ON LEARNING – Taken from ‘The Elusive Obvious’
ON LEARNING Printable version
Organic learning is essential. It can also be therapeutic in essence. It is healthier to learn than to be a patient or even be cured. Life is a process not a thing. And, processes go well if there are many ways to influence them. We need more ways to do what we want than the one we know—even if it is a good one in itself
Organic learning begins in the womb and continues during the whole of the individual’s period of physical growth. Other forms of learning directed by teachers take place in schools, universities, and colleges where there are numerous students. As well as similarities in these two types of learning there are essential differences between them, some of which are very subtle.
An adult, realizing he encounters inherent difficulties achieving what others manage with apparent ease, usually feels something is wrong with him. Parents and teachers alike will encourage such a person to make greater efforts, believing that some form of laziness is inhibiting the learning. Sometimes increased application does result in a form of improvement, but it is not rare to find people who discover later in life that the changes were only superficial.
The number of adults who experience difficulties in their social life, i.e. marital, professional, or body inadequacy, can be estimated when we think of the number of methods and
techniques available today to help such people. How many practice Zen, meditation, psychoanalysis by several different methods, psychodrama, biofeedback, hypnotism, dance therapy, and so on. There must be something like fifty or more known therapies for people who do not feel medically ill, but are discontented with their sensations and performance. In all the methods we have to help people in distress they do a considerable amount of learning. So we have to understand the different kinds of learning before we can see the importance of yet another method created and used by me.
For human beings, learning, and especially organic learning, is a biological, not to say physiological, necessity. We learn to walk, speak, sit on chairs the Indian way, the Japanese way, read, write, paint, play instruments, whistle. We have practically no instincts for eating and drinking, and we live as much by our cultural and racial environment as by our biology.
The nervous system of an embryo, a baby, a child is wired in, so to speak, through the senses, feelings, and kinesthetic sensations caused by the spatial, temporal, filial, and social, as well as cultural, environment. But, organic juvenile learning, involving a complex structure and various associated functions and taking several years, cannot be without errors and failures in perfection. Organic learning is individual, and without a teacher who is striving for results within a certain time, it lasts as long as the learner keeps at it.
This organic learning is slow, and unconcerned with any judgment as to the achievement of good or bad results. It has no obvious purpose or goal. It is guided only by the sensation of satisfaction when each attempt feels less awkward as the result of avoiding a former minor error which felt unpleasant or difficult. Pushed by parents or anyone to repeat any initial success the learner may regress, and further progress can be delayed by days, even weeks, or not occur at all.
Development of bodily structures coincides with the learner’s attempt to function in his environment. The baby will only continue rolling from side to side as long as no nervous structures linking the eyes, ears, and neck muscles have matured sufficiently to make other movement possible. I am not going to deviate from our immediate purpose by talking about the ripening of the palidum for primitive crawling, the striated body, or the future development of the brain for further progress in body movement.
The ripening of the nervous structures and their linkage in patterns will be affected by any of the body’s attempts to function, and vice versa. Learning may therefore progress to perfection, become deviated, or even regressed before the next ripening will coincide with another attempt at function. Time presses on in growth and anything not attempted in its own time may remain dormant for the rest of the learner’s life. If he has not learned to speak before a certain time he will never speak well for the whole of his life. In organic learning there is no appointed teacher, although the child may learn through his mother by accepting or rejecting her example. He will choose different acts from different sources as it happens to please his senses.
Scholastic learning with teachers in charge is perhaps the greatest human achievement and is the source of our successes as social beings as well as some of our shortcomings. The teacher knows what he is teaching and where he leads his students. The students know what they learn and when they have achieved the learning to the teacher’s satisfaction. Their training is strewn with exercises designed to reach the desired goal to the teachers satisfaction. We can learn medicine, engineering, law, and similar subjects this way.
Such learning has a prescribed curriculum which the group has to go through by the end of an allotted period. A few individuals will be successful with all the teachers. These are the students at high schools and universities whose organic learning was good enough. Some will never make it and will remain at the bottom of the class, whilst others will achieve a modicum of learning sufficient not to be rejected for the next class at the beginning of the following year. It goes without saying that this description does not give due credit to those teachers in each generation to whom we owe most of our progress. We owe to them also some of the best human beings in the past and in the present.
