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FRITZ PERLS: out of your head, into the NOW
Fritz Perls’ goal is to make you fully aware of the NOW. The NOW of this moment for you as you read this. The NOW for me as I type it. Being in the flow of the NOW gives you a more accurate map of Reality to better meet the needs of the moment and to increase love, joy, and adventures in your life. If you are after wild adventures go read that wonderful book, Wild Adventures. Written by a great psychologist.
I fear our ancestors would see many of us smothered by layers and layers of words, living in big, smelly boxes, filling our days with spiritless activities. We have idealized nature and live a short distance from our bodies, far, far from the flow of raw Reality.
Those who have crossed, with direct eyes
to death’s other Kingdom,
remember us, if at all,
not as lost violent souls,
but only as the hollow men,
the stuffed men.
T. S. Eliot
“The outward rusticity of primal behavior makes Western people devise a self-serving ideal of themselves as civilized, which sets them widely apart from other peoples and from nature... Such primal peoples live among animals and vegetation constantly in close contact with the sources of nourishment and death, understanding their environment and expressing their ideas and feelings in terms of the natural world. In contrast, people in the West have created an idealization of their relationship with nature which has neither life nor spirit.â€
Jamake Highwater
“Hey! I just had an epiphany. Now I understand what Jamake Highwater was trying to say.
Here in the mountains as a coyote I have direct contact with nourishment and death. I’m intensely aware of everything around me. I hunt and am hunted. That small movement in the grass may be something to eat. It is damp and muddy near the brook and the wind brings smells and sounds from far away. That large shadow scares me and I crouch down and stay very still.
“As a human in Berkeley I’m in the middle of dense clouds of words and idealized images of nature. Smelly boxes are my home. We civilized people have moved far from the flow of nature, far from raw Reality, and have created an artificial world---a world without life or spirit.â€
Young Woman
“Most of the crowd dropped words-data-logic and experienced a melding with each other and with the Forces around them. But on the way back to the Many Glacier Lodge, most were busy using words-data-logic to think and talk about what just happened, rather than continue the experience.
“Yes, and you sharp people are aware I have done the same. A balance of going back and forth between direct experience and words-data-logic is necessary. You can’t stay with raw Reality because you need to process and give meaning to the experience and survive on planet earth. But if you only know words-data-logic, you are dead.â€
Young Woman (From The Alice Trilogy)
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.â€
Albert Einstein
FRITZ PERLS
1. Exploring Reality
2. Intensify your exploration
3. Love Joy Adventure
4. Fritz’s manifesto
TWILIGHT REALITY: Fantasy Fun
You may or may not choose to use a candle. For most people candlelight creates a powerful atmosphere that increases the reality of the experiences, but try with and without and find which works better for you. After you explore ALPHA and BETA do the second Adventure a few times to enjoy the nourishing cookies and delicious tea at a Japanese tea house. Do one or more of the rest in order or go Zen---quickly look at the possibilities and go with the one that most attracts you.
Be sure and carefully read How to Guarantee a Wonderful Life at the end of the chapter.