Ninety-five percent of our talent comes from the unconscious, and only a fraction of that talent lives in the conscious part of us. We are constantly being fed by the unconscious: thoughts, impulses, unpredictable responses that seem to come from nowhere. However, as nature has constructed the human being, we are not fully in contact with the unconscious until we are asleep, at which time it takes over and expresses itself in our dreams.
The unconscious is very imaginative and creative. It creates scenarios that are full of sensory delights or horrors. It is also our greatest teacher, since it is in our dreams that we are informed of the truths in our lives. Carl G. Jung and Sigmund Freud did a great deal of work in the area of dream interpretation. The work that I am involved with in relation to the ultimate consciousness, however, has very little to do with interpreting dreams or reaching a psychological understanding of life. Those concerns are certainly very important, and we would all be richer and better adjusted psychologically if we did understand and work with our dreams in that way. My emphasis, however, relates to acting. My entire exploration of the unconscious is designed to create a connection between the conscious and the unconscious parts of ourselves, for if we accept as the truth that the major portion of our talent lives in the unconscious, then we must find ways to contact it and draw the most from it! We must create a liaison with it so that every time we act we can “plug into” that bottomless well of creativity.
The unconscious communicates with us many times a day, mostly in subtle and undetectable ways: we have a thought triggered by someone’s response, and that thought seems to have a wisdom or knowledge that goes beyond our consciousness; our intuition tells us things constantly; we have instincts of all kinds and flashes of insight, which usually fleet from our memories, just as our dreams do shortly after we wake. Unfortunately, it is all like smoke: you grab it only to discover that when you open your hand, it isn’t there. I think it is on the very highest level of importance that the artist explore and seek a connection between the conscious and the unconscious parts of his being. The unforgettable moments on the stage are those when the unconscious seems to seep into our acting.
There are various levels or degrees of experiencing the unconscious on the stage. The experience I will describe is the ultimate of these. On a scale of one to ten it is definitely a ten!
While on stage, the actor has a certain awareness of where he is and what he is doing. The creative process of using choices and choice approaches demands a certain level of intellectual guidance; but if he is ideally involved in his process, his awareness that he is on the stage acting is relegated to what I have termed “the eleventh level” of his consciousness. What that means is that he is totally involved in the moment-to-moment realities of the character, responding to the way he is affected by his choices, the other actors, and any external stimulus or internal impulse taking place in the moment, and that his awareness about acting, being on stage, the next line, what he must do next, and so on exists only far below the surface levels of his consciousness. It exists on the eleventh level of consciousness as it were. On the other ten levels the actor is functioning with total organic involvement in, and responses to, the realities stimulated by the choices and the moment.
In this state there is some communication with the unconscious. Depending on the impact and meaningfulness of his choices and on his involvement with them, the actor will call up a certain amount of unconscious support for the life that is taking place on the stage. If, however, the stage involvement exists only on a surface level of consciousness, the actor cannot expect very much backing or inspiration from unconscious sources.
Two things become quite clear. The first is that, if he wants to experience communication with the unconscious every time he acts, the actor must have a technique, a craft, a process on which he can depend to stimulate a high degree of reality, and with which he has attained a certain degree of mastery. Secondly, he must have additional techniques that will build that bridge between die conscious and the unconscious. These techniques are what a large part of this book is about.
The ultimate unconscious experience is essentially unpredictable. The actor doesn’t know when or if he will step over the line, and he knows even less what the ingredients for stimulating such an experience are. It happens infrequently, and most actors have never had it. When it does occur it is an unmistakable experience. It is like being taken over by some mysterious force or energy. You feel inspired, exhilarated, involved on a deeper, more meaningful level than ever before. Every thought of the play, or the choice, or your process in the moment disappears, and you are transported by this emotional energy that is deep, varied, colorful, and totally unpredictable. It is as if an invisible force has become the character, and the life of that character and of the actor truly become one! The words of the play flow with an ease and a truth you have never experienced before, and the moment-to-moment life is as unpredictable to the actor as it is to the audience. The impulses are deeper, fuller, and more dimensional than they have ever been, and what is at stake for the character in the play becomes so for the actor. If the character is fighting for survival, the actor feels that same urgency. The reality is ultimate. For as long as the experience lasts, it is the most fulfilling involvement you have ever had. It is like catching the tail of a comet and riding it through the universe!
I have seen it happen only a few times in my entire life: twice on television and once in the movies. As an actor I have experienced ultimate consciousness about six times in my entire career.
Once you have had such an experience, you never forget it, and you strive and hope for a reoccurrence. To witness it happening to another actor is almost as incredible as experiencing it for yourself. As it begins to happen, it seems to lift the actor and the audience out of the suspended level of theatrical disbelief and into total reality—something like watching the first man being rocketed into space. It lifts the audience out of the theater and away from any awareness of watching a play or film and into a kind of spectator-of-reality state. It is what theater should be! If only that phenomenon could happen more frequently! Stanislavsky said that the audience pays for two minutes of exciting theater, not two hours, and that if a play can supply those two electrifying minutes, the audience will feel as if they have received their money’s worth! He was probably referring to some such experience of his own. I think that it is possible to have experiences of the unconscious of varying degrees every time you act! I am also convinced that the ultimate-consciousness experience can be stimulated much more frequently than it is, and that the way to make all of this possible is to take it out of the realm of accidental occurrence and into that of practiced process by exploring the ways, the techniques and exercises, that would make it commonplace and not the rare exception!
Suppose you could go to die movies or to plays and be transported each time to a level of experience like the one we have been discussing. Let us further suppose that there is a way for actors to make acting that real, that exciting, and that important. There is! With the development of the ultimate-consciousness concept and with the realization of techniques that can and will stimulate that kind of unconscious power every time you act, we can look forward to a new breed of actors on the horizon!
I have been working with the concept on and off for about ten years. At first I was obsessed with the idea of finding a way to promote the ultimate-consciousness experience with some kind of regularity. It seemed to me that there must be a way to pique or trick the unconscious into cooperating. I knew of course that the unconscious could be reached through sleep or hypnosis. I became a kind of self-styled modern-day Edison looking for a way to make an “electric light” in the area of consciousness, only to become frustrated time after time with attempts that worked on the level I wanted them to only once in a while and without control or consistency. I gave up the pursuit many times, only to come back to it armed with new thoughts and exercises. What I didn’t realize in all of my experimentation was that I was looking for a “glory hole,” an incredible stash of gold nuggets worth a fortune, while all the time I was picking up gold dust along the trail! For a long period of time I started every class with an ultimate-consciousness workout. We would do a wide variety of exercises designed to elicit that wonderful response. Only a couple of times did actors reach that level; however—and it is an important however—every time we did such exercises, there were meaningful results for a large number of the actors in my classes. People would report experiencing deep emotional responses and sometimes unsettling and unexplained feelings coming from a very deep place in their being. When one of these preparatory exercises was followed by a monologue, the actor would fulfill the monologue on a much more important level than ever before. Suddenly, the work would take on a dimension and a meaning it had not had prior to the ultimate-consciousness workout. After each exercise I asked these actors to share their experience, and usually more than half of them would report that they had felt deep and complex responses, which had impelled them to more exciting behavior.
I was aware that something important was taking place, but I was still stubbornly looking for that ultimate of all experiences. Time and again I would retell of my ultimate-consciousness experiences, holding them out like a carrot for people to reach for. I knew it was possible to experience moments like those on the stage, so why not look for ways to make them happen all the time? I got discouraged many times and would then stop doing any exercises related to ultimate consciousness. Then something would happen in a scene or a monologue in class which seemed to have an unconscious origin. I would interrogate the actor: “What did you feel? Was that moment different from the moments preceding it? . . . What did you do just before that happened? . . . Was it the choice? Did you change the choice or the approach any time before that? If so, describe it!” I would seize on any evidence of an unconscious occurrence like a bloodhound hot after a scent! I gathered fragments of information every time these experiences happened, only to add to my confusion and frustration.
There were some common patterns and consistencies among all of the actors who reported on their work, and these always seemed to lie in the area of the depth of their involvement and the unique impact of their choices. It was certainly something to go on, so I pursued that evidence. Many of the exercises I structured had to do with very deep involvements and primal experiences. I pushed my actors to dig deeper for more meaningful choices. There was definitely some success with this work. What I had neglected to realize all this time was that in every other aspect of the work that I taught there was the element of conditioning, the conditioning of a complex instrument which had to be trained to believe in and answer to emotionally appealing choices, the day-by-day repetition of techniques that trained it to respond (e.g., the Sense-Memory process, which depends on repetition and the schooling of the senses to react to imaginary stimuli). This conditioning process was accomplished over a fairly long period of time, depending on how much work the actor did outside of class. It reminded me of that old joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The answer: “Practice, practice, practice!” So it was with the accomplishment of a process, a craft of acting. This realization renewed my excitement with the ultimate-consciousness exploration, and I am at this moment working on more approaches to the unconscious. The key, however, is to include a daily involvement with the approaches and techniques that promote the connection.
What also became quite clear to me was that the ultimate-consciousness experience was a climactic experience; that while it was extremely exciting and desirable, it was only the consistent connection between the conscious and the unconscious that could establish a flow of unconscious impulses and create the dimensional fabric of an entire performance; and that the possibility of achieving these heightened experiences of the unconscious was multiplied many times by having that consistent connection. If you can for a moment compare a technically presentational actor to an actor who functions from an organic origin and really experiences on some level the emotions of the character in the play, you will see that the differences between them, in terms of reality, are tremendous! Imagine the same organic actor supporting his reality from the wellsprings of his unconscious every moment he is on the stage! I am sure that the difference would be just as profound.
Long before I became involved in the search for the ultimate consciousness, I was acting—at first in school and later in professional environments. Even though I went to good schools and to a university that had quite a reputation for turning out fine actors, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing on the stage. My head was filled with ponderous “Method” theories, which served me better when I talked about them than when I attempted to apply them to my acting. In spite of my practical ignorance I would sometimes do pretty good work. That was usually accomplished when my head wasn’t full of intellectual concepts, which did more to derail me than to help me. There were moments on the stage when I would get inspired and when a certain emotional acceleration would take place. These moments were very satisfying, even though I didn’t understand where they came from or how to repeat them. I really don’t know whether they were connections with the unconscious; more likely, they were involved conscious responses to the other actor or to something else that had affected me in the moment. It was much later that I had my first real experiences with the unconscious.
I was studying acting with Martin Landau, a person who helped me enormously. He encouraged me to give up my intellectual involvements with acting and supplied some incredible tools to stimulate reality. All of this training took place at the same time as he was helping me to strip away many of my instrumental obstacles. For a long time I struggled with my problems, succeeding in small ways with the work. I had given up what I thought I could do for something that I could not yet do, so I was in a state of transition to another place, and I felt as if I were in limbo!
In my beginning scene work the kinds of comments I received from Martin were: “Eric, that isn’t even good bad English acting!” I would have been terribly hurt and offended except for the fact that he was right! From that point on, the journey took me into using more and more of what I felt in the moment, and consequently my work began to improve . . . slowly!
About a year and a half down that “bloody” road, I had my first ultimate-consciousness experience. I was doing a scene from Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke with an actress by the name of Kay. We—the characters—were arguing. I was working for the physical manifestations of her behavior that were rejecting me—“selectively emphasizing” what I saw in her eyes, the disgust I heard in her voice, the way her lips curled at the edges with distaste for me—when all of a sudden something happened that I had never experienced before: anger rose in my body like hot liquid erupting from the center of the earth! I felt hatred for her as I had never allowed myself to feel before; she embodied every woman who had ever rejected me, who had ever hurt me, who had ever been insensitive to me. I exploded with a flow of dialogue that took on all the meaning Williams might have intended, and possibly a bit more. I forgot that I was acting and felt what the character felt. The place became real; the relationship acquired an urgency. When the scene was over, I didn’t feel the need for a critique: I knew that something special had happened, and I also knew that I had crossed a line as an actor that I would never have to cross again.
That was twenty-eight years ago, and the experience still burns clearly in my memory! At the time, I didn’t know what had happened or what had caused it. Of course I knew that it was directly related to the choice, but what I came to understand later convinced me that it was the first of three ultimate-consciousness experiences that I had in that class. With the knowledge that I later acquired about piquing unconscious responses, I figured out what had caused the experience. At that time in my life I had a track record of very little success with women. I felt generally rejected by them, and I was deeply concerned and hurt by this. I had a very strong agenda, which even affected my dreams frequently. As a result of my choice, I had inadvertently sunk a shaft into the core of an unconscious turmoil which was only too ready to erupt, and it had! Many times I had heard Martin Landau quote Lee Strasberg saying that most of our talent lived in our unconscious, but at that time it had seemed to me little more than an additional piece of information.
