Something really cool has clicked since yesterday when I was teaching a class. I was showing a sequence and in the process of demonstrating the sequence I actually deviated from it due to the reaction that my partner gave me. Initially there was this immediate fear of - I have done it wrong, I am a fraud.
I stuck with this feeing and looked to find out more about it and I saw that this whole hang up I have is to do with elegance/beauty. It is something that Richard mentions in his journal but I could never quite understand this whole thing of beauty/elegance.
What I see now is that beauty/elegance/smoothness is all to do with how well I am able to act out the script, whatever the script might be. Elegance is not so much concerned with the practicality of what I am doing but rather with the extent that I successfully perform as an identity - how well did I follow the ‘recipe’ handed to me by society.
I can see this is something that my mum was always very attached to and something I have picked up too, hence the incessant need to do everything ‘right’ or ‘perfect’, for every conversation, action etc to be done with elegance, any deviation would be seen as things going terribly wrong.
So the goal of elegance is not down to earth practicality but instead ticking all the boxes in ‘perfect smoothness’ so that I can be ‘that’. The goal of elegance is to align itself with the ‘truth’.
What I am seeing is that there is something better than elegance, something better than the most ideal performance done by the identity.
Because elegance actually prevents the free application of intelligence to the situation at hand. Free application of intelligence operates with no prior tenets which actually obscure its operation. It looks at the situation without bias and acts in the way that is the most appropriate, even if it means deviating from the sequence. It’s been very cool to finally put a name to it, it’s interesting how putting a name to something like this can make such a difference, now I am zoomed in, focused on this thing so that I can see how it affects me in its totality. So lots of exploring to do now.