. The head is not free to move, because spectacles, you see, you can't look where the rim is, therefore you go there [demonstrating] and then you come back, the eyes to the rim, you shift the head, therefore you jerk it over, and · there is no smoothness in the movement of the head. In other words, it's not doing that .[demonstrating], but it does this and then [demonstrating] goes further. And therefore, on this point, neither the neck, nor the vertebrae, nor the eyes work properly. And therefore, the body doesn't work properly. Therefore you don't work properly. Not properly for me, properly for you. ·

3

Now slowly, go ahead, do that gently. Make stllre,look, that the head here rolls the same way as the roll there. If you go slowly, it will work nicely, and you will feel an improvement, not tomorrow, but here now, after you do it 20 times. Go slowly.

4

Now, keep on doing the following thing. Do that certain thing, and it may be so foreign that you can't feel it. Please lie on your back and do it. Don't do it sitting; lie on your back. You can have confidence, and you don't have an experience with 100,000 people like you. And therefore I know how to do it so that you feel better.

5

Now slowly, would you please put f:heright foot standing, the right foot standing, and the left foot long, but easy, comfortable. No, not like that, sideways. Open the toes sideways so that the foot, the leg lies properly. That's right. And now, would you please makeia circle on the dial lying only under the left side of your toes. H means you move around the left side of the toes only, you make a circle from 12 o'clock, make a circle, and while you do that, move the head as you did U]p to now. Go slowly. Do the head first, the chin goes near to you, near to tfo~throat, bring the chin near to the throat, and then make it oscillate like that, right and left, with little power, only feel how the head rolls on the floor while you do it, on the right side on the floor. The contact must feel equal to you, no matter how the head is made. Now slowly, keep on doing that, and then gently keep on moving, without stopping the movement of the head, and move the left hip joint on the floor as if the left part of the pelvis lies on a dial. You roll, you make on the left side of the pelvis a complete circle counterclockwise.

Counter-clockwise. Go slowly. Counter-clockwise. You can stop the movement · of the head and only do with the pelvis, and then slowly stop the pelvis and do only 120

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with the head, until you can make those two movements congruent. That means they go to the same hours. It means, the same movement; the movement you do with the head continues as if it had no interference from the hip joint. But you can understand that the interference, the hip joint, does not interfere with the head, and the head does not interfere with the hip joint. If you find difficulty doing it, iltshows that the brain, the nervous system, continues doing patterns that you already know, and that you cannot stop and let go so that you can make a new pattern. In other words, no matter how you kid yourself about your creativity, about your ingenuity in your work, if the brain fixes those patterns without you knowing, you find that you repeat yourself all the time, · with minor changes, and you call that creativity. If you want actually to use your internal ability properly, there is no reason why[ ...] should be a[ ...] and not the other people around him, should think that he is a genius. He is only a human being. And same thing with Milton Friedman. And same thing with you. I believe that if you removed some of the patterns of habit, habit of thinking, habit of feeling, habit of . sensing, that you did riot aUow them actually to change into something really new. Then of course you are no match to [...] who could do that. And in many people I have learned, but personally I said more than once, most ofthe things I show you here, some of them, which I just sorted out yesterday, I find people in the class do them as if they knew that all their lives. Because it's done like that, because we teach in that way, that it's important to every human being. It's a human way of acting. And when we learn that, we get rid of the rubbish that we collect, the miseries of the human species, the inherited misery in our culture, the inherited miseries in our religion, and inherited personal misery, our personal experience with parents and teachers, with all their good intentions, they still did some harm to us also. And therefore we must, at long last, look .at least for a few hours for your own well-being, really. Slowly, now, keep on moving the head like you do, and of course, now, 6 change over the movement of the hip to be, we did counter-'clockwise first, now clockwise. Change the direction in which you did it. If you did it clockwise, do it counter-clockwise. If you did counter-clockwise do it the other way around. In other words, change the direction of movement of the pelvis, of the left side of your pelvis. [comment from student] If you can't understand the movement,. don't do it. Do what you understand. What don't you understand? Can you repeat what I said? You can't. Then how could you understand? I say, if you do it, you will understand it. If you don't _doit, you can't repeat it, you can't say it, obviously how could you understand. We understand only what we can say. If you can't say it-say what you heard. Tell me what you heard, and then I'll be able to show you that you are as intelligent as anybody else. But what you will say now, we have it recorded, we can know whether it is correct · or not. Say it. [The pelvis moves counter-clockwise....] What did you say, how did you floor. move the head? Yeah, that's right, and we listened to the back of the head on the And then, what did we do with the left hip joint, left side of the pelvis? {The head moves counter-·clockwise.]Counter-clockwise. And so, what don't you understand now? You can't do it? I have the slightest illusion that you can do it, and some people who think they can do it, I let them do it 20, 30 times until they realize that they can't do it. And they can actually do it, if they listen to themselves like that, they are capable of elliminating anything that interferes with the presentation that they have, the image of themselves and the imagination of the movement as they understand it. And they only [...] doing it 20, 30 times, and gently like that, without being hurried, without telling 121