Scholastic practice is responsible for parents beliefs, and understanding of learning. It seems that well-meaning parents interfere with organic learning to the point that many therapies trace the real start and development of most dysfunctions back to the parents. These findings are so general that one would think we would be better off if we never had parents at all. Orphans fare even worse; they are reared by people who have the same attitude as the parents about what is correct, but care less. They think willpower is the real way to achieve correct functioning, and consider that repeated attempts will ensure excellence. In fact, exercising for the correct final state only produces familiarity and makes any errors habitual. The person who feels dysfunction is helpless. He tries to do the correct thing, knows that he fails, and is convinced that something is fundamentally wrong with him. When we consider music, painting, writing, thinking, feeling, or loving, we are inclined to believe that Beethoven, Bach, Picasso, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, Joyce, Wittgenstein, Einstein, Dirac, or Dante used their own personal ways and methods rather than what had been taught to them and was thought correct.
Teachers in front of classes of students rely on words to make their pupils understand and grasp the subject. This seems the unavoidable method of instruction but it does not mean that there are no serious drawbacks in the system. The laws of nature as taught now have become so habitual in our thinking that we do not stop to consider what they actually mean. Science does not discover the laws of nature but rather the laws of human nature. Discovery of how our brain functions may take many centuries yet just because we look outside for its manifestations. Take the example of a triangle, which is one of the simplest geometrical figures Everything we know about triangles from before Euclid and until today is actually contained in the simple figure we can draw outside of ourselves on a piece of paper, but, bisectors, perpendiculars, medians, inscribed circles, and circumscribed circles, the area, and the different shapes of triangles are the product of our brain and are not the laws of the triangle drawn there on the paper. It was either Pascal or Descartes who, by the age of thirteen, had completed his understanding of geometry and rediscovered what we know of it without having discovered any laws of nature except those of his own thinking. It takes something like thirty to forty years to become familiar with any “law” of importance, which is any thought of real originality, such as the periodic table of Mendeleev, color photography, relativity, and the double spiral in genetics; by then, appreciation of its significance and clearer understanding of its application may be possible. These things, of course, have something “out there” in our environment, and our brains have been wired in from inception until this very moment by the outside impinging on them, through our senses. With no senses at all, what sort of laws would there be in the world outside us? Our brains cannot function without an external world, without muscles and bones which are necessary only because self-propulsion is fundamental to animal life.
The “natural” numerical series from 1 to 2 to 3 to infinity is perhaps an even more convincing example of how laws are a study of the ways our brains function, as this law is claimed to be found only in “objective” reality. There are odd and even numbers in the series, and their distribution is peculiar. There are primes, and their distribution is still different. Also, there are Pythagorean trios: 32 + 42 = 52, since 9 + 16 = 25, etc. There are in the series enough laws to fill a thick book. Now where, in the world outside us, is the series and its laws? The series exists only when we write it down, or imagine it, which is how our brains were wired in in the first place. Obviously, all the laws of the natural series are the laws of function of the brain more than anything else. Organic learning is lively and takes place when one is in a good mood, and works at short intervals. The attitude is less serious, and the spells are more erratic compared with a day of academic learning or study.
It may be good to tell an anecdote here. A few years ago I had the good fortune to be introduced to Margaret Mead by Jean Houston and Bob Masters in the Serendipity Restaurant in New York. When we were seated at our table, Margaret Mead said she would first like to ask a question to see if my answer rang a bell with her. During her anthropological studies, she had returned to the same island for more than twenty years, yet she had not been able to teach the inhabitants or their children certain foot movements—a kind of hopping from one foot to the other, in spite of the fact that the people were good hunters and fishermen. I was unable to give a precise answer without knowing a little more about the movement, but I told her, in my view the fault or interference most probably arose from an inhibition or taboo affecting crawling in early childhood. She exclaimed she believed that I was on the right track. She then told me that the people of that island do not allow their babies to touch the ground on all fours for fear that they will grow bestial. Crawling is therefore eliminated altogether. That meeting was the start of a friendship which lasted until her death.
