Contents & Intro
Friends,
You will find herewith enclosed part 2 of my vitality and biology deep dive. This week focusing on the nervous system and vitality. Vitality, precipitates, and processual dynamism.
Below this short essay are links the the new bio-individual podcast upload. Kevin and I discuss the nauseating and trite trend towards “one-thingness” in health, practice and society. One good thing about the online realm is being exposed to all manner of extreme neurosis and comical personality defects, this has bestowed me much data for the development of our positions on that show.
We give thoughts regarding how one-thingness relates to cognitive and physical rigidity - the physiological opposite to vitality as we understand it - despite it’s most ardent champions insisting that blasting your testes with ultra-violet radiation or eating rice crackers to increase penis girth, or whatever this weeks deranged, low IQ trend in the vile merry-go-round of online one simple tricks that consistently keep coming up as if they’re original or interesting - insisting otherwise. This mentality is the same that drives things like the world-wide block-headed covid response, or the Australian Housing market, despite the “esoteric accoutrements” of the obscure nature of the prior.
For paying subs (thank-you as always sirs) I hope you’re enjoying the sequences from last week. There is a lot in that. With all the other work I’ve given at this point, you should be starting to experientially realise how it all fits together. How each modality compliments the other. You should also be feeling different, less stressed, more energised, with a clearer less compulsive mind. You may be noticing that in fact, most of the time there’s simply no need to theorise. Just to live. Less caring about politics and theories, less ‘taken away’ from the moment - if you’ve been working.
And that’s the key. As with all good things, nothing will happen unless the work is done diligently.
So I’m excited to announce that part 1 of THE COURSE (which I’m busily working through at the moment with my sound engineer) will come ed of of next week. I want to get it right so I won’t rush it, I want to quality to be as good as I can get it right now.
Although THE COURSE will not be published on substack once done, your signing up here means you’re entitled to a hefty-hefty discount when I finally get it up. The money I make here doesn’t remotely justify the amount of time and money I spend on these projects. What drives me most of all is a desire to find other practitioners, and pass on what I’ve learned works. And what I’ve measured to work. Because i believe no-nonsense synthesis is what carries us forward. So if you’re one of those people, please do get in touch with Kevin or myself.
As a reminder, this course is a 110 hundred part process, designed to fundamentally re-orient your energetic and reactive disposition - but unlike most courses this can be done fairly quickly. The catch is during that period it must be done consistently. And it never really ends, it’s a management process that can be deepened with time.
This is not a course of imagination, belief, opinions, talking, reading or visualisation - it’s something that measurably works. I know it works because I use the process on clients that I measure, and I can see in real time what various things are doing. So, you don’t need faith for this process. This is a good thing.
Like everything else presented results are all I’ve ever been interested in. As a brutal pragmatist. I have been told that I am acknowledged as negative & annoying for that reason, but “with some good ideas” - as they apparently disparagingly admitted on one occasion. I’m told from my mole on the inside. the difference between me and them, and the difference between my teachers and others, is they never sold falsities and feel-good delusions. That’s what I’ve inherited. It’s a better way to be, because that is a point from which there is actual hope.
I will say that such a judgment is bit rich coming from anyone on X frankly, since other than a few notable exceptions, I see nothing but the same excerpts, screenshots, books, the same words, the same suggestions, the same trends and the same delusions circulating the the manner of the human centipede, with stomach churning and dizzying regularity. And no answers. No methods. Large claims, some talking, and basically nothing else.
The problem is, none of these people have done what they talk about, so they simply don’t know. Unlike you, they haven’t been privileged to make the fundamental connections. They like something that “sounds reasonable” or they “read somewhere once and it defines me as a person”. But this thing is completely disconnected from the blood and instinct. So in the truest since, you could get the same thing out of reading a McDonalds menu. And before you know it, when the rubber hits the road and biological reactivity re-asserts itself, we may well have no read anything at all. So much for everyone free-will. It is truly spectacular to me that people, and some smart people even, insist they are wilful beings.
