Program Notes
Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley
This podcast celebrates the ten year anniversary of programming from the Psychedelic Salon. And so we return to one of the men who was responsible for igniting today’s psychedelic renaissance, Aldous Huxley. The talk featured here was delivered at MIT in 1961, sometime after it was first given at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. The Medical Center version of this talk has been credited with giving Dick Price the inspiration to co-found the Esalen Institute. Today, more than 50 years after this talk was given, there remains much of current interest in the sentiments that Huxley so eloquently puts forth.
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
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Salon.
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And I want to welcome you to this, our 10-year anniversary podcast.
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And since this has been a listener-supported podcast, all of these 10 years have been totally commercial-free.
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We don’t even use Google Ads on our website.
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So, hey, thank you one and all for helping this program continue on for so long.
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Now, before I introduce today’s speaker, I want to make one more acknowledgement.
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You see, I started these podcasts in the spring of 2005,
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but only with the intention of mainly exploring the technology a little bit.
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However, by June, I realized that, well, this is something that I wanted to keep on doing for a while.
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And so I reorganized my first few podcasts and gave each one of them a number and, well, more or less restarted the series on June 10th, 2005.
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And the reason that I picked that date is because, well, it’s the day on which we celebrate my mother’s birthday.
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If she were alive today, my mother, Ruth Cecilia Fox Haggerty Altapeter, would have been 100 years old.
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Happy birthday, mother.
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As you know, our 10-year anniversary actually means that we are today beginning our 11th year of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon.
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I’ll let you figure that out on your own.
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And did you guess who my selected speaker would be today? from the Psychedelic Salon. I’ll let you figure that out on your own.
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And did you guess who my selected speaker would be today?
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I suspect that you may have thought that it would be Terrence McKenna,
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and that would have been a pretty fair guess.
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But I thought that today we should instead go back to a speaker who was one of the first well-known persons to advocate the use of psychedelics,
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Aldous Huxley.
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And while Huxley is still spoken of with some regularity,
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it seems to me that the time has arrived to cover a little of the early history
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of what today has become a psychedelic renaissance.
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And if you go back to some of the people we now consider elders,
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people like Myron Stolaroff, Timothy Leary, Gary Fisher, and even Terence McKenna,
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you will discover that to a person, one of the first books that any of them read that described a psychedelic experience
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was The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.
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That book was written in 1954, and when he was still a teenager, Terence McKenna read it,
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and, well, from there you know the rest of that story. It changed his life. I was actually in my 40s when I first read it, and
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I can still remember being blown away by the fact that such a personage as Aldous Huxley could have
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experimented with mescaline, and then went on to write about it, even admitted it. You see,
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and then went on to write about it, even admitted it.
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You see, times were quite different just a few decades ago.
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Now, while I was living in Texas, and then later while I was living on the East Coast,
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I have to admit to feeling somewhat negative about the antics of what we then thought of as,
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well, the fruits and nuts in California.
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And I have no doubt but what that is the way us Californians are still thought of by many people.
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And at the center of all that craziness, well, it seemed to us to be a very strange place at Big Sur where everyone got naked
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in the hot tubs. It was called Esalen and it became
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ground zero for what became known as the Human Potential Movement.
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Now, have you ever wondered how the idea for Esalen came to be? Thank you. and that was in 1961. The talk was titled Human Potentialities,
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and it’s the talk that we’re about to listen to in just a few moments.
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Now, this isn’t the Medical Center version, however.
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As far as I know, a recording of that event no longer seems to exist.
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However, later that year, Huxley gave the talk again,
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and this time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.
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And that is what we are now going to hear.
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Let us begin by asking a question.
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What would have happened to a child of 170 IQ
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born into a Paleolithic family
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at the time of, say, the cave paintings of Lascaux.
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Well, quite obviously, I mean, even if he was as intelligent as Professor Wiener,
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he could have hardly developed cybernetics at that period.
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He could have been nothing except a hunter and a food gatherer.
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There was no other opportunity for him to be anything else.
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And now the interesting fact is, of course,
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that the biologists assure us
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that physiologically, anatomically,
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we are very much the same as we were 20,000 years ago,
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and that we are using fundamentally the same equipment as the Aurignacian
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man to produce incredibly different results, that we have in the course of these 20,000
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years actualized an immense number of things which at that time and for many, many centuries thereafter
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were wholly potential and latent in man.
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And this, I think, gives us reason for tempered optimism in regard to the future.
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I think there are still a great many potentialities of a desirable kind, of course also of an undesirable kind,
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many potentialities of a desirable kind, of course also of an undesirable kind, but I think there are still great potentialities for rationality, for affection and kindliness,
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for creativity, still lying latent in man.
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And it may be, since everything has speeded up so enormously in recent years, it may be that we shall find methods for going almost as far beyond the point where we have reached now.
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We may find methods for going beyond it within a few hundred years,
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to go beyond it as far as we have succeeded in going beyond our Ignatian ancestors in 20,000 years.
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I think this is not an entirely fantastic belief.
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The neurologists assure us that nobody, no human being has ever made use of more than,
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perhaps as much as 10% of all the neurons in his brain.
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perhaps as much as 10% of all the neurons in his brain,
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and perhaps if we set about it in the right way,
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we may be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.
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Well, there are, of course, geneticists who talk about the possibilities of eugenics,
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and quite clearly it would be possible to breed a more efficient type of man.
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But I think this is so far out of any question of practical politics at the moment that it’s not worth discussing.