A person reviewing his organic learning in order to assess the parts that have matured to the full extent of his genetic endowments must remember that there are few intellectual processes in which thinking can be divorced from the awareness of being awake. Being awake means that we know whether we are standing, sitting, or lying. It means that we know how we are oriented relative to gravity. When thinking in words, even subliminally, we are logical and think in familiar patterns, in categories that we have thought, dreamed, read, heard, or said sometime before. Learning to think in patterns of relationships, in sensations divorced from the fixity of words, allows us to find hidden resources and the ability to make new patterns, to carry over patterns of relationship from one discipline to another. In short, we think personally, originally, and thus take another route to the thing we already know.
To my mind, learning that allows further growth of the structures and their functioning is the one that leads to new and different ways of doing things I already know how to do. This kind of learning increases my ability to choose more freely. Having only a single mode of action means my choice is limited to simply acting or not acting.
This may not be as simple as it sounds. We all turn our heads to the right if we intend to look to the right, and our shoulders will also participate in the twisting to the right. Looked at from the point of view of organic learning, moving the head, the eyes, and the shoulders in the same direction is the most primitive, simplest mode of action learned in early childhood. The nervous system is capable of other patterns of movement, say the eyes to the left while the head and shoulders go to the right. There are actually six different possibilities. Try any one of them which is not familiar to you. Go very, very slowly so that you can realize where you move head, eyes, and shoulders while “differentiating” them from the only pattern you know. What for? Just see what happens to you when you have succeeded in a novel pattern a few times and have made it more or less as fluent as the familiar one. You will feel taller, lighter, you will breathe better and have a sense of euphoria which you may never have known before. Your entire intentional cortex will work with such a quality of selfdirection as you always felt it could.
Imagine now that you learn to differentiate and repattern most of yourself, that is, most of your activity. Your intentional cortex will lose all the compulsive patterns with no alternatives and you will find yourself actually acting in many new ways. To facilitate your task, sit or even lie to begin with. When the pressure distribution on the soles of the feet is removed, as when lying, the intentional cortex is freed from the standing pattern all through the body. This may be the first time in your life that new alternative patterns can be formed in the cortex connections and affect the performance of your self.
This kind of learning, such as you will achieve if you try and follow me is also the kind of learning produced by Awareness through Movement lessons where the accent is put not on which movement you deal with but on how you direct yourself doing it.
Consider such a small thing as the ability to differentiate the movement of the third finger in both hands—the annular fingers which seem of no importance at all. Well, humanity is divided by this into two groups: those who can play or make music and those who can only buy tickets to concerts, or hi-fi equipment. For we can live a “normal” life with annulars participating in the movements of the neighboring medius and auriculars. But the fiddle, the flute, the piano and most other instruments demand the independent movement of the annulars and that they should have the same degree of differentiation as the index finger or thumb. This is a small example of what amazing potential can be discovered in everyone if structures and patterns of functions are dealt with methodically in this way. To master such skills is not easy, but education and learning could undergo a qualitative change by popularizing a system such as this.
Differentiation is a word, and a difficult one at that. The importance of such an action is that it increases the number of choices available for what we already know one way of doing. When no alternatives are available, we may be well if we are lucky. But if we are not, we will feel apprehension, doubt, even anxiety from time to time. When there is no choice of choices, we feel that we cannot change even though we know that we engender our own misery. We think, “I am no good. I cannot do otherwise because I am like that.”
A wide variety of choices enables us to act differently and appropriately in similar but different situations. Our responses may be stereotyped but fit the terrain. We can use ourselves to better our lives. We cannot function satisfactorily if our thinking, senses, and feelings do not affect our acts or responses. Therefore your acts and responses must contain, even in your expectation or imagination, feelings of satisfaction, and pleasurable achievement or outcome. This makes therapies effective. By the end of this book, you will have at least some means that you can use yourself.
Summary
Humans have the most complex central nervous system (CNS) of all mammals. All nervous systems are built for learning phylogenetically, as in more primitive creatures. The human CNS is the best structure on earth for individual (ontogenetic) learning. The external world affects our senses and our brains. So much so that if we are born into an environment with any one of the three thousand languages, our brains will be so organized that we learn and know only that one language. Our ears, mouths, and everything else will be formed to speak that language as it is spoken in that environment.
