A stone in seaweed
Working with the images who are you? and where are you? are like working with concentric circles from a stone thrown into water. If you want to get the stone that on the bottom of the reservoir, it is better to dive into its center. The seaweed, growing around, can be mixed up, and the search under water can be difficult.
The advantage of turning to inner feelings is that they convey information about the main thing, which is the state of the one who sees everything directly, not implicitly. Everyone is in the landscape, which they are ready to be in.
Of course, it is possible to perceive circumstances in a synchronistic way, as equal to the state. Zen Buddhists are known to equate the expressions «It is hot, that is why I sweat,» and «I sweat, that is why it is hot» (Alan Watts). This is correct if we proceed from the belief that nothing depends on the will of a person. However, if to adhere to European «active life position and choose what depends on a person not indirectly, but directly, the thesis" Start with yourself» still has a meaning. In this case, among others, there can be the question: «Shall I sweat or take an umbrella?»
F. Perls divided «consciousness into three zones: self-awareness, awareness of the world and awareness of what lies between those two22. He proclaimed the principle of «from the actual.» But what is offered to the patient in therapy is rather the «reality of things.» D. Simkin testifies that in gestalt therapy he seeks to adjust his patient to the perception of what is happening «here and now. The patients «can see the room in which we are, hear sounds or feel their body, which is comfortable or uncomfortable in the chair, etc.23». There is no shift to «unusual perception with this approach.
Let us summarize this chapter.
Whats inside is primary
When closing their eyes, people begin to see with their inner vision the composition of their world. There is a correlation between the things, which are the charges they carry in themselves, and the world in which they live, their position in it, and their environment.
While exploring the nature of their charges, they can choose what to feed and what «to turn off. With this inner transformation they anticipate their entry into the new world. The new world appears as soon as its contributor is ready.
Somatopsychotherapy focuses on the elaboration within the component of bodily sensations.
Characteristics of what is found in the body
In case of introspection, no one found bones, muscles, vessels, nerves, but only a variety of light and darkness, heaviness and lightness, heat and cold, density and sparsity. These are the peculiarities of human self-perception. In rare cases, which apply mainly to doctors or lovers of scientific and popular medical literature, the patients begin to talk about their feelings of, for example, vessels in the head. «Are they thick or thin?» we specify in such an unusual situation. «Are there one, three, five, or ten of them?» Pretty soon, people of such «natural- scientific mindset stop to transfer their once acquired knowledge, and move on to describe their real inner sensations in the categories of weight, color, consistency, material, temperature, etc.
The quasi-material
The artist Kandinsky complained that in the physical world there are no colors that convey the colors of the metaphysical world. We can only talk about the similarity of sensations from the contemplation of the first and second ones, but, in any case, not about the identity of impressions24. The characteristics of the world of the open eyes are used to describe things of the world of the closed eyes. It is obvious that we can talk only about the similarity of what is felt inside as physical pounds, centimeters, and degrees. Things of consciousness are described by the characteristics of material things.
Jung used to say the same about the so-called «landscape images. «The principle of conscious life is: Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu. (There is nothing in consciousness that was not previously in sensation (lat.). But the principle of the unconscious is the independence of the soul itself, reflecting its images in its game: not the world, but itself, even if it uses the illustrative possibilities provided by the conscious world to make its images clear (emphasis by A. E.)25" In the somatopsychotherapeutic process, a patient also uses «illustrative opportunities provided by the outside world to clarify what they are experiencing inside. Of course, there cannot be literal understanding of the patients report: «I have a kilogram of wood in my head.» Both the patient and the doctor understand that they talk about sensations.
Heat in the feet
There is a contour of sensations, adequate to each of the normal human states. In particular, the state of rest corresponds to the coolness of the forehead, warmth in the hands and feet, as noted by I. Schultz and as it is advised by the proverb: Keep your feet warm, and your head cool. Joy corresponds to the feeling of being filled with inner light. Love gives the feeling of subsistence of the whole being with warmth and light and readiness to fly.
Being in one of the negative states (resentment, anger, anxiety, etc.) corresponds to the disturbed contour of sensations. Feelings gather in one of the areas of the body, a persons soul «shrinks and «pupates.
A touchstone
In one of the philosophical conversations my opponent declared: Is there any criteria of truth of life of a person? I answered him: Yes, there is! They are the sensations in the body. If the sensations are evenly distributed, the warmth reaches the tips of the fingers and toes, and there are no concentrates plundering the filling at the level of the head, or chest, or abdomen, you are on the right path. But, if there are some concentrates, if the hands or feet are cold (or the forehead is not cool), something is wrong.
Spinoza said: «Veritas est index sui et falsi» (Truth is the criterion of itself and of lie). This is absolutely true. The even distribution of filling in the body is the «touchstone both of itself and of lie.» However, it should be clarified if the examining is not in winter and not of a long-armed asthenic, the heat in the hands is not a result of the drug or does not occur due to hypersthenic constitution.
I would also include the patients relatives in the concept of a «human body. If in their bodies the sensations are evenly distributed according to their activity, then they live right.
Heat heaviness
Perhaps this is what the Hindus called prana, the Chinese qi, Mesmer magnetic fluid, Freud libido, Reich orgone, and his follower Lowen bioenergy.
It is difficult to talk about the nature of this phenomenon. Wilhelm Reich (18971957) asserted confidently: «Cosmic orgonic energy exists in living organisms as a specific biological energy. By this capacity it controls the whole organism and is expressed in emotions, as well as in biophysical movements of organs26.» However, he decided on it not at once. «What is biopsychic energy?» he asked a rhetorical question. Further he answered: «This question for me, as a clinician, who had to treat sexual disorders in people, in other words, neuroses (Reich equated neuroses and sexual disorders. A. E.), remained unanswered after 60 years of sexual research in the world of science, 40 years of development of psychoanalysis and almost 20 years of my own work on the theory of orgasm27.»