The cosmology she was reaching for
Ida came to the UCLA lectures already in her late seventies, a chemist by training who had spent decades absorbing what physics, general semantics, and biology were telling her about the kind of universe living things actually inhabit. She had read Korzybski. She had sat in on Schrödinger's lectures in Zurich in the late 1920s. She had spent a long career watching the dominant scientific cosmology — what she would call the closed universe, the universe of linear logic, hard boundaries, and reductionism — fail to account for the phenomena she was producing on her tables. The first lecture of the UCLA series, given in September 1974, opens with a long historical account of how Western thinking arrived at its closed cosmology and why the life sciences could not be fitted onto that bed. The audience needed the framing because the rest of what she would say — about fascia as an interface, about energy fields, about disease as the closing of process — depended on it.
"Arthur Kessler who called it that in the beginning, and he characterized it by the phrase, it's the nothing but order. Life is nothing but a group of chemical reactions. The brain is nothing but a computer. This point of view obviously describes a closed universe. A universe defined by hard boundaries designed to exclude. Such thinking automatically limits a world. Tribes accept such a cosmology, you are accepting a closed universe. You are defining a man as a nothing but a closed system. One of the characteristics of this kind of universe was its linearity. The world of Aristotle, who was the grandfather of this universe, Newton was its father, you realize, was a world of logic. And characteristically, the world of logic is a world of linearity. It is a linear, a straight world of straight lines, a linear world. It is understandable understandable that in an attempt to study and define his world, Western man should throw over it a grid of straight lines because in projecting his measure at that time, he could only project lines. Linearity, you realize, probably arose originally as a projection of man himself because man speaks linearly, one word after another. He thinks he tends, at least, to think linearly, one idea after another."
Opening the UCLA series, September 1974, on the inherited closed universe and its limits:
What does it mean to leave a closed universe behind? Ida's answer in the same lecture turns on a specific image — a coffee mug, held up before a light, casting a flat rectangular shadow on the wall. The mug is three-dimensional; you can drink from it, fill it with flowers, hold water in it. The shadow is two-dimensional; it can do none of these things. The shadow is what you get when you take a higher-dimensional reality and project it onto a lower-dimensional surface. This is the metaphor she returns to again and again across the UCLA series. A closed universe is a projection of an open one. It is a map drawn from a territory, and the map mistakes itself for the territory. The error is not in mapping; the error is in confusing dimensionalities. To become a citizen of the more open universe is, in the first instance, to recover the dimensionality that the projection lost.
"A closed universe is a projection of a higher abstraction of an open universe. And like all higher order abstractions, it lacks richness. It lacks the continuity given by the lower experiential order. It is a projection, not an experience."
From the same UCLA lecture, naming the projection relation directly:
The boundary becomes the center
One of the most striking features of Ida's open-universe doctrine is a structural claim about how things are defined. In a closed universe, things are defined by their boundaries — by what they exclude, by where they end. The skin is a boundary. The bones are boundaries. The categories of medical taxonomy — liver, kidney, muscle, nerve — are boundaries. In the open universe she was describing, the operative principle reverses. Things are no longer defined by their boundaries but by the position of their center, by their organizing relationship. This is the move that lets her say, elsewhere in the same series, that the lumbodorsal junction is not merely a region of the spine but a center radiating outward through the fascial planes — that the body is better understood as a centered radiance than as a skin-bounded sack. The cosmological shift and the anatomical shift are the same shift.
"The universe is opening. It's nothing but hard boundaries and disappearing. It's becoming defined by the position of the center rather than by the hard boundaries of margins, borders. And this is characteristic of an open universe."
