Beyond ‘Gifted’ and ‘Ungifted’: Asking Appropriate Questions and Appropriate Behavior—The Key to Unfold the Human Being’S Capabilities

Copyright © 2018 by Heinrich Jacoby-Elsa Gindler-Stiftung

Cover Design by Harald Rautenberg

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                            Softcover                          978-1-9845-2198-9

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Rev. date: 04/30/2018

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Heinrich Jacoby, 1958

CONTENTS

Introduction

Note Concerning The English Version

INTRODUCTION

It was in the field of music that Heinrich Jacoby found the key to his life’s work. He started out as a pianist and conductor. Whilst rehearsing with soloist singers, it struck him how much the quality of their performance fluctuated, depending on the extent to which they were in the mood or felt hampered by stage fright or other factors. This led him to the problem of musical talent, and he began to take a closer look at the way music is taught. His many and diverse experiences with adults and young people gradually convinced him that failure in this field had causes other than a lack of talent and that every person was born with a capacity for musical expression. In his publication Jenseits von ‘Musikalisch’ und ‘Unmusikalisch’ [Beyond ‘Musical’ and ‘Unmusical’], he set out the results of his research.

Music eventually became for Jacoby just one illustration of a fundamental insight: that the capacity for every kind of expression is latent in every individual. And while in our culture some forms of expression are segregated into the higher realm of art, they became for him but the privileged examples for every human being’s potential for creative contact with reality. This gave rise to what was to become his life’s endeavor— – to find out under what conditions this potential can develop unhindered, and to explore which disturbing factors in our culture cause the widespread ungiftedness we consider normal.

Hence an important part of Jacoby’s research was given to a critical examination of current child-rearing practices and their perverse consequences. By showing the child how to do, by helping and teaching him to get up, to walk, etc., we do not allow him to find out for himself how to do things, nor to discover his capacity for finding out. Yet since the way children grow up largely depends on their parents, Jacoby worked almost exclusively with groups of adults. Participants included musicians, actors and actresses, educators and teachers from all disciplines, doctors, special needs teachers, social workers, nurses, parents. His aim was that the group should recognize the capacities that every individual possesses as part of his or her biological equipment, rather than accept inability in one area or another as an inalienable fact of life. By trying out ways of functioning that they recognized as appropriate for a specific task, they would themselves experience that unfoldment was still possible in later life. Every so often participants had to admit that something deemed impossible gradually became accessible. Adults with such experience would also be better able to provide an upbringing and environment suited to children; for only unfolded people are able to trust in a child’s own possibilities for unfoldment.

Jacoby’s meeting with Elsa Gindler was most important; it led to collaboration and joint research that proved productive for both of them. Elsa Gindler had gained insights in the field of gymnastics that were analogous to Jacoby’s in music. Gindler’s work was about developing a conscious feel for one’s actual state of being and thus experiencing and setting free the ordering and regenerating processes of one’s body. To regain the feeling of being at home in one’s body proved to be the basis for all meaningful functioning and expression: this is where the projects of Jacoby and Gindler meet.

There was no instruction in the courses; the participants were required to try out, test and experience things for themselves. You can ‘offer’ people the things they need to help themselves, but you cannot help them. It was gratifying to watch the transformation of individual participants within the group as they began to straighten up and become freer, more confident, more capable, more creative and more sociable, and some gradually got rid of afflictions they had supposedly inherited, such as being cross-eyed or stuttering. However, Jacoby’s aim was not only personal unfoldment for its own sake; he also wanted people to become more capable of contributing to the peaceful, more humane functioning of the world around them, to become not only more human individuals, but more human members of society as well.

Because of the political circumstances in Germany, Jacoby’s work was for a long time accessible only to a limited circle of interested people. Operating under aggravated conditions and withdrawn from public life, Elsa Gindler taught in Berlin and Heinrich Jacoby in Zurich until the end of their days.

