Why Ida brought a bioelectronics engineer onto her platform
In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture series at UCLA's Center for the Health Sciences, Ida did something unusual: she stopped midway through her own presentation and handed the podium to a younger man whom most of the audience had never heard of. The audience had come to hear about a method of body manipulation. What Ida wanted them to hear, instead, was that the body they thought they were studying — the chemical, anatomical, physiological body of medical school — was not the body Structural Integration actually worked on. The body she worked on was an energy system, and the man with the credentials to talk about energy systems was Bob Beck. Her introduction of him is the cleanest single statement in the archive of why she thought the work needed an electrical engineer at the table at all.
"This is basically what we try to offer in structural integration, new ways of thinking about this universe which, to be properly appreciated, must be seen as the open system. Now I'm very nearly ready to hand this podium over to Bob Beck. He is, as I said before, a master in his field of bioelectronics, And he has many ideas which have not yet penetrated into the world that is twenty five years behind the times. Most of us got our education in that kind of a world. And I think you will understand more about man and man's understanding of man if he gives you this partly as a historic overview, partly as including some of the far out notions of man current today. It's quite true."
Ida hands the podium to Beck, 1974 Open Universe class
The phrase she chose — "twenty-five years behind the times" — is itself a piece of intellectual autobiography. Ida had taken her PhD in biochemistry at Barnard in 1916; she had worked at the Rockefeller Institute in the 1920s; she had sat in on Schrödinger's lectures in Zurich in the late twenties when the new physics was being born. She knew, in her bones, what most of her American audience did not: that the conceptual world of solid particles and Newtonian forces had been replaced, in physics, by a world of fields and frequencies. She also knew she could not deliver that physics herself. She brought Beck to do it.
The body as plastic medium — the doctrine Beck was brought to validate
Before Beck speaks, Ida lays the groundwork in her own voice. The claim she keeps returning to — across the 1974 Healing Arts series, the 1976 Advanced Class, the Big Sur tapes — is that the body is a plastic medium. Not a metaphor. A literal claim about the chemistry of collagen, which she had studied as a young chemist. The claim sits at the hinge between her old training and her new doctrine: the connective-tissue body can be reorganized because its material chemistry permits reorganization. Beck's job, on the platform that day, was to take that material claim and lift it into the language of fields and energy.
"The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe."
Ida Rolf, 1974 Healing Arts lecture, immediately before introducing the validation work
The plasticity claim does specific work: it allows the practitioner to add energy to the body — through pressure, through manipulation — and produce real, measurable change in the body's organization. Ida wanted the audience to understand that what she meant by "adding energy" was not metaphysical. It was the kind of energy a physics laboratory could measure. This is the bridge over which Beck walks onto her platform: if the body is a plastic medium that responds to added energy, then the question of what kind of energy the body is, and how to measure it, becomes a respectable scientific question.
"It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize."
Ida Rolf, 1973 Big Sur Advanced Class
Burr's L-fields and the body as electrodynamic organization
When Beck took the platform he had, in his hands, the lineage he wanted to invoke. Harold Saxton Burr, a Yale physiologist who had died only a few years earlier, had published in the 1930s and 1940s a body of work claiming that the basic organizing pattern of any living thing — a grain of corn, an egg, a human being — was an electrical field, measurable in millivolts from inches away from the surface of the organism. Burr called these L-fields, life fields. The mainstream had largely ignored the work. Beck had read Burr, built instrumentation sensitive enough to replicate the measurements, and arrived in Ida's classroom with field readings of human beings as part of his evidence.
"Discovered using, for that time, rather crude instrumentation that there were electrical fields, not electrical voltages but fields that could be measured by electrometers several inches away from the body that appeared to be the basic organization, building blocks of grains of corn, human beings, eggs, any life form, plants, animal."
Bob Beck, 1974 Open Universe class, on Burr's discovery
Beck's interest in Burr was practical as well as theoretical. He had built an instrument — a field-effect transistor input voltmeter sensitive to one millivolt full scale, with input impedance of roughly a hundred megaohms — capable of reading the fields Burr had described. The instrument made it possible to test the claim. And it made it possible for Beck to bring to Ida's classroom not a metaphor but a measurement. Burr had also speculated that the genetic material alone could not account for the precise structural organization of a mature organism — that an electrical pattern must contribute to the form. This was a claim Ida liked, because it gave a place in biology for the structural reorganization she effected through her hands.