From the UCLA opening, on the structural signature of the opening universe:
She returns to this point in the tenth and final lecture of the UCLA series, where she comes back to the mug-and-shadow image as her closing argument. By this point the audience has spent ten weeks with the cosmology, and she wants to make sure they leave able to recognize a closed universe and an open one for the rest of their lives. The distinction, in her telling, is not optional or aesthetic. It is the difference between living inside a flattened projection of reality — defended, bounded, reactive — and living inside the multidimensional reality from which that projection was drawn. The body she works on is a body inside that projection. The body she releases into is a body that has been returned to its proper dimensionality. This is what she means by becoming a citizen of the more open universe.
"Why do we want a balance around a vertical line? We want a balance around a vertical line in order that the field of gravity, the great big energy field of gravity, will then lie in parallel with the energy field of the human being, which is now a vertical line, and as it lies in parallel, it supports it. It does not break it down. Now, here's where we stand with reference to structural integration. This is what we think we have. This is what we think we're doing. Now, I think we've already made something of a case for the open universe. I think we've established a certain number of criteria by which you will recognize open universes and closed universes, perhaps for the rest of your life forevermore. You will recognize a closed universe and you will recognize its probable limitations. We've gone over those in the course of the various talks we've had together here. Let me remind you of my introduction and the derivation of our first hour, where in imagination at least you looked at this three-dimensional material solid cylinder, and you saw that whereas in the three-dimensional world this is a mug, it holds coffee, it holds water, it holds flowers, you have a lot of things you can do with it. The minute you make a projection of it, you set a light out here and you project it up here, and what do you get? You get the shadow of quadrilateral, and that shadow can do none of the things that this three-dimensional thing can do."
From the tenth UCLA lecture, returning to the mug-and-shadow image as the series' organizing metaphor:
Life is process, not substance
The closed universe treats life as a thing — a substance, a stuff, a mechanism whose parts can be enumerated and rearranged. The open universe treats life as a process whose determining feature is relationship. This is one of the central reformulations Ida makes in the UCLA series, and it is the move that lets her say what Structural Integration is actually working on. The practitioner is not rearranging stuff. The practitioner is working on the relationships between systems — between the segments of the body, between the body and the gravitational field, between the body and its own history. The work is dimensional, not material. The vocabulary she draws on here is Korzybski's general semantics, which she had absorbed decades earlier and which gave her the language of orders of abstraction and the distinction between map and territory.
"words, life is not a substance, it is a process. And the determinant is relationship."
From the first UCLA lecture, the doctrine stated in two sentences:
The implication for the work was immediate and consequential. If the body is a collection of systems whose behavior is determined by their relationships, then the practitioner's task is not to fix parts but to alter relations. Ida had made this explicit in her Big Sur advanced class the previous year, teaching her senior students that the word 'structure' could not be used without invoking relationship. The two were the same idea under different vocabularies. By the time of the UCLA lectures, she had carried this insight into its cosmological frame — relationship was not just the operative concept for the work, it was the operative concept for the universe the work belonged to. The body that emerged from a properly conducted ten-session series was a body whose relationships had been reorganized. That reorganization was what it meant, in the most literal sense, to become a citizen of the open universe.
"'tology' because 'tology' is the material dimension of that word structure. Structure wherever you use the word structure, the next time you use the word structure, look at it. See whether you aren't always talking about relationship. See whether you can ever talk. Use the word structure and be talking about something other than relationship. And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man. Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according to you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, teaching her senior students the relationship doctrine:
The fascial web as the interface
If life is process and the determinant is relationship, then the body needs an organ capable of holding relationships. In Ida's late teaching, that organ is the fascial web. The fascial web is the continuous connective-tissue body that runs from skin to bone to organ, the system that gives the body its contour and its capacity for distributing stress. It is also, in her UCLA framing, the structure through which the body relates to the energy fields of its environment. This is the claim that places fascia at the cosmological center of her practice. Valerie Hunt, the UCLA electromyographer who had been studying the work's effects on the human energy field, took the platform during the same series and made the claim more explicitly than Ida herself usually did.