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And also, at present, we really don’t know what to breed for.
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The most that we can say is that there are certain undesirable things
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which we would like to breed against,
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but when it comes to the positive side,
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we don’t, I think, know enough to be practical geneticists yet.
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So I won’t talk about that at all,
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but consider what can be done with
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the kind of human beings that we are at present. Now, I would think that one of the most important
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things we have to think about in relation to human beings and to the possibility of
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actualizing more of our desirable potentialities.
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One of the important points, which we should stress, I feel, more than we do now,
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is the fact of human differences.
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Now, human differences are in their way just as important as human similarities.
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Human beings are unique.
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The species is more variable than any other species.
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And every type of human being,
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every individual who can be categorized
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as continuous in a system of continuous variables
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within a three-pole system,
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every individual has a right to his own place in the system
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and a right to develop according to his own constitution and temperament.
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And I think that this, we shall find increasingly,
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is a matter of very great importance in getting the best out of human beings. That is to say,
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recognizing the fact of their intrinsic difference and trying, in each case, to work out means
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by which they can, every individual, can be helped to actualize his potentialities in his particular place in the general scheme of human beings.
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Now, of course, this fact has been recognized from time immemorial
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that no single one ideal is suitable for all human beings.
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After all, within the Christian tradition,
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we have the two ideals of the way of Martha and the way of Mary,
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the way of action and the way of contemplation.
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And within the Oriental framework,
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we have, I think, a rather more realistic division of human beings,
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where there are three main ideals. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that there are three ways of coming to enlightenment, to salvation.
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There is the way of bhakti, the way of devotion.
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There’s the way of karma yoga, the way of selfless action.
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And there is the way of jnana yoga, the way of selfless action, and there is the way of jnana yoga, the way of contemplation.
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And these three polar extremes correspond very closely, I think, to some of the most
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recent ideas about the categorizing of human beings.
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They correspond to the French idea, which was popular in the earlier half of the
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19th century, the three types, what was called the digestive type, the muscular type, the
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cerebral type, and ectomorph.
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And I think we shall find that probably in due course it will be found valuable to develop types of differential education for children, certainly for those
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at the extreme limits of these polar distinctions.
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We, after all, now have seen the value of differential education in regard to the, both
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to the intellectually highly gifted and to the intellectually under-gifted.
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But I think we shall find it valuable to have differential education,
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not merely, so to say, on the vertical level, but also on the horizontal level,
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that it will be useful to take children according to the nature of their temperament
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and give them slightly different kinds of training.
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One of the valuable things, I think, will be to, so to say, temper the wind to the shorn lamb.
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Above all, not to plunge the extreme, linear, thin, sensitive, introverted child
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into the midst of husky, extroverted mesomorphs,
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which causes a great deal of suffering on the part of the child.
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And there are, of course, I mean, we live in a world where people like Freud have said that extroversion is the way of health for everybody.
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Well, this is obviously simply not true, that it happened to be true for Freud, who was an extremely driving kind of extrovert.
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But it is not true for very many people.
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extrovert, but it is not true for very many people. And in fact, we see throughout civilization,
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various histories of civilization, that extremely ingenious devices have been made, A, for protecting the introvert from his two violent fellows, and also for finding means for providing safety valves and outlets for the violent
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people, aggressive people, without their doing too much harm to other people.
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After all, the whole monastic system was in a sense a device for saving the valuable introverted
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people from too much contact with the funeral classes,
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and devices like the Teutonic Knights and the Templars
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were methods for canalizing these tremendous aggressive energies of these types of people
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into ways which, though they might be harmful for infidels,
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were not harmful for their own societies.
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harmful for infidels, were not harmful for their own societies.
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And these were very ingenious devices, which I think we can certainly profitably imitate in our own way.
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Now, before I go on to the problems of education,
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the problems of education.
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I would like to talk about some ways of developing,
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of actualizing desirable potentialities,
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which may have nothing to do with education at all.
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These are the ways which are essentially chemical and pharmacological.
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Two or three years ago, it was announced that the Russian Academy of Sciences was engaged on a five-year plan to try to improve intellectual efficiency by pharmacological means.
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Now, this sounds a little fantastic,
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but I have talked to pharmacologists about this matter,
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and a number of them say that it is probably quite possible,
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that it may be possible to, by pharmacological means,
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which will do no harm to the organism as a whole,
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to increase the span of attention, to increase the powers
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of concentration, perhaps to cut down on the necessity for sleep, and various other things
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which may lead to a very considerable increase in general mental efficiency,
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seeing the extraordinary rate at which pharmacology is advancing at the present time,
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I would not be at all surprised if within the next 10 or 20 years
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something of this kind did become possible.
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And it may be conceivable that people will be made mentally more efficient
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by pharmacological means.
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Well, then there is another possibility, which is this, that somebody may discover a really
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good euphoric, something which will make people feel happy without damaging their physical organism.
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Well, psychologically, we know what the two best conditions for effective accomplishment are.
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The most favorable condition is crisis.
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People in crisis will do the most extraordinary things.
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But you can’t keep up crisis.
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There’s no essence of crisis if it lasts for a very short time.
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If it lasts for too long, then it becomes excessive strain and people break down under it.
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But the other condition under which people function at a very high level in general, is a condition of happiness.
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People who are contented and happy,
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I think that it very frequently happens, I think,
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that this mood of happiness, so to say,
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lowers the barrier between the conscious and the preconscious self,
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between the ego and the creative powers, and
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permits the person to do more and better than he would have if he had not been happy.