That’s what I’m going to pains to present here, an alternative way. What brings me comfort is that I know many of the readers here or listeners to the pawdlcasthst, people who have got in contact with me and are working at themselves here are serious about practice. Many of them don’t comment or only occasionally, and work “in the dark” so to speak. Which tells me they' grok what the case is, and they’re interested only in results from working.
The part that I will release on here is the fundamental building block upon which the rest of the work will be done. It will be deceptively simple - but I can assure you, the devil is in the detail. The devil is also in the fact you will need to do it once a day for 2 months, and once the course it out, there will be further daily practices. This is hard, particularly nowadays, when we can’t tolerate something that isn’t obviously and immediately gratifying. It’s easier to go online and get into an argument that everyone will forget about in 5 minutes.
Imagine spending those precious hours instead working for the purpose of personal enhancement. What’s presented will be a fundamentally physiology changing practice. Especially over time and when combined with all else I’ve jotted down here + whatever other work you’re doing on your own, like yoga or vipassana whatever else you like to do.
It is a complimentary practice - not a one-thing ultimate replacement - because we’re only about process, building & synthesis at this establishment.
So look our for that one.
All the best for your weeks, wishing you all a highly subtle vibratory, vital response of gratitude to whatever process you find yourself apart of.
Cheers
1. Vitality, The Nervous System & Gestalt in Vision
Regulator, ancient and intricate system, the progenitor of arousal towards a choreography of processes. Determining how closely we can live in accordance with the great vibe. I like vibes.
A complex world requires management; dynamic management. The extremely ancient, jelly-fish like pulsations of the ancient enteric system, the oldest part of us, the core, seemingly expressing universal pulsation itself - and the ANS; our experience itself is an expression of a symphony of dynamic processual interplay. A complex interdependence with all that surrounds it, aroused from a combination of dynamic memory, from it extends a strange and mystical desire for the novelty of survival and expansion. A channeling whatever the mysterious process of arousal is.
In the vision of a machine like universe of stable molecules and stability, the question the remains for me is, why is it that humans, or animals, engage in any endeavour whatsoever? A mechanistic outlook cannot not explain this other than with sad reductionist platitudes like ‘the primal urge to survive’, or the ‘perpetuation one's lineage’.
Yet, the way I see it now the truth lies far beneath assumptions such as this. To see you have to go deeper. It must reside in the invisible process and pulse of arousal - the pulse of arousal is the animating, motivational force - and shapes the qualitative ability for our nervous systems’ expression. Arousal in it’s broadest sense, for me, indicates health in it’s totality.
Recently, I have been going deeper. I have intensified my zen practice and am magnifying my bodywork practice beyong what I’ve done before; and offering commensurate theory here as I go through this process. Often I ask myself “why should there be any desire to go deeper?”
To understand more; where does this urge come from? When my body erupts in organic understanding; and everything falls into place - what is this? What can I call the totality of this experience, this energy that wells up, and surges are my tissues vibrate strongly and then subtly? Does this occur because the machine is manipulating itself in ways it shouldn’t? As some kind of pathos? Or is this an impermanent emergence of all aggregate potentialities, converging on an infinitesimal whirlpool of vital experience - and it is not a derangement or pathology, but an opening to what is.
The malaise that has taken root in modern times, what I now refer to as in-vitality, shows itself to me as an essential misunderstanding - or better yet - a blindness. The universe and experience itself is vital. It can be nothing else. This is what I see and feel to be the case when I go deeper. Experience completely shifts and whatever was normal before is the seen to be limited and unpleasant. The normal way from this point of view, is not what is reasonable. Such a misunderstanding, or blindness, can only be to me an affliction of perpetually stunted arousal, an ability for charge.
I once reflected on Nietzsche's Russian Soldier, from a point of view of the nervous system and it’s attributes on this substack. For me this is the truest imagining of our psycho-physical blindness:
“Being sick is itself a kind of ressentiment. — Against this the invalid has only one great means of cure — I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without rebellion with which a Russian soldier for whom the campaign has become too much at last lies down in the snow.”
