Jack:    I found that I need to have more continuous attention, and one of the things to help me was to sense the tongue in the mouth and to sense the inhalation and the exhalation of the breath together. But I found sometimes that that wasn’t enough, my mind will still be taken over by daydreams.  I decided to add something else to use up the attention as it were there were a third thing. For instance, on the train this morning, I tried with the tongue and the breath; also just making an observable regular movement, a movement of the finger based on the counting exercise that we’ve had, but because we were on the train, I wasn’t able to actually move the hand up and down. I found that that started to help me, and helped me remember more often during the day. This evening when I was coming home, I found that it expanded so that there was not only a more steady stream of attention, but I also started to relax, feel, and become more aware of the attention and of the tensions relaxing.

Mr Adie:   So?

Jack:   There’s a lot more to do I still feel rather tense, and I still feel rather mentally fatigued. I just want to know, I obviously want to strengthen my power of attention.  

Mr Adie:   You used the expression “continuous attention” to begin with. As far as that goes, you must try and realise that it goes in a wave motion. In a sense, it’s discontinuous, it’s one thing after another, in a wave like motion. It’s never sort of steady like that: it has a flow and you won’t be able to see it like that. But if you’re aware that this is the way, and then you’ll have a possibility of some kind of movement in yourself.

Again, it’s an idea, even if you don’t feel it, nevertheless it’s there. You know the heart beats and the blood goes in a sequence of impulses. Yet you don’t feel the blood running right now, that’s how it actually goes, and everything goes that way. Everything goes according to the law of seven, the law of three.

Well, that will help you to relax a bit more. In a train there are limitations, the train is moving and rattling a bit, other people you know or something. But it’s very useful, particularly if the carriage is empty. One should make the kind of effort that corresponds more to the situation.  I mean it’s no good going into an iron foundry wanting to be quiet. So, if you’re in an iron foundry, then you have to accept that. Relax very much, and allow this hellish row to pass through you, and then you can find you’re on a sort of wavelength that just passes through you.

Take a surgeon or a nurse on the battlefield, they must have this ability to let the horror pass through them otherwise they’d never be able to do the work they got to do.

If someone takes up a line of exercises, or work of that kind, it’s very good to check exactly why you are doing it: what do you expect and hope to get? The fact is, if you’re patient, you’ll probably get something that you haven’t imagined, that you don’t know, you can’t know in advance exactly what you’re going to get. Otherwise, the exercise wouldn’t be necessary, I’m always passing in the unknown in that sense.

So, I have to be quiet, otherwise I won’t hear, it happens to not be coming in a sort of an audible fashion. It maybe inner audible, it maybe inner silence. An inner silence has sounded. It seems an absurdity, but the inner silence is full of sound. It’s quite a different thing. Go on don’t leave it, but some of these exercises or part of exercises or very useful efforts that you make for yourself, limit them, do a certain amount. It’s all aimed to try and get a whole balance; this is what I’m after, not to do that for a moment longer that it’s necessary, because I’m out for balance.

I really aim to have absolute being, but of course, that’s because I don’t understand until I have it. Then in that kind of effort, the idea of laws suddenly appear, aligning.

Jack: Thank you.

Then, to Bardolph, who had been trying to work with his centre of gravity in the tanden, the “hara” or lower abdomen, Mr Adie said:

You have to be very careful about telling yourself your centre of gravity is there, or there. It has to vary. I live on different levels, each level has an appropriate centre of gravity. It isn’t only the body, the feeling and the mind, there’s also other centres. There’s the centre of the breast and higher; even centres above.

It’s important for all of us to try and see: if I say “I Am,” where’s that centre? “I Am.” Can I say, “well it isn’t there”?

“I Am.” It sounds somewhere. But how often am I there? “Pass me the toast please!” I’m not there. I dislike something very much, I’m not there. Where am I? Where is my centre of gravity? I look at one person and have one an impression, and another person: is it the same, do I look from the same place, what happens?

This is observation. Don’t try and force theoretical positions too much: they’re useful to have the idea. But what you need is the actual witness of it and to be able to function too.

If you’re doing a postural exercise, or preparing yourself, that’s one condition. Now when you get up and walk around it’s a very different set of circumstances. If as a result of your preparation you have some of that kind of higher energy about you then you will notice things and be able to disappear less and so on, but it won’t be like it was. You follow?

I mustn’t get these centres and the names too charted in a way, because what happens if I roll myself into a ball or lie down? Everything is different again. Nevertheless, it’s not at all wrong to try and ascertain centres with different senses of sensation and thought and feeling and the sense the work to do so, to do just that thing.

I mustn’t allow myself to formulate it in words and sort of hang on to them, because most of my formulations are not going to be right. I try to put them down, I soon land myself in sentences I can’t finish.