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And also, there are other points here.
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I mean, I think that we may find that if we have a good and completely harmless euphoric, that actually people may be more moral.
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Bertrand Russell has pointed out frequently that contented and happy people are generally much more virtuous and kindly than unhappy people, and that here again we may see in an indirect way the pharmacological
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advances contributing to the realization, the actualization of desirable potentialities.
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Well, now let’s come to the problem of education.
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come to the problem of education. Here, of course, I mean, the thing which, of course,
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is a burning question here at MIT and, of course, at many other places of higher learning is the problem of scientific specialization and what is to be done about it. Well, we
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cannot, quite obviously, we cannot escape from specialization.
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And the problem is, how is it to be offset and mitigated?
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How are the undesirable effects of extreme specialization to be avoided?
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Well, the answer up to the present, of course,
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has been that it should be,
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that the scientific specialization should be mitigated by courses in the humanities. And this is very good. It is excellent that there should be courses in the humanities.
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But when we examine the matter a little more closely,
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we find that, after all, courses in the humanities are courses
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in the world of symbols, of language.
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So that a man, as I’ve kept on repeating in these lectures, is an amphibious creature
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and among the worlds in which he lives, the disparate worlds which he inhabits, are the worlds of immediate experience, more or less immediate,
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and the worlds of symbols and language.
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Now, both these worlds, the scientific world and the world of the humanities,
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are both worlds of symbols and language.
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both worlds of symbols and language,
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so that a specialization in one type of symbols is being offset by a specialization in another type of symbols.
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So that I think we find here that this is finally not very satisfactory,
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that what we need, perhaps, is some kind of mitigation of all this symbolic specialization in symbolic subject matter
00:20:50 ►
by some kind of direct training of the mind-body, which has to use the symbols and do the living and form concepts and thoughts.
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And this, it seems to me, is one of the major problems which
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confronts us. How are we to find a method of teaching people, so to say, the non-verbal
00:21:16 ►
humanities in some way to counteract the excessive specialization on the level of symbols,
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both in science and in the conventional liberal arts courses.
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And incidentally, it’s interesting to reflect that the liberal arts of the medieval curriculum
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were all, with the exception of astronomy and music, were
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all verbal arts.
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They were all concerned with words, and even music was treated as a science rather than
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as a pleasure and an emotional appreciation.
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Of course, astronomy was also highly abstract and moralistic, so that almost
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the entire curriculum in medieval times was fully devoted to verbal training on the level
00:22:21 ►
of symbols. And we still inherit this. I mean, we are, I think, a good deal better
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than the medieval people were
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in regard to training outside the world of symbols,
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but we haven’t, it seems to me,
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yet gone far enough in this direction.
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And here I would like to quote again
00:22:42 ►
something which I quoted before.
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This is a remarkable phrase of Spinoza’s where he says,
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teach the body to become capable of many things.
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In this way you will perfect the mind and permit it to come to the intellectual
00:23:07 ►
love of God. But the more one reflects on this phrase, the more remarkable it is. And
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this, I would say, would be the kind of slogan, so to say, the kind of first axiomatic statement of what this type of non-verbal
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education should be.
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Well, now let’s consider the ways in which we could apply this kind of non-verbal humanistic
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education to human beings.
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First of all, we would start, I suppose, with perception,
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which is completely basic to all intellectual life.
00:24:01 ►
I mean, I think all good thinking, good feeling, good willing, are finally dependent
00:24:09 ►
upon good perception. And we do remarkably little, I think, in the way of training the
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perceptions. We do something in the realm of music, we do quite a lot in the realm of
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music. We don’t do very much in regard to the other special senses. We don’t do very
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much, I think, in the realm of seeing, which probably is the most important area of perception,
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the one which we make use of the most. And there is plenty of work which has been done
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which indicates that a proper training in the perceptions,
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a training above all in seeing,
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can be of great value to people.
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of great value to people.
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It can be used to help the human being in all kinds of ways
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to make the body more capable of many things.
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And let me…
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I would like to make a short digression
00:25:21 ►
because I’ve forgotten a point here
00:25:22 ►
which I think is important to make, that this
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type of
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special
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training
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of the non-verbal
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humanities, the training of the mind-body
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is probably particularly
00:25:38 ►
important at this time
00:25:40 ►
when advancing technology
00:25:42 ►
has made
00:25:43 ►
a great many of the skillful uses of correlated hand, mind and eye unnecessary.
00:25:53 ►
If you look at what used to be called master his trade and was fit to become himself a master. skills was that extremely primitive and simple tools were used with immensely skillful hands
00:26:29 ►
and eyes and minds to produce very complicated results.
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Today we have excessively complicated tools which can produce even more extraordinary
00:26:39 ►
results, but with a minimum of hand-eye-mind correlation, and often with no hand-mind-an-eye
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at all, if the machine is completely automatic and foolproof.
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And this word foolproof is very important, because a foolproof machine or a foolproof
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organization, it is not only foolproof, it is also spontaneity proof.
00:27:05 ►
It is also inspiration proof.
00:27:08 ►
It is also virtuoso proof.
00:27:11 ►
So that this means, I think, that we are now more than ever in need of this special kind of training the body to have these non-verbal skills,
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because there are so many areas of our life
00:27:31 ►
where this is not imposed upon us by the structure of our society
00:27:37 ►
and the nature of our technology,
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that we must do consciously what was done, to a very large extent,
00:27:47 ►
unconsciously in the past.
