Table of Contents:
Part one: Introduction to Static Deprogramming, Vitality and Gestalt Series, part (i) & (ii) - (further parts released in the coming weeks).
The full Pulsation Sequence for Members
I’ve run a bit if a thought experiment over the last little while.
Sitting in planes, waiting for meetings. During meetings. Jotting thoughts down while working and expanding on them in sterile hotel rooms. What’s been welling up is an approach bio-energetic response, processual flow, vitalism in a practicable, that is useable, and understandable way. A non-dogmatic, practicable and not explicitly “religious” way - in terms of how we typically view religion.
To synthesise what I know to be ultimately. What i seen to be the case so far, a culmination of all my practice. As an outcome of experience, truth in terms of meditative or psycho-physical-mystical experience. to uncover the black box, the part we don’t understand; have any control over, and for the most part even have a desire to understand. But the thing that regulates all. rules all.
No intellectualisations, words for the sake of words, speeches, clever opinions…unclear obfuscated opinions. Shades of theosophy by Evola. Such a synthesis must reflect experience as it is, and to point to it in such a sway that it is useable. The cast off all else. All the unnecessary layers. This has always frustrated me about most discourse or philosophy. I have my hard Zen roots to blame for this, granted. But I must always ask myself, “what is the point?”. What’s really being communicated here, beyond the facade, the accoutrement. I can’t help but always see the individual as the prime mover. More often, their words and theories don’t convey the meaning to me perhaps they wish it to; rather, I can only see what is really motivating them to push their content. I turn this same analysis back on myself, constantly.
It is motivating that due to the internet many methods and practices are beginning to intersect. An intersection of fitness, bio-energetic work, meditative work, dynamic movement practice, art music and so on. Streams that have only begun to coalesce. There is a dynamic yearning to create, to break free of restriction. As the worst crimes of stasis strengthen in our age, it is in this dynamic antagonism I’m confident something great will arise.
Increasingly I’m convinced a certain kind of human possesses the ability to express far more flexibility than many of us presume. We always refer to accident, birthright or genetics.And other kinds of appeals to chance. We can ask ourselves, what is beautiful, vital, what do we feel in our bones to be worthwhile and good. We know it without having to think about it. It presents itself as a jarring and hypnotising gestalt, we all know it’s there, and it breaks us out of our trances, only if temporarily.
What is this energy really. Vitality. How can we understand it better. Can it be captured by action, not merely described by abstraction or metaphor?
How can we learn to recognise, and perhaps seek to translate such energies into our real world practice? Ancient practices exist that open us up to processual vision, the world as it is. Mastering the ancient circuitries of the brain, synchronising with their rhythm and pulse; riding them to greater heights, leaving the roadmap for the far more superior specimens to come. Leaving mankind as it is behind. Leaving ourselves behind in every second, recognising that this is really the truth, anyway.
And they should be refined and expanded, as we should also be, with the instruments and tools we possess now, and will in the future of greater degrees of usefulness and sophistication. None of these technological developments need to be negative.
And so, while listening to engineers drivel on about green energy - many of whom could do with some rigorous toastmasters schedules I might add - I found myself thinking more deeply about such questions. So I throw my hat in the ring, trying to set through my own thoughts on this matter.
(i) Vitality and Gestalt - And Introduction to an Old Way of Seeing
From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any ‘new force’ or what not, directing the behaviour of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory. (Schrödinger - What’s life)
Everyone has some idea of what vitality or energy means, what this refers to in terms of our knowing experience. Yet in some other way, it may seems fleeting to us, hard to pin down.
In investigating dynamism, rethinking of causality, interdependence (or co-dependent arising) and the shortcomings of mechanistic thinking - of stasis - a torrent of realisation has occurred for me, particularly over the last few years as something in me clicked.
This stream has intensified greatly as I have re-engaged with the work. Bio-energetic work, seeking to deepen my practice of such modalities. Going deeper. In engaging in such a loosening process, what I refer to as psychic fibrosis becomes very obvious in myself and in others. As these energies are liberated, it becomes disconcerting the degree to which behaviours or reactivities can become entrenched. I regard this as a debilitating shortcoming of the species, nothing to be admired. Something that should be overcome.