The impact of their work, however, has spread as a result of key encounters between Jacoby and people such as Moshe Feldenkrais, and through Elsa Gindler’s students, who have passed on different aspects of their work. As many of them emigrated, Elsa Gindler’s and Heinrich Jacoby’s work also became known in other European countries, but particularly in the USA and Israel. In the preface to the German edition of Charles Brook’s book, Sensory Awareness [Erleben durch die Sinne], Charlotte Selver writes: I should like to state very clearly that my own work – —sensory awareness –—which I have been carrying out in the USA for many years, is based on the fundamental discoveries made by Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby in their lifelong research into the human being’s ways of functioning and behaving. Fritz Perls later met Charlotte Selver and incorporated important elements of her work in his Gestalt therapy. In Berlin it was Sophie Ludwig, who had worked with both for many years, who carried on their work and gave her much-frequented courses until 1996. Helmut Stolze’s Konzentrative Bewegungstherapie [Concentrative movement therapy], which also has been spreading outward from Berlin, is an offspring of Elsa Gindler’s and her courses. Lily Ehrenfried taught her Gymnastique holistique in Paris, where today a Lily Ehrenfried Society ensures the continuation of this work.

The effects of Heinrich Jacoby’s work can be seen in much that is beginning to become common knowledge today concerning our conception of the human being and his possibilities. While those who continued his work each developed a particular aspect of it that had become important for them and gave it a name, Jacoby himself always refused to attach a limiting label to his work, which is about a quality of being alive and of living together that encompasses all areas of existence.

The book Jenseits von ‘Begabt’ und ‘Unbegabt’ [Beyond ‘Gifted’ and ‘Ungifted’], which was edited by Sophie Ludwig and appeared in German in 1980 (sixth edition, 2004), provides a reliable introduction to the content and scope of this work. This English translation for the first time enables interested people in the Anglophone world to study the fundamental aspects of Heinrich Jacoby’s and Elsa Gindler’s research from a firsthand source. The book is based on tape recordings of an introductory course Jacoby gave in Zurich. In establishing the printed text, a number of contributions from course participants had to be cut. Nevertheless the lively give- and- take of the courses can still be felt, and the exploration of many concrete examples enables readers to try out this working method for themselves. They may then become aware of fundamental problems with ways of behaving, which in our culture have become normal and expand their conception of the possibilities every person possesses from birth.

Maya Rauch and Verena Ehrich-Haefeli

NOTE CONCERNING THE ENGLISH VERSION

The text was translated from German in cooperation with Angela Brewer and Susan George.

The editors subsequently decided that the English version should be somewhat abridged and concentrated, as had been done with the sixth edition of the German text.

2.5.2012, V. E.-H.

COURSE 1

Preparation for working together – previous experience in general

Form of cooperation, issues and method of understanding

Readiness to ask questions – stupid questions

The individual – originality

Problem of behavior in verbal expression

Direct expression

Understanding, working things out for oneself – no logical thread in the process of the course

Diverse material – few basic connections and relationships

Mere learning – working things out for oneself

Fear of doing things wrong

Appropriate behavior development through use – asking appropriate questions

The right kind of stumbling

The self- evident

Things being true

Must we work out for ourselves our whole cultural inheritance?

Copernicus: The sun rises and sets

No good at mathematics? Lack of connection to real experience

Children as incorruptible researchers

Knowledge, as opposed to belief

Concrete step toward dealing with working problems

Remembering: two different kinds of behavior

Free association – things come to mind

Illumination (the penny drops)

Appropriate behavior – appropriate use of self

What is appropriate?

Learning through doing – using oneself appropriately – appropriate questioning

High performance through pressure

Concentration – doing or allowing, permitting

Making music – doing homework

Using language – behavioral problems

The quality of the teacher is significant for the development of young people

1 FEBRUARY, 1945

Although we are meeting today for the first time to begin our work together, this does not mean that we are only just beginning to get to grips with our problem. Most of you decided to participate in these twenty-four evening sessions because you had read or heard something about my work or because you observed changes in family members, friends, or acquaintances, which they attribute to having taken part in my courses. From the answers to the questionnaires, which I discussed with each of you individually before accepting you for the course, it is clear that the reasons and objectives given for your participation are very varied and that your expectations are extremely diverse, but very different from what you will find here.

