The Alexander Technique gives the direct experience that the practical arises in total nonduality with the mystical or spiritual.
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.
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 resulted in what we might characterize as profound shifts in consciousness and identity, amounting to an experience of intimacy and attunement with a reality more or less 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.
As far as I know, 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 . . .” Indeed, as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, I would go so far as to assert that even Huxley, at least in this essay, does not demonstrate a complete enough understanding of the Alexander Technique and its fuller correspondence to the venerable philosophical traditions around the world that express the principles of a wisdom-based pedagogy (though his work Grey Eminence does contain some marvelous discussions of certain mystical practices, which a philosophical student of the Alexander Technique would recognize as deeply resonant with the Technique and the wisdom traditions of the world).
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 ego appears as part of a spiritual orientation to life. Even the most mundane sort of commitment there—for instance, submitting to reason and evidence—puts us in a position of having to transcend our ego.
The values most people hold most dear all demand transcendence of the ego: 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.
The mystical orientation thus emerges as another name for a spiritual orientation, one that emphasizes the transformation that takes place when we become more intimate with our own highest values 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 like Buddha outlined for us. Wisdom-based learning draws from traditions other than Buddhism, and indeed its principles have cross-cultural validation.