"And he published in a number of journals his theory that perhaps the sperm ovum, in the case of human beings, cannot carry enough information in the RNA DNA nucleus to account for the exquisite structuring of the mature organism, perhaps there is another element out there somewhere which might have elements of electrical pattern that can account for a little bit more of it than we can with subatomic physics. And he wrote this absolutely fascinating book and as soon as I got my hands on it, it had been out for many years, I just saw it last year, I built an FET input, voltmeter that's sensitive to about one millivolt full scale and has about a 100 megaohms input impedance for the engineers here and began replicating some of his work in actually reading the energy fields of human beings."
Bob Beck, 1974 Open Universe class, elaborating Burr's hypothesis
The closed universe of medicine and the open universe of energy
Ida's lectures in the 1974 series carried a recurring polemic: the medical model she had been trained in, and against which she developed her own work, treated the body as a closed system — a sealed bag of chemistry, atomistic and mechanical. The new physics she had brushed against in Zurich in the 1920s did not treat anything as closed. Living systems, in particular, had to be understood as open: continuously taking in energy from the surrounding field, continuously dissipating it back. Beck's instruments were measuring exactly this exchange. The Open Universe class title was not decorative. It named the doctrine.
"And this complicated structure requires that energy be added or put in constantly to maintain its complication. An open universe can be maintained at a distance from the equilibrium point in what physicists call an improbable state by that continuous addition of energy. None of this is true of the closed universe. Man is not a closed order, not even in purely biological terms. The biological man must be looked at as a collection of systems, not of atomistic aggregates. This in itself takes him out of a closed universe. You can't keep collections of systems in a closed universe. The characteristic of such systems is that relationship is the determinant of what you get out of it. Described in these words, life is not a substance, it is a process. And the determinant is relationship. And I hope that your speaker, Mrs. Longstreet, when she goes into this at a later point, will give you the sense of wonder that I always get as I look at the shifting of dimensionality in approaches to life, because this understanding of dimensionality came through the work of Korzybski, was initiated through the work of Korzybski, shall I say. And I hope she's going to go into that in sufficient detail for you to have that wonder."
Ida Rolf, 1974 Open Universe class, on open versus closed systems
The polemic against the closed-system view of the body was, for Ida, also a polemic against a certain professional culture. Medical schools, she said repeatedly, taught their students that gravity was the enemy of the human being. The biomechanics curriculum at Harvard, she said, was the gold standard of measuring posture against a vertical line — and the worst offender in the failure to teach how a body might actually reach that vertical. The vocabulary of fields, frequencies, and resonance — Beck's vocabulary — offered an alternative.
Beck's three questions and the instruments he brought to answer them
Valerie Hunt, the UCLA kinesiologist who organized the Open Universe class and who became the most committed laboratory researcher of Structural Integration, described Beck's contribution to the research program in specific terms. He was the engineer; she was the physiologist; Ida was the practitioner whose claims they were trying to instrument. Hunt's electromyography registered the muscular changes in the worked body. Beck's devices registered something else — the field outside the body, the energy environment the body lived inside. Hunt described the planned 1975 study by listing the array of measurements: electromyography, brainwave patterns, Kirlian photography, aura readings, anxiety tests, hemisphere dominance — and Bob Beck's black box.
"We will have Bob Beck's black box that he's going to have to tell me how to use, which I understand is deep sea and has to do with energy fields outside the body. We will have four subjects who are enrolled right in the laboratory and this data will be kept constantly upon them throughout the entire hour and a half with an aura reader reading the aura simultaneously on tape."
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Open Universe class, describing the research design
Beck's own intellectual route to Structural Integration ran through a similar series of questions. He had come up through engineering and physics, had taught himself the literature on extrasensory perception, had built biofeedback devices at the moment in the late 1960s when alpha-state research was new, and had spent time with the various populations that interested him: Tibetan meditators, Yogis, healers, schizophrenics. Hunt described in one of her 1974 lectures the three questions she said had organized her own research after she met Ida. They are also Beck's questions in spirit if not in formulation.