"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. The great web of connective tissue which supports us which causes our confirmation which causes the very nature of our functioning which separates tissue from tissue which differentiates us in all senses, which is the most extensive tissue we have in the body, is the weigh in of the energy fields. Rolfing by reorganizing and freeing the body in its primary and most basic receptive and responsive modes. Receptive meaning the energy fields entering and responsive meaning the energy fields being dissipated. I think this makes possible a quality of experience which is open and dynamic. And once it is open, then the mind, the body and the spirit do operate in magnificent symphony. And I think it has to be opened that way. I would even go farther and say that, from my experience and I'm experiencing it right now, I think the opening and this kind of total experiencing someday we will find that it alters the process of mitosis, cell division and rejuvenation. And that'll blow you, blows me."
Valerie Hunt, speaking in the UCLA series, naming fascia as the interface between the body and the energy fields of the cosmos:
Hunt's framing — fascia as the interface between the body and the cosmos — was not exactly Ida's vocabulary. Ida tended to speak more concretely about the fascial web as the organ of structure, the tissue that determined contour, the medium that made plasticity possible. But the two were saying compatible things. The fascial body was the relational organ. It was where the practitioner's hands made contact with the relational reality of the person, and it was where the energetic relations between the person and the gravitational field were either supported or obstructed. In the Healing Arts conference of 1974, Ida made her own version of the claim, framing it in the physical-chemistry language that had been her training. Fascia was a plastic medium; pressure added energy to its bonds; the result was a more resilient, more vitalized body.
"Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Ida's own physical-chemistry account of how the fascial body is changed:
Disease as the closing of process
If health, in this cosmology, is the body's participation in the open universe — its capacity for ongoing relational process, its dimensional fullness, its energetic exchange with the gravitational field — then disease is the inverse. Disease is the closing of process. It is the moment at which the system stops opening and begins defending. Valerie Hunt, again speaking in the UCLA series, makes this point in language that Ida herself would echo: derangement is the closing of the opening process, and if the human is a part of the open universe, then health requires that the human stay open. This is not a moral claim but a structural one. The closed body is a body whose fascial relationships have stiffened, whose energetic exchange with the environment has narrowed, whose dimensional range has collapsed.
"And, if man is a part of this open universe then we have to open up. And the disease is the derangement. We've heard this. It is the closing of the process so that the individ"
From the UCLA series, Hunt naming health as the requirement to stay open:
Hunt drives the same point home in its inverse form a few sentences further on. The opening is what life is; the closing is what disease is. Living things, unlike non-living ones, have the capacity to close part of the open universe — and that capacity, exercised, becomes the structural basis of disease. The claim is sweeping but it is also specific. It identifies the disease state not with any particular tissue or pathogen but with the body's relationship to the process it should be participating in. The fascial body that has gone rigid, the body image that has gone fixed, the cosmological habits that have collapsed into the closed projection — all of these are forms of the same closing.
"And the disease is the derangement. We've heard this. It is the closing of the process so that the individual does not have the process of opening up."
From the UCLA series, the inverse formulation — disease as derangement, the closing of process:
Hunt's framing arrived at the same place Ida's did, by a different route. Hunt came to it through laboratory measurement — the aura widths that expanded from half an inch to four or five inches after a Structural Integration series, the brainwave patterns that shifted, the muscle-firing patterns that became more coherent. Ida came to it through her hands and through the cosmological reading she had absorbed across her career. Both arrived at the same proposition: opening is the work, closing is the disease, and the body that has been properly attended to is a body that has recovered its capacity to remain in process. The reverse, in Ida's own teaching, applies equally to the practitioner. The practitioner who can no longer change cannot do the work.
"And, of course, thank God, they've not only been changing, they've been developing. Actually, you need to be more conscious. I hear a certain amount of complaints going on these days because some of you who are in those older earlier brackets of Rolfing are complaining because we have so many new classes and we keep telling everybody about the difference in the teaching nowadays from the old teaching and so forth. But actually you see if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world we also would be in the garbage pail, I fear. It is this capacity for change and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change that keeps us as a valuable contributor to the culture of today. And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity."