My second experience with unconscious responses occurred many months later. I was working on a scene from Desire Under the Elms with an actress by the name of Marsha. We had been working on that scene for quite some time—as a matter of fact I had already used up four actresses on it. I was doing Eben, and she was playing Abbie. I had been having considerable difficulty with the scene, and the critique was always the same: “You are doing some nice work, but I don’t believe that you are a farm boy! You don’t have that connection to the earth; you seem much too sophisticated!”
I am a very stubborn person, who never gives up on anything, and while it might sound as if I think that that is a good quality, it has caused me a lot of grief over the years, as well as incredible rewards! I tried a large variety of choices while working on that scene and finally decided to work for the sense of an animal. The animal I chose to use was die gorilla. That was the choice that made the difference! It grounded me; I became more visceral in behavior and more of the animal that Eben is connected to. Working to create a sense of the gorilla stimulated other impulses apart from the character elements: it made me feel more “territorial,” protective of what was mine. I became more aggressive, and my responses were more impulsive. The scene began to take shape, and I began to fill Eben’s shoes. There wasn’t any more of the prior criticism. On the contrary, I was praised for my connection to the character. I felt very good about the discovery of the animal choice, and—after having attempted the scene over thirty times—I felt victorious.
It was later, however, that I experienced the connection with the unconscious. One evening, while I was repeating the scene, something took hold of me. I was working for a sense of the gorilla, as well as for some sexual choices in relation to Marsha, and emphasizing her available behavior of competitiveness and challenge. In the scene as written, Abbie is attempting to seduce Eben in order to get control of the farm they live on. She is brighter than he is and manipulates him sexually. He feels that the farm has been taken away from his mother to begin with and that it is rightly his. He is torn between his feelings of possessiveness and of revenge against his father and his helpless attraction to Abbie. The scene is loaded with intense ambivalence. Abbie uses his love for his mother as another way to manipulate him. It becomes a conflict of wills, with the sexual impulses getting stronger and stronger.
That evening, while working with my choices, I was transported into a place where I truly felt my existence was at stake. All of a sudden I began circling Marsha. I really felt like a cornered animal. The intensity of her looks frightened me, but at the same time the challenge was exciting and sexual. I felt that this was a battle to the death! The stage disappeared, and I was suddenly alone with her, and I wanted her! I wanted her on my terms, and I was going to take her. The words of the scene flew from my lips as if they were occurring to me at that very moment. Everything was at stake for me—my manhood, my pride, my possessions, my very survival! It was a very complete experience, and again I needed no critique. It was apparent to everyone that something important and unusual had just taken place.
Much later, when I understood more about responses from the unconscious, it was fairly simple to figure out what had happened: the combination of the animal, the sexual desire, and the challenge of wills had elicited very deep and “primitive” feelings. Marsha had a natural competitiveness with men—or at least with me. We argued in rehearsals! There was always the issue of who would get his way about how to approach the scene, about when to rehearse, and so on. The choices I had used to create a strong sexual attraction, combined with the animal impulses stimulated by working for the gorilla, were enough to reach into the unconscious and trigger a primordial and instinctive response. Wherever it is that we came from, our origins are somewhere imprinted in the inherited unconscious memory of us all, and when something penetrates our protective shield, that unconscious memory is freed to gush into our consciousness. I believe that one of the “buttons” to the unconscious is the use of primal and primitive preparations. At the time I was doing that scene, the unconscious connection was made by accident. It was a lucky combination of choices and available realities that had pushed me into that experience. Understanding and knowledge can take this out of the realm of accidental occurrence and make it possible for the actor to repeat it.
The third and most important experience of the three took place about a year later. I say most important because it was the fullest ultimate-consciousness experience I have ever had. The scene was from Dark of the Moon. I was working on the character of the Witchboy. It was the final scene where Barbara Allen dies in his arms and he is going to have to return to being a witch.
There are a great number of obligations in the scene: he is grief-stricken over Barbara Allen’s death and terrified about going back to the life of a witch. In the scene he hears the witches coming for him in the form of eagles, and at that point he releases the body of Barbara Allen and experiences an incredible combination of terror, helplessness, and overwhelming grief. His behavior at that time is intense and out of control. I knew that what I needed was a powerful choice that came from a deep place, a place where my greatest fears lived. I searched for several weeks during the rehearsal period and finally came upon an experience that I had had many years before. It was a very disturbing experience, which I still believe to have been supernatural.
My aunt lay dying in a hospital. There were two of us in her room with her: her daughter and I. She seemed to be fighting with someone, or at least she was arguing with some imagined presence. I stood there holding her hand. She was conscious and coherent but heavily sedated, and I thought that the conversations she was having were a result of hallucinations stimulated by the drugs. At one point her daughter was called away to answer a phone call. Suddenly, the room got cold; the light seemed to grow dim as if the sun had disappeared behind a cloud, but there was no sun that day: it was overcast, the shades were drawn, and the lights were on. I felt a presence in the room. An eerie, intangible, undefinable entity had come into that space. Suddenly, at that moment, my aunt sat bolt upright and shouted, “No, I wont go!” She clenched my hand with what seemed to be superhuman strength. I knew right then that the “Angel of Death” was there! I knew it; I felt it with a kind of instinctive knowledge. I had never experienced such terror, such helplessness. I was afraid for my aunt, and I was afraid for myself. I didn’t know what to do, and in that moment I also knew that I could do nothing! It was a moment that seemed out of time, out of place, as if it were existing on another plane—a surrealistic moment when time seemed to stand still and everything ceased to move. Then, suddenly, the room was filled with people—doctors, nurses, orderlies, etc. . . . Later the doctor said that my aunt had come very close to dying in those short moments when we were together in that room. To this very day, forty years later, I still get chilled when I think of the experience.
It was that experience that I used as a choice for Dark of the Moon. I recreated it by approaching it as an “affective memory.” I worked for my aunt, the room, the light in the room, the odors, the colors, the sounds, and the chill of that presence beside me on that day. As I worked for the choice that night in class, I felt an incredible change taking place. I began to feel that presence again. I felt that same helpless terror; only this time I imagined that It had come for me! I looked for a place to run to, but there was no escape route. I lost all reason and whimpered like a child. Rational thinking was out of the question! Time seemed to stop as it did in the original experience! I lost all awareness of the stage and the scene and crossed that line into another level of consciousness. The experience was so powerful and absorbing that immediately after the scene I had no recollection of my behavior. I can honestly say that it was the richest experience I have ever had on the stage. It is what we all want as actors!
It wasn’t until I started to explore the ultimate consciousness that I was able to put together the ingredients of that experience and to understand why it had catapulted me into the unconscious the way it had. At the time of the scene I knew something wonderful had happened, but I really didn’t go beyond crediting the choice for the results. Later on, I understood that the original experience had affected me on such a primal level that it had pushed buttons that connected to my unconscious. My intrigue with the occult, the fascination I have always had for the supernatural, the terror I feel toward all unexplain-able things, my natural fear of death, and my feeling that it comes in the form of an emissary (I grew up with the old-country superstitions about this “Angel of Death”—called “the Malchamovis”—indelibly impressed upon my imagination, and I must have dreamt about the passage to the other world many times while growing up)—all of these elements had come together to pique a response from the unconscious that had transported me, the actor, into the land of the ultimate consciousness! It is hard to imagine how many choices of this kind an actor has in his repertoire of experiences, but I do know that there are more than one!
Over the years I have had many fleeting tastes of unconscious life—in a scene in a film, in a moment of relationship while doing a television show, and so on. Most of these responses from the unconscious happened unexpectedly; however, upon examination after the fact, each seemed to be the result of a meaningful choice, of an impulsive reaction to a stimulus supplied by the other actor, of something which had touched a buried memory or an undefinable feeling from a time in the past. Sometimes these ultimate-consciousness experiences were the result of an anger or a rage that had ignited a fuse which burnt deeper into the unconscious than I could understand. As time went on, I learned to accept these wonderful and unexplainable flashes, even though I had no control over when and where they happened.
It has only been in the last seven or eight years that I have learned how to communicate better with the unconscious. I believe that there are ways to pique and control the flow of unconscious responses into conscious behavior. Contrary to what I originally expected and wanted, I now feel that the process of establishing a relationship between the conscious and the unconscious is a conditioned process; that while the ultimate-consciousness experience is still not a decided-upon event, the actor can enrich and deepen his life on the stage enormously by doing a great deal of work in this area; and that the ultimate-consciousness kind of actor will stimulate that ultimate experience much more frequently than an actor who does not delve into the unconscious! With practice and repetition an actor can create a communication with the unconscious that will supply the kind of inspiration and excitement which live only there.
As I have already mentioned, there are many levels to ultimate-consciousness experiences, and those I have described are at the top of the scale; but for the sake of clarity and because the total experience is so intense, I will refer to all experiences where the unconscious flows into conscious behavior as ultimate-consciousness experiences.
As I said earlier, creating a liaison with the unconscious is a matter of seduction and conditioning. The first step is to make a conscious decision to communicate with the unconscious, by becoming aware of its existence, of the way it functions while we are awake, and of what impulses can be traced to unconscious sources. As with all other explorations, here too you start with questions—inventories exploring the manifestations of unconscious impulses. Many times a day we have “feelings” and thoughts that seem to come from nowhere, intuitions and recollections of things in our past, which spring up because of an odor or a sound or some subtle or subliminal stimulus. We often wake up with a mood that colors our behavior for the whole day. It is important that you start to investigate these feelings, moods, thoughts, and so on. Ask yourself what you are feeling (personal inventory) and where that feeling is coming from. Most of die time, especially in the beginning, you will not be able to identify the cause or the origin of a particular unconscious impulse. There will be times, however, when you will be able to trace a response to something that you can remember from your past. There are scores of stimuli that hook into our memory banks and unconscious areas.
In a movie I was watching on television a while back, there was a character who was using a whip in one of the scenes. He would pull the whip back over his head and with a flick of his wrist crack it through the air, and it would make the sound that a whip makes as it is suddenly jerked backwards. I listened to that sound for a minute or so and was transported back to the circus at the stadium in Chicago. I smelled the unmistakable odors of sawdust, cotton candy, horses, and so forth; I began to experience that same internal excitement I used to feel, mixed in with the anticipation of seeing the clowns, the high-wire acts, and all the other wonders of the circus for which I would wait all year. While sitting in my chair in my library and watching the old Western, I was taken to another time and place, rich with feelings and thoughts that had been locked in my unconscious for years. The memories were conscious, but the feelings, the excitement, and the return to childhood impulses constituted what I think is that “connection” with the unconscious. The experience happened by accident, as most such experiences do. There are, however, ways to encourage these connections to happen much more frequently.
Try to become more conscious of your feelings across the board! There will be something different about a response from the unconscious: it will be more dimensional, possibly somewhat mysterious in its essence. Be careful not to interfere with it by questioning the response or feeling while it is happening. Allow it to run its course of expression, and then question it! If you identify the stimulus as I did with the whip, it will be easier to go back to it and to the surrounding stimuli it brought up and to explore this experience of the unconscious more thoroughly. With this kind of exploration you are building that “bridge” from the conscious to the unconscious by deliberately working with stimuli that push those unconscious buttons. Each time you get involved like this you add building material to that “bridge.”
The sensory process, which I describe in great detail in all of my other books, is a very good approach for piquing responses from the unconscious. If you are working with or for an object that has strings attached to the past and that is very rich with emotional impact, there is a likelihood that you will stimulate unconscious impulses, which will flow into your conscious responses to that object. Affective Memory is another useful technique, which I will get into later in this chapter.
The Personal-Inventory exercises also put you in touch with how you feel in the moment. As you become increasingly conscious of the unconscious you might add other questions that trace the origin of your feelings.
Example:
“How do I feel? ... I feel... a little out of touch at the moment. . . How do I feel? ... I feel a little sad . . . I’m not aware of why, but I feel a little down . . . How do I feel? , . , I’m looking out the window... I see all the trees and the lake ... I feel nostalgic too ...”
At this point you might add another type of question to the Personal-Inventory process:
“What and where do these feelings come from? . . . What stimulated them? . . . Was it something internal or external? . . .”
There is a chance that you will know the answer, but if not, continue to do the exercise, and explore the origin of die feelings that you have hooked into. In the above example there is a possibility that the sadness and nostalgia, if related to a prior experience in the same or a similar environment, could create a connection widi the unconscious. Oftentimes it is a combination of elements that piques a response from the unconscious. If the temperature, the exact time of day, the position of the sun in the sky, the shadows being cast on the deck in front of you, the time of year, and the odors indigenous to that time match the environmental stimuli that were part of an emotional experience in your past, it is possible for you to relive an entire unconscious response to that event replete with the attitudes and emotions that you had at the time. Unfortunately, we experience thousands of these “feelings” without knowing what they mean or what they are related to. In order to become more conscious and to establish that conscious-unconscious connection, the actor must do something to promote an awareness of these fleeting “feelings.”