"was a kind of energy that we really don't know how to call it. It could be called bioplasmic or auric or atomic or electromagnetic. I sort of like electrodynamic because then I"
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Healing Arts lecture, naming the kind of energy at stake
The 1974 demonstration: aura width and the integrated body
The central claim that Beck and Hunt and Ida together kept returning to in the 1974 lectures was specific and quantitative. The aura — measured by trained observers, photographed by Kirlian methods, and instrumented by Beck's field-sensitive devices — was reported to enlarge after the ten-session series. The numbers Ida gave were precise. A randomly selected incoming person tended to have an aura half an inch to one inch in width. After the ten sessions, that same person's aura widened to four or five inches. Whatever one made of the metaphysics, the team was treating the observation as a measurable change in the energy environment of the body.
"has found, for example, and will tell you about it, that random incoming people tend to have auras a half an inch to an inch in width, but after the integration of structure and the integration of the myofascial body, which is called rolfing, their auras will have increased usually to four to five inches in width. That's what we said. Wow! Obviously, we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life here. Whether this really relates to or equates with the energy referred to earlier, the energy whose principal distinguishing characteristics is its failure to observe the law of inverse squares, which characterizes Newtonian energy transmission."
Ida Rolf, 1974 Healing Arts lecture, reporting the aura measurements
The framing here is careful. Ida does not claim to know what the aura is. She claims to know that whatever it is, it gets wider after the work. She also concedes openly that she does not know whether this enlarging field is the same as the gravitational field that runs through the body — the field she had spent her career invoking as the therapist. She leaves the question for Beck and Hunt to pursue with their instruments.
"Whether this really relates to or equates with the energy referred to earlier, the energy whose principal distinguishing characteristics is its failure to observe the law of inverse squares, which characterizes Newtonian energy transmission. This we do not know at this point, nor do we see any way to determine it in the very near future. But that which we do know is exciting enough. What do we know? What have we found out? We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line."
Ida Rolf, 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on what is and is not yet known
Beck on the body as electrodynamic field
When Beck speaks in his own voice in the Open Universe lectures, his language is less guarded than Hunt's or Ida's. He had been working at the edge of what he called the interface of magic and science for years, building photocell-based detectors of what he called psychic energy, replicating L-field measurements, and traveling to Japan and Tibet with portable encephalographs to record the brainwaves of meditators. By 1974 he was willing to state, as a working conclusion, that the living body simply was an electrodynamic energy field — and that this was the conceptual frame the work required.
"And that is living man, the body, is an electrodynamic energy field in the highest holistic concept. I have described it to you in the laboratory. I have described it to you in my experience."
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Open Universe class, stating the central conclusion of the bioelectronics work
The catalog of names Beck and Hunt tried out for this field is itself revealing. Bioplasmic was the Soviet term — the word the Kirlian-photography researchers used. Auric was the term inherited from older Western traditions of spiritual diagnosis. Electromagnetic was the conservative physics term. Atomic was a borrowing from particle physics. Electrodynamic, which Beck preferred, kept the door open: it pointed at something measurable without forcing the question of which physics it ultimately belonged to. The team did not pretend they had settled the question of what the field was. They were arguing that the field was real enough to instrument.
"Now that I guess is as good an explanation as any for where we are today in consciousness. Okay. What do we do to instrument this and take it out of the realm of magic and see what is actually happening physiologically? And this is where bio instrumentation might have a few valuable contributions to make. About 30 ago, a doctor of physiology who taught in the medical school at Yale University, doctor Burr, Harvey Saxon Burr how many of you are familiar with his work in L Fields? Great."
Bob Beck, 1974 Open Universe class, on the chakra as a possible transducer
Coherence: the laser metaphor and the goal of the work
The single concept Beck offered that most powerfully shaped Ida's later teaching was coherence. Borrowed from laser physics, the term named the difference between light that is scattered, incoherent, and dissipated — and light that is aligned, in phase, and capable of carrying enormous amounts of work per quantum of energy. Hunt began applying the metaphor to the human body almost immediately. The integrated body, in this framing, was not a body with more energy. It was a body whose energy had been brought into coherence. The same total energy, organized differently, did more work.
"Institute. My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities of coherent energy are equal to atomic bomb energy and very large quantities of incoherent energy or dissipated energy is like random trade winds. They may be pleasant if you don't do much with them. I think that one of our goals should be human coherent energy in our quest and not just more energy. We might even solve our food problems. If we had coherent energy, we wouldn't have to feed the fuel as often. It's my opinion that Doctor."
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Healing Arts lecture, applying Beck's coherence concept
The coherence concept solved a problem for Ida. She had been claiming for years that her clients reported more energy after the ten-session series. The naive interpretation — that the body somehow generated more total energy out of nothing — was thermodynamically embarrassing. Coherence offered an alternative: the body produced the same total energy, but the energy was now phase-aligned. Less of it was being wasted in counter-productive muscular activity, in fighting itself, in postural strain. The same caloric input now yielded a more functional output. Hunt's electromyographic measurements supported this directly.