From the 1971-72 mystery tapes, Ida addressing her practitioners about change as a condition of the work:
The vertical and the energetic exchange
How does the body actually open? Ida's answer was always the same and is the operating mechanism of her practice. The body is a plastic medium. It is segmented, with major masses — the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs — connected by myofascial structure. Its segments can be reordered. When they are reordered so that the body's vertical axis substantially coincides with the gravitational vertical, the gravitational field stops breaking the body down and begins supporting it. The body's energy field comes into parallel with the earth's energy field. Energy is added rather than dissipated. This is the technical heart of her cosmology. The opening of the body and the entry into the open universe are the same event, observed from different distances.
"Now the question is, what is back to shape in this context really mean? And the answer is simple and really expected. Back to shape in this context means vertical. Vertical to the surface of the earth, vertical like the burrows of the chestnut, vertical like the force of gravity. Because only when the gravity vertical of the body substantially coincides with the gravity line of the earth can that energy field of the earth reinforce and augment the field of the human body. Then the energy of the earth contributes to the energy of the body. The body becomes vitalized. The flesh becomes resilient. Body functions of all sorts improve, for gravity at this point is the nourishing factor. Gravity is the nourishing medium giving to the energy quotient man gravity a higher value, because the man is more energized. This expresses itself in many changes in behavior patterns. Among them, among them is a different state of consciousness. We usually refer to it as a higher state. We have described the body as a plastic medium. Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, the technical mechanism of the energetic exchange:
The vocabulary of energy fields, of auras, of laser-coherent versus dissipated energy — all of this entered Ida's late teaching through her collaboration with Hunt and the UCLA research group, and through her readings in physics and parapsychology. She was careful to ground these claims in measurable phenomena where she could. The work of the science group, the Kirlian aura measurements, Hunt's electromyography — these were the bridges by which her cosmology was being tested against laboratory results. But underneath the new vocabulary the proposition had been hers from the beginning. The body in proper relationship to gravity was a body that had become an energy gainer rather than an energy loser. The body that gained energy was the body whose entropy was being reversed. The body whose entropy was being reversed was the body that had reentered the open universe.
"And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. 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. Is this is this the work of that other energy, the one that does not manifest obedience to the law of inverse squares, the law that I've called psychic energy the stuff I've called psychic energy."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, on the body as energy gainer and the reversal of entropy:
The body as centered radiance
If the universe is defined by centers rather than boundaries, what does the body look like under that description? In August 1974, in an IPR lecture in New York, Ida walked her advanced students through an answer that took them through the anatomy of the lumbodorsal junction. The twelfth dorsal vertebra, she told them, is the innervation center for everything in the body below the head — digestion, elimination, reproduction, the kidneys, the adrenals. There is nothing within the body that does not have some sort of connection, most of them direct, to that junction. To see the body properly was to see it as a centered radiance, with the lumbodorsal hinge as the center and the fascial planes as the directions of radiation. The skin-bounded sack was the closed-universe projection. The centered radiance was the open-universe reality.
"Well, the point is everything does happen right and about this you all realize that that twelfth rib, the twelfth dorsal vertebra, is the center for the innovation for everything around except your head. You see, it's the innovation for digestive activity, for eliminative activity, for reproductive activity, for the kidneys, for the adrenals, for the spleen, etc, etc. There is nothing within that body that doesn't have some sort of connection directly, most of them directly, some few of them indirectly, that lumbodorsal junction. And this is what is telling you of its importance, aside from the fact that you can feel it. But for all of these things to work, and particularly for the adrenal gland and the kidneys to get appropriate innervation. That lumbar dorsal junction, that twelfth dorsal vertebra, has to be working. When it breaks down everything breaks down including the energy source that's of the adrenals. So now you have a new way of looking at a body. You have a way of looking at it as an extension of that twelfth dorsal area of that luminal dorsal ridge. And I think at this point you are, all of you, very aware of how many ways you can look at these things that walk around on two legs, how many facets there are to these energy centers that are contained within a skin and walking around on two legs. But you see, this will never be a practical addition to cultural information until we can tie it up with that old measurement thing that keep popping up. You have to be able to measure these things before it goes into the textbooks. So once again, we're up against it. We need money. Let's not worry about it this morning."