In the questionnaire you were confronted with things whose scope and significance will only become clear to you in the course of our work together and which will have required some of you to deal with matters needing your—perhaps even unconscious—reflection. It doesn’t matter how serious you were about filling in the questionnaire, whether you were willing to do so or resistant to it, you had in any case to attempt to justify the opinions you expressed concerning for example what you and those around you think about what is called being gifted or ungifted. The need to provide me with such personal information as events and influences, which, in your opinion, have fostered or hampered your development, must certainly have met with some resistance on your part. Hardly anyone can have filled in the questionnaire providing details of your past history without having had fairly lively discussions with me in your imagination.

Even the drawings and especially the recording on the phonogram, which made many of you feel uneasy, forced most of you to take some sort of stand. And I know that for people who have never had to do a drawing since they left school, and particularly for those who consider themselves to have no gift for drawing, the challenge of having to provide two drawings can be so great that they would almost rather not take part in the course at all. Many can only overcome their resistances and fears by doing the bare minimum simply in order to get it over and done with. This is very obvious from the work they provided. But this way of doing the work tells me at least as much as about them as it does about the people doing it more conscientiously. In some people these exercises aroused interest in their purpose and usefulness, and in others they gave rise to resistance against me.

I deliberately intended to provoke this kind of reaction. Such reactions—whatever happens—are bound to occur as a result of the traditional attitude of the pupil, listener, or learner and require personal commitment. Does this process cause a certain degree of conflict or produce a particular attitude, even if you are not conscious of this at first?

(General agreement!)

During the first serious discussions I had with you before the beginning of the course, I noticed time and time again how profoundly all of you, without knowing the reasons why, were affected by the problems we are going to be facing. This will be the case even if your experience of the problems of ability and capability as well as of various ways of behaving has mostly been painful.

You already know that I am not going to be giving lectures. Since we shall have to establish for ourselves some kind of common language as we go along, please interrupt me whenever you have a question or objection. You will all be aware that people can be so preoccupied with unexpressed issues that they cannot attend to the underlying conflicts.

In the first years of life, beginning at home, then in kindergarten and then more systematically in school, children’s readiness to ask questions is curbed. This is because the child asks so many and such uncomfortable questions, which adults find tiresome. People then say things like, Don’t ask so many questions! Don’t ask such stupid questions! Don’t speak before you’re spoken to! This special form of discipline makes children reluctant to ask spontaneous questions, and even to express themselves spontaneously. You all know that it is customary in some schools for the whole class—even of the older pupils—not only to stand up when the teacher comes into the room but also for each pupil to rise when asked a question or if they have something to say.¹ This is disruptive and interrupts concentration on the job in hand.

The words used here cannot at first be always equally easy to understand for everyone, but the facts we shall be talking about can be readily understood by every member working in our group since the problems we shall be dealing with are so elementary and concern such general issues that no lack of education or special knowledge could prevent anyone from having to face them.

While we’re on the subject, let me remind you of something I’m sure you all know: sometimes when we would like to ask a question about something that isn’t clear, or contribute to a discussion, we say to ourselves, Oh, I’d better not. Everyone else must already know that! Or they’ll laugh at my stupid question!" I expect every one of us has remained silent for reasons like this. Yet when we are brave enough to go on and ask, it often emerges that others didn’t know either. I’ve had countless cases where the so-called stupid questions have helped to shed light on a problem. The same applies incidentally to questions, which appear to concern specific personal matters. Such cases show just how useful it is to work in large groups because when someone actually plucks up the courage to speak, we see time and time again that many people have exactly the same questions and problems. This helps to us understand others and also to reassess our own difficulties, because if you discover your situation is not as unusual as you had thought, something that may have been seriously bothering you doesn’t seem nearly so bad.

There is no such thing as an individual with a unique personality in the usual sense of the personality cult. The word individual merely means that this person is no longer a component part of human society. That connotation of the word in-dividual, which over time has come to denote the sense of uniqueness, of a unique personality, in other words that which is attributed to the individual in terms of tremendous achievement, character, or knowledge, and which usually attributes personality to itself as a particular merit, should be rooted out and destroyed. Each individual would be nothing at all, and would know nothing, could not even physically exist, without others who have brought him into existence and with whom he has lived—without everything that has been handed down to him as the collective achievements of thousands of years of culture and civilization. Theoretically we all know this, but we do not put it into practice in our daily lives. Do we realize that everything we consider original in our thoughts and achievements has nothing at all to do with individual personal merit, that in our mother tongue alone we have been given the collective wisdom and knowledge of millennia reaching right back to unknown time immemorial? The structure and wealth of expressions in our mother tongue contain much more than the person speaking it is consciously aware of. We often unconsciously say things that are much more relevant and significant than we ever realize!

