Your study guide for ATM lessons

Source

  • Amherst Year 1, June 12
  • DVD 3; 1980 VHS 6
  • Duration of the recording: 84 min. (without “What To Do About Feeling Nausea”, appr. 8 min.)
  • audio only

Synopsis

Lesson Outline

  • Half an hour discussion (see below).
  • Lying on back, scan.
  • Feet standing, eyes closed (overcome the habits of using the eyes to see, which are very strongly built up; instead attend to the sensations of moving the eyes). Take eyes from centre to right–inside corner of L eye, outside corner of R eye. Quality of movement (effort), speed (jumps).
  • Go quickly to the R and then slowly back to the centre; go slowly to the R and quickly back to the centre.
  • Same thing, but now imagining that your eyes are focused on the ceiling, and following a line from the centre to the R on the ceiling and to the horizon.
  • From the R corner, look a little up, a little down, in an arc.
  • Sitting, see what it is like to turn left and turn right.

Focus of Moshe’s Teaching

  • 1/2 hour lecture before:
    • Starts by discussing nausea people had experienced with extensor lessons the day before. (Car accidents, neck problems, liver problems.)
    • Discussion of the old charity model (progress from religion to science); of eyes (they evolved for light–could god or goddess have made an eye first and then light later?).
    • Even astrology–which is nonsense–is correct in its fundamental thought, because it says we are organized in relation to our environment.
    • Discussion of organization of the head in relation to the feet, as though standing in gravity. (Imagine you are standing and a plumb line runs down the midline of your face and to the floor–where does it land? Closer to the L or R foot? This will be the foot you rest more of your weight on in standing. To the L of the L foot or R of the R foot? Surely you will have many troubles and be in a wheelchair in 10 years if this is not corrected.)
  • During
    • Lengthy scan–discussing what is heaviest (the head) and what never touches (behind the ankles, unless the feet are everted and legs turned out; behind the neck–if you have no neck lordosis, you will have terrible eyesight and constant knee problems). Then what might or might not touch–behind the knee, behind the lower back.
    •  
  • 1/2 hour lecture after:
    • Appropriate approach to writing–only what you remember, after class. Never during.
    • Discuss what it means to say now when we turn right, it is as though thought is directly translated into action. All the hundreds of millions of neurons fire at once. The habitual things that get in the way are inhibited.
    • Return to the way these simple movement have such a powerful effect. The associative and emotional areas of the brain are just below the motor and sensory cortex (he prefers “intentional cortex”). The spreading of inhibition from the intentional cortex to the whole brain. Discussion of hypnosis, which requires two things: muscular and capillary relaxation.
    • Fundamental relationship of eye movement and turning of the head, related to how we line up our binary sensory organs (eyes, ears) to relate to the environment and to organize ourselves to act in the environment.

Related ATMs

  Mapping:

Positioning:

John Hughlings Jackson:

René Descartes:

Johannes Heinrich Schultz:

Xavier Bichat:

Resources

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