From an August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida walking advanced students through the body as centered radiance:
She wanted her practitioners to carry this picture in their hands as they worked. The closed-universe body — bounded by skin, organized by skeleton, populated by labeled organs — was the anatomy of the textbook and the medical school. The open-universe body was something the practitioner had to learn to feel. It required the kind of perception that Ron Thompson's dissection photographs had been preparing the advanced students for: a sense of the fascial web as a continuous spider-web architecture in which every plane communicated with every other. The advanced classes of 1973-1976 were, in large part, an attempt to teach this perception. The cosmology was not abstract; it was what the experienced practitioner's hands had been confirming for years.
"hours in order to present tomorrow a program of pictures which were taken by Ron Thompson in this dissection laboratory. Where you will be able to see what you get on the slab on the table apparently has very little relation to the pictures in the anatomy book. Feel that But if you look at these pictures, these Ron Thompson has taken with absolute inspiration of the dissection which they did, you will get this understanding of this related spider web thing so that you will begin to understand what your job is as you get into the advanced work in field. Nothing wrong with what you're being taught in the elementary work. You have to start somewhere. You can't explain life to a five year old in terms of the same symbols that you use to a 45 year old. He doesn't understand them. And the same is true as you begin to get into an understanding of what constitutes a body. You've got to start there. But in order to get a more sophisticated, advanced, shall I say control of the body body is what I really mean. You have to then work your way out of it, beginning to see the actual realities as they emerge. Now those old anatomy boys that worked in the fourteenth century and the fifteenth century and so forth were mighty smart babies and I can't understand how just cannot imagine how they got the kind of understanding that they put into this old anatomy books."
From the 1976 advanced class, on the perceptual demand the work makes of its practitioners:
Education for the open universe
The UCLA Open Universe Class was titled, deliberately, with an educational frame. Ida was not lecturing to a self-help audience; she was lecturing in a university extension program, and the question on the table was what an education appropriate to the cosmology she was describing would look like. Her co-presenter Marilyn Ferguson — and Valerie Hunt, and others in the rotation — spoke directly to this question. The current educational system, Hunt argued in her own lecture in the series, was a system that trained people to be five-sense-oriented, three-dimensional, materially closed. It produced citizens of the closed universe. To produce citizens of the more open universe required educational flexibility — in ego structure, in body image, in the willingness to lower the ego's threshold and admit other orders of knowing.
Education and open universe demands flexibility and this I think we have not had flexibility in our ego structure our selfhood flexibility in our body image We know that if we take a guided trip, if we go see Pythagoras or Saint Thomas Aquinas or Carl Jung in a trip we have to lower the ego. There is ab"
From the UCLA Open Universe Class, on what an education adequate to the open universe would require:
The body image was not an incidental item on this list. In Hunt's framing — and in Ida's, when she addressed the question — the body image was central to the whole question of openness. A rigid body image produced a rigid citizen. The fact that a body's shape could change within minutes under a practitioner's hands was, for Hunt, a direct assault on one of the most entrenched cultural assumptions of the closed universe: that bodies do not change except by aging. The cultural reach of the work, in this reading, was not in its effect on backs and shoulders but in its effect on what the recipient now believed was possible. The closed body image was a closed-universe map. Releasing the body released the map.