Mechanical repetitiveness of my interaction with the world becomes pronounced. Yet as this breaks down and certain responses begin to dissolve, I also notice that energy is liberated in my body. I can feel it. In these moments, there is no sense of burden. Even the heaviest burdens become light. Anxieties and ruminations are blown away.
In the outcome of every practice I’ver undertaken over the years; the physiological states, the mental states - they are all extraordinarily vibrant. I feel like I’m on fire, without burden. Extreme clarity. When I read about vitality, in the way that some philosophers speak about it, I note many similarities.
Does our habit of mechanistic thinking and acting disconnect us from this. Our inherent ignorance to what it is accentuated by a certain, mostly acculturated way of seeing. Was it always this way for human kind? Is vitality a separate force, an invisible and unknowable power? Existing aside from the world we normally see, one of molecules, chemical interactions, interactions in ultra specific contexts or mental actions? I don’t think so, I think it is there all the time and except for certain occasions we have the blinkers on, we simply can’t see it. in fact, we constantly on guard against having any glimpse of it.
In the age of neuroscience, chemistry, static biology, any talk of vitality has a pseudo-spiritual connotation. On my surveying of technical literature the notion of vitality I note that the idea of vitality is being almost completely ignored. As a pseudo-science or some 19th century superstition without validity. Where it is mentioned in ancient or older literature, it is spoken about - in terms of this or that constituting vitality. Descriptors.
These days, in it’s place we have promoted measurement and splitting, breaking down and analysing at the prime mover.
Yet we know vitality is a thing. We have other words, expressions for a general state or expression of it - so all of us inarguably recognise it. We say “vibrate” “vibrant”, “full of life”, “vibrating” “brimming with energy”, “humming”. None of this is accident. On some level we know these things to be true representations of concrete perceptions and states. Whatever it is, it seems to point towards the dynamic animating manifestation of life itself.
If such an Élan Vital animates all and we can see it, then we also notice when it is dulled; so it must be in some way a manifestation of life, showing itself according to certain frequencies or resonances in nature. There seems to be vital resonance and frequency for all processual things. There is also a discordant inversion we can also see and comprehend. These are things we just know, they seem to be baked into the fabric of what we are, no matter how far away from this foundation we live.
We are entering a world in which everything is tokenised. All human interactions, or bodies and their data - tagged and bagged - totally digitised, building a wall between this and our organic analogic and processual experience.
Our real world is world of bio-electric & peristaltic pulsation, vibration. Strong organic amplitudes. This organic regulation is being replaced with a digital translation. A simulation of binary 1’s and 0’s. In an attempt to introduce the wickedness of safety for all, and rid the world of uncertainty. The beast hates uncertainty.
In our day to day experience, although it’s not obvious to most, the clouds of perceptual ultra-specification mean we’re constantly swayed to miss the widest possible view. Ultra-specification and focus are products of the rule of the left-hemisphere conscious experience. In ancient terms, a feature that would be used to hone in on our prey. A critical but extremely limited frame.
A frame that requires the predator to pause, become rigid - ready to strike. To seek only the most immediate parameters to ensure success. Now, this predator function seems to have become disembodied. It is now preying on us - through us. We possess it on some sense, and weirdly enough, right now it possesses us.
This is the key: in our quest for the smallest specific components, we have become psychically and cognitively rigidified. We are the ultimate victims, the prey of this ancient adaption.
Rigidity is devitalisation - it shares none of the qualities of true vitality.
Some cite the replication crisis in science as a failure of the methods of science. Cynics tell us an inability to replicate experimental results shows that scientists are dishonest people, educated swindlers, desperate for funding.
While I think this is no doubt occurring, I am now convinced the real reason is a much deeper and ultimately connected to what we’re discussing here. Reasons that are for most people completely unconscious. In our pursuit of the truth of material, of something like the replication crisis in science, we reduce all possible reasons down to one thing. Like a predator honing in on it’s prey; likewise in science our vision become specific and unwavering. We cut out everything else in the process. And scientific tools are in a very real sense, simply extensions of the nervous system.
When honing in on a singular pathway, or a singular part of the mechanism we are no longer taking into consideration anything outside of our scope. But what else lies within this vast forest of experience? It doesn’t really matter to us.