"much more regular after Rolfing. Well, that could be described many, many technical ways, and that is it has to do with a sensory nervous system. We have to judge through our sensory system how much energy is required to do a particular piece of work and modulate the amount of activity of the muscle to that particular job. Here the modulation was very smooth. There was what we call recruitment of other motor units so that fatigue was not as great. I have a feeling, although I can't prove it, that there was a downward shift in the control of the movement. This is a tremendously important one. There are three major upstream sources. Like having a switch, a three way switch on a light, a source of energy. It can be turned on at various places. Ordinarily, when we turn on that switch, we get exactly the same light or energy source at the other end."
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on the smoothness of post-series energy release
Beck on biofeedback and the question of imitation states
Beck's interest in measurement was not limited to fields outside the body. He had been one of the early commercial developers of biofeedback equipment, designing the AlphaMetrix device in the late 1960s and traveling, with portable encephalographs, to record the brainwave patterns of meditators in Asia. His findings raised a question that haunted the consciousness movement of the period — and that Ida, in her own classroom, kept circling around. If the brainwave patterns of advanced meditators could be matched, on the encephalograph, by an ordinary person using biofeedback to train an alpha state, was the trained state actually the meditative state? Or merely its electromagnetic imitation?
"And at least in this part of the world, Joe Camilla was the discoverer or rediscoverer of the fact that brain waves became an objective readout for internal states of human consciousness. Here is a more recent photograph of him at his laboratory at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco. More and then we'll get into what I hope is a far out discussion. Goody. One of the interesting things that was developed, in the way of information in the '19 late nineteen fifties was research done by a group of scientists who backpack a Beckman dynagraph portable encephalograph through the hills of China, Tibet, and Japan, and found that yog masters and Zen masters and Tibetan meditators, etcetera, Independent studies were done of electroencephalography in Zen, electroencephalography with yogs, yogas, etcetera, yogins. They had identical brainwave patterns when they reported their altered states of consciousness such as samadhi, sartori, etcetera. And this raised the question, if a person with biofeedback can be trained to simulate these states of consciousness, will he then have an imitation of an altered state of consciousness such as sartori? And of course a number of instruments, came on the market for home use. I developed the AlphaMetrix device device which we feel is the best and I think you can verify that on a bench, but that's beside the point. And it gave me the opportunity of going around and wiring up the heads of a number of people who had remarkable talents to see what was happening encephalographically."
Bob Beck, 1974 Open Universe class, on biofeedback and the brainwaves of meditators
The question Beck staged for the Open Universe audience was not a small one. If the meditative state and the biofeedback-trained alpha state were electromagnetically identical but phenomenologically different, then the instruments alone could not settle what was happening inside the practitioner. Some additional kind of evidence — perhaps a different kind of measurement, perhaps a different kind of subject report — would be needed. Hunt's laboratory was, in effect, trying to develop exactly that additional evidence for Structural Integration: instruments plus aura readers plus subject reports, all triangulating on what happened during the ten sessions.
The Anechoic Room: Beck and Hunt outside the laboratory
The collaboration between Beck and Hunt extended beyond the formal laboratory. Hunt described, in one of her 1974 lectures, an evening she spent with Beck and two others in the UCLA Anechoic Room — the physics chamber designed to absorb all sound and electromagnetic reflection. The room was supposed to be a baseline measurement environment, electromagnetically dead. What the four of them experienced there was not what the room was supposed to produce. Hunt narrates the episode with characteristic humor, but the implication is serious: the researchers themselves were taking the energy-field claim into territory the instruments could not by themselves cover.
"It flows in waves that are magnified which impinge upon time and space and alter them actually obliterate them. Bob Beck and Emily Conrad and Gary and I went to the anechoic room and I told you about that. This is this room in physics that is supposed to be sort of like no sound. And we got into this room and it had a flat floor on it that was like a trampoline made out of steel wire. Only it wasn't quite as as flexible as a trampoline and it had all these lovely bafflings coming out like this and the reason for this green floor is because the bafflings were coming up like this from the bottom. And we moved around on this trampoline having been up most of the night. All four of us beamed into some atomic stuff that was throwing off our solar system our atmospheric system and we'd been awake. So we were in fine shape to go into an anechoic room. You remember we were going in to hear the energy of a kundalini come up the spine as Emily raised it."