"And it seems strange that we go through all these kinds of procedures but we never really take a look at self. And Sess says the secrets of man's capacity lie within himself. The secrets of the universe lie within man himself also. And the secret of an open man in an open universe lie within man. And it lies within then new concepts of man which provide new kinds of experiences for man. And this means for you and me also. So we'd have to say that the open man in the open universe has many levels of consciousness and we've built our personal world on a very, very limited part of this and we've built it through our educational system. I think the problem of education has been our vision of man, not in our goals. I think our goals are excellent. But in our vision of man and what is his potential has been our faults. And if we change that, our vision of man, then it is impossible to keep the same education that we've had. It's impossible. I said I wasn't going say anything about reading, writing, or arithmetic. These are tools for thought, for knowing, and for conceptualizing, and they are important. But they are important in a linear, real world of problem solving."
From the UCLA series, Hunt arguing that the educational problem is a problem of the underlying picture of the human:
What the citizen actually experiences
It is one thing to describe the cosmology in the lecture hall. It is another thing to register what the body itself notices when the work has done what it can do. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, one of Ida's senior students described an experience he had after his seventh hour — waking in the middle of the night with his whole body washed in a kind of multidimensional perception, sensations carrying images, images carrying sensations, what the mystics had meant by their bodily experiences. He named the cosmological reading of it directly: when the body has been changed so that there is flow where there had been blockage, the body's range of experience expands. The body becomes capable of more dimensions. This was what the cosmological frame had been pointing toward all along.
"Let me let me tell you what I'm trying to get at. I'll tell you in terms of an experience. I think it was after my seventh hour. I have this written in my diary, I'm pretty sure it's after the seventh hour, overall think maybe a month afterwards. I woke up in the middle of the night, and my body was completely awash in the kind of thing that I only experienced once way back with acid in which there was sensation, there was symphesthesia, there were images. It was like smelling colors and the whole thing. I understood them the first time about what the mystics were talking about when they were talking about essentially a bodily experience. These were not out of the body experiences. The mystical experiences were precisely in the body. And to me, the thing that came out of that experience was the realization that at some level, when you change the structure of the body so that you have flow where there is more sensation, you are also increasing a kind of imagery in the body. That the more the body feels, the more you begin to think actually with the body. And that I would have the experience and I remember another time, Rolfing, of of sensation entering into an area, and there were images riding on that sensation. And you see, you're getting into a multidimensional universe, more and more multidimensional. Basically, our body is a three-dimensional reality. And when you get a two dimensional reality, it doesn't seem real. It doesn't seem significant to us because or it has no meaning to it. I think a lot of times what happens to a lot of people is they put everything in the same pause pod."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a senior student reporting a multidimensional bodily experience after his seventh hour:
What is described in such accounts is not exotic. It is what Ida's whole cosmological argument had predicted. If the closed universe is a projection of the open one — if dimensions are lost in the projection — then the body that has been returned to its proper dimensionality regains access to experience that had been flattened away. The mystics had been describing this; the laboratory measurements were beginning to confirm it; the practitioners felt it under their hands. Ida's contribution was not to invent the phenomenon but to give it a coherent description in which the bodywork, the cosmology, and the experiential payoff were the same description seen from different angles.
"I think even then from a cellular level, become a part of the total environment, a part of the open universe. And I think what it does to us in experience is we become aware of our awarenesses. We become conscious of our consciousnesses. And that is different than becoming aware or becoming conscious. Rolling is not done to you. You allow something to happen in your body. It progresses as it has progressed with me, and it makes it possible for you to grow. I think it was the beginning opening for me. The rolfar provides a physical, a spiritual and a mind energy to us in an ordered way so that we in turn can order ourselves. I think we allow the energies to flow, our body will organize a really true gestalt. And I have just one other statement and that is I have one conclusion about process. I have talked about process tonight and shared with you a process of my opening. And if if our quest really is for what is the meaning of life and for a broader capacity to live that meaning, then we are concerned with process. We are not concerned with a thing. I think too many times we look for a thing or a gimmick. We're concerned with a process, a process that makes it possible, to become a part of this open universe. And I only hope that what I have brought to you tonight in terms of my process will be helpful to you to look at your process and to, in a way, reevaluate your quest, redirect your energies so that you revitalize, are more successful. I can tell you what the meaning is in my life, that is I want to live it openly and spontaneously in an open universe and I want to share it with other people and I want to contribute and validate to the concept of these energies for all. Thank you."