In my other books there are detailed descriptions of Personal Inventories I and II. For the sake of clarity and distinction I will now refer to this new kind of exploration as Personal Inventory III.
The approach technique for doing all of the personal inventories is the same:
“How do I feel? . . .”
The response:________
“How do I feel? .. .”
The response:________
—and so on. You include all the distractions that occur while you are asking those questions.
When doing Personal Inventory II, you add: Am I expressing what I feel, and if not, why not, and what can I do to express it? In Personal Inventory III, you also explore the origin of certain specific feelings that you suspect are anchored in unconscious agenda. When you feel something that seems deep and cannot be explained, if you intuitively sense that there is a well of unexplained impulses beneath what you are feeling and expressing, then you should investigate that possibility by adding questions to the conventional personal-inventory process.
“How do I feel? . . . O.K., I guess ... I feel rested today ... I feel lazy. How do I feel? ... I don’t know! . . . How do I feel? ... I feel good ... I mean, I feel O.K. . . . maybe a little anxious! How do I feel? ... I feel a little irritated . . . anxious. . . Why do I feel anxious?... I don’t know!.. . I’m not all that anxious, either. How do I feel?... I guess I feel a little out of sorts. . . yeah, that’s it, I feel out of sorts! What is stimulating that? ...”
(The origins of the irritation, the anxiety, and the overall feeling of “out of sorts” could be investigated through the use of Personal Inventory III.)
“I don’t have a clue! . . . I’m looking around the room, and there isn’t anything I see that makes me feel anxious. How do I feel?... I feel a little frustrated! . . . What’s causing that? I think I feel frustrated because I don’t know what is stimulating this anxiety that I feel. . . How do I feel? . . . I’m curious about the feelings I have . . , I wish I could find out why I’m irritated!... All right, I am going to break it down into each sense. . . What do I smell? ... I smell the pine trees, the wood smoldering in the fireplace ... I smell the air and the odor of the lake . . . How do those odors make me feel? ... I feel fine about them: they make me feel good! What do I feel in my body?... I feel good . . . healthy. . . My clothes feel loose and comfortable; the chair I am sitting in feels good . . . What do I taste? ... Is there an unusual taste in my mouth? No . . . there isn’t. . . There is the aftertaste of the coffee I drank a little while ago; I taste a little sourness just barely there. What do I hear? ... I hear an airplane high up in the distance , . . I hear the breeze blowing on the drapes ... I hear a bird occasionally chirping as it flies by the open window ... I am aware of the music coming from the stereo in the corner... It is soft and barely audible . . . What is it I hear? ... It sounds like a fifties song... As I listen to it, I begin to feel an increasing level of anxiety!. . . What is that all about? ... I don’t know ... I like fifties music!. . . How do I feel? I’m curious about how and why I feel this way. . . (Listening to the song more intently) What is it about that particular song that makes me feel this way? ... I don’t think it’s the song at all . . . Does that song remind me of anything? ... I can’t specifically remember an experience. I wish I could remember the exact year when I listened to it! .. . Do the words mean anything special? . . . (Listening) No ... or at least I don’t think so . . . Does it relate to a particular place?... I used to listen to music on the car radio... at home . . . sometimes at school in the lounge . . . (At that point I feel something specific happening, almost as if I had pushed an important button in my brain.) Yes ... I remember . . . there was always music playing in the background in the Student-Union lounge where I would go to study for tests.” Just as I realize that, my anxiety level rises to a high pitch, and I identify the specific emotional life going on inside me as the same feelings of fear and anxiety that I experienced all through my school years when I was studying for a test: I would become anxious and irritable and feel that there wasn’t enough time to do everything I needed to do. I felt inadequately prepared to take and pass the test no matter how much I had read and prepared throughout the semester.
So on a less-than-conscious level I was responding to that background music from the fifties, which had keyed into an unconscious memory of those times at the Student Union when I was preparing to take a test. Without my conscious knowledge I was being affected by that subtle and almost inaudible music, which was stimulating a very discernible emotional response. This kind of thing happens all the time and many times each day. By becoming more sensitive to the unconscious influences in our lives, we can establish a conscious awareness that will lead to communication with the unconscious. If we pursue the experience beyond the recognition stage, we can really delve deeply into the unconscious, thereby building a more solid bridge between it and our consciousness.
At the point in the Personal-Inventory exploration when you have identified the origin of your feelings, you can ask more questions about the time, the place, and the stimulus relating to the original experience.
Example:
“What kind of room is this?. . . (Answer the question sensorially.) What is the color of the walls? . . . (Sensory response) Where is the music coming from? . . . What does it sound like? . . .” etc. . . . etc. .. .
The questions should cover as many areas as possible—including your dress at the time, other people that you remember, smells, other sounds, the specific books of study, and so on.
If you involve yourself in this process repeatedly and whenever you experience a response from the unconscious, you will progressively establish a strong connection with the unconscious, which will do a number of things for your acting: first, it will enable you to become aware of areas and choices that you might use in your work; secondly, it will allow you to go deeper into impacting emotional areas; and—possibly the most important of all—it will stimulate a much more consistent flow from your unconscious into your conscious behavior in a scene. When that happens on the stage, the life is fuller, more dimensional and unpredictable, and the actor is much more available to ultimate-consciousness experiences.
This is a cumulative process: each day that you work on your instrument or your craft, you are adding layers of growth. By working each day with consciousness and the unconscious, you are paving a road that can be traveled every time you act. When the actor achieves a constant connection with the flow from the unconscious, he becomes a multidimensional artist. He achieves what people call “depth,” an inspired quality of life on the stage. I wonder how many more wonderful artists would exist on this planet if we knew that it was possible to work toward, and achieve, that kind of brilliance, rather than believing that it is a fortunate accident or gift of birth to possess those uncommon qualities.
There is a very popular concept among actors and other creative artists. It is believed that if you can act, then you act! That is absurd! It is like saying that if you have the talent to be a surgeon, all you need to do is appear in the operating room and go to work on the patient!
There are an enormous number of techniques and approaches that I teach and write about. It would be preposterous to consider working to perfect or use them all at one time. But does that mean that they are unimportant to your work as an actor? Of course not! All of the instrumental and craft exercises and techniques are there to be used as they are needed, much as a carpenter chooses to use a saw when a hammer won’t do. The daily work of the actor is designed to help him master all of the techniques existing in this process; and while clearing the instrument of all obstacles is of the utmost importance, so is building that bridge to the unconscious. To be successful at anything you must have some organization. If you can organize your day so that you use the time to your greatest advantage, you will be able to find the right opportunities to work at becoming more conscious and at making those connections with the unconscious.
When we sleep, our unconscious is awake, and it essentially takes over. It creates the dreams and nightmares we have, teaching us lessons through the symbolic information yielded by those dreams. Many books have been written about dreams and how to interpret them. Freud and Jung are possibly the most famous for working in this area, but there have been others.
Dreams teach us the greatest lessons in our lives. If you can comprehend and interpret the information in your dreams, you will learn and understand what you are doing and what you must do in order to grow and to change your life. Most of the time, however, we do not even remember our dreams after we wake up and consciousness takes over. It is rare for most people to recall a whole dream or the specific details of a dream unless it has had a tremendous impact on them. For our purpose, dream interpretation is secondary. It is wonderful for you to understand your dreams and to help yourself with that knowledge, and I encourage you to explore that ability; but here the emphasis is on establishing a greater connection with, and greater use of, the unconscious, and for that purpose it is important for you to become increasingly aware of your dreams, to remember them, and to emotionally relate to them.
We dream several times each night, even though sometimes we don’t remember dreaming at all. The first step in becoming aware of your dreams is therefore to decide consciously that you are going to do just that. Before going to sleep tonight, make a strong decision that you are going to be aware of dreaming. Know that you will dream, and insist on being aware that the dream is going to happen. The second step is to remember your dreams, and it also depends on wanting to remember them and making a commitment to doing so. The third step is to attempt to re-experience some or all of the dream while being in a conscious state.
There are a number of reasons to remember what you dream. One of them is to create a growing communication with the unconscious. Another is to learn from the dream by interpreting its message; and yet another is to use the dream.
There are a number of ways in which you can use your dreams in your acting and in the process of becoming an ultimate-consciousness actor. First, the unconscious is rich with potential choices that you can use to deal with and fulfill material. As you become more conversant with your dreams, you discover a multitude of new choices to explore. The second—and perhaps more important way to use your dreams—is to work to re-create and re-experience them while in a conscious state. After you are fully awake and have a solid memory of many of the components of a dream, you can work to recreate those elements in much the same way as you re-create any imaginary stimulus. But before we get to that technique, I want to discuss some of the ways by which you can insure remembering what you dream.
The moment you are awake in the morning and are conscious of the world around you, catch the threads of the dream that you have just had. Try to recall as many details as possible. The dream will disappear very rapidly, so become accustomed to working fast. As you condition this early morning activity, you will be able to hang on to more and more of your dreams. Another technique, which isn’t quite so imaginative, is to use a tape recorder and to teach yourself to awaken when you become aware of just having had a dream. Record everything you can remember at that moment, and listen to it in the morning. It will probably sound somewhat disjointed and a little incoherent, but I’m sure it will make enough sense for you to get something out of it that you can use. A pencil and paper might do just as well, except that I have found it difficult to read my handwriting the next morning! You can also use the tape recorder after you awaken in the morning, thus making sure that you can return to the dream later in the day or even at some future time. Whatever process you use, it is very important that you establish a memory of your dreams. As you ensure the habit of remembering and recording them, you will condition yourself to retain your dreams much more frequently and completely.
Although the evident value of the dream itself is not to be denied, our purpose for dealing with dreams in this context is primarily to establish a connection with the unconscious. When you break a dream down into its separate parts and then attempt to restimulate your emotional response to each stimulus in the dream, you are connecting the threads of your unconscious with your conscious state. The more often you do that, the greater becomes the tie between the two levels. There are a couple of ways to re-create a dream. The first is just by remembering it and encouraging a moment-to-moment emotional response to the memory. If you do that immediately after a dream occurs or after a particularly impacting dream experience, the re-creation could be almost as vivid as the dream itself. The other way to re-experience a dream is to re-create it sensorially. In order to accomplish this successfully, you must be proficient with the technique of Sense Memory. Using Sense Memory will restimulate the actual response to the objects and the stimuli in the dream, and, as a result, the reality level will probably be greater.
The Sense-Memory process is executed in the same way as when you are practicing with an object, asking questions about the object as it relates to the senses. The major difference is that here you are attempting to re-create elements of a dream—which is something full of symbolism and of objects that change shape and meaning without warning. If you have recorded or written the dream down, you can be much more specific about the details and objects in it, not to mention the chronology of events.
Start by dealing with the place where the dream is occurring, beginning with sensory questions relating to that place.
Example:
“Where am I? . . . (Answer the question visually. Since a dream happens when you are asleep, you can approach the sensory questions and responses with your eyes closed.)
“What does this place look like? . . . (Respond visually with the inner eye.)
“What color are the walls? . . . (Also a visual response. Attempt to see the colors, sizes, shapes as they were in the dream; and if they are distorted or different from what they might actually be in reality, try to accept the distortions as the reality of the dream.)
“Where am I in this place? . . . (Respond with whatever senses are called for as a result of that sensory question.)
“What are the sounds I hear? .. . (Respond with the auditory sense. Attempt to hear what is there.)
“Where are the sounds coming from? . . . (Another auditory question. Respond with that sense.)
“How many different sounds do I hear? . . . (Auditory response)
How do I feel? . . . (Sensory and emotional response)
Who else is in this place? . (Sensory response)
Where is that person? . . . (Sensory response)
What is he doing? , . . (Sensory response)
What does his face look like? . . . (Sensory response)
What do I see in his eyes? . . . What color are his eyes? , . . How is he changing? . . . Whom does he look like now? ... Do I know him? . . .
How is he dressed? . . . What sounds is he making? . . . What else is happening in the room? . . . Who else is here? . ..
“It looks like a different place now. . . How has it changed? .. . How am I dressed? . . . What is that odor? . . . (Respond with the olfactory sense. Smell it!) Where is that smell coming from? . . What is happening now?
. . . How do I feel? ... I hear someone crying . . . What does that sound like? . . . Who is it?. . . Where is the sound coming from?... Is it me?. . .