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Open Universe class, on the Anechoic Room experiment with Beck
What is most telling about the episode, for the history of Beck's relation to Ida's work, is who was in the room. Beck the engineer. Hunt the kinesiologist. Conrad the movement teacher and chanter. Each of them brought a different instrument — one electronic, one electromyographic, one bodily — to bear on the question of what happens to a human energy field when ordinary environmental input is removed. Beck did not see his work as confined to circuits. He saw himself as one of several investigators attacking the same question from different angles.
Entropy, negative entropy, and the thermodynamic frame
Beck's vocabulary — coherence, field organization, electrodynamic energy — gave Ida a thermodynamic frame she could use to explain why the work mattered at a planetary scale, not just an individual one. Across the 1974 lectures she returned again and again to the second law: the universe was running down, entropy was increasing, disorder was inevitable. But the integrated body, by becoming more organized, ran in the opposite direction. Each successful ten-session series, in her language, was a small local reversal of entropy. Beck's instruments registered the local reversal as an enlarged, more coherent field.
"Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up."
Ida Rolf, 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on entropy reversal in the integrated body
Ida went further than Beck would have, philosophically. Beck the engineer would not have claimed that his measurements of expanded auras constituted evidence for cosmic entropy reversal. Ida the philosopher of structure was willing to make the leap. The two of them operated, in this sense, in complementary registers: Beck supplied the measurement vocabulary and the instruments, and Ida supplied the metaphysical reach. Each kept the other honest. Beck's circuits prevented Ida's claims from drifting wholly into metaphor; Ida's reach prevented Beck's measurements from collapsing into mere data.
"Hunt is offering seems to say authoritatively that a kind of energy seen by workers as light, as color, felt by workers as something akin to warmth, not heat, but an emotional as well as a physical outgoing warmth, something that turns on as well as turns off, is associated with the increased energy of the human body. When physical myofascial fleshly order is introduced into the random disorder of the average body, the average human body. In other words, as we lessen the entropy of the average body, the disorder that exists in its mass As we lessen that entropy, that disorder begins to disappear, and where we seem to be uncovering the same sort of generalized behavior, the same sort of evolving order in the psychic personality guiding and manifesting its energy as we found manifest in the inanimate universe. To repeat, we find that physical myofascial order reflects in a more vital organized pattern of psychological and, if you like the word, spiritual being. We spoke earlier the fashion in which the energy of this universe seems to be running down."
Ida Rolf, 1974 Healing Arts lecture, summarizing the entropy frame for the work
Connective tissue as the interface to the field
The bridge between Beck's bioelectronics and Ida's hands had to run, conceptually, through the fascia. Ida had built her career on the claim that the connective-tissue web was the organ of structure. Beck's electrodynamic claims required some physical substrate through which the body could exchange energy with its surrounding field. Hunt proposed, in one of the most striking passages of the 1974 lectures, that the fascia was that substrate — the interface between the body's internal electrical activity and the larger fields it lived inside.
"And therefore, I can talk about it as I believe it is. And I'm going to make some statements which I can't back up. But I think in two or three years I'll back them. And one of them is that it is the connective tissue which is the interface between the energy fields of man and other parts of the cosmos. Now that is a big hunt to swallow. I do not think that the energy fields are brought to us by the five senses. I think these are grossly limiting. The very nature of the five senses, the structural nature of the five senses, limits that part of an energy field which can be brought to us. And yes, we do receive information from the five senses. But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds."
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Open Universe class, on fascia as interface
The synthesis Hunt offered was speculative, and she knew it. But it gave the research program a workable hypothesis: if fascia was the interface, then manipulation of fascia should produce measurable changes in the body's coupling to its surrounding field. Beck's instruments could test this. Hunt's electromyography could test the muscular consequences. Aura readers could test the visible field. The various measurements would converge — or not — on a single underlying claim. The 1974 lectures were the public face of this convergence.
What Beck could not measure and Ida could not say
Both Beck and Ida were honest about the limits of what the instrumentation could show. Beck repeatedly admitted, in the Open Universe lectures, that his devices could detect fields, could register voltage gradients, could photograph corona discharges around fingertips — but could not yet bridge to the level of personal experience the integrated body reported. The phenomenology of the work — the flashbacks, the emotional releases, the reports of expanded consciousness during sessions — sat just beyond the reach of his circuits.
