An insight into the nature of "Awareness."

At the moment, I'm learning a lot about the Feldenkrais method of bodywork, which I know Dylan has heard of from being in the same class, but may be too difficult to explain to people who haven't been exposed. Essentially, it's a theory of how best to form new habits in human beings. For a number of reasons, the founder of the method, Moshe Feldenkrais, decided that the physical movement, the mechanism over which we have the most concrete and willable control, was the best vehicle for re-patterning inner tendencies that might not be so much under our control. Students of feldenkrais are told that the goal in all of the movement sequences is "Awareness," and the lessons themselves are in fact called "Awareness Through Movement."

What does it mean? "Awareness?"

Feldenkrais explained it via negativa by giving the example of someone walking up the stairs. Unless he or she is paying attention, he or she will have only a generalized awareness of the exact number of stairs climbed. To count the stairs as you climb them would require a form of "awareness." Closer to a definition, perhaps. Similarly, we are engaged at all times in behavioral and perceptual activities which we can perform relatively well without requiring any awareness whatsoever. We can eat food without tasting it. We can talk without being aware of our vowel or consonant articulation. We can listen to music without registering contrapuntal patterns and repetitions over time. We can go to an art museum, see something with a bunch of pretty or unpretty colors, without any awareness of the objective relationships between colors, which, it could be said, are the contribution of any given artist which make him or her MOST WORTHY of the designation "genius." These people are creating structural frameworks which do not necessarily impose themselves on the perceptions of a spectator who hasn't been schooled or acculturated to view visual art with this type of awareness.

Mr. I's case is a perfect example of a situation in which someone has awareness forced upon them through deprivation. Mr I was obviously not unaware of the structural relationships between colors, and as a painter and lover of art, probably needed no such schooling. But if you or I were by some miracle allowed to experience his condition TEMPORARILY, and thereafter return to full color perception, we would be automatically primed for a type of color awareness we had previously taken for granted. As a result, we become much more engaged by and grateful for our peculiar ability to differentiate color in this way, and art, and LIFE, in general become a--for lack of a better word--more pleasing to experience.

The Feldenkrais bodywork is fashioned in the same vein on the principle that an increase in awareness of interrelations between structures (in this case, structures of the human body) corresponds to a decrease in general suffering, confusion and anomie, and that therefore is inherently desirable.