them, "This is no good, do it better," or "Do it faster," or "Doit slower," or, "I don't like the way you do it, and surely you should do it like he does." If you don't do that, then in 20, 30 times, you will suddenly find that you understand. And those other people, too.

7

Now stop it. Rest a minute. Stretch oultyour lei~s, and open them. Spread them a little 1bit.And now do the movement with the head and see whether it's different from what it was when you started. Leave the movement with the head alone, and see whether it feels different from what it was when you started.

It's only by doing it a long time that by doing the other, differentiating your abilities, moving one side of the pelvis, moving the middle of the pelvis, and doing it, after you've done it a long time, it suddenly dawned on you, what it actually does to you. And then of course, it's worth a billion dollars. More than that, you couldn't get it for a hundred billion dollars. [skip in tape]

8

Now, would you please just put your feet togeither, the soles together like we did all the time. And now, move the head only. The pelvis, if it moves, of course it will have to move, but move the head in the way you did. And feel, because you moved with the left side of the pelvis, therefore you will feel that one side is different from the other, a1~donce you realize that you will also be able to feel what is your peculiar personal way of doing it which makes it so different from other people.

Now, can you feellnow-you the blond girl-that you actually roll the head and don't think of moving the chin? Ah, now the head stops rolling so much. You stopped thinking of the chin. In other words, you can tell here whether she thinks of the chin or not. Her internal presentation or perception of herself in the movement is that in one direction she holds the idea of the chin in her mind, and in the other way, she doesn't. Look, there, now you have the chin in your mind. Here, no. Here you think of the head. Now, see how much attention do you pay to the rolling of the head, how much attention you pay to the movement of the chin? .Ah, now you stopped rolling the head, look, and to the left you didn't roll it. Look, now you roll it again. In other words, you can, by movement, know what the person thinks. And I explained to you already, or didn't I, the other day, why movement is so important. You exaggerate the movement, you, the chap who wants to go to town ·with it. Don't, do with the chin only the minutest movement you can. Don't twiddle your head . so much. Don't do any, don't achieve it perfectly. Don't be superior to yourself. Just be you ..And don't press the head backward. Now watch, the right side, and watch the left side, and see how much you do, look. And then watch. Has anybody had any feeling in the jaw, in the joint? Yeah? Anybody else, feeling any change in the jaw joints, in the ears? Now, you c:an see that future trouble of the hearing is eliminated. Yeah, see, my ears, my hearing have deteriorated lately, only in the last year or so. I didn't know, and I went and saw a friend of mine who's one of the tvvo best ear and nose and throat surgeons of the world, Professor[ ...] of the[ ...] in Zurich, and Professor[ ...] in Los Angeles. And he made a study of my head and said, "Look, there's nothing wrong with you, except for some sort of interference with the 122

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auditory nerve. Therefore I don't know, maybe it's degeneration, maybe it's your age, but there is nothing wrong in the ears. Nothing." And he spent about an hour examining it. Then I did something to myself, finding out, and actually this movement that you're doing now, the two of you felt in the ears and the jiaw, it actually happened to me, it cracked, and one movement was so funny, and then suddenly, I found that my hearing was as it used to be. Only my habit of thinking that ifs not good, is changing slower than the change actually happened. The feeling of an ear, that my hearing has deteriorated, isn't a feeling. It might be more than the actual problem in the ear. Every time if I just forget it and think of how I used to listen to people, I find that I can hear every damn thing. No trouble. 9

All right, would you please bend the left knee, and put the foot standing, and do the same movement with the right leg. Straighten the right leg and do on the right side of the pelvis, the movement, and continue moving the head, the chin. And make a point of moving the iehin a small amount and a small movement, not a big one.