In the immediacy of the soldiers dilemma, his fatalism is very apparent. Yet to us, with our decadence, stimulation and distraction such a fatalism is hidden. We are so focused on minutiae, details, cells, formulas, the dead theories of dead men, that the physical sickness and commonness that ails us is naturally kind of occult. I agree when Hyatt refers to us as the “terminal point and click man”.
We are disconnected from our primal and vital essence. In our world things that should be immediately obvious become opaque. Things that were designed to reduce struggle becomes the source of struggle, and exponentially complicate. We develop systems of abstraction against themselves, and all the time we miss what is right in front of our eyes - this is disconnection. A loathsome daze, an in-vitality.
We are taught to be rigidified and also unconscious and lazy - to above all else protect ourselves against the primal, against the fire, heat and blood. Against the intensity of streamings that arises from omnipresent regulating core. An ancient inheritance, irrational, rhythmic and vibratory, a source of life-energy that animates our tissues. Instead we’re taught to habitually fear our primordial drives, above all else. Many things we consider evil today are merely projections of this struggle against ourselves.
We can’t and don’t understand them, and any overwhelming arising of such a thing terrifies us and those around us, and such a fire must be extinguished. Tissues and membranes, fascia and ganglia, seize up against the intensity of life itself. Such a candle is blown out in a pseudo-nirvana, an unconscious death reverie.
In this age, we are on guard against ourselves and what we’re meant to be.
We are a biological roadblock in a broad sense also - and to have any hope of ascending, this kind of deep biological self-guardedness must be untied and discarded.
(ii) Some have chartered charted an alternate course to this more common malaise, yet one that is much of muchness: This is the practice of deliberately quelling the flames of arousal. As a way out of being subject to its dictates. But even this desire is desire. A kind of pseudo-arousal.
But the impulse remains unaltered at it’s most fundamental core - arousal, enigmatic force, commands as the paramount function of the nervous system. It’s gesticulation and proper regulation the prime mover the very essence of vitality itself. There is no one simple trick for this, this is a complex work for the individual - there are only tools. And we must be cautious that the tools themselves don’t become the prime source of rigidity.
I see that the nervous system at once channels and strengthens arousal when allowed, when it’s at its best. And within consciousness this converges as a powerful gestalt.
Surge ignites action before cognition, emerging from the depths of the psyche and the body. It is so difficult to comprehend through use of reason because it exists prior - reason, whatever that is, if it is anything is a product of primordial force. It can never be disconnected except at death.
Arousal, the lifeblood coursing through the organism and its intricate neural architecture, forms the bedrock of existence. Any pursuit aimed at rekindling the ebb and flow, the harmonious symphony of the body's give and take, flood tide and ebb current. Indeed, our blood itself is pushed through the vascular tree in exactly such a resonant fashion. We see this everywhere in the world.
These forces must center around the intrinsically self-less bio-energetic pulse of arousal. One must strive to refine its place and action, to cultivate a background to allow it to fully manifest itself when required.
A question may arise: Should we even seek to regulate this subterranean influence? Is it something that is simply regulated by ‘good genes’ or ‘good luck’?
I refuse to embrace such notions as genes and luck as absolutes. These are limiting metaphysical beliefs; they are statements only. The truth is much more straight forward: we have a certain amount of talent and gut, and all that matters is how we choose to use it.
Yet I have to acknowledge that in all probability, if someone should even be drawn to this project, there is a element of having the right biological constitution and ability. Most who read things like this, will never do anything at all. They will just talk, read, post excerpts, argue, live according to what others assert is good, go to the gym and repeat. Nothing of value will be truly learned, knowledge like this will never become organic in such people. It will just be a simulation. Only very rarely will someone do the work.
They will never see, so it is of no value.
(iii) In an uncharacteristically intimate admission in a group of old friends, one individual (plied with alcohol) told me of a stunted sexual impulse. Of course we all laughed, but you could tell deep down there was worry. We are not that old. Here lies the stark embodiment and reminder of vitality's antithesis. Many would pursue testosterone therapy, or ED pills. Maybe this is helpful but when I look at their faces there is something else missing.
