Dialectic, viewed from an educational and functional perspective, is concerned with the deeply felt needs, desires and wants of human natural functioning, and their integration through guiding ideas, directions and intents into effective action. Dialectic aims at the dynamic, action-oriented, moral, purposive dimension in human life, that part which is the inwardly felt impulse for the initiation of an action (its telos, purpose.) It seeks to bring out this essential purpose as the moral guiding force of the whole experiencing process.

    When applied to the disciplines of somatic functional learning, this perspective on Socratic Dialectic can clarify and bring out such a dimension in them. This dimension then becomes the unifying and directing principle of the functional dialectical method, just as the purposive dimension is central in the total human process. The moral, purposive dimension thus becomes primary, and the somatic, functional method becomes clearly defined and used as a means to serve this end.

    This clarification of purpose is simply the equivalent of putting the specifically human concerns of living as the first priority. Integrating action and function, as in the somatic functional disciplines, follows and serves this priority.

    What I most want to bring out in this chapter is that the central act of dialectical functional learning is a deep, fundamental felt-experiential act of choice. This is a felt shift that happens in the subtle feeling life-energy (i.e. eros) through the examination of desire and the subsequent choice for what is morally good; and that ideas (ideai, in the specifically dialectical functional sense, which will come out more clearly as we go along) are the pivotal points of focus and the essential instruments for that shift. This central act of moral choice is what acts most truly as a guiding principle for the course and flow of the dialectical process, and more particularly for the right use of Socratic questioning.

Moral Choice

    Fundamental experiential choice is a felt shift, through which the potential for directing action is explicitly brought out. This choice is the transformational power of functional learning, and it is what we are especially trying to evoke and awaken through dialectical inquiry.

    Therefore, I will now elaborate on fundamental experiential choice. It is central to Dialectic and to functional learning, and it is the basis for the learning process described in the next section of this chapter. I will also discuss the link between Dialectic, functional learning, and fundamental experiential choice.

    We are always giving "directions for the use of the self" to ourselves. These directions are in the form of messages and images that we play to ourselves as cues for habitual responses. We construct these cues in our own peculiar ways (internal communication.) They may be simple or they can be complex (such as some combination or sequence of visual, auditory and kinesthetic representations.)

    These cues direct our life-energy, giving it structure functional, experiential nature of Plato's language (logos) of Dialectic, and prepare the way for understanding how this ancient art may be enacted today.

    Many aspects of Dialectic and of functional learning utilize fundamental experiential choice.

    Imaging is one example: when you project an idea, it goes through your whole energy field as a psychic life energy form (eidos.) This form is the fundamental direction for the creation of your experience, perception and action. This is happening whether you are consciously aware of it or not. You are thus creating your experience all the time even if you are not conscious of doing it or how you are doing it.

    Fundamental experiential choice is the central act of repatterning. Repatterning occurs through felt shifts that move through and effect the various structures of experiencing that give representation (image) to the basic felt-experiencing. It is choice of attention that is the real key to patterning and repatterning. This is what all methods and techniques of repatterning (whether body movement, mental, psychological or emotional) work with, mostly implicitly.

    However, the experiential repatterning of Dialectic adds a significant element of precision, specificity and effectiveness to the act of fundamental experiential choice, while maintaining the process' rootedness in ongoing felt experiencing. How this is accomplished will be discussed next.

    The dialectical use of felt-experiencing is not merely somatic and organic, but goes beyond this to the deep feeling core of human moral choices. The Socratic inquiry suggests the following: the "problems" of life are moral, i.e. they all stem from misdirection of self, and this is what needs investigation, not the problem itself. By entering into the dialectical process you discover that you are responsible for your actions and your experiencing. By becoming conscious of this responsibility you can redirect and master your experience, perception, action and your life. This is what Socratic moral responsibility is, as investigated, remembered, and actualized in Dialectic. It is the purification of truth from illusory self-images, rather than the getting rid of a problem. The problem, if there is one, is in the misperception and resulting misdirection of self.

    This new way of being is the basis for a wholly new type of action, expression and relationship to the whole situation. Dialectic's purpose is not to cure, fix, heal, ameliorate or indulge suffering (pathos.) Nor is it to identify suffering as a problem against which to apply a solution. Dialectic's purpose is to precisely examine suffering through the process of felt-experiential inquiry. Through this process, the sufferer can see what he is doing, and can then release himself from the suffering he is creating, into er freedom.

    So, a primary aim of Dialectic is to evoke this awakening of self to its directing activity. This is done, as a practice and method, simply by exploring this whole territory in a full dialectical interplay, and following the experiencing where it leads. The exploration brings awareness to that territory of self, and this is a recollection (anemnesis) and an awakening. To come alive to that self-referal directing activity of soul (psyche) is the soul's distinctive moral power (its specific arete.)