00:27:53 ►
Well, now to get back to this question of training the perceptions.
00:27:58 ►
Now, quite a lot of work, as I say, has been done in this field. I know only a little of it, but I’ve been very struck, for example,
00:28:03 ►
by the work which was done at the University of Ohio by Professor Samuel Renshaw in the training of all the
00:28:13 ►
special senses, above all of vision, and by another man at the University of Ohio, Professor
00:28:20 ►
Hoyt Sherman, who employed Renshaw’s methods in relation to the teaching of art,
00:28:26 ►
with the very greatest success.
00:28:28 ►
And here are two extremely valuable techniques.
00:28:32 ►
I can’t go into the details of them now, but they have been fully developed.
00:28:36 ►
And one of the interesting things seems to be when these techniques were applied to elementary schools, it was found that the children who underwent this kind of training of the visual sense were developed more rapidly.
00:28:58 ►
They seemed to be more intelligent.
00:29:01 ►
Their scholastic performance was better.
00:29:04 ►
They were more interested in what they were doing
00:29:07 ►
and therefore they behaved better
00:29:11 ►
so that there was great advantages
00:29:14 ►
on every level seemed to accrue from this type of training
00:29:19 ►
and as I say a lot of work in these fields has been done
00:29:25 ►
and I think there’s a very good case for looking into this
00:29:29 ►
and seeing what more can be done.
00:29:33 ►
Now, of course, the training of the perceptions
00:29:34 ►
is only a special aspect of the general training in awareness.
00:29:41 ►
Now, I would regard awareness as one of the, so to say, the absolute values
00:29:49 ►
of human life. I think it is an absolute good to increase awareness. This is an act of faith,
00:29:57 ►
but I think that awareness ranks with kindliness and intelligence as one of the basic goods which we should try to realize.
00:30:10 ►
And, of course, from time immemorial,
00:30:12 ►
philosophers have been saying,
00:30:14 ►
know thyself, gnoske tefsu.
00:30:17 ►
But it is, of course, very characteristic of our strange civilization
00:30:21 ►
that philosophic and moral precepts are given,
00:30:26 ►
like know thyself and the ideal of self-knowledge, but no means whereby this ideal can be implemented or the
00:30:33 ►
precept obeyed.
00:30:35 ►
No means are offered.
00:30:38 ►
And it is for this reason of extreme importance that we examine the means.
00:30:46 ►
I mean, we are full of high ideals and full of noble precepts,
00:30:51 ►
but we are extremely short of methods whereby we can fulfill these ideals and obey the precepts.
00:30:59 ►
And this is why recent advances in this field seem to me to be particularly welcome. Now, I’ve
00:31:09 ►
been greatly impressed recently by a book which was published nearly ten years ago by
00:31:16 ►
Peirce, Hefferlein and Goodman called Gestalttherapy, which is, among other things, a huge compendium of means by which awareness can be heightened and extended in every direction.
00:31:35 ►
The therapeutic value of this is quite clear.
00:31:40 ►
The attempt is being made not to dredge up materials out of the past,
00:31:47 ►
but to get people to live in the present.
00:31:51 ►
Neurosis, after all, in one of its aspects,
00:31:53 ►
can really be defined as a person reacting to present challenges
00:31:59 ►
in terms of reactions which were appropriate at some time in the past
00:32:04 ►
when he had some traumatic or other experience,
00:32:07 ►
but which are wholly inappropriate now.
00:32:10 ►
And the standard therapeutic method, of course,
00:32:13 ►
is to dig up these events out of the past
00:32:16 ►
and try to abreact them and get the person to understand them.
00:32:20 ►
But an equally good and probably rather better method
00:32:23 ►
is to get people here and now to live in the present.
00:32:27 ►
And this is precisely what the Gestalt therapists are trying to do.
00:32:32 ►
They propose any number of very interesting exercises for increasing the people’s awareness of the here and now,
00:32:44 ►
people’s awareness of the here and now, of events outside themselves,
00:32:50 ►
events going on within their bodies, the nature of their fantasies, their wills, and so on.
00:32:55 ►
Now, this, of course, is by no means an entirely new discovery.
00:33:00 ►
It’s interesting to note that one of the most successful therapists, a man with a European reputation while he was working, he died in 1925,
00:33:07 ►
was the Swiss psychotherapist Dr. Vitoz,
00:33:11 ►
whose methods were essentially the same as those of the Gestalt therapists.
00:33:18 ►
He treated neuroses and he treated them, by all accounts, even more successfully than the majority of his fellows
00:33:27 ►
using these other dredging-in-the-past methods,
00:33:32 ►
simply by getting people to be aware of what was going on outside them,
00:33:37 ►
what was going on within themselves,
00:33:40 ►
of being aware of such a simple act as raising the hand, for example,
00:33:43 ►
or being aware of such a simple act as raising the hand, for example,
00:33:52 ►
being aware of external things in a completely receptive way with a minimum of imposition of ideas upon them,
00:33:56 ►
but what he encouraged above all in the matter of perception
00:34:01 ►
was this matter of pure receptivity.
00:34:04 ►
And he did this not merely as a therapeutic method,
00:34:09 ►
but he did it also as a way for increasing the enjoyment of life,
00:34:15 ►
for teaching people to live better and more satisfactorily.
00:34:20 ►
And he summed up his philosophy in these words,
00:34:24 ►
when you have learned to become more receptive, you will have a greater enjoyment of life, and everything will interest you more.