And if I have asked you to interrupt me, please also allow me to take you at your word—that is, the actual words you use. I shall probably want to pin down the specific words used in the remarks by those who speak in the discussions. It won’t take you long to notice that this is not mere pedantry or quibbling. The words we use are never randomly chosen, and the choice of words is certainly not fortuitous when people have had to overcome their reluctance to speak.

You often hear people exclaim,: That’s exactly what I wanted to say! after further questions have clarified what the speaker meant, and revealed the opposite meaning to what was originally said. Perhaps the speaker might have had an inkling where the resulting discussion would lead, but had this been really clear, then different words would have come to mind.

Underlying this process is a very specific quality of behavior involved in expressing oneself, which directly affects the way we happen to speak. When we had our one-to-one discussions, I pointed out that all kinds of resistance is likely to emerge during our work because it is only natural that defenses and protests should surface when you yourself, your actual behavior, thoughts, and opinions are up for discussion.

My message to you, and what I would like to interest you in, can really only become clear in the course of our work and in fact can only become obvious once our introductory work is done. I would like us to work at understanding one another! I could, of course, tell you a great deal about what I know will happen, about what I want and expect of you. I could simply tell you, as is often done in books or lectures, in clear and simple words, about insights you may have no idea of and which might even appear alien to you. But what I want is not merely to extend your knowledge yet again, but for us to get so close to our problems that they do not merely gradually come into focus for you but that you are also able to grasp that by and large, what is being discussed is your day-to- day life and not just Heinrich Jacoby’s opinion on certain subjects.

One of the incidental effects of this way of doing things—which intellectually trained people might initially find particularly irritating—is that I shall not be following any particular logical thread in our process of clarification, that I do not move from point A to point B and then from B to C, but that we will be touching on a range of apparently disconnected questions and issues arising through examples in the course of discussion or through connections, which I shall point out. Through the hotchpotch we shall probably be touching on, through the varied issues that will emerge during our discussions, you should bit by bit be able to recognize the basic links and connections.

This approach might initially make you feel uneasy because as a rule you are used to learning things. Now I really mean it when I say I hope you don’t learn anything in my course! That might sound paradoxical, but what I mean by learning is simply accepting the results of others’ experience, merely accepting, noting, and then storing it. But getting to grips with something means testing out for oneself the premises leading to the discoveries and insights and then working through these discoveries and insights on the basis of such premises. This working out for oneself or getting to grips with things would involve diametrically opposed objectives to those involved in mere learning. Who is best when it comes to learning?

Mr. Q.: The person with the best memory!

H. J. : Yes, and what else?

Dr. X.: Those who make the least mistakes!

H. J.: Absolutely! The better the pupil, the fewer the mistakes; then –— the sooner the better –— no mistakes! Generally speaking, that’s the attitude of our average school.

Mrs. B.: But aren’t there some schools which don’t give marks according to the number of mistakes made?

H. J.: Just because we might find here and there some schools or teachers with different attitudes, we shouldn’t conclude that things aren’t all that bad. It’s what’s being done for the overwhelming majority that is decisive for the development of mankind and for attitudes in our society, not what might be happening here or there. It is crucial never to be contaminated by positive exceptions.

This is a problem of the sort of citizens we’re brought up to be, rather than one of teacher, parent, or educationalist. Our education, the prevailing mentality in society, incites us to be inclined to quiet down as soon as possible as long as we do not appear to be directly affected or threatened ourselves. We shouldn’t be reassured by the fact that we know of some schoolchildren whose work is not marked according to the number of mistakes they make. Of course, there are good schools like this. But that doesn’t change our basic observation that, seen from a certain viewpoint, learning means being able to give the right answers as soon as possible. Viewed from the same angle, working-it-out-for-yourself means precisely the opposite, that is to say, continually learning, discovering things from your mistakes, working out what is less wrong, and in so doing not merely recognizing what is right, but—and this is most important—just how the right thing comes about and precisely why it is the right thing!