    The practice of Dialectic is fundamentally the practice of subtle discriminating during the act of experiencing. This is the same discernment of choice used when experiencing a felt shift. But the central act of Dialectic is an act of choice in the "use of the self." Through Dialectic we guide our deeply felt needs, impulses and desires (eros) into integrated, proper use, to attain natural happiness.

    It is important to discuss how Dialectic achieves such discrimination. Knowing what you are doing (through self reflection on your current reality and perception of how you are directing yourself), is the basis for what Alexander [F.M. Alexander, the creator of the Alexander technique] called "inhibition" of that doing. It is not inhibition in the sense of forcibly stopping action. It is simply taking a look at what you have been doing. That vision creates distance from the action, thereby taking you out of automatic immersion in the action. Conditioning is therefore no longer a determining and compulsive force because you have stepped back to see for the first time what you have been doing.

    This seeing is not enough in itself, though. Once you have reached the point of suspension (aporia) of your current actions, you have opened a space for the creation and projection of new directions for new action, based on the discovery and expression of what you truly desire (your idea of the good, for you, and of what you want to create in your life. )

    The creation of these new directions for the use of the self, within the fertile space of the suspension of your previous habits of action, sets up a natural dynamic (dialectical) tension impelling you toward the desire-filled new vision or idea. Energy is attracted to flow through and in this new idea as a path of least resistance (which is a fundamental principle of all natural functioning, called the "law of least action.") The direction of this dynamic tension is toward release, ease, opening and fulfillment of desire, away from resistance, pain, holding, unfruitful "wrong doing" that has no real charm. The new creative idea actually becomes much more charming to awareness as a new natural direction for the whole self, thereby making its use and implementation probable and almost inevitable.

    This approach (as in all repatterning, but fully and explicitly realized in Dialectic) completely eliminates the need or the desirability of working with "problems". The problems and concerns of life are looked at as current perceptions of reality, and through self-reflection brought to a state of suspension (every good drama has suspense at its pivotal central core, and Dialectic is high drama.) In this suspension new creative ideas can powerfully and quite naturally redirect all the energies, forces and aspects of the self.

    Dialectic, then, uses movement in, around, and through a felt shift and release. Dialectic's process is a basic act of transformation, levering into it from varied angles, perspectives and approaches, but always following the energy of opening where it leads. There is no need for any elaboration beyond this natural movement of dialogue around the felt shift, because the felt shift experienced through Dialectic is transformation.

   To be guided in dialogue by attentiveness to felt experiencing and to the felt shift follows one of the main guiding principles of Plato's Dialectic: to always be guided by the logos (the articulation of the idea through "true speech.")

    This principle corresponds to the other main principle of Dialectic, which is to always be guided by the energy of eros, the deep-feeling desire for wholeness, union and communion in transcendent love.

    These two laws correspond to the two primary factors that create the right atmosphere for the activity of fundamental experiential choice: 1. the dynamics of attention to the felt shift (with questioning, perspectives and various other approaches serving this attentiveness), and 2. the energy relationship in presence, love and awareness.

    To summarize, fundamental experiential choice is the middle way between the misdirections of action that either aimlessly let things happen, or try to force them to happen. The functional learning disciplines, guided by Dialectic, use the act of fundamental experiential choice to achieve a liberating transformation of self. This is accomplished by experiencing a felt sense of what you have been doing, letting that felt sense shift in your experiencing, and then choosing what emerges from that shift.

    This shift is not to another way of doing what you were doing (that was wrong doing, perhaps with a wrong aim), but to an entirely other way of being with and in the whole situation. This is a release of "end-gaining" and a shift to "process", to whole-body heart-felt intuitive knowing.

    This discriminating is carried on through a process similar to Focusing [a "functional learning" technique developed by Eugene Gendlin.] Focusing uses such acts as "checking," "fitting", etc. in the play of outward life-action to relate those actions back to inward felt sensing. The criteria for the "fit" is the direct feeling sense of eros and the discernment of telos.

    In terms of practice, what happens is that you do something, and then check back. Does it really give a felt sense of completion, of rightness? Does it satisfy the desired aim that you intended? Feel it, test it. Then adjust, go through the process again, act and check back, feel and adjust. Discriminate as you go along.

    Reach into that quiet inward sensing place to the felt sense of shift and opening. Let it be, let it happen in itself. Give it attention while it moves and opens up. Recognize it, affirm it, choose it as a "direction" to set in motion your thoughts, feelings and action.

    Stay with that feeling sense and its outward connection into use and expression. Let it follow through into action and expression.

    Stay centered in the fundamental choice as you act outwardly. You choose the whole experience in your active open attention to it from the place of the felt sense; but you don't do anything to make it happen. Action starts from and inevitably flows out from the place of choice.

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