Where do I feel those sounds in my body? . . . Who is that child directly across from me?... He looks familiar. . . It’s me .. . I’m ten years old and he ... I ... am crying . . . What do I look like? . . . How tall am I? . . .
What is the color of my hair? . . . What does my face look like? . . . What sounds am I making? . . . Whom or what am I relating to? . . . What do I hear him . . . me . . . saying? ... He is speaking to me . . . asking me to take care of him . . . me . . . What do the words sound like? . . . How does he , . . I. . . look when saying those words? . . . Someone has just entered behind him . . . me. . . Who is it?. . . What does he look like?. . . How tall is he? . . . How is he dressed? . . . He has a blank face . . . What does that look like? . . . How do I feel, watching all of this? . . . He is forcibly holding the child . . . me . What do I hear?... I feel helpless ... I can’t move ... I feel stuck to the floor! . . . What does my body feel like? ... I hear myself screaming . . . but no sound is coming from me! . . . What does that feel like? . . .”
The process can continue for quite some time, and you can ask many more questions than the example indicates. Be specific in each area of exploration, and allow yourself to stay with any group of sensory questions that feel right. Remember that a dream is quite different from the conventional reality of life and that you must make a conscious adjustment to accept the unpredictable changes that occur without logic or reason.
The more you practice the process of re-creating your dreams, the better you will become at it. Re-experiencing the dream won’t be exactly the same as having it, because the conscious mind is now involved in the process, and it is much more logical and rational than the unconscious. As you repeat each dream, its meaning and message will probably become clearer. Just doing this will build that connection with the unconscious, and along with that will come a better memory of what you dream. In a short time you will begin to notice a change in your work on stage. At first, you will experience just a deeper feeling of inner life, but later, as you establish a better connection and a greater level of trust, you will begin to experience more impulses and a greater dimensionality and unpredictability in your work. Best of all, you will have created a foundation for the ultimate-consciousness experiences to occur.
The time at night just before you fall asleep and the time in the morning when you are not in a deep sleep but are not yet awake are what I call “the sleep-wake state.” These are times when you are very much in touch with your unconscious. It is then, in that preconscious place, that you can participate in your dreams with some amount of conscious control and awareness. It is also a special time when you have the capacity for extrasensory perception. I have had clairvoyant experiences during those preconscious morning states, where I knew what would happen later in the day, and several times in my life those fleeting premonitions have come true. Whatever the powers of the unconscious are, it is then that we are the heirs to those powers. The first step is to become aware of these special times. Just before you drop off tonight, make a conscious effort to note that moment or two when your thoughts wander into unexplainable journeys; wake yourself up and quickly grab the threads of what just happened. Continue to explore these little sojourns into the world of preconscious fantasies and dreams. The phenomenon of waking up is different from that of falling asleep: in the morning these “journeys” are more like real dreams, while at night they are not like dreams at all, but more like fantasy trips.
Besides providing the valuable opportunity to experiment with the conscious-unconscious connection, this involvement is a lot of fun. Going to sleep at night takes on a new dimension. It becomes an adventure into the wild unknown of the unconscious imagination. At first, just wake yourself up after each “going under,” and try to put the disjointed elements together to make some sense out of them; or just wake yourself up and don’t attempt to understand anything at all—just enjoy the experience. After a few such explorations, start to inject thoughts into the involvement. Think about being on a safari in Africa and walking through the bush, for example, and let yourself fall off to sleep while exploring that fantasy. Continue to change your story, and see what happens.
By injecting these fantasies you can see what the unconscious will do with them, while at the same time programming yourself for a possible response from the unconscious stimulated from a conscious place. After a period of time, you will find that this process is very much like working the muscles in your body. You progressively establish a greater communication with the unconscious so that when you act and are working for a choice that will make an impact, that choice will not only affect you on a conscious level, but it will also pique unconscious responses more readily than usual. Since the greatest part of our creative talent lives in the unconscious, elevating the unconscious into consciousness puts us in touch with that wellspring of talent; and because of die new conditioning, the exception becomes the rule: inspiration from the unconscious becomes a much more commonplace event, which leads to an abundance of exciting life on the stage.
In the morning you are still asleep and possibly dreaming. As you get closer to consciousness, you become more aware of the preconscious zone you are in. As that awareness occurs, try to remain asleep instead of jarring yourself into consciousness. Suggest to yourself that you know that you are dreaming or musing, and participate in the dream. Be a part of the “action,” and at the same time become a bystander to that action. Stay involved as long as it is possible to maintain the preconscious state. When you become more conscious of being awake than asleep, languish in this elevated level of awareness as long as possible also. There are a variety of levels of preconsciousness, and each one has its rewards. While you may be too conscious to dream in a more highly elevated state of preconsciousness, you will still be experiencing that connection with the unconscious, which should be savored as long as possible.
So much of your success with both of these preconscious states depends on decision, discipline, and repetition. If it were a simple thing to communicate with the unconscious, we could do it easily. Nature, however, has separated the unconscious from the conscious, and in order to take advantage of the treasures locked in the unconscious, we must diligently and patiently pursue any opportunity to uncover them.
In addition to the preconscious states, we must also consider the unconscious state when we are really “under” and dreaming. At that time, we are, for the most part, totally involved in our dreams and not at all conscious of dreaming. There are times, however—and we have all experienced them—when we are aware that we are having a dream. It is then that we can become both participants in the action of the dream and spectators to the drama involved. This phenomenon usually occurs by accident when there is an element of consciousness involved. Why it happens or what causes it to happen, I don’t know! I imagine that it depends on how deeply one is “under.” For our purposes it isn’t important to understand the workings of any of this. What is important is to find techniques to communicate with the unconscious and to reap the rewards of becoming an ultimate-consciousness kind of actor.
If before going to sleep every night you accept that you are surely going to dream and decide to be aware in your dreams, there is a possibility that you will become increasingly better able to know that you are dreaming when you are. Suppose that the next time you begin to dream, you have an awareness that this is a dream: at that exact moment acknowledge. Yes, I am dreaming, and I will watch and enjoy this as if it were a movie! Just watch at first, but later, as you become more able to know that you are dreaming, you may want to participate in the dream. For example, in the middle of a nightmare, while being chased by some faceless monster, you may become aware that. This is indeed a nightmare! At that moment you can participate in the action and allow yourself to feel the exhilaration as well as the fear. You may even enjoy the chase a little. What you are trying to accomplish by doing all this is to integrate the conscious into an experience of the unconscious.
Nightmares affect the entire nervous system, the heart rate and blood pressure rise, and the entire experience may be totally exhausting. It is said that nightmares are the expression of our deepest fears and terrors, and I am sure that they have a function in taking the pressure off by releasing those fears so that they don’t fester. It is extremely important for our psychological health to dream, and it is therefore essential, no matter what our reasons are for interfering with the dream process, that we do not disturb nature’s intentions. However, I am confident that dream participation will continue to be the exception rather than the rule.
Once you gain some experience watching and participating in your dreams, you may want to begin to manipulate them somewhat. If the conscious part of your brain has enough power, you might consciously suggest other responses and actions In the dream. For example, the faceless monster in hot pursuit could suddenly trip and fall and become unable to keep up, or you might suggest to the part of you that is creating this nightmare to hide around the next corner or to turn abruptly and knock the monster down, There are an infinite number of ways to create a new scenario for any dream. You can become quite creative with your suggestions. There will be times when some particular conscious input might jar you awake. If that happens, go back to sleep with the decision to pick up the dream where you left off. You will probably be able to manipulate in some way any dream in which you can participate. You can add people to a situation, change the environment, decide not to feel what you are feeling; you might want to challenge someone’s behavior, refuse to understand something and ask for an explanation, and so on. If your attempted manipulations are unacceptable to the unconscious, you will more than likely awaken or stop dreaming. Don’t expect to be able to do all of this every time you dream. The phenomenon is rare, but the more you commit to having it happen, the more frequently it will!
To recapitulate: First acknowledge that you are dreaming. Once you know that, allow yourself to watch the dream. After doing that several times, begin to consciously participate in the action, and after some experience being a participant, slowly begin to suggest changes and additions to the action of the dream. Make sure that you don’t lose sight of the purpose of your experiments. These involvements can be entertaining and educational, but the purpose is to establish a growing communication with the unconscious.
There are a lot of people who do not remember dreaming at all. They have some recollection that they did dream, but the dreams remain vague and out of reach. Others remember every part of their dreams and can describe them in vivid detail and color. Why some people are more in touch with their dreams than others is somewhat of a mystery. If you are one of the lucky ones who remember their dreams, it will be easier for you to participate in them and to manipulate and use them as a source of rich choices in your acting. If, on the other hand, you have difficulty recalling any or all of the parts of a dream, the techniques discussed in this chapter can help you strengthen this ability and teach you to use your dreams to make yourself a more complete and dimensional actor.
If you are thinking that dealing with this area and all of the techniques for relating to and using your dreams seems far afield and very different from any of the acting techniques you have ever been exposed to, you may be right. You may even feel that this kind of involvement is esoteric or psychological and wonder what any of it has to do with the wonderful world of imagination, pretending, and fantasy-not to mention the nuts and bolts of doing your job on the stage! You may be asking yourself, What about that wonderfully simple reality of just acting? Why is it necessary to do all of this “Method” stuff when in reality acting is a talent, and if you have that talent, you just act? There is a wonderful story about Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, when they were making The Marathon Man. There was a scene in the film that called for Dustin Hoffman’s character to be extremely fatigued and under stress from having stayed up all night. Hoffman supposedly did just that and also some other important work to fulfill the obligations of his character in the scene. Upon seeing him in the morning, Olivier commented that he looked terrible and asked what he had been doing to look so bad. Hoffman told him of his process and that he had been up all night to stimulate the reality in the scene, upon which Olivier exclaimed, “Have you ever tried acting? “—or so the story goes. Olivier’s response is a typical one for any actor who is not oriented or committed to a “Method” process. While there is room for many techniques on the stage, and while talent is definitely talent, the truth remains that creating reality is the goal of every committed actor, and if creating that reality is based on a specific process, then the actor must engage in that process.
I am very aware of how full and extensive all the elements of my process are. I am also aware of the complexity of the work and of how many instrumental exercises and techniques, as well as craft approaches, are involved. At first, when you look at it from the ground up, it may all seem overwhelming, but it is a day-to-day involvement—putting one foot in front of the other. Before you even realize it, you have traveled quite a distance on this journey. If you structure a daily work schedule, you have ample time to do everything that is necessary to become a master craftsman and even have time left over. Every day of your life will pass anyway. Those days will turn into weeks and the weeks into months and years, and only you can decide whether those weeks and months will be filled with the activity of becoming an artist or just another older person! The work you do in the dream area is done for the purpose of creating a relationship with the unconscious and strengthening it so that you will be able to cross that line into the ultimate consciousness much more frequently. Working with your dreams, becoming more conscious of them will insure that your unconscious participates more fully in your acting. Dealing with your dreams is just another way of getting the unconscious to yield its “gold” into every role you do. There are other techniques for reaching the unconscious, and we are about to embark on the exploration of those.
The dictionary definition of intuition is: “Knowledge discerned directly by the mind without reasoning or analysis; a truth or revelation arrived at by insight.” This definition suggests that intuition comes from a place other than consciousness; but if that is true, then where does it come from? Most people think that it is some kind of unexplainable talent or gift that is given to one at birth. “He or she is a very intuitive person,” they say. Intuition has always held some mysterious property, and few people question its existence or accept the possibility that it can be trained or influenced. Let us for one moment conjecture that intuition is just knowledge—the kind of knowledge that is acquired through schooling, reading, listening, and experiencing—only it is not acquired consciously, but unconsciously; and when we experience a feeling which we accept as an intuition or an insight of some kind, it is really just the realization of another kind of knowledge, which has come into consciousness from the unconscious. If that is true, then we can say that at those times we are once again in direct communication with the unconscious.
Have you ever had an intuitive feeling that something was going to happen—not a national disaster, but, for instance, that someone would do a certain thing at a certain time? If you analyzed the feeling in an attempt to trace the origin of the intuition, you might find that what you had was really a subtle perception based on a series of experiences involving the person and the events in question.
As I explained in the first chapter, consciousness is very closely related to the unconscious, and being a highly evolved and conscious person means that you have elevated your perception to a very high level. Again, let us speculate for a moment: suppose that perception constituted a direct connection to the unconscious—was at least one of the ways in which the unconscious acquired its education. Being a perceptive person would then be another way of communicating with the unconscious! As a result of our perceptive inputs, the unconscious spews out intuitive responses at a very healthy rate many times a day.