This way of expressing the essence of working-it-out-for-yourself covers only one aspect of the problem in that it defines the working-it-out-for-yourself approach in terms of its opposite, the learning approach. It can also be defined in terms of the quality of behavior appropriate to the work-it-out-for-yourself approach (trying out, touching, etc.) and indeed by another criterion: calling on our biological resources and setting appropriate questions and tasks accordingly.

I often wish that above the entrance to our schools there was a notice saying, Have fun making mistakes! Do you understand what I’m trying to say here? (Assent.) One of the greatest fears is the fear of making mistakes –— doing things wrong –— what then! Throughout the history of mankind people have accumulated knowledge, insights, and discoveries mainly as a result of trial and error, through noticing that something is not quite right, and experimenting with doing it less badly and finally, acceptably. It is only when forced to ask why something isn’t working that you become aware of just what it is that makes things run smoothly and how to ensure this will happen.

I advise you to become interested in the history of science and of discoveries, especially in the autobiographical details, diaries, and correspondence between people who have achieved something unusual and from whom we can learn about their own development and the way they worked. You will see that how these people report the way their discoveries and achievements came about is quite different from what most people usually think.

Wilhelm Ostwald, the great chemist and Nobel Prize winner, once said in a discussion (perhaps many of you will know of him as the founder of the Ostwald color teaching method): The only self-evident things are those I haven’t yet thought about! At that time he was nearly eighty years old. That true researcher’s single sentence contains a lifetime’s wisdom.

The only things that are obvious are those you haven’t yet tackled personally. As a result of our schooling and the way we have learned things throughout our lives, we are full of this kind of self-evident knowledge, that is to say we know many things that we don’t know at all. That’s why in our discussions you’ll feel many longstanding, comfortable opinions are under attack and sometimes you may even feel shocked because something that seems so obvious is no longer accepted as such.

This brings me to another request: when I say I don’t want you to learn from me, what I mean is this: I don’t want you to believe anything I say. I’m being blunt; I’m hoping you’ll take me at my word. Please put questions and protest as long as you like until such time as you don’t merely have to take my word for it! Without this insistent need to check and classify what has been proven, even the most correct statements are wrong. Even what is true is still false as long as we have taken it on trust without checking it out, as long as we have not ourselves experienced it to be true. Something may be entirely true, yet it is not my truth if I just swallow it whole. I am not now speaking of the truth, but of the truth of something, of the being true of something. Truth in general exists just as little as freedom in general. There will always be a being free for something, a being free from having to be something and a being true of something as opposed to the thing it is being compared with.

Mr. A.: Do you mean that we should for ourselves really make an effort to work out for ourselves the whole cultural achievement of mankind going right back to our very beginnings?

H. J.: There’s a grain of truth in that, exaggerated as it may be, though I did not express it in that way. The whole content of widely differing cultural achievements accumulated over the centuries can be ascribed to relatively few basic functions and facts. Once you have faced up to this issue, new facts are experienced either as true analogies to things you’ve already got to grips with yourself or as variations and logical deductions from the same.

Dr. X.: But there are certain fixed scientific facts, such as mathematical, algebraic, chemical formulae, the laws of gravitation, etc. You surely can’t expect people to work all that out again for themselves?

H. J.: That’s precisely what each one of us—starting from scratch—does have to do! We mustn’t just take it for granted that things are true and correct simply because they’re universally taken to be so. We must all check them out for ourselves and not simply learn them off pat. Yet because of the way we’ve grown up, hardly anyone can see things otherwise, as Dr. X. has just said.

For the law of gravitation especially, it is not only possible but also necessary for each child to check out the basic principles for itself. The teacher must create situations in which certain things happen to the child enabling it to stumble across certain phenomena so that he or she can recognize the law of gravitation and express it. We are talking about relatively simple phenomena. But especially in those situations where we would expect to find a complicated background as a result of what we have merely learned, we do come across simple ways of connecting things up, which each of us can even experience for ourselves, firsthand, so that we don’t merely have to believe them, simply take them on trust, but can check them out personally.