Now you, you see, you with your beard, you have never touched your throat with your chin, or your sternum. Now, go slow, and lower your chin, touch your sternum. Now, watch a thing, it's incredible: he is a clever man and knows quite a lot-watch him, look at him. Sit up and see. Do as you did before. Look, can you see what he does? He has never touched with the chin, never drew the chin to himself. Therefore, he increases the movement, bigger and bigger, and he doesn't get the kind of result that you got or you got. Now, how come? He is an intelligent man. And you have heard it and you did it with the chin, and look what he does, he does it with the back muscles of the neck, of the head. Look, takes the head back. He actually doesn't, draw the chin closer, though it shouldn't be done, I should give him the time until it dawns on him, because the neck will be painful. He is doing a lot of movement with a power which is not necessary. Therefore, in the end it will be fatigued, and then he will do the right thing. In other words, he will learn through doing. He will understand it only while doing it. Without doing, you don't understand, nobody does. You cannot become a[ ...] or a[ ...] or anything without actually playing on the fiddle. It doesn't matter how much thinking, how many universities, musical academies, you go through. If you don't use the[ ...] and the fiddle and play, if you don't do, you can't understand what good playing is, what a J[.;.]is. You read that Yehudi Menuhin was three months with me, too, but he doesn't mention it. But he went · to [Yunesco], you know [Yunesco], the Romanian teacher-what did he learn from him; it was after he was already a world famous violinist. Why did he have to go to [Yunesco]? He had many world famous teachers before. What did he go there to do? If you read, you will understand. He did what you do now, and you don't understand, in order to understand. He found that there were things in his fiddling that he didn't understand, doing something artificial, not expressing himself. And other none of the other teachers got it from him, [Yunesco] did it. You know what [Yunesco] did? You wouldn't believe it. He did some sort of movement, he didn't correct his handling, he didn't correct his music. He just kept on insisting, change the way you do it. Change that and find out what you're doing. What are you doing with your thing? Do you always hold it that way or that way or that way? How do you do it? And therefore, you find that the greatest teacher of music, a Romanian fiddler, [Yunesco ], was considered one of the greatest fiddlers, you can see that Yehudi Menuhin, it took him 20 years to l23