00:34:34 ►
Now here, let me repeat this thing which I’ve mentioned before about happiness.
00:34:50 ►
happiness. I would say that enjoyment is a categorical imperative in this sense that if we can be interested in things and enjoy them, we shall be freed from many of the temptations
00:34:59 ►
of delinquency. Here again, Russell has underlined the fact that this chronic boredom in which so many people live certainly encourages too small-scale delinquency and probably also even encourages the fact that people still tolerate the idea of war,
00:35:26 ►
because war is so exciting that it’s an immense relief from the boredom of ordinary life.
00:35:33 ►
And of course it is an extraordinary and I think a very appalling fact
00:35:37 ►
that the suicide rate regularly falls in wartime,
00:35:43 ►
that it takes a war to make life sufficiently interesting
00:35:48 ►
for people not to kill themselves. And this happens even in neutral countries which are
00:35:55 ►
not at war. I mean, people are so interested to see what tomorrow’s paper will contain
00:36:00 ►
that they delay or put off completely their ideas of suicide.
00:36:07 ►
And it’s a terrible thing that it requires a war
00:36:11 ►
to make life seem worthwhile and meaningful
00:36:15 ►
to immense numbers of people
00:36:18 ►
for whom the ordinary humdrum life of peace seems unutterably boring and who therefore requires some kind of delinquency
00:36:30 ►
to liven things up. And I think Vito’s is probably right that if one has been trained
00:36:38 ►
to become intensely aware receptively of the world and of what is going on,
00:36:46 ►
life becomes extremely interesting,
00:36:49 ►
and that many things which seem very dull seem to be exciting and beautiful.
00:36:57 ►
And this, I do think, is a very important point.
00:37:07 ►
Well, there, of course, are other areas in which awareness can be trained
00:37:09 ►
I mean I think the whole area
00:37:12 ►
of imagination is one
00:37:15 ►
which we do very little to train now
00:37:17 ►
and it is an area of immense importance
00:37:20 ►
very valuable work has been done in this field
00:37:24 ►
by Herbert Reid in his Education Through Art
00:37:31 ►
this is a very remarkable book
00:37:34 ►
which shows how the faculties of imagination
00:37:41 ►
can be trained in such a way as to foster the creativity of the person who trains them.
00:37:51 ►
And in Gestalttherapy, we find many recipes for the training of the imagination.
00:37:59 ►
And there are a number of other books that I happen to have read.
00:38:03 ►
I’m sure there are many more that I haven’t read.
00:38:06 ►
I know an excellent little book, for example,
00:38:09 ►
The Training of the Imagination of Children.
00:38:12 ►
It’s called Imagination Games by a man called DeMille,
00:38:17 ►
which is extremely useful as showing, first of all,
00:38:22 ►
how to get children to use their imagination to get more fun out of life,
00:38:27 ►
but also what is very, very valuable is to show them how to use their imagination
00:38:33 ►
in a preventive and therapeutic way so that they can get out of all kinds of obsessive and painful situations.
00:38:42 ►
I mean, for example, a simple device would be in relation to some grown-up
00:38:47 ►
of whom they’re frightened, where they can use their imagination in such a way that they can
00:38:52 ►
make this grown-up in their fancy perform ridiculous acts, climb on trees like monkeys,
00:38:59 ►
they can multiply them, have plenty of them dancing a jig. They can finally throw them into the sea in their imagination.
00:39:07 ►
And this is a very valuable procedure,
00:39:10 ►
which will certainly help a great many children to get out of many of their fears.
00:39:18 ►
And in the same way, in Gestalt therapy, there are many exercises of the imagination
00:39:23 ►
In Gestalt therapy, there are many exercises of the imagination designed precisely to decondition oneself,
00:39:27 ►
to get out of the obsessive ruts
00:39:30 ►
which we tend to have been pushed into by our education.
00:39:37 ►
This is an immensely powerful instrument
00:39:40 ►
which can be used to help us in innumerable ways.
00:39:49 ►
But then let me very briefly touch on another exercise, another technique of awareness,
00:39:59 ►
which is a technique which Don Dewey greatly recommended, a technique devised by the late F.M. Alexander,
00:40:09 ►
which is a technique of being aware
00:40:12 ►
of what Alexander called the use of the self,
00:40:17 ►
of being aware of the wrong use of the self
00:40:20 ►
and of taking lessons in the right use,
00:40:23 ►
which, again, is too complicated to describe at length.
00:40:28 ►
But Dewey was so convinced of its enormous value that in one of the prefaces that he wrote to Alexander’s books,
00:40:38 ►
he says that Alexander’s technique is to education what education is to life in general.
00:40:51 ►
It proposes an ideal and provides means whereby that ideal can be realized.
00:40:54 ►
This is obviously extremely high praise,
00:40:59 ►
and yet the extraordinary fact is that although Dewey has had an immense influence
00:41:04 ►
on education and the minds of educators in general,
00:41:06 ►
nobody has paid the slightest attention to this, and that Alexander remains almost unknown. I’m glad to say there is in this area a tiny
00:41:15 ►
oasis of Alexanderism at Tufts University, where some quite interesting research, very
00:41:23 ►
interesting research is going on in relation to his work.
00:41:27 ►
But it seems very strange that a method so highly recommended by this man
00:41:35 ►
who after all produced a revolution in education, John Dewey,
00:41:39 ►
should have been so totally neglected.
