thanks for the extensive reply Alexander, and sorry for the belated thanks too!
AE
Since the age of fifteen I'd been dabbling in Chaos Magick and Robert Anton Wilson / Christopher Hyatt style Undoing exercises. Nothing that I stuck with. It was boring and painful and didn't produce any significance results, minor states of altered consciousness maybe.
During this time I'd spent a lot of my life dreaming about the future. All the things I was going to do. I was going to be in a band and get girls and start a revolution, fantasies along those lines.
I can relate to this; dreams of 'powers' and fame and success.
I realised we don't have free-will
Also familiar, spinning out on 'infinite expressions of an eternal substance' after a few books and how free will looked pretty unlikely, yet i never found the 'switch' to turn of the naggin feeling of needing control. which is in itself a paradox (a switch to turn off control, when there is no control? - I would now understand it to be 'sense of control' rather than actual control)
AE
I just seemed to lack the willpower. So I'd have this cycle of getting excited, trying to bring my dreams to fruition, failing, then falling into a dazed slump for months, then years.
have you been reading my journals? that's my line!
AE
Basically I had a conceptual shift. I became a mechanical materialist. I started seeing myself as a machine and I got interested in 'why' I acted like I did. Now this was all going on while I was on an 'up' part of my cycle. I mention this because at the same time I'd started seeing an Alexander Technique teacher, to fix my posture, it was something that had bugged for me ages. At some point in these few months I also read F.M Alexander's books. I started taking them seriously because...and I think this is the right order.
So all this stuff was happening and at one point I decided to sit down and sort out all the problems and vague fears and worries and hopes I'd had. It was then that I noticed something. All my future fantasies about how awesome life could be, were just that, fantasies. Yet the feeling I got when I imagined them was real. It made me realise I was acting on my imagination. This was a big change for me. I then applied the same thinking to other stuff, Enlightenment met with the same results. I wanted to get Enlightened but I saw how stupid that was, it was a state I'd only ever been told about and what motivated me was the ideas about how good it would be, ideas that were happening in my imagination. So I then realised that actually I only wanted this stuff, wanted to get OVER THERE, because HERE was bad.
Ok, we diverge here, i went the path of trying to gain control, (control that, if i had been smart enough to listen to what i was contemplating, didn't exist), so it seems that a precondition in your life was this 'i'm not in control' thought. hmm, OK, that makes sense. I can see how that would be formative of the conditions spoken about in terms of 'pure intent'.
So back to the Alexander Technique. While all these realisations were going on I was having AT lessons and I experienced my first real 'change'. I got out of a chair without any effort and then was able to sit in a chair without any effort. The vague tensions and aches in my back just went. Like a part of my body had gone missing. getting out of the chair seemed to be a thing that did itself. Standing I felt buoyant. With these changes my mind seemed to become even more clear. Things were more still.
How long did you practice the Alexander Technique before this event?
Now during the course of these experiments I began reproducing for myself the state the Alexander Teacher helped me get to. I became fairly good at getting rid of bodily tension. Then here's an interesting thing.
I would love to know what this state is called, is it a part of the system?
i won't keep quoting and asking individual questions, as I understand what you mean by the autobiographical content being important too. i suppose the kicker question is have you been able to replicate this experience? and does it line up with the type of accounts of 'selflessness' other report (perhaps there are degrees of it if not?)
anyway, despite not getting back to you, your post has been very helpful, I really appreciate the time you spent putting it together.
cheers
andrew
edit: oh, an thank you too #1_0, and EiS, would love to read more replies to this topic if others can spare the time...