Fascia and the Time-Free Body

The Impact of Biotensegrity on Social Change.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste”. Sir Winston Churchill

The chaos and ruptures in our lives have left us with an opportunity. We can use catastrophe to revision and restructure culture. We've had time to rethink many things, including what it means to be human in a culture sliding towards decay. Yet, if we look to the past, and integrate it with what we now know, we may well find the future we desire is already here.

Sometimes regenesis first requires us to reclaim the history we lost. The book, The Dawn of Everything, written by an anthropologist and an archeologist, offers a fresh look at cultures and human adaptability. The authors describe three fundamental freedoms found in previous cultures that provide a good direction for social transformation.

They are: the freedom to move about and seek refuge; the freedom to disobey; and the freedom to create new social systems.

What about the bodies and minds of the people who build cultures? It is impossible to separate cultures from the bodies who made them so, I've translated these freedoms into to a somatic context as:

The freedom to move freely and from one's own volition.

The freedom to question and reject.

The freedom to create and evolve new forms.

Parallels between our previous understanding of how bodies are made and how cultures form abound. A biomechanical body lives in a box and creates a linear, time-bound, mental-rational culture. A biotensegral body lives in fluid interconnection and adaptability and can move freely, reject the toxic in favor of what nourishes and create new supportive structures.

From direct, embodied experience, rather than the idea of it, we can fall back, out of the prefrontal and enter a liminal space as part of (and partner with) the process of creation.

Our bodies are the field that absorbs and remembers cultural limitations. Bodies configure themselves in response. Then bodies transmit those limitations back into the culture. Our energy is enlisted to perpetuate compliance and discourage innovation, creating an endless loop of stuckness.

Discouraged from trusting the guidance of what is alive in us, we imitate movement, shape ourselves into conformity, and carve a world of reboots, revivals and remakes. A culture that's not innovating is not regenerating itself.

Yet, if culture was created by us and through our bodies, then why can't our bodies now become the portal through which a new culture is created?

We've been taught not to trust our body's inherent agency and to be tone deaf to our biointelligence.

It wasn't always this way. There are many documented cases of individuals with metanormal sensory capacities (Hindu siddhas and Christian charisms come to mind) throughout history. There are cultures like Kalahari Bushmen (who slept with an ear to the ground to hear the movement of prey) and Micronesians (who navigated vast distances by lying prone in a canoe sensing the currents beneath the pitching and swelling waves). These super-sensory abilities were simply accepted and integrated into their way of life.

Fluidity and adaptability were so natural to some indigenous culture that they even rotated social structures seasonally, fluidly changing their customs and names to suit the new situation.

At this moment, when the old structure crumbles before the new one forms, there is reason for hope. Sweeping cultural change, as difficult as it seems, is possible. The decks could even be stacked in our favor. Nature herself may have a telos toward our evolution.

Time-Free Bodies Become Terrestrial

It's easy to get vertigo navigating a paradigm shift while it's shifting, especially when it involves our perception of time and space. However, one of the most important examples of the co-evolution of consciousness and capacity (mind and body) is the emergent perception of the 4th dimension.

Perception in four dimensions, rather than three, is not just seeing. It uses more of our sensory capacities. It includes the perception of the sensory antenna in our fascial matrix. Our bodies act on this information before it registers in our minds. Yet to develop a conscious relationship with it, we must slow down and cultivate new a relationship with life as a continuity unfolding through time.

“Present is not the now moment, it is the undivided nature of yesterday, today and tomorrow.” (Jean Gebser)1.

Fourth dimensional perception, otherwise known as time-freedom, liberates us from the time-bound paradigm we are outgrowing. Whole body perception 'sees' more than just what is physically manifest and measurable.

Seeing into this dimension, we see what has and has not yet manifested in time and space. We see spirit nested in all levels of being. In this wholeness, the body is both witness to and an instrument of the process of the soul becoming terrestrial.

When Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, spoke of three anatomies alive in us all (the primitive, the cultural and the cosmic), she was speaking of time-freedom. In the primitive and the cosmic, we perceive timelessness. In the cultural we can perceive temporal (seasons and cycles) as well as bound, linear time. In this time of transition, we are already becoming both/and. The openness of time-freedom breathing fresh air into a time-bound perspective is already morphing us and culture faster than we can absorb.

We are seeing what has not yet become visible because we see with a synesthesic blend of sensory awareness from a dimension of being that is not limited by culture.

The ground for our time-free body is our fiber-optic fascia. It is brimming with latent and emergent haptic-kinesthetic capacities.

In Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance, James Oschman writes of two kinds of time, neurological time and connective tissue time. Neurological time is time-bound. Our connective tissue consciousness is our quantum information system. It is time-free.

In describing the work of Emilie Conrad, Oschman goes further to say this connective tissue consciousness is a Continuum Pathway of sensing and adapting that is more than neurological or cognitive. “ It is an emergent, pristine, awareness of wholeness and an eternal connection to Spirit, Nature and Origin.” 2.

This idea was foreshadowed by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Gebser, William Irwin Thompson and many others. Rather than observing, it is our participation in the embodied experience of sensory awakening, playful self-shaping, and embracing both mystery and biological life that is the way to embracing all life as sacred.

Slowing down and becoming articulate in the language of our Mother Tongue, our biointelligence enfolds science, myth, and magic with the on-going mystery. It leads us directly to the experience of ourselves as origin. It accelerates the self organization of dynamic systems in individuals and culture. All the visible and invisible somehow unite to form a new creation to carry the eros and poetics of life into the future.

Notes:

Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, pg. 294.

James Oschman, Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance, pgs. 47- 56

Bibliography:

Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance, by James Oschman. Butterworth-Heinemann Press.

Life on Land, by Emilie Conrad.

The Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, Volumes 27 and 30, by Sri Aurobindo Gosh.

The Ever-Present Origin, by Jean Gebser. Ohio University Press.

The Future of The Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature, by Michael Murphy. Tarcher/Perigree Press.