Three short audio excerpts from two classes Charlotte Selver gave in New York City on November 12, 1959.
The Thrill Comes From This
““Why not be here in the moment we are working here
to such an extent that you really feel:
this is what I want,
and this is [what] I’m here for,
and this is what I [unclear] myself for.
The thrill comes from this!
There is not such a thing like constantly offering novelties.
Everything is a novelty – if you let it be!” ”
In the 1950s Charlotte Selver worked closely with the English-American interpreter of Eastern thought, Alan Watts, such as in November of 1959, when Charlotte’s students were urged to attend Alan Watts’ lectures at the New School for Social Research. They often gave joint seminars, though this didn’t seem to have been the case in this particular series. The audio excerpts presented here are from classes given on the eve of a talk by Alan Watts on “Taoism and the Psychology of Repression”. Charlotte suggested that in her classes they also deal with "the psychology of repression. So much of the healthiest things in the world we are not admitting. We repress them,” she said at the end of her morning session on November 12.
Each of these fragments shows how deeply she and others were engaged in laying the foundation in the modern Western world for the now widely recognized movement and mindfulness modalities.
What is more, it was a very advanced study and cultivation of what it means to live fully in the present moment, beyond “practicing”. This becomes especially clear in the longer piece titled “Experiencing” vs. Observing” (below), where we also find a reference to another important influence at the time on Charlotte’s understanding of consciousness and the human potential, General Semantics.
“When I say permissive,
that doesn’t mean you become lifeless
or insensitive or anything like that.
...
Never mistake permissiveness, or ‘letting happen’ [allowing],
which is in every real first class activity,
with this kind of dulling of whatever it is.”
Experience vs. Observing
This video is a 4:50 minutes long. The quotes below are just a couple of excerpts. You can find the full text and audio by following this link. Hear and read the full text here.
“In experiencing you have to be very clear about the difference between enumerating all kind of items which you feel. That is observation. Experience is something entirely different. This occurs to you without any enumeration.”
”When the whole organism is awake we don’t need any observation anymore. Because we are ever so much more awake than usually when we observe.”
[Observing] leads everybody to this kind of effort in the head which makes actual experience impossible, or at least lowers it to a tremendous degree. And it creates usually, let me say, a dutiful anxiety, but not genuine experiencing.” ”