ry and until you walk out
of the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling like
somebody else--like somebody else that has been lent to you to
be--somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will be
allowed to wear or be or whatever it is for the rest of your life.
Incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a
new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find
yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking
people you thought were impossible before--even including very
conveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind about
your body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing
with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you.

It is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a
purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is a
putting of the facts in a man's mind and the facts in his body
inextricably together in his consciousness--as they should be, in that he
is no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swings
free, and feels able to stop when he is being fooled about himself.

I have been reading over this chapter and all I can say to my readers is,
as a substitute for leaving it out, that I hope it sounds to them like a
fairy story. I like to think when I am going on from chapter to chapter
in a book--I like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are.
The principles underlying what Mr. Alexander does with new brain tracks
and what I am trying to do can be discussed in this book. The facts can
be looked up and are suitable subjects not for books but for affidavits.

VI

REFLECTIONS ON THE STAIRS

It is a not unfamiliar experience for a man to go to a dentist, get into
a chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast corner
of his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinks
he is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower or
southwest corner. Then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and the
northeast corner toothache is over.

(These figures or rather points of the compass may not be literally
right, but the fact that they point to is.) Nearly every man has had
things happen to him not very different from this. You have a bad
lameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you that
you are deceived about the real trou