00:41:53 ►
been so totally neglected. Now, finally, before I leave this subject, let me say that I’ve mentioned the Gestalt therapy and the work of Vito in our century, but actually, of course,
00:41:59 ►
these kind of techniques go back to an enormous distance into the past, above all in the oriental
00:42:08 ►
literature.
00:42:10 ►
One can find, for example, there’s an extraordinary tantric text, which I suppose goes back, I
00:42:16 ►
don’t know, probably to the beginning of our era, where the text is introduced by a kind of interview between Shiva and his divine consort Parvati, the goddess.
00:42:32 ►
And the goddess asks him, what is the secret of your kind of enlightened consciousness?
00:43:06 ►
And he answers by giving her a list of 118 exercises in consciousness, which will help to go forward into this ultimate transforming consciousness. in psychology for the purpose of developing the end products of what Kumaraswami called autology, the science of the self with a large S, the science of the pure ego, the science
00:43:12 ►
of the Atman.
00:43:13 ►
And in these exercises, which outline methods for becoming conscious of every type of human activity,
00:43:25 ►
even down to sneezing and eating and going to sleep.
00:43:30 ►
He suggests, or he anticipates,
00:43:34 ►
almost everything that Vito’s and the Gestalt therapists have done,
00:43:40 ►
and it provides a sort of complete curriculum, actually,
00:43:44 ►
of what can be done in this field for developing the mind-body,
00:43:53 ►
for teaching the body, or we should better state the mind-body, to become capable of many things, as Spinoza put it.
00:44:04 ►
become capable of many things, as Spinoza put it.
00:44:20 ►
Well, now we have to go on to a very important point, which is the problem, actualizing love and kindliness,
00:44:28 ►
and if possible, preventing the opposites from being actualized.
00:44:34 ►
This, of course, is one of the major problems which is always confronted in every society.
00:44:40 ►
How do we encourage love and benevolence?
00:44:44 ►
How do we encourage love and benevolence?
00:44:57 ►
And how do we prevent these impulses to violence and brutality from breaking out and doing their appalling harm?
00:45:09 ►
Well, here again it’s interesting to find that whereas all the great world religions have inculcated love and kindliness and benevolence,
00:45:24 ►
virtually none have provided means whereby these qualities can be actualized, can be built into the child. And it’s a very curious fact that it has remained for an extremely obscure, very savage tribe in New Guinea,
00:45:35 ►
a tribe described by Margaret Mead,
00:45:38 ►
to develop an extremely effective method for building an attitude of love into the child during infancy.
00:45:49 ►
Margaret Mead describes these methods of the Arapesh.
00:45:53 ►
The Arapesh, unfortunately, on this side, they were entirely admirable,
00:45:59 ►
but they were a bit sloppy otherwise.
00:46:01 ►
They seemed to lack the ability to do things very well,
00:46:07 ►
but I don’t think there’s any incompatibility
00:46:09 ►
between love and efficiency.
00:46:12 ►
I think that’s by no means past the wit of man
00:46:16 ►
to combine the two.
00:46:18 ►
But the methods which she describes
00:46:20 ►
are extremely interesting.
00:46:21 ►
The infant is held by its mother.
00:46:27 ►
While it is being nursed, she talks to it, plays with it, caresses it,
00:46:32 ►
and periodically brings the child into physical contact
00:46:38 ►
sometimes with other members of the family, other members of the tribe,
00:46:43 ►
sometimes with the domestic animals, and always murmuring, as she does so, the family, other members of the tribe, sometimes with the domestic animals, and always murmuring as she does so the word good, good.
00:46:50 ►
Well, the child doesn’t understand it yet, but of course the tone means something, and
00:46:55 ►
when the child learns to speak, the significance of the word good will enter its mind,
00:47:12 ►
and a real conditioned reflex of an extraordinarily valuable nature will have been built up. And Margaret Mead records how extraordinary it was to discover these children, these Arapesh children,
00:47:21 ►
would naturally be alarmed when she came into the hut.
00:47:25 ►
I mean, she was of a different color.
00:47:26 ►
She was dressed in a wholly different way.
00:47:28 ►
She came from somewhere right outside the tribe.
00:47:32 ►
And for a moment, the child would be very frightened.
00:47:35 ►
But then the mother would just say, good, good.
00:47:38 ►
And the child would immediately run to Margaret Mead and let itself be picked up.
00:47:44 ►
run to Margaret Mead and let itself be picked up.
00:47:51 ►
And the general attitude towards the other human beings and towards animals was one of trustful affection and liking and benevolence.
00:47:57 ►
And their whole pattern of life of the Arapesh was deeply influenced by this early training.
00:48:08 ►
Well, we should certainly not be too proud to learn from people, however primitive they
00:48:13 ►
may seem, because this seems to be an extraordinarily brilliant invention, and as heaven knows,
00:48:20 ►
we need enough of love in this extremely loveless world which we live in.
00:48:28 ►
Now, the converse, of course, is the problem of how do we deal with the aggressive elements
00:48:38 ►
in man, the tendencies towards violence and brutality, which are apt to be very strong.
00:48:44 ►
towards violence and brutality, which are apt to be very strong.
00:48:50 ►
And this is something which has certainly preoccupied people from time immemorial.
00:48:56 ►
It is, of course, quite useless to make exhortations and say, be good, and so on, unless one offers some means whereby these tendencies can somehow be worked off in a harmless way.
00:49:06 ►
Well, here again we can probably learn quite a lot from earlier civilizations.
00:49:12 ►
The violent dancing of the Greeks, the Dionysiac Orders,
00:49:17 ►
undoubtedly all these things helped greatly to get rid of a great deal of aggressive tendencies in man.