You have all learned elementary physics, basic mechanics, and so on. How many of you have heard or learned of Copernicus saying that the Earth revolves round the sun, etc.? And yet how many of us still talk of sunrise and sunset?² (Surprised but smiling agreement.) These examples show us clearly what we mean by simply learning things, where mere learning is not bound to affect the way we actually experience events resulting from them! Any young person could go quite a long way in working out for themselves the basics of the Copernican worldview. We could then behave in such a way when watching the sun rise or set—and this brings us on to a very important facet of the problem of behavior—that we attempt to experience these events in the way we know in theory that they take place. It is not so very difficult to create a situation where you can try to experience what it is like to feel the Earth’s surface or the roofs and mountaintops moving up or down and gradually covering the setting sun, and likewise for the rising sun. Until such time as you have experienced or at least imagined for yourself what this implies, you have merely learned all of this knowledge about it and your relation to all these guiding factors in the sphere of astronomy is so vague that once again you can only learn by heart these subtle and complex interrelations. No one, neither teacher nor researcher, could possibly achieve productive work in this field by working in this way.

The same applies to the principles of mathematics. Most people have learned by rote what an angle, a square, a straight or parallel line is. But a child can really work all this out for itself and discover the way these descriptions fit the phenomena it has known about for a long time. Even a two-year-old has already found out in practice in every corner what an angle means. And later the child learns: An angle is . . .,, a straight line is… . . ." without this learning being connected up to a real situation it has long since experienced for itself. This lack of connection to one’s experience is one of the most important reasons why so many adults later on, but also so many children in the higher classes at school, complain that they have no gift for mathematics. Having to juggle with ever more complicated abstractions from a basis of foundations you have not worked out for yourself either leads to a feeling of resignation or else to the laborious effort of having to learn the right answer by heart because of examination pressure. Yet you could work out for yourself every theorem and proof if only the guiding principles had been linked to direct personal experience and if you had been able to test out personally each axiom and definition that would have to be used to obtain these proofs.

Yet mathematical abstractions were originally extrapolated from real phenomena and relationships. An angle is an expression of a section and at the same time a term chosen to cover certain specific phenomena whose content is defined in a special way, as for example in Euclid. At the same time this definition refers to angles only if they consist of a given number of degrees. If angle did not refer to a real angle or if the phenomenon of the concept angle were not up for discussion, the word angle would remain an empty word. Yet we still lure children into learning definitions off by heart and into wrestling with abstractions whose contents they have not tested out for themselves,—so consequently they merely need to memorize the words!

Children resist this for a long time until they give in and have become well-behaved enough to be willing to learn things off by heart. A small child will be inclined to try things out for itself and is unwilling to be shown things. Freddie do it! Freddie do it!, they exclaim. A child only stops being the way Newton, Robert Meyer, Leibniz, or Helmholtz still remained as adults, that is to say incorruptible and tireless researchers, after adults have made the child anxious, have threatened it if the child does things wrong i.e., differently from the way it has been shown—and have then persuaded it to be shown how to do things.

Any small child who has not yet been confused by adults is an incorruptible and tireless researcher. We have got used to seeing it as evidence of an unusual gift if adults still behave in this way. Yet any as yet undamaged child demonstrates through its behavior that nature has equipped mankind to behave in a manner and with the characteristics considered typical of the research capacity of the greatest researchers we revere: that is, deeply involved, totally absorbed, and in touch with reality, and not with catchwords, ready-made concepts, and clichés!

As long as a child remains itself, it will refuse to be fobbed off with clichés. But the more successful its education, the more prepared a child is to accept these clichés, until it no longer notices that they are its sole diet. When a young person decides to study for given exams in preparation for studies in a particular subject, he or she has already unconsciously recognized that to a large extent studying is about learning off by heart a certain quantity of book content. (General agreement.)

To establish a lasting background for the picture we want to paint together, we need to deal with the previous history and quality of the real situation which our thinking feeds off, and in which our investigation is taking place, so as not to fall victim to illusions about the reality and quality of our thinking and testing.

Mrs. B.: But there are situations, problems, where it is difficult or even almost impossible to acquire true knowledge for oneself by testing things out!

H. J.: Of course there are. In such cases you need to be aware that –— possibly only temporarily—you have learned something at one remove, and not behave as if you had checked it out personally. Personal experience need not necessarily mean in every case being able to see for yourself with your own eyes. But as far as possible, we should bear in mind the distinction between what we have learned at firsthand and what we have been forced to learn at one remove, particularly if we want to justify our position and put forward arguments. If you want to act responsibly in these circumstances, then you must dare to investigate and find out for yourself!