"That hormones are in a constant state of emotion and alteration? That electrodynamic and electromagnetic energy changes are occurring constantly which are affecting our body. And yet we try to conceive of the body as static and educated in the same way. And it is not. Our physical senses really tell us very little about our bodies. They tell us that which is on the surface and the outside and that's about all they tell us. And actually we have the capacity we don't have it now, we weren't educated that way. We have the capacity and we have other levels of consciousness to know and experience molecular action inside the body and to know all about it. If we talk about an educated physical body what are we talking about? Are we talking about knowing what is happening in this body, being aware of it, knowing that thought influences not only how it appears and how it looks but its health. In order to experience this level of consciousness and molecular action we have to limit and minimize body ego and body image. We do not reach that level of consciousness in the level of reality which we're commonly working. We have to open this in order to have that capacity to educate ourselves physically. Giving energy, releasing energy is help, a constant flow of it. And when we have so much individuality, so much rigidity of ego, so much rigidity of body image, we do not have ebb and flow of energies. We have a block in energies, a stiffening and a blocking."
Valerie Hunt, 1974 Open Universe class, on what stays outside measurement
Beck, on the engineering side, was equally cautious. He told the Open Universe audience repeatedly that his work was concerned with making magic measurable — with bringing into the territory of instruments phenomena that had previously been the property of mystics and shamans. He did not claim that the instruments captured the phenomena fully. He claimed they captured them well enough to bring them inside the boundaries of science. Ida valued this caution in him. She had spent a lifetime watching people overclaim about the body, and she trusted Beck precisely because he did not.
Coda: what Ida took from Beck
By the time Ida gave her 1976 Advanced Class lectures in Boulder, the vocabulary she had absorbed from Beck and Hunt had become part of her teaching language. She talked about the body as a field operating in fields. She talked about energy added by pressure and energy dissipated by random movement. She talked about collagen as a protein whose chemistry shifted with the energy environment, releasing calcium when energy was added and locking it down when energy was withdrawn. The biochemistry she had learned at Barnard in 1916 had been recast, through Beck's bioelectronics and Hunt's electromyography, into a fully field-theoretic vocabulary.
"the energy which is in that body, those mineral substances will differ. In the case of a young person, those unions may be hydrogen, may be sodium. As a person gets older, these elements change and the mineral unions become calcium. You all know what happens when there gets to be too much calcium. Now, by adding energy to this, you can back this up and you can take some of this calcium and tell it to go somewhere else than to come on in hydrogen and get it to work here and get us a more flexible flexible body. Now I'd like you not to listen to me, but to think about what a miracle this is for you. This is what makes the human being the dominant species of animals because of this ability of change. Because of this ability to voluntarily decide what they want to do and how they want to do it. Are they going to utilize the energy fields around them? I don't know very much about energy. The only thing that doesn't make me feel bad is that I know all the rest of the men on this earth are in the same boat. That we do know. We do know that objects, particularly vital objects, all have fields around them which are resultants of what is going on in the that we relatively know."
Ida Rolf, 1976 Advanced Class, integrating Beck's field language into her own teaching
What Beck gave Ida was not, in the end, a set of proofs. The 1975 study Hunt designed was never completed in the form originally planned, and the aura measurements remained, for the rest of the decade, more demonstration than data. What Beck gave Ida was a vocabulary — coherence, field, transducer, electrodynamic, negative entropy — that let her speak her doctrine in language a 1974 audience could hear. The doctrine itself was older. It went back to her Rockefeller years, to Zurich and Schrödinger, to the long decades when she had worked alone on bodies and watched them reorganize under her hands. But the language Beck brought made the doctrine sound less like art and more like science. That was what Ida wanted from him. That was what he gave.
See also: See also: Beck's full discussion of his FET voltmeter, the photocell oscillator, biofeedback and ESP correlations (UNI_011, UNI_013); Valerie Hunt's full electromyographic findings on smoother post-series energy release (CFHA_03); Hunt's tentative final conclusions on coherent human energy (CFHA_04). UNI_011 ▸UNI_013 ▸UNI_042 ▸UNI_043 ▸UNI_074 ▸CFHA_01 ▸CFHA_03 ▸CFHA_04 ▸UNI_073 ▸UNI_102 ▸76ADV12 ▸76ADV221 ▸76ADV212 ▸RolfB1Side2 ▸