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Bene Gesserit Training
Friday, March 19th, 2004 01:09 amWe've been reading a text in class called A Functional Approach to Mysticism in which the author (a psychiatrist) describes how he performed an informal experiment on meditation involving concentrating on a blue vase. To get into the feel of things, I thought I'd do a similar experiment in class, but since concentrating on an object stuck me as beyond the attention-span of the average first-year student, I changed it so that they got into pairs and concentrated on a spot between the other person's eyes.
It was a disaster. I'd forgotten that a random group of nineteen-year-olds are not the same as the kind of twenty-somethings who go to workshops on this kind of thing, and just looking at another person for any length of time produces embarrassment and giggles (OK, I was doing this kind of stuff when I was sixteen, but I was weird, particularly considering that I wasn't born anywhere near Northern California).
Fortunately, I had another class to experiment with, so this time I got them to concentrate on one of their hands (specifically, the knuckle of the middle finger). The results were amazing. Within five minutes, they were getting many of the effects described by the author as happening after several twenty-minute sessions: colours changing or becoming more vivid, enhanced detail, changes in the dimensions of the image, physical sensations like heat or cold etc. What really interested me was that while most students' experiences corresponded to what the author calls "deautomatization" (i.e. returning to an appreciation of pure sensory input rather than categorising experience), a couple of students went in the opposite direction, doing a kind of scrying of their hands - one even saw a medieval war taking place on his hand, complete with catapults hurling balls of fire.
I suggested in the discussion that followed that we had witnessed two opposite trends in mysticism. On the one hand, you have the return to sensory experience unfiltered by concepts found in Taoism and Zen. On the other, there is the kind of visionary mysticism exemplified by William Blake looking at the sun and seeing a choir of angels.
What I didn't mention was that I'd filched the exercise from the Dune books: concentrating on your hand is the first step in Bene Gesserit training!
Anyway, I can add this to my list of Weird Things I've Done In Class.
It was a disaster. I'd forgotten that a random group of nineteen-year-olds are not the same as the kind of twenty-somethings who go to workshops on this kind of thing, and just looking at another person for any length of time produces embarrassment and giggles (OK, I was doing this kind of stuff when I was sixteen, but I was weird, particularly considering that I wasn't born anywhere near Northern California).
Fortunately, I had another class to experiment with, so this time I got them to concentrate on one of their hands (specifically, the knuckle of the middle finger). The results were amazing. Within five minutes, they were getting many of the effects described by the author as happening after several twenty-minute sessions: colours changing or becoming more vivid, enhanced detail, changes in the dimensions of the image, physical sensations like heat or cold etc. What really interested me was that while most students' experiences corresponded to what the author calls "deautomatization" (i.e. returning to an appreciation of pure sensory input rather than categorising experience), a couple of students went in the opposite direction, doing a kind of scrying of their hands - one even saw a medieval war taking place on his hand, complete with catapults hurling balls of fire.
I suggested in the discussion that followed that we had witnessed two opposite trends in mysticism. On the one hand, you have the return to sensory experience unfiltered by concepts found in Taoism and Zen. On the other, there is the kind of visionary mysticism exemplified by William Blake looking at the sun and seeing a choir of angels.
What I didn't mention was that I'd filched the exercise from the Dune books: concentrating on your hand is the first step in Bene Gesserit training!
Anyway, I can add this to my list of Weird Things I've Done In Class.