Mr. Z.: It is very relevant to speak of guidance and opinions at one remove. Today we see things almost entirely at one remove: all our conventions, the way we follow guidelines and submit to majority opinion; all of that is nothing but living at one remove.

H. J.: We certainly think and say much more at one remove than we imagine. In fact taking others’ opinions for granted goes so far that most people, even if they think they are being spontaneous in discussions, are often only passing on opinions they have heard from others. How hard it is for us to have really thought about something we are actually putting forward as an objection! Arguments often only contain what we have only found out or learned in the way we have just described. This is a situation we shall often encounter, without attaching any criticism, implicit or explicit, when pointing it out.

The truths about people and their relationships that we take for granted as needing no more investigation are the ones we must pay particular attention to and show that they do not require further investigation after all. To begin with, I shall want to inculcate in you a certain skepticism with regard to such apparent evidences. Once one gets away from the logical and static way of looking at things, the confusing diversity of images and concepts becomes much more simple and obvious. Rather than wanting to investigate the details and plethora of substances the world appears to offer us, which we can never master, we need to be interested in the functional connections, the natural laws of things, the infrastructure generally applicable to all things, underlying the individual material cases.

This also applies to the problem of isolated knowledge or experiences classified according to certain contexts. The more we bear in mind the context referred to by individual cases, the more likely it is that these will automatically open the way to countless other material applications. Everywhere, even outside the realms of natural sciences, we can find analogies without having to go back to square one for each individual case, but also without being obliged to rely on belief alone.

(After a few questions)

Let’s remain in touch with the reason that gave rise to these questions: my instruction not to fall victim to the self-evident facts, but to work through the basic principles and not to accept anything, including from me, without checking it out! We can only verify things on the basis of concrete examples, not through speculation. And when one is familiar with the dialectical nature of all expressions of quality –— that is to say, the fact that the idea of quality contains within it some conscious or unconscious representation of its opposite or of some deviation from quality –—this makes it easier to comprehend abstract questions. The expression limit or limitation of the human world picture, for example, undoubtedly also implies the fact that something more must exist, part of which is delimited by these limits. It is only the experience of something more which gives the expression limit its content. Limitation can only have a meaningful content if the notion of its opposite, unlimited, can have been experienced and vice versa! Large acquires its meaning through the experience that something is larger as compared to something smaller, gifted its meaning through the experience of un or less gifted, etc. Learning and teaching acquire their, to me, negative connotations only through experiencing the potential of working things out for yourself, and, the other way round, the positive assessment of working things out presupposes experience of the problems inherent in traditional teaching and learning. What we believe, because we do not check, cannot know, or cannot yet know, that is a completely different problem.

Believing does not begin where we can no longer know things for ourselves—even if unfortunately that is the case for most people. Believing begins where people have no urge to know. Believing stems from a completely different form of behavior and from an attitude of being different from uncertainty. Underlying belief is a confidence, a certainty different from that underlying knowledge backed up by investigation and supported and validated by logical arguments. This is the only way we can understand Credo quia absurdum. These questions do not always crop up in the first course, and what we do with this particular set of problems may well provide an example for the kind of approach I have been talking of: we will deliberately leave these questions open, not so that we can give up on them, but so as to tackle them at another level after real experience with behavioral problems and with the possibility of being able to look at examples we have together worked out for ourselves.

A first concrete step in dealing with our specific working problems would be for you to attempt to find stillness at home so that something of what has happened here, perhaps something that has moved you, can resurface. If you become aware that something has remained or has become problematic for you, please make note of it. If something has remained problematic for you, then please present it later on if it hasn’t become clear here.

Asking you to become still once again after our work and to attempt to allow what has gone on here to reemerge also guarantees that each of you will be alert and ready to tackle issues. It will mobilize you in a different way from what you would be doing if you were, for example, simply reading through the notes you had made here. I shall be asking you to do something similar in the next course, before or at the latest once you have arrived here, and certainly not at the last minute, to be still, so still that you get in touch with what we have been talking about. Please don’t behave like members of an audience you will have seen at concerts or lectures and will be all too familiar with: they go along and wait for someone to do things with them, someone who is specially employed to mobilize, teach, entertain them, etc.

