(Section 14)
To understand more about what happens in bodyplay and in the apprenticeship itself, it is necessary for the student to begin to grasp the nature of ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is not what we usually think of as reality. What we usually think of as reality is a frame that is fit over the ultimate reality.
The ultimate reality is a webwork of the relationships among all possibilities. Every possibility is contained in the web of the ultimate reality. It is a scientific fact that the wider the range of scope, the more probable the improbable will happen. The ultimate reality is the widest possible range of scope. So in the ultimate reality, all possibilities co-exist with one another in the web of relationships. This is true for completely opposite possibilities. The web of possibilities can be called “God”. For God all things are possible. But our awareness cannot cope in this total web of reality, in which, for example, the color green is pink, but also blue, and also C-flat, etc. This web of reality relationships would be absolute chaos to us. We could not operate or even exist in this web. So we create a frame of reality to operate in.
There is a cultural frame of reality which we all absorbed into our being just by growing up in our social culture. This is not just the rules, the taboos, the morals, and the ethics that we are taught. The cultural frame also includes what is and is not possible within our reality. This cultural frame is always changing. We all are affected by our cultural frame in deep, fundamental ways. There is no way to completely escape this cultural frame in life ... not even insanity. And there is no reason to completely escape. I am using the cultural frame now by seeing material objects around me, by using language to think and write, etc.
But we exist in a dynamic relationship with this frame that we call reality. We change it as much as it defines us. We have slipped back for a minute to the web of ultimate reality. This web is the relationships among all possibilities. The possibilities could not exist without the relationships. What is real are not the possibilities, but the relationships among them. This statement is abstract now by itself, but it will become more concrete as we add more possibilities to it.
The human mind, when deprived of all sensory input, will create another reality very quickly. This is because, to keep on existing, the mind needs other possibilities to relate to, even if it has to create those other possibilities itself. The teacher cannot be a teacher without the student ... and vice versa. So they create each other.
In bodyplay, if you focus on the body centers, there will be no magic, no healing, no fun. But if you focus on the relationships between the people, between the bodies, and among the body centers, then there will be magical healing fun which will radiate its effects. If you search for who you are within yourself, you will never find yourself. Only by searching within your relationships with others will you find your real self.
The cultural frame of reality is always our base camp. But for most people, it is also a prison of how things have to be. The price of order from chaos is usually believed to be limits. If someone is sure that she cannot do something, there is no way she can do it. But if the possibility that she can do it slips into her awareness, even on the sublevel of awareness, the odds of her doing it rise dramatically. The more passionately she believes in the possibility of the ability, the more she focuses on it in a disciplined way, the less she doubts the possibility, the more likely she is to break out of the cultural frame with its limits, into the web of ultimate reality in which the possibility of ability and the possibility of disability are equally probable.
She then brings the possibility of ability into her own frame of reality and does the “impossible” ... “impossible” according to the cultural frame. Most of the time the cultural frame denies this has occurred, calling this a freak, a miracle, a hoax. The cultural frame for self-survival makes this reality shaping difficult ... but not impossible. Any doubt or fear makes this reality-shaping function harder to pull off. The more passionately doubt and fear are hung on to, the harder it is to do this reality shaping.
This reality shaping is the root of all magic. It is the true alchemy. For a long time, I called this reality shaping “faking”. This was unfortunate because people thought I meant living a lie, an untruth. What I was, and am, talking about is shifting reality by a committed, disciplined focus of will from our backbrain over time, shifting reality from one possibility to another. This is not just wishing to make what you want so. This is hard work.
Evolutionary change on every level always comes from this journey of a single person or a small group, into the web of all possibilities, bringing back into the frame a new possibility, trying it out in the frame. Sometimes the result is insanity for the person(s). Sometimes the new possibility works for the person(s), but the frame is not ready to incorporate it yet, because it would mean giving up opposite possibilities long cherished. But introducing a new possibility into the framework for a certain amount of time, in itself creates a new openness in the frame. True evolution happens when the frame accepts as its own the new possibility brought to it by the misfit heroes.
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