Of course, some of these intuitions are not earth-shattering, but they are intuitive responses nonetheless. Many of them pass without recognition or notice and consequently are not consciously dealt with. If in your quest to become an ultimate-consciousness actor you add to your daily work plan an involvement with intuitive responses, you are then taking another path on the journey into the unconscious. What must you do? How do you relate to intuition? Isn’t it something that happens quite by accident? Do you just sit and wait for intuitional inspiration? No, you do not! You start by treating the intuition like a normal occurrence—one that happens quite often but usually goes unnoticed. You start to acknowledge your “feelings.”
Example:
You are having lunch in a restaurant somewhere, on a nice, sunny spring day. In walks a middle-aged man who seems shy and introverted, but at the same time you sense that he is extremely lonely. You know intuitively that he is going to sit down at the next table, even though there are many empty tables farther away. You also intuitively feel or know that he is going to strike up a conversation with you. Something tells you these things—and, lo and behold, that is exactly what happens! How did you know this? Was it a coincidence, a lucky guess, perception, or was it an intuition you had the moment you saw that man come into the restaurant? You don’t have to break down the components or analyze the event; all you have to do is to begin to trust the feeling and accept it as part of your communication with your unconscious.
Start by becoming aware of these intuitive impulses; honor them and encourage yourself to have them. When you feel something, explore the feeling. In the example of the lonely man in the restaurant, you might have pursued the intuitive flash by asking more of the feeling:
“When is he going to speak to me? What is he going to say? Will he come up with some lame excuse to talk to me, such as ‘Do you have the time?’ or will he be up front with his desire to converse? What else might he say?”
If you follow up on an intuitional impulse, you will essentially be accepting the intuition and at the same time encouraging it to function better. You don’t have to wait for the intuition to happen; you can encourage it to work, as one primes a pump to suck water. Include it as part of your daily practice as an actor. When arriving at a particular place where you have never been before, ask yourself what you intuitively feel about the place, what that pretty girl behind the desk is going to say first, what might happen in this office in the next few minutes. Some of what you do might fall into the category of playing with a crystal ball, but the process is designed to excite the intuition. Sometimes it will respond, and sometimes it will all be conjecture. No matter! Keep doing it.
Besides asking yourself what you feel about this or that, also ask yourself what impulses you are having and cutting off before ever expressing them. Many intuitive impulses pass right by us without being expressed or even acknowledged. How many times have you had the impulse to say something to someone and let the moment pass without fulfillment? Some of those impulses came from your intuition. Often you meet someone that you immediately mistrust, and yet the person has not done or said anything to warrant your distrust; it’s just a feeling you have, but it turns out later that your intuition was correct. How often have you said, “I wish I had gone with my impulse to go there or to do that” or “If only I had trusted my intuition, I wouldn’t be in this mess”? You strengthen your intuitive powers by using and encouraging them. Keep asking yourself. What do I feel about that?. . . about him?. . . about this situation? . . . Do I sense danger in this move? ... and so on.
There are a number of impulsivity exercises that I do in my classes, and most of them are used to encourage impulsive responsiveness as an antidote to a dependency on the intellect, logic, or premeditation. These techniques can also be used to exercise the intuition; all that is necessary is to make a simple adjustment in the exercise. In addition to expressing every single impulse that you have, also ask yourself, What do I feel about this? and about that?. . . How does that affect me?
The Disconnected-Impulsivity exercise is done this way: dealing with the moment-to-moment impulsive reality that you are experiencing, and including the environment as part of the exercise, you express moment-to-moment all the impulses that occur, as fast as they do.
“Window ... see sky . . . floor ... I feel empty . . . books on shelves . . . mystery . . . Alfred Hitchcock . . . see door . , . leave . . . enter .. . Sunshine Boys . . . funny movie . . . can’t help . . . jump down . . . song sing I wish I knew the answer.. . nice place here . , . want to succeed , . . see clouds . . . pretty . . . I’m tired . . . don’t want to think . . .” etc. . . . etc. . . .
The exercise can continue for quite some time and include both internally and externally stimulated impulses. Using the same structure, you can add other questions, questions that will stimulate an intuitive flow. Insert these questions between the impulsive responses of the conventional impulsivity exercise:
“How do I feel about this place?.. . What do I feel about that person?.. . What might happen here? What was this place before? What are the energies in the room? . . . What are these people thinking about? .. . What kind of experience is this going to be?”
If you intersperse these kinds of questions into the exercise, you will tempt your intuition to become involved. Trust is a major ingredient for elevating the intuition into your consciousness. Encourage yourself to trust even fleeting intuitional impulses.
One of the reasons for encouraging moment-to-moment life on the stage is that there is a real connection between going with the moment and communicating with the unconscious. Logically speaking, it is easy to understand that if there aren’t any obstacles to expression, the impulses will flow more freely. In addition, there will be an increased possibility for unconscious impulses to ventilate themselves in conscious expression, and with the flow of those unconscious impulses you can expect some intuitive life. Far too often these intuitive responses are unnerving to the actor. They don’t seem to service hi; concept of the material, so he short-circuits them; but along with them he may indeed inhibit the possibility of having an ultimate-consciousness experience.
Behavioral leadership and conceptual involvement will certainly inhibit the flow of organic moment-to-moment impulses; but the reverse is also true: if the actor services the moment and honors what he feels, he will establish a flow of emotional reality, some of which comes from unconscious sources. Intuition is encouraged to function if one allows oneself to trust that whatever happens will be acceptable. Trust is a major ingredient in creating reality and inducing intuitive flow.
There must be a place to experiment and fail! If every time an actor acts he must be “good,” he will never take the risks necessary to grow. So in order to establish a level of trust in expressing moment-to-moment impulses, the actor can practice at home or experiment in the laboratory (class, workshop) or in rehearsals.
There are several ways to stimulate trust in expression. I have already mentioned the impulsivity areas: there are numerous impulsivity techniques, which you can locate in all of my other books, where they are discussed in great detail.
Whether in a rehearsal or in a classroom, you can start working on a scene or monologue by creating the realities through your choices and approaches and expressing your impulses in sounds or gibberish. The sounds become the expression of the impulses stimulated by the choice you are working for, and if that choice was originally selected to address the responsibilities of the material, then the emotional life will essentially parallel that material. If the actor allows each impulse to be expressed through either sounds or gibberish, the life will be much more intuitive and impulsive. With die omission of words, concepts are also eliminated, and the actor is free to honor his moment-to-moment realities and thereby create a structure of trust in his work.
Another good technique for establishing trust in your impulsive flow is the inner-outer monologue. It is done simply by going back and forth between the written material and the reality of what you feel in each moment.
Example: (monologue from I Never Sang for My Father, not verbatim)
MONOLOGUE: |
“I left my fathers house that night forever. . .” |
INNER LIFE: |
I heard myself say that line ... I feel awkward . .. |
(The actor carries the preceding impulses into the next line of dialogue.)
MONOLOGUE: |
“I took the first left and the second right, and this time I went all the way to California ...” |
INNER LIFE: |
I feel a little better. I’m looking around the room . . . searching for something to grab on to. . .I feel a little confused.. . |
(Carries the life into the next lines.)
The above process continues throughout the entire piece, as you go back and forth between the written words and your moment-to-moment inner life. If you carry the emotional life from the inner monologue into the written piece, the written words become the expression of your inner truth, and you encourage yourself as well to free and trust your unconscious life and your intuition.
It is very important to accept that it is all right to express any impulse, even if it is not right for the material. If you really violate the logic or the author’s intent, you can always make an adjustment with your choice. It is also important to note that, more often than you might imagine, the life that is expressed impulsively is not only acceptable for the material, but may even bring to it a more exciting and multidimensional reality than the author originally conceived. If the actor never forgets even for a moment that he is an actor, then all of life can be used as the playground, the training ground for using the multitude of techniques that stimulate a greater level of consciousness, a freer instrument, a fuller grasp and mastery of the craft, and the conditioning of a conscious-unconscious relationship that will lead to ultimate consciousness.
Intuition is not some mystical gift given to some and withheld from others. It is more than likely unconscious knowledge that has been acquired in this life from instinctive places and that rose into our conscious awareness because of a closer connection with it. The greater the connection, the more intuitive the flow.
Just as in any of the other areas of instrument and craft, here too there are exercises and techniques, which work to connect the conscious with the unconscious. Most of these approaches are to be practiced regularly and must be repeated often. Some of the following techniques can double as preparations for getting into a scene.
I have used this technique as an instrumental exercise for many years, for the purpose of getting actors more deeply into emotional experiences. It is a marvelous way to break through the obstacles that stand in the way of really deep feelings. An exciting bonus of the exercise is that it also piques unconscious life. I have seen actors do incredible things immediately following a primal-moan workout! In addition to the size and depth of the emotion it produces, it often brings out dimensions and colors that no other exercise stimulates. The emotion, the sounds, and the color of expression often seem inspired-as if they came horn a very different place. Both the immediate responses to the exercise and the acting work that follows are full of ultimate-consciousness life.
To do the exercise, lie down and assume the fetal position-on your side, curled up into a ball with your hands between your thighs. Begin to make a sound that comes from the deepest place in your being. Hold the sound as long as you can on a single breath, and repeat it again and again. It should be a very deep, moaning sound, a sound that might emanate from a very deep pained place. It is not unusual for the exercise to stimulate heavy sobbing. If this occurs, just accept it and go with it! The more affected an actor is while doing this technique, the more successful he is with the process. It should last for about five minutes, although it can be done for shorter or longer periods of time. The sounds must be supported by emotions, or the exercise is not being done properly.
This particular exercise should not be done arbitrarily. It is also not the kind of exercise that you might repeat daily, the way you deal with your dreams. As an instrumental approach, it should be done to crack through resistance or to attempt to go deeper when you feel blocked from the source of your emotions; as an ultimate-consciousness exercise, it can be used as a preparation leading to a monologue or scene; if you are experimenting with the conscious-unconscious connection, yon might want to try a primal moan to plummet down to a deeper level of life. It can also be used in combination with several other exercises to create a “piggyback” effect (I will get into that later). Because the exercise is loud and must be done lying down in what must look like a very strange position, you can’t do it in an office before going in on an interview or on a soundstage just before, or in between, takes; the right time and place must be selected.
While doing the exercise, try to get deeper into your emotions, encourage the sound to have some kind of vibrato, and when you begin to be taken over by the exercise, surrender to every emotion that you are experiencing. When you finish, lie there for a moment or two, and then sit up very slowly. You will probably feel a little strange and disoriented; that’s not something to be frightened of—it is normal! Don’t pull yourself together; instead, capitalize on the life that has been stimulated by the exercise, and begin working with a choice and a piece of material. Whatever your choice approach might be, include all the emotional impulses piqued by the primal moan.
Several things will probably happen as a result of the exercise: you will be infinitely more available emotionally; you will be much more responsive to any choice that you are working to create; and—most important of all—you will be experiencing at least some unconscious support of your conscious behavior. How much of, and how full, an ultimate-consciousness experience it might be is dependent on many things: where you are emotionally when you start the primal moan, how available your unconscious is at that particular time, what experiences you have had leading up to doing the exercise, and what your general connection with your unconscious is. If you “dry up” while in the midst of rehearsing a monologue after doing the primal moan, just go back to it and repeat the process.
This is another good primal-type exercise. It can be done by itself or immediately following a primal-moan workout. Both of these exercises hook into unconscious impulses. Both of them stimulate unexplainable impulses that can be very exhilarating. A Primitive Abandonment is done much like a conventional Abandonment, except that you can do it in a lying, sitting, or standing position. When the exercise is done properly, it looks like someone is having a tantrum—an uncontrollable physical fit accompanied by large animal sounds. The body undulates and shakes with rhythmical animal beats and energy until the whole experience feels like some savage ritual from the deepest, darkest parts of the jungle! It is done for as long as necessary to stimulate a completely abandoned state, both physically and emotionally. It should give rise to a primal, primitive, basic feeling in the actor. Besides the evident freedom produced by this technique, there should also be a heightened feeling of sexuality and aggressiveness and a connection with unconscious impulses, which will flow quickly into conscious responses. Like a Primal Moan, a Primitive Abandonment should not be done arbitrarily, but for a specific purpose. It too is used as an instrumental exercise to unclog the actor at those times when he is encountering a lot of obstacles in himself.
There are a variety of ways to do the exercise: you may want to start slowly, just by creating slow rhythmical movements, undulating in every part of your body while encouraging a beat—a primitive beat that is very animal-like. This can be done in a small space, or you might be impelled to use a large area as you move around. The slow rhythmical undulation should progressively build into a more frenzied abandonment, culminating in very large sounds, movements, and animal-like behavior.