From the UCLA series, Hunt summarizing what the opening of the body actually makes possible:
Coda: opening, not open
In the final lecture of the UCLA series, Ida named a small but consequential preference. She preferred 'opening' to 'open.' The universe was not a static condition that the citizen either inhabited or did not. It was a process, an opening, in which the citizen participated. The work of becoming a citizen of the more open universe was never finished. It was the work of remaining in process — of continuing to soften, to feel, to relate, to receive — against the constant cultural and physiological pressure toward closure. The closed body image, the closed institutional cosmology, the closed analytic habits of the inherited science — all of these would always be available, always ready to reabsorb the citizen back into the projection. The work was to stay in the dimensional reality from which the projection had been drawn.
"Oh, this requires a real smart girl, much smarter than I am, much smarter than I am. Go ahead. Anyway, first of all, let me realize with you that we, as far as I know, have never defined structural integration. I know thank you, Bob. I know perfectly well that many of you in the audience here know about structural integration and have experienced it. I'll leave it there. You have experienced it, and so in theory you know. But over and over again, the story comes up, well, so and so asked me what structural integration is, and I didn't know how to And as you know, our title here is Structural Integration and the Opening Universe. I prefer opening to open. I think you'll understand why before I stop speaking. So let's take a look at this structural integration. What is structural integration? I don't like that word is, and I'm sure Mrs. Longstreet doesn't like to hear me using it."
From the tenth UCLA lecture, Ida stating her preference for the word 'opening' over 'open':
The preference for 'opening' was characteristic. Ida had spent forty years revising her own teaching — adding hours to the recipe, refining the advanced work, recasting her vocabulary as new disciplines (general semantics, energy-field research, tensegrity) became available to her. She did not think her own description of the work had reached its final form, and she did not expect anyone else's to. The open universe was a universe in which descriptions kept opening too. To become a citizen of it was not to arrive at a settled understanding but to remain in the relational process by which understanding kept being remade. The body was where this happened most directly, because the body was where the fascial web held the citizen's relationship to the gravitational field in tangible, alterable form. But the body was only the most direct version of the cosmological move. The universe was opening. The citizen, if she stayed in process, opened with it.
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt and the Open Universe lecture series, UCLA, autumn 1974 — additional passages on closed and open universes, the role of fascia in energy-field reception, and the educational implications of the cosmology are scattered across UNI_011, UNI_012, UNI_021, UNI_032, UNI_041, UNI_042, UNI_054, UNI_062, UNI_064, UNI_072, UNI_073, and UNI_102; UNI_021 carries an extended introduction by Hunt locating the educational frame, and UNI_032 includes the testimony of a colleague linking the work to the microcosm-macrocosm tradition. UNI_011 ▸UNI_012 ▸UNI_021 ▸UNI_032 ▸UNI_041 ▸UNI_042 ▸UNI_054 ▸UNI_062 ▸UNI_064 ▸UNI_072 ▸UNI_073 ▸UNI_102 ▸
See also: See also: the September 1974 Healing Arts conference at the Center for the Healing Arts, Los Angeles — Ida's most extended single account of the energetic and thermodynamic claims supporting her open-universe cosmology, with parallel presentations by Hunt and others. CFHA_01 ▸CFHA_02 ▸CFHA_03 ▸CFHA_04 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder and 1976 advanced classes — Ida's late teaching to senior practitioners, where the cosmological frame was being translated into refinements of the recipe and of advanced perception. T1SB ▸B2T8SA ▸B3T1SB ▸B3T11SA ▸76ADV11 ▸76ADV211 ▸76ADV222 ▸76ADV281 ▸