00:49:27 ►
And the problem, of course, is a very, very grave one.
00:49:38 ►
Professor Gordon Allport has talked about the extreme difficulties of getting rid of prejudice.
00:49:50 ►
I mean, he’s written at great length on this subject,
00:49:55 ►
and he’s reviewed the various things which have been done, for example,
00:50:00 ►
to diminish ethnic prejudice, prejudice against racial groups.
00:50:06 ►
And he does come to a rather pessimistic conclusion that very few of these methods are really effective,
00:50:13 ►
that probably the only really effective one is some kind of individual therapy.
00:50:18 ►
Well, obviously you can’t individually therapize millions of people.
00:50:23 ►
individually therapize millions of people.
00:50:38 ►
And we obviously must find some way in which these kind of violent drives,
00:50:45 ►
which evidently give a profound psychological pleasure to people.
00:50:52 ►
I mean, these kind of violences pay, so to say, a high psychological dividend.
00:50:58 ►
As Blake said years ago, damn braces bless relaxes. And people like being braced rather than relaxed.
00:51:04 ►
And there is a real satisfaction to be got out of this,
00:51:09 ►
I mean, which we understand now quite well what the physiological basis of this is, that
00:51:14 ►
there’s a release of the adrenaline, which many people find very satisfactory in fairly
00:51:20 ►
small quantities. I mean, I think there are many people who are genuine adrenaline addicts.
00:51:27 ►
They fly into a rage and do very violent things because they get a real kick out of it.
00:51:33 ►
And we have to discover ways by which this kind of desire for having lots of adrenaline can be got rid of. In the past, after all, it was all very simple
00:51:45 ►
because we lived in an extremely dangerous world,
00:51:48 ►
running away from animals, running away from other savage men,
00:51:53 ►
and we got rid of our adrenaline in that way.
00:51:56 ►
But in a world where everybody is virtually sedentary,
00:52:01 ►
people are sitting in cars on foam rubber,
00:52:04 ►
this presents a very, very serious problem,
00:52:09 ►
and we quite clearly have to discover ways by which this kind of physiological product of violence,
00:52:19 ►
which is also a cause of all kinds of evil tendencies can be worked off.
00:52:26 ►
Now, years ago, William James wrote an essay, which is still very interesting,
00:52:31 ►
called The Moral Equivalence of War,
00:52:34 ►
where he laid out some ideas for finding some kind of equivalence
00:52:42 ►
which would satisfy people instead of war, but his suggestions I don’t
00:52:49 ►
think go nearly far enough.
00:52:50 ►
I think unquestionably we have to work out a great many new devices for getting rid of
00:53:01 ►
these dangerous and disturbing factors in man. As I say, I think there are plenty
00:53:12 ►
of precedents in earlier civilizations, some among primitive people, some among quite highly
00:53:19 ►
civilized people, which we could probably examine and reinterpret in the light of what we now know about the hormones
00:53:27 ►
and other physiological aspects of the body.
00:53:32 ►
And I think it is perfectly possible that we could develop means whereby a lot of the,
00:53:53 ►
A lot of the, what seem to be now quite normal, drives towards violence and cruelty could be got that I’ve naturally been able to touch only on
00:54:08 ►
a few aspects of this enormous subject.
00:54:12 ►
But I think I’ve said enough to show that there would be a very good case
00:54:16 ►
for a systematic examination
00:54:20 ►
of these various fields I’ve touched upon,
00:54:25 ►
and no doubt of other fields too,
00:54:28 ►
to see where we could find material
00:54:32 ►
which would be of value to us
00:54:35 ►
in this task of realizing desirable potentialities.
00:54:39 ►
I could envisage one of the big foundations, for example, setting up a research project.
00:54:50 ►
I don’t think it would be necessarily very expensive.
00:54:53 ►
Simply for examining what has been found empirically to work in these various fields,
00:55:01 ►
they would have to be prepared to look into material
00:55:05 ►
which wasn’t exclusively scientific.
00:55:08 ►
Some of it would seem rather queer and phony and primitive.
00:55:14 ►
But after all, truth lives at the bottom of a well
00:55:17 ►
and the well is very often muddy.
00:55:19 ►
And we mustn’t be put off by the mud
00:55:22 ►
because the truth may be sitting there.
00:55:28 ►
be put off by the mud because the truth may be sitting there. And my own feeling is that if this were looked into, if all the empirical findings were found, if the general principles
00:55:37 ►
underlying the findings were determined, because undoubtedly there are general principles underlying these
00:55:46 ►
different methods
00:55:48 ►
of helping people
00:55:50 ►
to realize their potentialities.
00:55:52 ►
And then, if
00:55:53 ►
systems could be worked out
00:55:56 ►
experimentally, whereby
00:55:57 ►
these findings could be
00:56:00 ►
applied on every level
00:56:02 ►
of education,
00:56:04 ►
from the kindergarten upwards to the grave, then
00:56:09 ►
I think an enormous revolution in education, not merely of children but of adults, could
00:56:18 ►
be achieved. And my own view is that this is not merely utopian fantasy,
00:56:27 ►
but it is, so to say, topian.
00:56:30 ►
I mean, utopian means no place,
00:56:32 ►
and the opposite of that is topian, a place.
00:56:35 ►
I mean, that it is conceivable that it would work here and now
00:56:39 ►
in the sort of place we live in.