get to [Yunesco]. {Yunesco] didn't want to waste his time. It's only when Menuhin was at the top of his career that he agreed to take him for a few months. Now you're doing something, look. How come it dawned on you when you did it, it's already 50 times? Now, if you do it now, you will see what it does to you. Oh yeah, look what your stomach does now with each movement, look. Look. Plop. Look. Plop. Can you see, the diaphragm now beats with the movement of the ... you didn't notice that for yourself. You try and see that it moves the same way with you. In other words, his diaphragm didn't work properly before; that's why he had his head back. Now he does. Watch. Look, that's right. Now, this may have no importance to you or to him. But I can tell you, even know the name? One the world famous orchestra conductors. At his [Marcovich]-you own time he was hailed as a genius, which he is, actually, because he's an extraordinary conductor, but... the same sort of thing. Look. In conducting, and moving himself, there was actually what is it'[ ...], he became a little bit older and actually hqd a syndrome which is called, something that has to do with the ears and that, a disease, and he traveled the world over trying to treat it, in Moscow. When he came to me, to Tel Aviv, I worked-with him, and he improved. He improved to such a degree that when he became the Chief Orchestra [...]-you know that in Paris there is Concert [Pavlue]-maybe you, the musicians, there is a musician, he knows Pavlue, but there is a Concert [Pavlue], you know that there is a, yeah-there is an orchestra of first-rate quality, and many great conductors considered it an honor (or them when they are made permanent conductor of the Concert [Pavlue], which [Marcovich] was. But that was at a time when he already, as far as a world figure in music, he already was over the top and was on a descending slope. Therefore, some people thought there ,,vas a [Marcovich], but now he's not bloody good, he is going down. Just like with old fiddlers, all of them, they find a time when suddenly, publicly, they think, ah, there are · better ones, young ones, who go. And so it was with him. Then, he was about a few months with me in Israel, because if you want to· improve something which is near perfection, it takes longer than doing the rough, big change that a cripple will need, or something like that, It is when you want to improve a human being to the best of his ability that it becomes delicate and it takes time. So, I worked with [Marcovich], and he went to Paris, and he was going to give a concert in [Pavlue], the first time he came after working with me. Then, he sent me, actually I think it was The New Yorker, that the music reviewer of The New Yorker was at every concert, [this is paraphrased] " ...and realized that I expected to hear [Marco vi ch] as I heard him already 50 times, and he used to be better, and I wasn't interested. So I[ ...] that because I had to write a review of the music for my paper. I went there, and I thought I would sleep it off and write something after. And then," he said, "with the first movement of his hands, something struck me and I didn't know what it was. I found that that music I heard actually changed me, and I was totally absorbed in that music, and then I realized that he was breathing his music. In other words, I suddenly saw that his breathing had the rhythm of the music, he breathed the music, and I have never seen a conductor doing that. I saw them move, papapapapapa,but I never saw them breathing that music, having the same rhythm in their music, as in what they did." Now, that reminds me of him. You see? He couldn't breathe his music because his head and shoulders and brain were stiff with wanting to get back to the success that 124

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he didn't have. And once he got rid of that and got the skill how to do it, he was better at old age than he was young. So was Beethoven when he started being deaf, he made his best music when he was deaf. Think on that. That's why we do it. Now slowly, now, can you see? He doesn't do it big like that, but he does the right thing. Now, keep on doing that, and then twiddle your pelvis, your left side of the pelvis, and see whether he can do that. You stopped the head. Look, slowly, until you can attend to the two together. Gently, you take all the time you need. Now you try to do the same thing and you will see that you will understand that you are, yeah, that's right. And if you understand that, you will remember me for the rest of your life. Yeah, lie down and do it. Slowly, you're seeing that.by seeing and listening, you won't achieve anything. It's only by you rediscovering the kind of thing that you see, that you will find yourself improving. 10 · Now, we did it already with the other side, didn''twe? Not yet? Change over the legs and do it with the other side. That means bend the right leg and lengthen the left. And we will stop it in a minute, because once it gets boring, it stops improving. [commentfrom student] Yeah, bend the left leg and the other one's straight, and do that. And you can listen to your breathing, and listen to your shoulders. While you are doing it, you will realize actually that the movement of the head, being down like that, actually changes the entire organization of the body, the entire organization of . ourselves, each. 1.1 Now, aftery0111do that a few times, you will do something. Put both feet together, with the soles together, and now just do the following thing: cross your fingers, and put your, turn your hands like that with the thumbs towards yourself. Tum the thumbs towards yourself, no, that's away from you. The thumbs tum inward until they come out and then put your hands, put both palms above your head as if you're going to push the wall above your head away, all right? Have you got it? That's right. Leave your hands there. Don't press them down, don't do anything, just leave them as they are. The others may not touch, or one shoulder may, the other one may not. Now, keep that there like that, just keep on doing the thing with your head. Now, slowly, move the head as we did, and just feel what it does to your elbows, and the hands. Most of you have put your hands very nea:r the head; you're unable to stretch them straight and lie on the floor easily. If you push, you'll find that they don't straighten. Slowly, don't push them! But keep on moving the head and you will see they will straighten, which will show you how important the damn thing is. Slowly. Don't intend to straighten; they will straighten by themselves. In other words, some of the contractions in the chest, in the spine, in the ribs, in the clavicles, in the shoulder blades,. which you have no control over, nobody has, you willl get that to be able to do it. Don't push, don't test. If you achieve, you will never achieve it. The achievement is ingrained in our education in such a way that as soon as we want to achieve, we hold our breath, we screw ourselves up, in order to achieve what we think we ought to be achieving, which is not what we are. We should achieve by our own skills, by a feeling of elegance, your feeling of aesthetically right. Then you will straighten it without any trouble, no trouble whatsoever. Slowly. 125

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Now, move, while you do that with the head, gently, move your pelvis from 6 to 12 o'clock.