So we will come to an agreement that you will consciously attempt to get in touch with what has happened here, not by thinking it over and brooding, but by becoming more still and open to what might come to mind, what might reemerge. Is it clear that thinking over, making an effort, and exerting oneself is quite a different quality of behavior from being still and composed in order to allow things to reemerge? If all you need to do is to allow things to happen to you, it is obviously inappropriate to make an effort, to do something. The expression letting things come to mind is certainly significant in this context.

Among the opinions we shall also have to revise is the view that the creative personality is doing something, although the wisdom of our language makes us say something came to mind or he saw what to do. Seeing how to do something is a really vivid and telling image: things suddenly become so clear that I can see something, notice things that were probably there before, but that I couldn’t see in the dark!

Mrs. B.: But people also say that genius is hard work and that a so-called genius can attribute their achievements to their untiring efforts.

H. J.: This addresses several problems at once: (1) what you’re calling genius is far from being a matter of general consensus as to what and who we mean, (2) you are using the term hard work as if it were self-evident that we all understood this to mean the same thing. The emphasis you placed on the word effort describes a particular kind of effort. But there are people, and particularly those who are extremely creative, who are hardworking in the way a certain mystic³ recommends: If you don’t grasp something, let it be: the thing might grasp you!

Hard work can, on the one hand, mean constant openness and readiness to shift, to become illuminated, to have ideas, but it can also mean—and this applies to most of us here—brooding over, practicing and exerting oneself. If you are still and totally concentrating on something, more can happen in a shorter time—and what happens can be very productive—than many hours of brooding over and exerting oneself. We can’t really compare one kind of hard work with another just like that. What kind of effort, what kind of concentration can we consider an appropriate form of hard work?

We will need to consider the quality of appropriate behavior, the appropriate use of self, and the appropriate way of posing questions and setting tasks. What we mean by appropriate here is not something rational, utilitarian—nothing that reminds us of production and usefulness, but rather something which will emerge from specific situations in response to as yet unexplained conditions and which corresponds to the objective being sought. We will have to be guided by both the biological structure of the human being and the quality of the performance.

We need to examine the biological and physiological angle to find out how we are organized to cope with life and the demands of civilization. How are we organized to experience things? To think? To compare things? To have ideas strike us? To get in touch with something? etc. There’s no doubt about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate if we consider how we are biologically constituted. Being appropriate arises from the way we are organized. Our eye, for example, functions like an antenna. As soon as light strikes the lens, we can see. We don’t have to do anything for the light to hit the lens once our eyelids are open. It is then unavoidable that the light stimulus will reach us. The optical preconditions to recognize things have been met for us –—preconditions that enable the whole function of recognition and interpretation to begin of its own accord. Yet we know from experience that we can gawp at things, strain to see something we want to see. We are exerting ourselves, although everything is happening of its own accord! We are looking at,, upon,, gazing upon,, staring at.

If we examine what is the appropriate part of our behavior that enables us to see, it turns out to be permission, relaxation, letting things happen to you, which is appropriate. Any exertion becomes a source of disturbance, of inappropriate excess. When we are striving toward outside, we cannot as clearly read what is reaching us—despite ourselves—as when we abandon ourselves to what is getting through to us without our doing anything. The same absurd habits of behavior apply to listening—listen closely, listen carefully! How often have we heard such comments, starting with when we were very small.

It is in early childhood that we come across the roots that lead to such inappropriate behavior being considered normal. Most people involuntarily strain when, for example, they want to hear better. In so doing they furrow their brows, stiffen their neck, hold their breath, and so on. The more difficult something appears, the greater the effort made. Instead, we should be attempting to become more open, more relaxed, because it is permission that is required by the structure of our organization as a precondition for contact and special achievement. Noise, for example, gets through to us whether we do anything specific or not. Physiological investigation shows that we do not possess any special musculature for hearing or seeing whose nerve endings can contribute to light or sound reaching us.

I’ve had to repeat these self-evident truths for decades because in daily life, almost everyone behaves in exactly the opposite way from what our knowledge tells us. This too is proof of the sterility of knowledge we have simply learned off pat and which seems singularly inapposite to