Following Your Own Authority

By: Charles Brooks

During my life, I have often rejected one authority only to accept another.  Underneath, I was afraid at the thought of living in a world where there was not someone, somewhat like myself, who knew.  But I have now come to feel that, to know what one is doing with life, it is no use to consult authorities.  It is precisely through the veils which authorities have spun for us that our own ears and eyes and nerves must begin to penetrate if our hands are to grasp the world and our hearts to feel it.  We must recover our own capacity to taste for ourselves.  Then we shall be able to judge also.

Experimenting with Standing in Daily Life

By Charles Brooks, from Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

The reader who is interested in such experimentation may feel like trying it out deliberately …[as we have practiced it].  This is fine if you have the time and patience.  Otherwise, wait for some occasion when you are obliged to stand anyway.  There are bound to be plenty of them.  Perhaps you are waiting in line at the bank or in the supermarket or at some other location.  Instead of allowing your energies to sour into impatience or boredom, you may channel then into experiments like these.  You do exactly what feels agreeable and interesting, merely making the decision to forego your customary inertia and to give yourself, as fully as is practicable, to exploration.  You may explore anything that comes to you.  The only condition is that you give it your respect and time.  If you can explore without hopes or expectations, but with the same kind of care you might give to doodling at the telephone, something will come of it.

Something In Us Can Teach Us

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

In Zen they say, “Buddha is in everybody.” That's not a shallow statement. It means something. Buddha is in everybody. Buddha is in you and in you and in you and in you. Buddha is in all of us. That means something in us knows. Something in us can teach us. Something in us can inform us how it wants to be. So that we can feel whether we are coming in touch with another person in such a way that we can be open for the other person, or whether we are not open for the other. We can feel whether we speak the truth or whether we go a little off the truth. We can feel whether we're putting pressure on something or whether we only give our weight to it. We can feel whether we allow our breathing to function as it wants to function or whether we manipulate it. We can feel whether we're dealing with a person and letting the person have his own way of being or whether we manipulate him. And so on and so on. In other words we have the ability within ourselves--if we become more awake--to feel more clearly what our own nature has to tell us. That's the thing that interests me.

We Have Nothing to Teach You

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

We have nothing to teach you. We only help you to discover what is already there, inside you. Our method is that there is no method. It is a very sensitive inquiry, a very sensitive discovery which everybody makes for himself through his own experimentation into what we actually become aware of when we begin to use our biological equipment more sensitively, more sensibly. It's not an empty phrase to say, for instance, when something doesn't fit fully into reality that it is nonsense. And this sensing -- this possibility of becoming more alerted in our senses, and using them more fully and more altogether -- this is the content of our work.