But gently, you will find that you will have to stop the movement of the head, because this is one movement right and left, and the other one is up and down, they are some of the most difficult things to do together. Difficult for whom? For those who are . wired in like computer machines, not like human beings. For human beings it's no difficulty at all, because there is no musician with difficulty playing one thing with one hand and another thing with the other hand. And there is no difficulty for any conductor of with one hand, beating a rhythm, and with the other hand, indicating who should be quiet and who should be loud. No difficulty. No difficulty for any woman to do that, in her kitchen. It's only difficult for people who want to do it and they don't know how. Slowly, move the pelvis up and down, 12 o'clock and 6 o'clock, while you move the head right and left with the chin like we did. That's right. Do it half a dozen times. 13 · And then, just after half a dozen times, just move your hands and see whether they can go a little bit further than before or not, away from the head. That way. · ·

You will be astonished, they can do at least five to ten inches. If you go on, then you realize which are the paths that actually let go? They are more important to you than t,c:,anybody else in the world. If you can attend to your feet, and to your stomach and the head, to feel the different movements, it doesn't matter how much time you spend on that, you will realize something extraordinary: that your arms and your shoulders let go at points that you couldn't let go in all your life. Now, how do you do that? Don't ask me, I knew before that you could. I knew.before that most people are more intelligent than they told you that they are, that their learning is more superior than what they know. And look, even that bloody lawyer, look what he's doing. But he's lifting it high, he will find if you keep on doing it like that, it will lower down to the floor, with the hands on the floor, and you will still be able to do it even better than that. 14 That's right, stop it a minute. Put your hands on the floor, straightened. And just see for yourself what you understood from what you have been doing. Lower your hands and see. Can you see? The floor knows that you have changed, and the floor knows only because you feel that you touch the floor differently, because the floor doesn't itell you anything. Can you see, some of you touch the small of the back, and they are surprised to find that there's such a change there? And then, observe what your stomach, what your diaphragm does. That's right. 15 Now would you please put both feet standing on the floor. Put your hands again that same way, but do the non-habitual interlacing. And then, tu~ out your hands there and see. Now, very slowly, very slowly, move your pelvis so that you go to 6 o'clock and 12 o'clock. It means, push it forward and backward, and use your legs to help you. That's right. Use your legs to help the movement.

Then you will realize in your back, that your chest does not touch the floor absolutely symmetrically, because it actually shouldn't normally. It shouldn't touch symmetrically. Because you're not built symmetrically at all. You see, everyone of us has a liver, and the human liver weighs more than a chicken Iiver [laughter]. It's a little 126

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smaller than a cow's liver, but it is enormous, it weighs a few pounds, and it is only on the right side. And the organs of a woman are on the left side, and the heart is not in the middle, and the lung, the right lobes, the right part of the lung, has three lobes and the left one has only two, there are three bronchi on the right side and only two on the left. In other words, symmetry is out of this world, for the human being. But functioning, we can learn to be so symmetrical that we can walk over a rope, a wire stretched over Niagara Falls without falling. We can jump in skiing 150 meters in the air without deviating a tenth of a degree from the direction in which we started. In other words, our nervous system is capable of making variants to the extreme in spite of us being asymmetrically structured. Can you see? It's the only animal not structured, like a human being, that is the structure and the function are not the same. In human beings, whatever the structure is, the same as the function. The function and the structure are cause and effect. That means a telephone, wouldn't work unless you lift it, and it's· made so that you take the telephone in your hand, the connection is made. Therefore, human action is made for cause and effect. It's the simplest. But in our structure, we are the most complicated, the most complex brain that exists. I told you, [...] thing of this earth, and therefore you find that the structure is asymmetrical, but our ability to function symmetrically is better than any damn thing that a human being can make. Now, would you please, instead of pushing, can you feel that the chest can widen and thicken and the stomach can be drawn in when you push with the legs, the pelvis? And then the other way around, when you push, . go with the coccyx down, the chest can flatten and the stomach can thicken, and your head moves. While you do that, five or six movements like that, make them gently so that you can think and feel that at a certain moment, you would begin to move your chin agalin, without interrupting this movement. The seesaw movement you won't interrupt, but you will slowly introduce the chin movement right and left. can do that provided And those of you who can achieve that easily-everybody he does not hurry and does it at his own pace, and listens to his own self wherever it is, between the legs, behind the legs, in the trousers, outside the trousers, under your armpits, between your breasts and under your breasts, at the back and in the small of · the back, wherever you can, into your ears, into your nose, into your nostrils, into your throat inside and tongue and everything. 17 If you do that slowly, you will find that now, if you make the 6 o'clock, you should be able almost to stretch your arms straight forward, straight above your head. Just try and see whether you can straighten them more than before. 18 And now if you can't, just move them to the right until your left, move both hands to your right, slowly, until the left arm touches your head. Slowly. And attend to the other movements as closely as you can without effort, without killing yourself. That's right. Until the left arm touches your left cheek. You can move the head of course while you move the hands, it goes there, too. That's right, and you move your pelvis, and it doesn't matter if you do it all perfectly well, the ability to attempt it is already a change in the nervous system sufficient to produce extraordinary results. 16

