In a 1941 article in the Saturday Review of Literature, Aldous Huxley argued that, in the entire history of humanity, we have developed only two reliable solutions for the problem of bridging the practical and the ideal: mysticism and the Alexander Technique. If you have ideals that you don’t know how to make a reality in your life—if you feel a tension between your most sacred ideals and your lived experience—or if you just want maximal success and efficacy in order to reach the ideals of your own potential, these two solutions can radically transform your world.
Huxley’s claim may seem both strange and obscure if we have limited understanding of “mysticism”. For now, let us rest assured we do not mean anything woo-woo, though it may mean something that pushes the edge of scientific paradigms that now stand long overdue for a shift.
Of Alexander’s principles, Huxley wrote that they made it,
possible to conceive of a totally new type of education affecting the entire range of human activity, from the physiological, through the intellectual, moral and practical, to the spiritual—an education which, by teaching them the proper use of the self, would preserve children and adults from most of the diseases and evil habits that now afflict them; an education whose training . . . would provide men and women with the psycho-physical means for behaving rationally and morally; an education which, in its upper reaches, would make possible the experience of ultimate reality . . .
The Alexander Technique makes all of this possible, says Huxley, because “it can be combined in the most fruitful way with the technique of the mystics for transcending personality through increasing awareness of ultimate reality.”
What does Huxley’s assertion mean?
To understand it, we could look in particular at those philosophers and sages most interested in a practice of education that results in what we might characterize as profound shifts in consciousness and identity, amounting to an experience of intimacy and attunement with a reality completely unimagined prior to the educational experience.
Such an experience leaves the learner—as experienced by others in the community of life—as wiser, more loving, more beautiful, more graceful, more trustworthy, more insightful, more creative, more just, and so on.
We could refer to this as making learners (and teachers) into full participants in reality, in accord with the meaning of “mystical participation”. Any education calling itself “transformative,” but lacking these sorts of shifts, should rethink its name.
No one has yet provided a detailed account of the relationship between the Alexander Technique and mysticism, and how the Alexander Technique not only makes possible more ethical behavior, but, “in its upper reaches, would make possible the experience of ultimate reality . . .”
The mention of “mysticism” may put some readers off. We should focus on Huxley’s mention of “the technique of the mystics for transcending personality through increasing awareness of ultimate reality.” Transcending the deeply ingrained limiting beliefs we have about ourselves appears as part of any holistic spiritual orientation to life. We leave so much of our potential trapped in stubborn beliefs.
And yet, all of the values most people hold most dear demand transcendence of the ego and its limiting notions: Love, compassion, kindness, benevolence, wisdom, creativity, justice, critical thinking. We find ourselves needing to serve or participate in something greater than ourselves—and indeed this seems to come with the nature of reality itself, for in participating in the nature of reality—the nature of mind, life, and Cosmos—we participate in something that transcends the ego.
We can only do this when we find out for ourselves how much potential in us remains untapped. We have to face the “I can’t,” and both the wisdom traditions and the Alexander Technique offer us a way into the shocking, wondrous magic waiting for us beyond that “I can’t,” beyond our suffering and our confusion.
Such a “mystical” orientation thus emerges as another name for a holistic spiritual orientation, one that emphasizes the transformation that takes place when we become more intimate with our own highest values and potentials—and with reality itself (which of course means intimacy with what we truly are).
Without an essential place for the transcendence of self-centeredness, we leave ourselves with the virtual impossibility of becoming homo sapiens (the being of wisdom), and the high likelihood of becoming homo economicus (the being of economics)—whether we like it or not, and whether it accords with reality and even our own values or not.
Indeed, we see here one of the great dangers of wisdom-based learning: It threatens to dispel the delusory images of human beings and reality that currently organize the dominant culture and all its activities (including its ways of speaking, and all the activities of teaching and learning that more or less align—intentionally or not—with the dominant culture’s conquest consciousness).
Reading these lines from Huxley reaffirmed my growing admiration for, and understanding of, philosophers properly characterized as mystics, including Dōgen and Plato, and even including aspiring mystics like Nietzsche and (in his own way) Dewey. It seems to me that Huxley needed to emphasize that we must fully integrate Alexander’s discoveries with those of the mystics. Wisdom-based learning arises from this integration.
To the extent that Dewey was right that something in the Alexander Technique bears the same relationship to learning that learning bears to all other activities, he was wrong in leaving that with any implied completeness. Alexander simply made clear in, a certain important way, some of the principles the mystics already outlined. By studying those traditions and integrating them with Alexander’s discoveries, I could eventually make the unique contributions that constitute wisdom-based learning.
While Alexander’s work supported me in developing the notion of the core human skills underlying everything we do—skills that we are as opposed to skills that we have . . . a crucial distinction—we could not possibly ground education in a holistic and comprehensive way without the insights into the nature of mind that only mystical geniuses of the wisdom traditions outlined for us. Wisdom-based learning draws from many traditions, and indeed its principles have cross-cultural validation.