Another way to approach Primitive Abandonment is to start with very large expression, throwing yourself around on the floor, writhing and flinging your arms and legs in all directions, while at the same time matching this wild movement with sounds and rhythm. In both cases you end up in the same place: wild, animal, primitive, and impulsive!
A third approach to the same technique is to adopt the physical attitude of a wild animal and then, using the general movements of that animal, accelerate them into a frenzy, as if the animal were truly going wild. It is not important that you really get an organic sense of the animal, as you would if you were working with an Externals choice approach; what is necessary is to stimulate movements and sounds that are animal-like and that fit the animal that you have chosen to “imitate.” If, for example, it is a gorilla, you would begin by assuming a simian position (close to the ground), start to move as a gorilla does, make apelike sounds, and then exaggerate them to a very large degree until it became a wild and abandoned experience. Again, all three of these approaches lead to the same goal. The variety gives you a choice, and, besides, some approaches work better than others for particular actors.
Sometimes it is advantageous to do a Primal Moan just before a Primitive Abandonment. Using these two techniques in combination with each other can yield some very exciting results. If you choose to try this, come directly out of the primal moan into the primitive. Don’t pull yourself together before starting the second part. Whatever that button is that opens the doors to the unconscious, it seems somehow connected with the animal in us—the primitive, instinctive parts of our being.
The primitive exploration has many bonuses: besides piquing the unconscious, it stimulates a heightened degree of sexuality and aggressiveness, violent impulses of various natures, and a directness that is very necessary to acting.
When approaching the Primitive-Abandonment technique, be sure that you clear a large space, removing all furniture or other objects that can become dangerous to you when you are in the midst of all of the violent movement. If you are aware of the dangers of colliding with solid objects before you begin the exercise, then there will be no risk of getting hurt while doing it!
After you have finished the Abandonment, you might want to go directly into dealing with a piece of material, or you may choose to let the exercise “settle.” Whatever the case may be, encourage an unbroken flow of expression following the exercise. Do not pull yourself together or interfere with any of the impulses wanting to be expressed. Allow everything you feel to run its course, and be vocal in your expression! If you want to deal with a monologue, you could just carry the existing behavior into the lines—which would most likely not be right for the material—or you could begin working on an interim preparation or choice to affect the existing life and take you closer to the responsibilities of the piece. Doing material immediately after such a workout is a good way of determining what the exercise did for you. Of course, you will be irreverent to the piece, but if you give yourself that permission for the sake of the exploration, you will discover what link, if any, you have created with the unconscious.
This technique is approached in the same way as a conventional Switch-Trick exercise. You start to encourage impulsive responses to arbitrarily suggested stimuli. The suggestions should come in rapid-fire succession and if possible be supported by some sensory-involvement process. The major difference between this and the conventional Switch-Trick exercise is that here you selectively emphasize stimuli that frighten or terrify you! The suggestions should be filled with your real fears and with what nightmares are made of. They can be expressed out loud or silently, but the responses should always be audible.
Either in a sitting or standing position, start with very impulsive suggestions of things, people, places, and conditions that terrify you.
Example:
“It’s dark; I can’t see anything; I feel surrounded by dangerous things that want to hurt me. (Switch!) A man with a knife coming at me. (Switch!) There’s a snake at my feet! (Switch!) An ugly monster behind me . . . (Switch!) Spiders crawling all over me! (Switch!) I’m drowning. . . going down . . . can’t breathe! (Switch!) I feel the presence of unseen evil spirits! (Switch!) The walls are closing in on me! Closer . . . closer . . . closer! (Switch!) I’m being swallowed by the ground under me . . . like quicksand. I’m going down faster and faster!”
Your suggestions here are of a very personal nature. You should use those things that are the most impelling to you in fear areas. The exercise can be as short or as long as necessary to accomplish the desired goal. Once you begin to respond organically and your suggestions become less arbitrary, the flow of impulses will reach a high level of emotionality and hopefully elicit unconscious responses. At this point you might try working for a choice that is connected to the material you are attempting to fulfill; but if the exercise has had a very large impact on you and it seems impossible to jump directly into working for a choice, then it might be necessary to let the stimulated impulses run their course before starting with a new stimulus.
The Switch-Trick exercise is a marvelous way to hook into the unconscious and to make connections with primordial impulses. Under very frightening or stressful circumstances, something happens to us: we acquire powers, strengths, intelligence, survival mechanisms, and insights, which help to protect and save our lives and which originate in our unconscious. This exercise connects us to those powers. If, in addition, you are suggesting stimuli that come from the world of your dreams and nightmares, then you are dealing with a direct link to the unconscious.
This is a combination of the Primal-Moan, the Primitive-Abandonment and the Switch-Trick exercises. These three work very well in combination. They should be done in the order given and one immediately following the other. Start with the Primal Moan, and at the point when you feel you have reached the summit of that exercise, go directly into the Primitive Abandonment. You will begin to know when to go to the next exercise by what you feel. So when you sense it is right, go into the Switch-Trick part, carrying the life over into the beginning suggestions. You will be amazed at the kind of things that spring out of your mouth and at the incredible thoughts and impulses stimulated by the prior preparations.
If you are successful with the trio, you can expect to stimulate very theatrical emotional responses and life, while at the same time making an important connection with the unconscious. As you begin to work in other choice areas, you should become aware of the depth and quality of the resulting life. The choices that you use should dredge up fuller and more dimensional responses and make you infinitely more impulsive.
A very important prerequisite to having deep and organic experiences on or off the stage is to get out of your head! Whenever an actor short-circuits himself, it is usually the result of some kind of intellectual activity. If, in the midst of a scene on stage, an actor comments on what he is doing in the moment, he immediately interrupts the flow of his involvement in, and responses to, what he is feeling and expressing. A running commentary on what he is doing or feeling keeps the actor from any connection with authentic and organic moment-to-moment impulses, not to mention the wall it builds between the conscious and the unconscious. Whatever he does, the actor must find ways to connect with the flow of organic reality.
Working with animal movements and sounds directly links us to the animal in all of us. It takes us out of the intellect and stimulates primal feelings and impulses, and it also creates a foundation for unconscious life. Again, let me remind you that this is very different from working with an animal to attain a full and organic sense of it as you do in the Externals-Choice-approach area. This involvement is much more general and arbitrary and does not depend on the achievement of accuracy with the animal. It is done exclusively to stimulate primal and primitive responses and, hopefully, to connect with the unconscious.
There is a considerable amount of freedom in this exercise. You can choose a specific animal or use a conglomerate of several. Start by assuming some kind of animal stance—a position on all fours or a crouched simian attitude. Begin to move about rhythmically the way the animal does, slowly at first, so that you might ease into it, and then increasing the speed and size of the movement. Add sounds as you begin to feel more comfortable. Relate to objects and to the environment from that animal place, and increase the fervor of the exercise until you get to an abandonment level. Continue the involvement long enough to experience impulses that are definitely animal. When you feel like an animal and have stopped thinking and commenting, you have achieved your primary goal. Do not snap out of the exercise abruptly; instead, let the impulses you have stimulated by this process run their course and slowly become more “human” in quality. You can do animal explorations as a preparation to doing a scene or as an ultimate-consciousness workout or for both reasons. Besides separating you from your intellect, it really creates a connection with your unconscious impulses.
The sounds of an animal can be very provocative. I personally have had a great deal of success with the sounds that a lion makes. While working with animals at the zoo, I became fascinated with the lion, more for the sound it made than for its movement. The, sound seems to come from a very deep place in the animal’s body. It starts from the abdomen and seems to rumble through the body, up to the throat, and out of the mouth. It almost looks as if the lion is about to regurgitate when he is manufacturing the sound. I found that when I was working with that sound for a period of time, I began to feel very animallike! In addition, I became aggressive and primitive. It is usually better to combine the sounds with the movement of the animal; however, on some occasions the sounds alone may work quite well. In circumstances where you have very limited space and cannot move around, picking the right sound may do the trick.
Start making the sounds of any animal that you are familiar with, and vary them in your exploration. Go from one animal to another, experimenting with the various choices to see which sounds yield the best results. If you start at a low volume, increase it as you go along, so that at the culmination of the exploration you are making a lot of noise. If you choose animals that make more subtle sounds, try to experience those on a very deep and visceral level, and repeat them until you begin experiencing the animal feelings that they have stimulated. At this point, try an impulsivity workout, expressing moment to moment whatever you feel. Doing this on the heels of an animal workout, or of any of the ultimate-consciousness exercises, is a good way to measure the impact of the exercise on the unconscious.
If you haven’t had any experiences with animals or if you haven’t observed them, begin the exploration of die sound and movement by making general animal growling sounds and jumping around in tempo. This will excite whatever primitive impulses are buried inside. Animal explorations are rich with results and usually open the capillaries of the unconscious.
I use this exercise in my class for a variety of instrumental and craft reasons. It is also, however, a wonderful way of communicating with the unconscious, Repeating this technique opens up your memory, while at the same time it frees a plethora of forgotten emotions. As we live from day to day, we experience an enormous amount of feelings related to the impact of people and events in our lives. As we grow up, those experiences are filed away in the memory banks of our unconscious and stored there for our entire lifetime. In unlocking those experiences by recalling them, we bring up not only the components of each experience, but the emotional reactions we had at the time. It is possible that those emotional responses were not even expressed then and that by reliving the experience we are able to express emotions that we were too inhibited to expose twenty years earlier! With the expression come impulses that are solidly ensconced in the unconscious. As the actor does the exercise, this unconscious life filters in. and if the connection is solid, it will probably carry over into a scene or monologue, thereby setting the stage for an ultimate-consciousness experience.
The exercise is done verbally and audibly, beginning at the age of five and continuing into the teens and older. You start by saying,” I’m five years old. and I . . .” filling in the blank with whatever occurs to you from that age period and staving with each age until you run dry and cannot remember anything more or you feel that you have expressed all the significant things. You then move on to the next age: “I’m six years old, and I. . .”—and so on.
Example:
“I’m five years old, and I ... am sitting on the floor . . . I’m in kindergarten . . . I’m five years old and . . . die teacher’s name is Mrs. Anderson . . . She doesn’t like me . . . She makes me put my bubble gum on my nose ... I have it there all day! . . . I’m five years old, and my best friend is Bobby Snell. . . I’m five years old and I hate school... I want to play the triangle, and Mrs. Anderson makes me play the sticks ... I hate her... I have bad dreams about her .. . I’m five years old and I . , . live on Fillmore Street. . . There’s a train that runs across the street... I chase it and scream to the engineer to throw us chalk... I’m five years old, and I saw Frankenstein, and I can’t sleep because I know the monster is in my closet... I cry, and my brother Phil turns on all the lights and opens the closet door and shows me that the monster isn’t there . . . I’m five years old, and I worry a lot! I’m five years old, and my brothers and sisters are so much older than me. . . I’m five years old, and I don’t think I’m smart like they are . . .” (You can go on with this age or you may elect to go to the next level.)
“I’m six years old and I... am in first grade!... I feel smarter now. .. My teacher’s name is Miss Bryant, and she is beautiful. . . and I think I will marry her . . . She likes me . . . she smiles all the time ... I think she is smiling because she likes me . . . I’m six years old, and I hate recess because I get hurt in the school yard every day... All the kids are bigger, and I fall a lot. . . I’m six years old, and I have lots of toys... I play outside until the cold comes . . . then we play inside. . . I’m six years old, and I. . . have a scooter... I call it The Red Rocket, and everybody wants to ride it. I’m six years old, and my father is old ... I wonder how he got that old . . . My mother is too , . . I pretend that my sister is my mother , . . and that’s what I tell all the kids in school. . . I’m six years old, and I. . . want to be an aviator! . . . I’m going to fly airplanes ... I fly little balsa-wood gliders off the roof of the building I live in. I’m six years old, and I . . . listen to scary shows on the radio ... I sleep in the same bed with my sister Helen, and she listens to the radio with me . . . She told me that if I slept close to the wall a hand would reach out and get me, so I traded places with her!. . . I’m six years old, and I laugh a lot. . . I’m six years old, and I have a dog . . . His name is Marchy... He goes to the bathroom on my bed! . . .”
Continue the exercise for as long as you wish, allowing yourself to express all the emotions that are stimulated by it. Be aware of large changes at certain times in your life. Some actors start out carefree, until, at a certain age, they hit upon some major trauma that changed the course of their entire life. If you discover such a juncture in your own life, explore it thoroughly, since it might be very rich with suppressed impulses. Be sure that you respond in the now, and not retrospectively: “I’m six years old, and I have a scooter,” not, “I had a scooter.” If you deal with the exercise in that way, you will re-experience the life as it happened, here and now!
