KAKU: Sensory Awareness, But Not of the Endgaining Variety

The Alexander teacher Patrick Macdonald wrote:

‘The pupil must learn to stop doing, “to leave himself” in the hands of the teacher, neither tensing nor relaxing. Further, any emotional involvement in trying to learn what to do, or in what is going on, should be avoided. The best results are gained when a pupil can disassociate himself from what is happening, as if he were standing on one side watching someone else being taught. If he can do this for a time he will find himself taking his proper part in the process, with an awareness that is quite different and greatly enhanced. Alexander named the opposite of this kind of behaviour “endgaining” (i.e., the desire to bring about the end in view, however wrong the means might be).’

FM Alexander’s genius was to find a real, workable way for us, ordinary people of his own time, to begin to free ourselves from the tyranny of our own end-gaining -- without recourse to religion, or to drugs and drink, or to ascetic practice.

Patrick Macdonald, who was taught by FM from the age of 10 onwards, points directly to this way of quite different and greatly enhanced awareness, which is the very oppposite of endgaining.

In the Guardian’s “Great interviews of the 20th century” Francis Bacon tells David Sylvester about his effort to make himself freer in painting the Crucifixion...

FB: I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. And it’s one of the only pictures I’ve been able to do under drink. I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit freer.

DS: Have you been able to do the same in any picture that you’ve done since?

FB: I haven’t. But I think with great effort I’m making myself freer. I mean, you either have to do it through drugs or drink.

DS: Or extreme tiredness?

FB: Extreme tiredness? Possibly. Or will.

DS: The will to lose one’s will?

FB: Absolutely. The will to make oneself completely free. Will is the wrong word, because in the end you could call it despair. Because it really comes out of an absolute feeling of it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well just do anything. And out of this anything, one sees what happens.


Francis Bacon was not bullshitting. He was describing a real, genuine struggle to dull the edge of his end-gaining tendency, and thereby to leave himself free to paint. Out of that struggle came an understanding of the freedom that can exist in despair.... “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose. You’re invisible now; you’ve got no secrets to conceal....”

There is truth in that struggle, and in those words. But it is not the whole truth.

If we end-gain for the freedom of despair, relying on drink, drugs, or any other artificial means, then we are turning nothing into something, and tying ourself in knots. In our effort to be free of end-gaining, we are re-doubling the dis-ease. Anybody who looks at a photo of Francis Bacon, with his sunken eyes and depressed posture, can see that his end-gaining efforts to be free to paint, even if they resulted in great art, did not result in him being at ease with himself.

Francis Bacon was not buddha. But he understood something.

That which does itself, I cannot do. But I do try to do it.

So how -- if not through drink, drugs, ascetic practice or other forms of end-gaining -- do I free myself from the desire to do it?

Now, here is the secret: I can learn to see myself trying to do it, I can wake up to my endgaining.

This was where Alexander’s acute skills of observation came in -- the skills of a Tasmanian bushman. Alexander realized that
(1) in trying to do it, I invariably stimulate a universal pattern of misuse of myself, namely, pulling the head back and down onto the shortening spine, and thereby restricting the mechanism of breathing; and
(2) this universal pattern of misuse, associated with end-gaining, can be brought into sensory awareness.

But the sensory awareness involved is, as Patrick Macdonald wrote, “quite different” and “greatly enhanced.”

A few years ago I gave some Alexander lessons to a bloke who had done a lot of sitting-zen practice. He was a strong individual who was very wary of any whiff of authoritarian Zen bullying -- a big strong bloke who I liked a lot. But his big problem from an Alexander point of view was that he would try to feel everything out in an end-gaining way. If I mentioned his head, he would try to feel what was going on in his head. If I put my hand between his shoulder blades, he would try to feel what was going on between his shoulder blades. My job was to pursuade him that feeling like that is not the kind of sensory awareness that frees us; rather , it is just the kind of doing that we are learning to stop.

There is nothing called freedom that I can feel. But there is fixity -- talking in terms of a real person pulling the head down onto the spine and holding everything in -- which I can learn to perceive kinesthetically. I have no sensory register of what freedom is; but I can learn to sense on deeper and deeper levels what it is not.

When I feel centred, strong, fearless, in general it is not that.

What I feel is the wheels getting stuck. When the wheels are running smoothly, there is nothing to feel.

The freer I am, the less there is to feel.

But when something comes up that can be felt, Master Dogen’s instruction here is not to suppress it or to analyse it, but to feel it. Just to feel it. Not to feel it with the body or to sense it with the mind -- that would be end-gaining. To feel it through the acceptance and use of the whole self.

Thus, Master Dogen’s instruction, when some impulse arises, whether it be a thought, a desire, a wish, an emotion, an image, or whatever, is just -- but not in a partial endgaining way -- to wake the whole self up to it.







NEN something in the mind
KI arises
SOKU just
KAKU wake up, perceive, feel, become conscious, become sensorily aware

Rendered into a Japanese sentence, these four characters are read:
NEN OKOREBA SUNAWACHI KAKU SEYO.
NEN something in the mind
OKOREBA if it arises
SUNAWACHI just
KAKU SEYO wake up! become sensorily aware!