The attempt to nail an interaction down in one very specific context - in set specific circumstances at a certain time - that these specific constraints themselves are only a very small part of the totality of processual influences that shape the nature of the measurement, at that time and place.
It seems clear to me, that the replication crisis is driven by this inherent cognitive oversimplification. albeit a necessary one. And that this type of science therefore, itself represents a form of rigid devitalisation.
Extrapolating this to everyday life, the way we exercise, view our diet, view our relationships and our interactions with the world, we suffer from the same reductionism.
One thing the beast cannot handle is uncertainty…
One experiment in one circumstance, one physical and energetic context, one time and from this one simple trick we seek certainty, cures and redemption.
Yet as we have seen this compulsion leads to all kinds of absurd and ridiculous outcomes. Outcomes that are often far worse than the situation that we sought to fix, on both an individual, and by extension on a so-called “collective level”. A term I hate because I believe the term collective, although sometimes useful, is a kind of linguistic magic trick.
Even within the controlled environment of an experiment, there are vast pseudo-inanimate dynamic systems and inputs that could be impacting the experiment. That the participants can scarcely comprehend or perhaps even perceive, particularly when they are rigidified and devitalised individuals.
The replication cannot occur in just the same way in another place, since the complexity cannot be reproduced in any meaningful way. Some sciences are more prone to this than others, where there are smaller and more numerous hierarchical processes acting in unison; each one also acting in accordance with it’s own timescale.
We cannot see this because our cognitive and intellectual training does not allow us to see it - so to us it is a mystery, because we don’t really see the world as it is.
The same can applied to our personal lives. Our diets, interactions, relationships, experience, movements - whatever else. Reductionism is a sure fire way to miss anything of significance - important signal from the environment. I can confirm this as someone who has lived in this mistaken frame. Focusing on one things all the damn time - one explanation - one obsession as a cure for an in-vital constitution - this in itself is the very problem.
In some sense, all this should be quite obvious - but in no way do we operate in such a frame of mind in our day to day experience, at least the majority of us don’t.
When we speak about something like vitalism, it is not unusual that such an intuitively obvious thing should be considered “mystical” of pseudo-scientific, in the context of the rigidified, narrow minded cognitive biases I’m describing here.
It doesn’t fit into our static and rigidified way of approaching cognition and life, and so very often such an obvious thing is declared not specific enough to be meaningful.
How stupid. How can something so obvious be completely missed? We are an animal out of touch, one that doesn’t know itself any longer, that’s tied in psychic masochistic knots. One as Iain McGilchrist would say, with a severe brain asymmetry that is by its very nature de-energising and de-vitalising.
A consequence of this process of reductionism in it’s most extreme expression must therefore be in-vitality. We’ve thrown away our most primordial means of insight, an intuitive grasp of inter-dependent dynamism in ourselves and our environments - this natural vision that encompasses the intuitive knowing of vitality. The knowing of vitality is a momentary gestalt. It can’t be seen in a component part - it is a total picture. Health and energy, movement practice, consciousness of the body, throwing off the shackles of excessive reasoning and staring at our reflections. Practicing big-mind.
In fact all these things should be immediately apparent, and in certain points of human history they clearly were. Such a world view was simply a given. Sublime dance, music, athleticism, youth and its expression, vitality itself is dynamic form: not static form, not one thing. It is a gestalt - an all encompassing gestalt of momentary flux. But something that is seen, not reasoned out. I argue it can be encouraged, we can be charged with it. We can undo ourselves into it or open ourselves to it, in practical ways.
Devitalisation is the modus operandi of this peculiar form of world we find ourselves in. It must be understood in each of us and brought into balance.
Even in me saying this, perhaps some nodding in agreement, others maybe in a homicidal rage that I should dare question the mode of their being, i will say this - only a great and concerted training of body and mind can truly, practicably, reveal this truth and to make it organic experience.
A process of disentanglement is required to begin to open oneself to the great potential of another way of being. Unity through opposition, like a knife striking a flint. Vitality through flexibility and dynamism. the biggest possible vision of which we’re capable.
There is no way to just think ourselves better, or to find one simple trick to dig ourselves out - not matter how exotic or esoteric it may seem.
Part 2 coming next week…
Complete Reichian Pulsation Movement
Ok, as promised are my poor reproductions of the drawings of the Reichian Pulsation movements.