This technique yields wonderful results in connecting with the unconscious. I have personally experienced amazing things as a result of it, and I have seen other actors do the same. Try it just before doing a scene with another actor. Do the exercise, and begin working for a choice. Your responses will be deeper and will reveal more vulnerability and more facets of emotional life. If you practice this exercise repeatedly, you will establish a connection with your past. It will help you become comfortable digging into past experiences, and, as a bonus, these will in turn filter into your dreams, making them richer.
Making the techniques in this area part of your daily workout will help you build that bridge to the unconscious, and even without ultimate-consciousness experiences, the content, depth, and variety in your acting will make you grow as an actor beyond description. If the unconscious becomes a consistent part of your acting, you will be infinitely more impulsive, unpredictable, and irreverent.
I spend considerable time describing Affective Memory in my other books, specifically in Irreverent Acting. It is the twelfth choice approach and is primarily used as a tool to re-create experiences from your past so that you can achieve the emotional results you need for the scene you are attempting to fulfill. Mostly, it is used to reach areas of emotional life that are not available through other, conventional choice approaches. It also helps the actor to develop a richer and fuller substance in his acting.
The real bonus of Affective Memory is that it pries open the steel doors to the unconscious. By setting up the circumstances for sneaking up on an emotional response, the actor, if successful, piques and liberates the unconscious life locked up in the specific experience that he is trying to re-create. The result of a successful affective-memory involvement can be startling. It can actually take you back to the original experience, making you relive it just as it was the first time and feel things that you have not felt in a very long while. If, for example, you had a stammering problem as a child and the experience that you re-created happened in that time frame, you might really re-experience stammering. If the exercise is successful enough to put you back there, all that you were will exist now! The potential of this connection is staggering! Not only could you as an actor stimulate life and responses beyond which you have already grown, but you could also open a bottomless well of unconscious impulses that have been locked away for twenty years or more! The rich fantasy life that you allowed yourself as a youngster, but that you no longer subscribe to; the fun; the willingness to pretend, to believe the unbelievable, to wonder if Santa Claus really exists, to believe before questioning, to be in a time of your life when it wasn’t embarrassing to cry in public or to be childlike—imagine freeing all those wonderful things just by doing an Affective-Memory exercise!
Affective Memory is done by using Sense Memory as an approach technique. After identifying the specific experience that you want to re-create, you start by sensorially exploring and creating all the objects and stimuli that existed around you, possibly hours before the actual event itself. For example, if the event you are focused on occurred early in the evening, you might begin by asking yourself questions about the early afternoon. All the elements that you re-create must lead to the actual moment or moments of the experience. In a sense, you create everything that surrounded the experience and then sneak up on the moment of encounter!
Start with the place and the time, and ask sensory questions that will create those realities for you; then go to the people involved and create them in specific detail. Create the time of day, the year, the temperature, the way you were dressed, the objects around you—in short, everything! Ask all sensory questions in the here and now, and respond to them in the same manner.
Example:
Let us say that the event in question is the funeral of your father. The actual moment or moments that you wish to re-create are those after the eulogy, when people started to leave the cemetery and the casket was lowered into the ground. It was then that the grief and remorse took you over, that you felt so much pain and loss that it was almost unbearable! Those are the moments that you wish to re-experience.
You might start the exploration with your first waking moments on the morning of that day, as you saw the ceiling and became aware of your bedroom and the objects that surrounded you; or you might start with the cemetery just before the funeral. Wherever you decide to begin, do so by creating the components of the environment, asking the questions in the here and now:
“What do I see in front of me? (Answer the question visually, with the sense itself.) How far away is the canopy? (Respond sensorially.) What are the colors of the chairs in front of me? (A visual response) What does the ground look like?. .. (Visual response) What is the texture of the ground? the colors? ... Is there grass? How long is it? What are the variations in the textures and patterns of the ground? Can I see the coffin?. . . How far away is it? What is its color? What is the shape of the coffin? How is it adorned? What is it sitting on? How would it feel to touch it? (That last sensory question is responded to with the tactile sense: you attempt to feel the texture in your fingers and hand.)
“What is the temperature? . . . Where on my body do I feel that temperature? What does the sky look like?.. . Color of the sky?. . . Are there any clouds? Is there any wind? . . . Where is it coming from? . . . Where do I feel it on my face? . . . How am I dressed? ... As I look at my pants . . . what do I see? What is the color of my trousers? .. . Texture? . . . Material? .. . How does it feel to my fingers? ... on my thighs? ... As I touch my shirt. . . what do I feel?. . . How does the collar feel on the back of my neck? ... As I look at it, what is the color I see? . . . Do I feel the jacket on my shoulders? . . .
“Is there anyone else around? . . . Where? Who is it? . . . How far away from me is that person standing? . . . What does he look like? How is he dressed? What is the shape of his face? Can I see the color of his eyes from here? . . .”
You may ask dozens of questions in each area. Go back and forth between the senses and employ as many of the five senses as necessary. The number of sensorial questions you ask is dependent on how many are needed and how specific you must be in order to create the reality. You must actually see, hear, feel, smell, and even taste the stimuli that make up the experience. The reality must be complete if you expect the moments of the experience to recur. The Affective-Memory process comprises the entire experience. The hope is that you will feel the same things you felt at the time. If that happens, you will surely unlock a treasure of unconscious life. In fact, it might even transport you into an ultimate-consciousness experience. The first time you attempt an Affective-Memory exercise in a certain area, it may take you several hours to realize the total experience, but after several repetitions you will be able to recreate it in a much shorter period of time.
This is a technique that enables the actor to discover new choices to use in his work. Many of the exercises and techniques have a double or even triple purpose. This one, in addition to locating choices out of our past, often piques important unconscious life. Unlike some of the other ultimate-consciousness exercises, it is more of an exploration than anything else. While a primal moan will definitely elicit a large and deep emotional response, a choice hunt may not. It all depends on what you stumble into on the journey. This process will involve you very deeply with the past experiences of your life and will liberate hundreds that you might have forgotten. It is like taking a journey into the past. The trip will lead you into a variety of emotional areas, and even if you don’t have significant experiences of the unconscious while on a choice hunt, you will certainly discover the keys to the doors of your unconscious. Each time you do this exercise, more choices and experiences will become available to you. A choice hunt is not only designed to find compelling choices; it is also intended to stimulate emotional life. As you follow the path of your explorations, you must encourage each experience to come to life, and you must respond to the elements and objects in each part of your life.
The best way to approach this technique is to lie down and close your eyes, but you may also do it in a sitting position. You must, however, keep your eyes closed. Start by picking a memorable experience from your past. Each experience you choose should be emotionally important or impacting, like a graduation, a wedding, a funeral, your first day at school, your first sexual encounter, your first big break as an actor, a memorable military experience, a memorable and meaningful relationship, a rejection, winning an award, falling in love, having a baby, losing someone you love, leaving someone, discovering a beautiful place, coming home after being away a long time, etc. . . . etc. . . . Once you choose a memorable and meaningful experience, begin to just visualize it at first, and then support it sensorially. Go through it and attempt to relive it, at first as a memory and then by slowly making it more vivid and real. If you supply the sensorial elements as you move through the experience, it will change from a memory into a more tangible reality. Asking questions about the sounds and odors indigenous to a special place will bring the reality directly into your ears and nose. Once you begin to feel, taste, smell, and hear the objects that comprise your memory, you will experience a “replay” of the original event.
As you take the trip, ask as many sensory questions as you want and respond to them directly with the sense that you query. Encourage the expression of your emotional responses. The more you express, the more you are open to feeling. If you pique unconscious responses, the thrust of the experience will carry you where it will. Allow yourself to go anywhere it takes you. Be careful not to comment on what is taking place emotionally, or you will short-circuit the connection to the unconscious. If that does occur, just reinvest in the sensorial process and pick up where you left off. After completing an entire exploration of a single experience, ask yourself to remember any other memorable event that preceded the one you just worked with or that might have followed it. The time frame could be days, weeks, months, or even as much as a year in either direction. The amazing thing about a choice hunt is that once you remember one experience in a certain time period, it leads you to two or three more, and those lead to others, creating a kind of pyramid effect. You may get involved in a choice hunt that lasts for an hour or more, as you jump from one experience to another. Approach the exercise as an adventure, and encourage yourself to go on an unpredictable journey.
Example:
In a lying down position and with eyes closed, choose a specific experience from your past. For the sake of the example, lets say that it was the first time you kissed a girl. After choosing that particular event, start by asking yourself questions about it:
“Where was I? . . . What kind of place was it? Was there anyone else there? Who was the girl? What did she look like? . . . What did she have on? How was I dressed?” etc. . . . etc. . . .
As you ask these questions, begin to visualize being in that place. Encourage the experience to “screen” itself on the inside of your closed eyelids. As you get more involved in it, change the questioning process to sensory specifics, and ask the questions in the here and now, not retrospectively:
“What is the color of her eyes? .. . (Respond with the visual sense.) How close am I standing to her? (Respond tactilely in proximity terms.) What does she smell like? (Respond with the olfactory sense.) How many odors do I smell?” (Respond in the nose.)
Go through the entire experience asking sensorial questions and responding with the specific sense involved. While on this track, you will begin to have many of the same feelings that you had at that time, even if it was twenty-five years ago or more. These emotional responses come from the storage room of your unconscious and help you to make a connection with it. As the experience becomes real and you begin to relive those old feelings of fear mixed with excitement, you cross a line into the unconscious; the richer the emotional response, the stronger the connection. Since it is your unconscious that has held those feelings and impulses for so many years, releasing the same sensations is an indication of your success in making that conscious-unconscious connection. After completing “the first kiss” experience, you might ask yourself what followed it with this particular girl. Did you kiss her a second time? When? Where? What happened before that experience? Were you turned down by other girls? If so, when? where? and by whom? This kind of investigation allows you to “piggyback” experiences—one leading to three or four others.
Another way to locate experiences is by identifying time frames: the first grade in school, the second grade, junior high, college, summers, winters, holidays, memorable Christmases, and so on. Besides being an enormous tool for reaching the unconscious, choice hunts are incredible emotional preparations for getting ready to act. The more you do them, the easier they get.
There are three approaches to this particular technique: (1) Images, (2) Fragmented Images, and (3) Fragmented-Image Visualization. The first is done premeditatedly and the other two impulsively.
Have you ever wondered, What ever happened to my Teddy Bear? my model airplane? that BB gun I grew up with? Where did these things go? Do they still exist? Does someone else have them? How did they disappear from my life? They were so incredibly important at one time! The places and people that comprised my existence—what happened to them all?
For three years, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I was totally involved with the Boy Scouts. They were one of the most important things in my life. The basement of the Lutheran Church was our meeting place, and it became my second home. Whenever I entered that room, I felt a rush of warmth and good feelings. Even now, forty years later, when I think of that place and the objects and people in it, I feel a mixture of varied emotions. If you have lived for several decades, it almost seems as if you have had many different lives. When I recall periods of my life, it seems as if each one was more than a chapter in a book, more like a book in itself. Who was that person on that life path at twenty, full of ideas and commitments, following a specific direction, having relationships with people that were going to last a lifetime—or so he thought at the time? Where are all those people and what happened to those ideals and commitments? It all seems like someone else’s life, not mine! Yet it was my life, and I lived it seriously. I realize that we grow and change and outgrow people; I know that we evolve and discover new things, that we change goals and directions. That’s what life is all about! In each period of our lives, there are places, people, objects, and experiences, the memories of which become the substructure of our inner life—our unconscious! Our personalities are molded and faceted as a result of the collection of all these objects that have affected and sculpted us. That treasure is there to be discovered and used in a creative framework! All that we must do is find the ways to recall it, to pique it, to dig up the cornucopia of buried gold.
There are many reasons for going back to the various times in one’s life. First, they contain the raw material that performances are made of. Secondly, when an actor uses a past experience to stimulate a desired emotional life, he is also making a connection with the unconscious. That connection, whether he is conscious of it or not, enriches the life he is experiencing and expressing on the stage, and that, as I have been saying in these two chapters, is the desired goal of the work. Instead of depending on chance or accidental ignition of unconscious inspiration, he must use the tools for consistently creating those “accidents”!
The approach I call Images is dealt with by collecting in your memory the lost and forgotten objects of your life. It isn’t necessary for all the places and objects to have been forgotten; it is enough that they be out of your mind at the time. Sit down in a quiet place where there aren’t any distractions, and begin to think about and remember places from your past. Start with a bedroom when you were younger. Search your memory for the objects in that room. As you begin to see them with your “inner eye,” bring them into your present environment; attempt to see and re-create them outside of your mind. Ask sensorial questions, and allow yourself to “trip off as a result of the way these objects affect you. You need not stay with that room for too long, particularly if, let’s say, you are distracted by something sitting on a table there.