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Now, slowly move both hands like that to your left, until the right side touches your right cheek. Slowly, move slowly, that's right. And keep on doing any of the three movements you can think of, more or less correctly. It doesn't matter whether you can do them perfectly. If everything we'd do would be perfect, there wouldn't be a living thing on this earth. Slowly. That's right, move slowly until the right arm touches your right cheek while you move your head like that. Move the pelvis to six o'clock, and then straighten your arms if you can, and see, just make an attempt to You didn't straighten, and see whether they have straightened-Hey! turn, you didn't twist your hands. That's right, now keep on doing that. Now, you, would you please see how many people straighten both arms as perfectly as you can. Look, one, two, three. Look, four, five.

20 Now, would you please slowly, just sit up. But gently, and rolling to the side. And stand up, gently. You know, once you learn to do that, and I'm· sure that you won't hurt yourself, you wHl go as fast as anybody can ever think. Walk around and see for yourself what you feel. How's your back there? Look, that's the back, you see? It's the second day that he's here, and it's getting better, a little bit. You can see by what he's doing that he's better. Now slowly get up, walk around and see what it feels like. Again, look at that feeling. That's what it feels like when you get a little bit more . like yourself. Can you imagine what you'll be when you're really, really yourself?Then you'll be extraordinarily efficfont, gentler, and effective citizens in any society you'll be. [skip in tape]

ATM Pelvic clock, sitting and rolling the head Please sit, and put the soles of the feet together, and put your hands 1 behind you. Put your hands behind you on tfoe floor to lean properly. Close your eyes so that the sun doesn't come in your eyes, and then keep the back of the neck free so it doesn't matter H the head is moving down and forward. Don't lift the head and don't turn it backwards. Lower your head, look down, look at your sex. That's right, that's right. And now, would you please think of the dial on which you sit, and move your pelvis to 12 o'clock. 12 o'clock is where your siexis, front to your feet.12 is in advance of you. Now, move the pelvis forward so that the pressure of the pelvis goes forward. [to student] Your feet are too narrow and too near to yourself. Too much yoga business. Are you a yoga teacher? No? A yoga practitioner? Yeah, sure. Then you will see, with my work the practitioners who hold their legs like that, they find that the knees lift and they become normal. Those who can't open the knees like here, look, he becomes normal, he opens his knees now, almost like she does, and she does even more. You see? They're doing the proper human thing. You find wha1tis superfluous is improving, what's insufficient is improving, just like if you have a normal food diet, not heal th food and not rubbish food, just the food that your system needs. Then the fat ones grow thin 128

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and the thin ones grow a little fatter. Those who keep a diet and keep thin all the time are actually unhealthy people. Even the American Academy of Medicine, two months ago, they declared that they found to their astonishment that the people who are underweight live less than the people who are overweight. It was just stated two months ago by the American Academy of Medicine, and for 20 years they said the opposite. Now they found that people who keep themselves underweight have poorer he