This goes on for as many sittings as are necessary and until you walk out of the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling like somebody else—like somebody else that has been lent to you to be—somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will be allowed to wear or be or whatever it is for the rest of your life. Incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking people you thought were impossible before—even including very conveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind about your body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you.
It is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is a putting of the facts in a man's mind and the facts in his body inextricably together in his consciousness—as they should be, in that he is no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swings free, and feels able to stop when he is being fooled about himself.
I have been reading over this chapter and all I can say to my readers is, as a substitute for leaving it out, that I hope it sounds to them like a fairy story. I like to think when I am going on from chapter to chapter in a book—I like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are. The principles underlying what Mr. Alexander does with new brain tracks and what I am trying to do can be discussed in this book. The facts can be looked up and are suitable subjects not for books but for affidavits.
VI
REFLECTIONS ON THE STAIRS
It is a not unfamiliar experience for a man to go to a dentist, get into a chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast corner of his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinks he is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower or southwest corner. Then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and the northeast corner toothache is over.
(These figures or rather points of the compass may not be literally right, but the fact that they point to is.) Nearly every man has had things happen to him not very different from this. You have a bad lameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you that you are deceived about the real trouble being in your right knee, calls your attention to a place three and a half feet off way up on the other side of you, says you should have a gold filling put in a tooth there and your right knee will get well.
What seems to be true of people is that though in a less glaring and more subtle fashion, there are very few of us who are not subject either all or part of the time to more or less important and quite unmanageable illusions about things with which we are supposed to be—if anybody is—the most intimately acquainted. One keeps hearing every few days almost, lately, of how people's inner organs are not doing what they think they are, of how very often—even the most important of them have been mislaid—a colon for instance being allowed to do its work three inches lower than it ever ought to be allowed to try, and all manner of other mechanical blunders that are being made, grave mechanical inconveniences which are being daily put up with by people, when they move about or when they lie down, of which they have not the slightest idea.
The sensory impressions of what is really happening to us, of where it is happening and how and why are full—in many people of glaring and not infrequently dangerous illusions, but these physical illusions which we have are reflected automatically in our spiritual and intellectual ones. All kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are not seeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresy trials, lockouts and strikes—all the irrational things people say and do to each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the way people are being fooled by their own precious insides. Each man is doing things that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because he is off on his facts as to what is going on the first few feet off, because the first hundred and fifty pounds of consciousness which have been assigned to him to know about personally and attend to personally he is letting himself be fooled with every day.