The memories of those objects with which you become involved will bring with them associations and thoughts of people that were related to them. For example, my first camera was a Falcon; it was an inexpensive plastic camera that used thirty-five-millimeter film. I have had many very expensive professional cameras since that one, but never one nearly as important! A couple of weeks ago I thought about that camera. I have no idea what precipitated that memory, but there it was on my mind. With the recollection came a flood of memories that were overwhelming: I saw the camera in my mind’s eye and immediately thought of the store it was purchased in: Leo’s Camera store on Roosevelt Road. I saw Leo, with his shiny bald head and his broad smile, instructing me on the use of the camera and on photography in general. I wanted to be a professional photographer for a number of years, and that camera was the first instrument that ignited that ambition. I remembered Morty, my friend. We “hung out” together for years, but I hadn’t thought of him for a very long time. His face jumped into view, and I was filled with warmth at the sight of that little, round, fat face with the sparkle in the eyes. We used to go to the park and photograph “the great pictures of the future” We spent hours looking for that “special shot” and ended up photographing cute girls instead.
I also thought of my mother and father and of how they were in those days, and I cried because I missed my father. I remembered seeing him a whole block away, coming home from work, and laughed to myself at his unique walk: he seemed to list to the left, which made you think he might topple over at any moment—but he didn’t! I saw Tony hitting balls in the school yard across the street from my house, and I thought of that school. I became angry; I could feel the hot liquids running through my body. I had suffered a lot of abuse and trauma at that damned school! There was Mrs. Lane, my teacher, who treated me terribly. She was so critical and judgmental I never felt I could do anything right. I used to get sick every morning before going to school, and the twenty-yard walk there became “the last mile” for me every day for several years. Then I thought of Chris, and Ralph, and Buddy, who made my life a nightmare with their prejudice and abuse of me. I wished in that moment that they were standing in front of me. I could have at that very instant destroyed all three of them! And then I thought of little Anthony, who died of a brain tumor at the age of nine, and I felt such a rush of grief over a death that had occurred forty-five years ago!
I also remembered sitting around the kitchen table with my father and mother and sister, listening to the evening radio shows. My mother would putter around the kitchen doing the dishes, stopping every so often to listen more intently to Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons. We would talk and laugh. I remembered my father’s infectious laughter and began to chuckle and cry at the same time. I recalled that we had one of the first recording machines—a Federal. My brother had brought it home one day, and for years after that we all made records, singing and joking and “tumulting.” What a wonderful time that was! I wished for it to be back! Then I thought that it was ... I was recreating it all over again, giving it life, and feeling the impact of all those things. In the space of a few minutes, I had run the gamut of emotions, and it had all started with a camera, a Falcon camera that I wish I still had!
After completing the journey, I felt as if I had really been on an emotional trip. I not only felt more vulnerable, affectable, and readier to act; I also felt as if I had opened a door into the unconscious. I was flooded with impulses and feelings, some of which I didn’t even understand. The connection lasted for several hours and affected everything I did, thought, and felt during that period.
About a year ago I ran across an autograph book I had used at my grade-school graduation. A lot of my classmates had written little jingles in it, starting with “Roses are red, Violets are blue . . .” and so on. Another journey started. I remembered people I hadn’t thought of in years, things they had said to me and I to them, the way they used to dress, and activities we had shared together. Again, the trip started with an object, an autograph book.
There are countless objects and places connected to the unconscious, and each of these can impel you to incredible experiences. Sometimes you may start with an object that you have had for a long time, holding it or looking at it and allowing it to stimulate whatever it will. At other times, just sit quietly and let your thoughts jump around the various times in your life, and see what you land on. As the various memories flood into your consciousness, allow each object to impel you where it will. Help your images by attempting to verify their reality through the use of Sense Memory. Images is an exercise you can practice daily, at any time. It will strengthen your relationship to the unconscious and at the same time be an applicable preparation for acting in a scene.
This technique is approached impulsively; as a matter of fact, it is the impulsiveness of the involvement that often yields the most important results. Like Images, this exercise uses places and objects to supply the impetus. Start it by arbitrarily suggesting things from your past. Very quickly suggest an object from a time and place in your life, and rapidly go on to another. Suggest the first thing that jumps into your head, and as soon as you have named the object, go on to the next. Allow yourself to be affected by each suggestion, but do not dwell on it. Keep the exercise going for as long as you are functioning with it, and then allow for the carryover.
Example:
Standing or sitting, start by focusing on a time period, for example high school:
“Parking lot. . . (Switch!) Car. . . blue Dodge. . . (Switch!) Cafeteria. . . noise . . . Ray Lindberg . . . milk-drinking contest . . . (Switch!) Parker-fifty-one pen ... I love it . . . black and silver . . . lost it . . , Spanish teacher, what’s her name?. . . Rosemary. . . beautiful. . . bell. . . change classes .. . The hangout across die street. . . olive burgers . . . play pool after school. . . The new building. . . like it. . . football games . . . sitting in the stands . . . cold . . . love it . . . check out the girls . . . Ruth . . . Cookie . . . wow! . . . Someone put a dead cat in her locker .. . awful. . . study hall . . . who studies? . . . Don’t like school . . . the halls are depressing . . . Allan . . . he’s crazy, but fun . . . cars . . . cars . . . Pontiac . . . mine .. . love it. . . Dates . . . want to be liked . . . Chemistry lab . . . mix strange stuff. . . Can’t be serious . . . talking about sex. . . wondering about it . . . hair blond and wavy . . . pompadour...”
Again, continue the exercise for as long as you want, moving into different periods in your life. If you want to stop at any point and “trip off” on one of the objects, feel free to do that. Another variation of this exercise is to do it nonverbally, silently suggesting the stimuli and encouraging yourself to respond with sounds or gibberish. The value of this approach is that it will help you to express your emotional response to each suggestion if you haven’t already been able to do that.
This approach is very similar to the one above, and it works in the same way. The variation came about as a result of an experience in one of my classes. One evening, an actress was attempting to do Fragmented Images, but she was experiencing considerable difficulty with the exercise and was very frustrated by it. She stopped and said that her internal images were occurring faster than she could express words related to the objects and that that was creating a kind of short-circuiting effect. I told her to go with the images impulsively and forget about verbalizing anything. She did . . . and had a great deal of success with the exercise. I incorporated this discovery and created this variation in the Image area.
In this exercise you go from object to object in the same manner as with Fragmented Images, only you do it silently, allowing all your images to crystallize as you switch from one to the other. As with any visualization process, it is preferable to support the inner visualizations with outer sense-memory work. It is my belief that visualization promotes intellectual involvements. As you visualize objects and quickly try to re-create them, the objects themselves will stimulate the recollection of others. Thus, as you become more deeply involved in the exercise, it will continue of its own momentum. Follow the path of your images and of the thoughts that they stimulate, no matter how far afield they seem to stray. As I mentioned in the section on dreams, the unconscious functions with its own kind of logic, which is very different from the way the conscious mind works. All three of these exercises yield excellent results.
There is an old bromide that states, “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” It’s true! There are thousands of antique shops, junk stores, thrift shops, swap meets, and the like all around us. What is responsible for the great success of such places and events? Why is it difficult to pass by a lawn or garage sale without stopping for a “look-see”? The fascination is universal. What are we looking for? What is it that we expect to find on that table filled with junk from times gone by? Possibly we don’t know it, but we are looking for our past! We are trying to have the experience of déjà vu. How many times have you bought something at one of these places only to throw it in a drawer and forget about it? You look at the many objects on the table or in the display case, and one attracts your attention. You stare at it for a few moments and are not aware of what it is that attracted you to it. It is an old pocketknife, similar to thousands made in the same way and shape, with a cracked and yellowed stag-horn exterior and a tarnished, too-many-times-sharpened blade, and you have an impulse to buy it! Why? Do you need a pocketknife, and better yet, one that is as old and beat-up as that one? No! It isn’t the knife; it’s your uncle, who sat for hours whittling pieces of wood, which later turned into wonderful carved figures. You sat with him and discussed the world, your future, his philosophy of life, for many of your growing-up years. He had great affection for you, and you for him. He influenced much of the way you look at the world now. It was a good time in your life. The knife in that case is echoing the sounds and feelings of that time, and your unconscious responds to them. The impulse to hold it and have it comes from the feelings stored in your unconscious. The same holds true for negative responses: when you see or hear something and you have an immediate repulsion to it, that too relates to some experience in your life that has been piqued by the object.
Part of your instrumental and craft involvements should include explorations like these. As time allows, visit places like the ones mentioned above, smell the odors, listen to the sounds of an old toy, pick up objects and feel them. Allow yourself to be open to whatever happens. Know that your awareness of the impact of these objects on the unconscious will make you better able to use the experience in the creative process. Stand and hold something, and allow it to make you feel whatever it stimulates for you. Don’t try to relate it to an incident or a specific time; just feel! The exploration is not limited to objects that you can hold in your hand; it extends to furniture, carpets, buildings, old records, and sounds of all kinds. Opening an old Prince Albert tobacco can might be the door to “the twilight zone”; old magazines piled high in a thrift shop could take you on a stroll down memory lane into the land of Oz! Besides creating a liaison between the two states of consciousness, this exercise puts you in touch with many wonderful choices that are just lying around for you to use in the next play or film you do!
Identifying and cataloguing the choices that are connected to the unconscious is also part of the work. Often you stumble onto these choices while looking for ways to fulfill material. However, if you know that you are looking for gold, you go where the gold is to be found, and you are particularly sensitive to anything on the ground that glitters.
A very good way to identify a “hot” choice is to listen to the feelings you have when you think about it. If it scares you, if it makes you uneasy, or if it excites you in a fearful way, it is an indication that you have some deep life attached to it. Dreams can also suggest choice explorations; unfinished or unresolved feelings are a good area in which to look for choices; so are deep hurts. The choice I spoke of earlier—the time when my aunt was dying in the hospital and I thought I was in the presence of the Angel of Death—was certainly very well connected with the unconscious, for reasons related to my own terror of death and possibly feelings of helplessness and a deep belief in the supernatural. When looking for these blockbuster choices, start by identifying your own “availabilities”: What are you terrified by? What makes you intensely insecure? Where is your rage locked up? What are your survival instincts, and what piques them?
For example, let us imagine that every day that you are going to look for ultimate-consciousness choices, you start with your fears: “What am I afraid of? I am afraid of total darkness! . . .” Find a place where you can be in total darkness, like a closet. Stay there for a while, and see what happens. If you feel strong responses that are not rational or logical, or if you begin to “trip off” as a result of being in that closet, then you will know that it is a possible choice to explore for stimulating an ultimate-consciousness response. “What else do I fear? I fear the ocean—not to look at but to be in, away from the shore, alone! It terrifies me!” You might sensorially attempt to create being in the ocean, alone and far from shore. If that doesn’t work, go out on a boat and look at the ocean, and imagine being in it. In other words, try either to supply the stimulus that arouses your fears or to re-create it. “I’m afraid of high places; I fear falling.” Sensorially supply the high place, and see what happens. Make a list of your discoveries, and use them in the future. The more work you do with the unconscious, the more “risable” you will become unconsciously.
Finding strong choices that pique responses from the unconscious depends on several things: being aware of the need to collect them, being conscious of the way things affect you, having the ability to identify an ultimate-consciousness choice when you come in contact with it, knowing where to look for it, and using your time wisely in the search. You might want to keep a journal, listing all kinds of choices and underlining the ones that are very strongly connected to the unconscious.
The ultimate-consciousness exercises are filled with choice possibilities. The choice hunt will most likely uncover many potential choices. Images and Fragmented Images will also yield a number of new ones. “I’m Five Years Old” is full of possibilities. Catalogue them for future exploration.
All of the techniques and involvements discussed in these first two chapters contribute to the relationship you will create between your conscious and your unconscious. If you do these exercises every day of your life, you will, without a doubt, be in control of the phenomenon of unconscious inspiration in your work. It is very important to allot time in your daily work schedule for exercises that deal with strengthening your connection with the unconscious. Many of the activities that you become involved with are natural to living. They include being more observant and aware and elevating your consciousness by using the techniques already discussed. Once you have experienced the incredible difference that occurs in your acting when it is supported by the unconscious, you will be dedicated to working with it from that moment on.
One of the most important prerequisites to accomplishing ultimate consciousness is trust! In every area of this craft you must learn to trust your impulses! You must have the courage to be irreverent to the material until you have found the blueprint that will fulfill it. You must trust your intuition even when it seems risky to do that! Taking chances, risking failure, exploring the unknown, getting out of the way of ultimate-consciousness inspiration when it occurs, being afraid and doing it anyway—these are some of the prerequisite abilities you must learn to possess.