I wanted to mention to him some kind of adventure therapy. This is a cure for someone who has chosen a sedentary cradle to grave lifestyle. I refrained sense, since this individual like most humanoids choose wrongly justify their woeful states through painting the situation with brushstrokes of virtue. I see this all the time. Men proclaiming greatness based on doing, as Hyatt famously said, what billions and billions of humans have done before - as if it’s some revolutionary act. Clouds of misery raining down upon them. I know these men. And as usual with this animal, shouting virtues like this always is an obfuscation for a deadened in-vital core. This will be difficult for many to accept. Particularly those that see value in surface obsessions. Maybe you’re right?
It is also a truth that there is no reason at this time they should be sad parodies of their biological selves, like 80- year old men in the prime of their lives. Dousing themselves with alcohol. Their societies fall apart around them, but as long as they can chisel out a little more comfort and some "‘status” from HR, and show it off the the neighbours because they don’t even get the enjoy the comfort in most cases, having been subjected to vicious demanding females - show me how on any level this is virtuous outside of some mid-wit disconnected abstractions about how the “proliferation of more units like this” will “save us”.
Their lives are lives of complete subjugation, and with age their worn patterns are borne for all to see. When one of the primary pillars, that of strong sexual impulse falters and fades, it shows me a biophysical stasis, a numbing.
I wonder if I could run an experiment, where I could rid these men of their nagging wives, allow them to motorbike for a few years in another land, take away their desk jobs and replace it with something exciting: would their sense of arousal return? Would you need any molecular intervention with such changes? Supplements of therapy?
Supplements or therapy are a “one-thingness” band-aid, furthering covering up their fight against themselves.
(iv) It is clear to me, experientially and theoretically, that vitality as a form and experience or a gestalt, is connected to the strength of arousal of the nervous system, it’s ability to receive and act upon charge. The vitality of the world “outside of us” is determined by that inside of of us. In truth, there is no-demarcation between the subject and object, once seen, there is a incomprehensible stream off processual dynamic flow in flux, and nothing else.
For us then this is a force that is felt viscerally.
Within the crucible of dynamic landscapes, arousal moulds the very contours of subjective perception, the force of charge into that of relief. The organism must be able to receive charge, and discharge it - but also to hold charge in it’s tissues, membranes, and viscera. Vitality becomes synonymous with the strength of rhythmic pulsation, the charge's potency, a symphony that echoes the sheer 'feeling' of being alive. The body is therefore a process, and the most important process for us is the process of undoing and untying. A process that doesn’t end.
We can explain any of this by mechanism without instantly falling in to the same erroneous view. So, any mechanistic explanation must be acknowledged and discarded as a tool once it’s use has come to an end. There is nothing to hang on to here. Such tools are only resulting precipitates of process, and we have no choice but to acknowledge process, the process of untying, retying, as primordial truth; and that cogs and parts are only a small part what we can momentarily tie down. In this way, we find a way in which we embrace living. And in this work, we know this to be true, because we can feel it as health. We can feel our body and it’s tissues as pure energy. This should be all the evidence we need that the work is right.
Pulsatory force cannot be reduced even to the sum of these parts since arousal is a processual constant, the force that drives all biological life to seemingly uncover what lies in the sea of mystery, of which barely any we have proper sight of. That is our purpose - we are life itself.
We are here to uncover more, to shape more, to make known the sea of experience that lies beyond our knowing.
We as its precipitates represent the underlying dynamism of its expression.
In this interplay, mastery becomes a symphony of attunement, where the entirety of the body must be resonant.
Frequency and vibration, a symphony of interdependent processes unfurling in a realm of boundlessness and potentiality.
The steed breaks into a trot. Pushing further, the gallop ensues. These are junctures of transformative shift, discontinuous leaps driven by energies that unlock the full magnitude of the charge.
Striking flint and knife against one another, from this we derive a spark and the potential of fire.
Reject those who would limit you with moralistic platitudes. Find no comfort in justifying your self-limitations. Don’t deaden yourself with politics or ideology or bad religion. Refuse to reject the world and embrace rigidity. Open yourself to charge.
2. Bio-Individual Podcast “Against One-Thingness”
Should be self-explanatory by this point! Hope you enjoy this discussion, I did.