BO-EN: Forgetting the Peripheral

The Chinese-sounding reading of these four characters is:

KYU a long time
KYU a long time
BO forget
EN relation, condition, connection, bond, involvement, border -- peripheral thing

Read aloud in Japanese, this phrase would be:

HISABISA NI EN O BOJI

HISABISA NI after a long time, for a long time, over a long time
EN involvement, peripheral thing
O [object particle]
BOJI forget

“Over a long time, forget peripheral things”

How are we to go about forgetting peripheral things?

If you want to hear a good strategy for dropping off to sleep, ask an insomniac.

Forgetting is one of those negative processes -- like dropping off to sleep, or like losing performance anxiety, or like non-thinking, or like releasing a stiff neck -- on which a person can’t get a direct grip. Whatever clever strategy the person comes up with, it always turns out to be just another case of “It is not that!”

Those negative processes don’t respond to urgent intervention. They take time. They need to be given time -- plenty of time. If we bring a sense of urgency to those processes, It doesn’t happen. When we bring a sense of having plenty of time, then It can happen.

When we take plenty of time, we have more opportunity to benefit from the direction in which, courtesy of the 2nd law of thermodynamics (www.secondlaw.com/two.html#time), time’s arrow is pointing.

I must admit that I feel a terrible fraud preaching to others about taking plenty of time. I have always been one for going straight for the target, cutting to the chase.

Do you remember that scene in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life where, in teaching a class on sex education, John Cleese’s character is giving a practical demonstration with his wife. In a line which caused me to hoot with laughter, because it rang all too true with my own experience, he asks his wife: “OK dear, shall we take the foreplay as read?”

In a sense, that is what I am doing on this blog -- going straight for the target, cutting to the chase.

The last time I visited Marjory Barlow, after she moved to her son’s house in her old age, I asked her if she was happy.

“Oh, Yes!!! I am happier now than I have ever been!”

What is the secret?

“As you get older, you don’t worry any more about the things that used to bother you.”

Like what, for example?

[Long pause]

“I can’t remember!”


That story gives us cause for hope. Still, for those of us who are not yet old, the question remains unanswered: How are we to go about forgetting peripheral things?

Having been back in Aylesbury now for one week, I am conscious of being more bogged down here in the tangled skein of peripheral things than I generally am when living the simple life in France. The phone in France very rarely rings, and even when it does I am generally too far away to answer it, working in the garden or sitting in lotus. When the phone rings in England it is more than likely some end-gaining person who wants to involve me in their needy grasping for the solution to some specific problem -- a bad back, or a so-called “specific learning difficulty.” If I were wiser I would see every such person as a great teacher. But, not being wise, I find myself reacting badly to such people, in perfect accordance with the mirror principle. I wish they would all bugger off and leave me alone. As a philosophy on which to build a successful professional practice, I wouldn’t recommend it.

In his book Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, FM Alexander wrote:

It was a strange lack of reasoning that permitted men to make a false division in an organism that can be satisfactorily developed only as an indivisible psycho-physical unity. I was recently discussing this and other kindred matters with a scientific friend, who put the following query to me: “Why have we overlooked these important points for so long?” In reply I referred to the phrase now in such common use: “Life has become so complex.” In my opinion we have here the crux of the whole matter, and I venture to predict that before we can unravel the horribly tangled skein of our present existence, we must come to a full STOP, and return to conscious, simple living, believing in the unity underlying all things, and acting in a practical way in accordance with the laws and principles involved.







“Taking plenty of time, forget peripheral things.”