Darkness & Light (1)

In the spring of 1994, shortly after starting to look into the teaching of FM Alexander, I had to make the dreaded visa renewal trip, subjecting myself to all kinds of indignity at the hands of people who I sometimes felt to be racist bureaucrats. On this occasion, I was living in Bushi, in Saitama Prefecture, and noticed that the immigration office lay at the end of a long route that I could easily cycle, along the side of the river. I remember it as one of the happiest days that I spent during my 13 year stretch in Japan. Most of the way there and back I found myself singing the old Johnny Nash song I Can See Clearly Now.

"Here is the rainbow I've been praying for."

The song pretty much summed up how I felt at that time, as I cycled merrily along.

"I can see all obstacles in my way."
Ha! How reliable were my feelings?

"Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind."
Oh really?

For he saw that in Nanda the seed of liberation, which is wisdom, was tenuous; while the fog of the afflictions was terribly thick; 9.15


This morning in the middle of my sitting, the neighbour's dog started yapping. I observed my habitual reaction to an auditory stimulus that I perceive to be a noxious one. Enemy number one, in my pantheon of auditory enemies, are low-flying light aircraft, closely followed by Mme Pickard's unnecessarily large flock of cockerels, but incessantly barking dogs are also somewhere up there in the top ten.

For through an illusory fixed conception one is bound to an object; Seeing that very same object as it really is, one is set free. 13.51

On seeing one and the same form this man is enamoured, that man is disgusted; Somebody else remains in the middle; while yet another feels thereto a human warmth. 13.52

Thus, an object is not the cause of bondage or of liberation; It is due to peculiar fixed conceptions that attachment arises or does not. 13.53

My habitual reaction to an auditory stimulus is darkness itself, unconsciousness itself. And the antidote to this darkness is simply light itself, consciousness itself.

"Say no to the desire to be right. Let the neck be free, to let the head go forward and up, to let the spine lengthen and the back widen, while sending the knees forwards and away."


"This is suffering; this is the tangled mass of causes producing it; This is cessation; and here is a means." 3.12