00:56:42 ►
I don’t see any reason why this sort of thing,
00:56:45 ►
if it were carefully investigated and experimented with,
00:56:49 ►
should not yield something which would be extremely helpful,
00:56:53 ►
which would, once it got started,
00:56:55 ►
would probably develop in all kinds of new ways.
00:56:59 ►
So that, as I say, I am, in a tempered way,
00:57:04 ►
extremely optimistic about what could be done if we
00:57:08 ►
would only pay attention to what has to have attention paid to it, and systematically try
00:57:16 ►
to discover what has been done, what might be done, how it could be applied on a large scale. And in this way, I do think we should be able to be of great help
00:57:31 ►
in making a better world for ourselves
00:57:36 ►
and in making it possible for more people to realize more of the potentialities which undoubtedly still lie latent in practically,
00:57:49 ►
no, not practically everybody, in everybody.
00:57:53 ►
Well, with this, let me close and end by thanking everybody
00:57:59 ►
for the great kindness which has been shown to me here.
00:58:04 ►
The only thing I’ve had to complain about here is that I’ve had to talk too much.
00:58:11 ►
One should never talk excessively. I won’t spend more time listening than talking, but this has been my function here. Thank goodness had many opportunities of listening to extremely interesting people,
00:58:26 ►
both on the undergraduate and on the level and among the faculty.
00:58:31 ►
And I’m very grateful for this and very grateful, too, for, as Dr. Lampson said,
00:58:38 ►
for these people who have sat so quietly without chairs.
00:58:43 ►
Thank you.
00:58:54 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:58:58 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:59:04 ►
So now do you see how a young man like Dick Price was in 1961,
00:59:06 ►
just 30 years old,
00:59:11 ►
how he could hear this call to arms and then convince a friend whose family had some land on the coast to join him in the endeavor that we now know as Esalen.
00:59:15 ►
I doubt if Terrence McKenna ever heard this talk as he was, well, he wasn’t even 15 years old yet when this was given.
00:59:22 ►
But I’m quite sure that there are some 30-year-old
00:59:25 ►
salonners and 15-year-old salonners and even some of us older salonners who can find something in
00:59:32 ►
this talk to inspire us to do whatever it is that we can to help ourselves and others realize more
00:59:38 ►
of our potential. A good friend of mine writes aphorisms, and, well, he’s written many thousands of them,
00:59:46 ►
but the one I remember best goes,
00:59:48 ►
I am under no obligation whatsoever to live up to my potential.
00:59:54 ►
And as funny as that sounds, I’m afraid that I’ve actually seemed to live that way for much of my life.
01:00:01 ►
But now that I have a little more perspective on my life,
01:00:04 ►
I understand that whenever I beat up on have a little more perspective on my life, I understand that
01:00:06 ►
whenever I beat up on myself for not living up to my potential, I was actually disappointed in
01:00:12 ►
myself for not living up to other people’s expectations of what my potential promised.
01:00:18 ►
I quite often have not lived up to other people’s expectations of me, but that is quite different from not living up to
01:00:25 ►
what I know in my private moments to be my true potential. So, hey, I don’t beat up on myself
01:00:31 ►
much anymore, for what that’s worth. So, what did you think when early on in this talk, Huxley
01:00:38 ►
suggested that while it may be possible to breed what he called a more efficient type of man,
01:00:44 ►
While it may be possible to breed what he called a more efficient type of man,
01:00:48 ►
but that wasn’t politically possible at the time, he said.
01:00:52 ►
Now, keep in mind that this talk was given in 1961,
01:00:57 ►
which wasn’t all that long after the Nazis had done their eugenics work.
01:01:01 ►
So any talk at the time about eugenics wouldn’t have been very well received.
01:01:07 ►
But what do you think Huxley would say about our current state of DNA work with humans?
01:01:11 ►
In a way, well, it seems to me that this is actually a form of eugenics hiding under a different name, perhaps.
01:01:14 ►
But then I’m sure that probably a lot of our fellow slaughters will disagree with that.
01:01:19 ►
It’s funny, though, how we can sometimes look differently at things
01:01:22 ►
when different words are used to describe them.
01:01:26 ►
Now, just for the fun of it, a few minutes ago I picked up my copy of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.
01:01:32 ►
It’s a tiny little book, only 79 pages.
01:01:35 ►
And this particular copy actually may be a first edition, as the only copyright notice in it says 1954.
01:01:42 ►
And the price is printed on the cover as being 95 cents.
01:01:46 ►
But if you want this particular edition,
01:01:48 ►
I see that there’s still one used copy for sale on Amazon right now.
01:01:52 ►
However, the asking price is $49.95,
01:01:56 ►
which reminds me to kind of say thank you for being a fellow salonner.
01:02:03 ►
And so beginning tomorrow, June 11th,
01:02:05 ►
the Genesis Generation, my novel about the psychedelic community,
01:02:09 ►
will be free on Amazon for the next five days.
01:02:12 ►
So if you’d like to read my story, you can do so for free
01:02:16 ►
and download it in the next few days and have it on your Kindle
01:02:19 ►
or print it out if you’d like.
01:02:21 ►
And after that, of course, it goes back up to its normal price,
01:02:25 ►
which is the outrageous sum of $2.99.
01:02:28 ►
And there’s also now a paperback edition
01:02:31 ►
that’s going to be available for a short time longer.
01:02:34 ►
Well, that’s about it for today,
01:02:36 ►
but I’ll be back again the first of next week.
01:02:39 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:02:44 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.