Bois, Longstreet, and the line of descent
The link from Korzybski to Ida did not come direct. It came through Samuel Bois, a Quebec-born former Jesuit who had become one of the principal developers of general semantics after Korzybski's death in 1950, and through Ethel Longstreet, a Los Angeles teacher of general semantics who studied with Bois and who became Ida's friend and intellectual companion. In the Open Universe class of 1974, taught at UCLA under the auspices of Valerie Hunt's department, Longstreet introduces Bois by name and explains how the lineage reached Ida. The picture that emerges is of a small, dedicated circle: Bois carrying Korzybski's project forward into what he called epistemics, Longstreet teaching the work to anyone in Los Angeles who would listen, and Ida absorbing it through both written work and personal friendship. The introduction Longstreet offers, in the third Open Universe lecture, is the cleanest single statement of how the practice and the philosophy met.
"I know that Doctor. Rolfe, in her study with Doctor. Sam Bois, who has developed the work Epistemics following Alfred Korczewski, became a friend of Ida Rolfs. And she attributes a good deal of her approaches to the work of Rolfing to this work."
Longstreet, lecturing in the 1974 Open Universe class, names the line of descent that connects Ida to Korzybski:
Longstreet's standing in this circle was not casual. In a separate Open Universe lecture, the host introduces her as someone who had taught general semantics to hundreds of Angelenos over many years, who had moved with the field as it shifted from Korzybski's original formulations into Bois's epistemics, and who had stayed at the leading edge as the work absorbed cybernetics, systems theory, and Eastern thought. Ida, who was almost exactly Longstreet's contemporary and equally restless, found in her a peer. The mutual respect was real enough that the introduction frames Longstreet's continuing presence as a gift not just to the class but to the broader project of which Structural Integration was a part.
"hundreds and hundreds of people in Los Angeles in a very quiet way with this discipline. The most interesting thing about her to me is that she didn't stop with the movement. That is, as Korzybski began to recede after his death as a force and a continuing innovator, she followed then the people who took his notions further than he did. And all the thinkers that moved in where he was and made their contribution around the edge, she was aware of she was pushing out all the time the edges of what general semantics meant and what it could mean. I'm not even sure you use the term general semantics anymore, do you Ethel? What are you talking about now? Epistemics, epistemology. Epistemics, which has become a kind of marvelous word showing them the most fulfilled notion in our time of where this original thing that Corsuch began with has gone. And so, you have here, I think, a woman who has demonstrated a multi level life in this community. She's a researcher. She's a person who helps others. She's a lecturer. She deals with groups in very direct and interactive ways."
The host of the 1974 class explains who Longstreet is, and what she has carried forward:
The three formulations
Korzybski's general semantics rests on a small number of formulations that look deceptively simple. Longstreet, in the 1974 Open Universe lecture, lists them in sequence: the map is not the territory, the map does not represent all of the territory, and the map is not a map of the territory alone but of the mapper in interaction with it. The first formulation is the famous one; the third is the one that matters most for a practice like Structural Integration. It says that whatever a practitioner sees in a body, whatever description she offers, is partly a function of her own nervous system meeting that body — never a neutral readout of what is actually there. For Ida, who spent her advanced classes insisting that students learn to see before they learn to name, this was foundational doctrine, even when she did not pause to cite it.
"make, the map is not the territory, or the word is not the thing. The map does not represent all the territory. And three, the map is not a map of a territory, but a map of the mapper himself, an interaction with the territory."
Longstreet states the three core formulations of general semantics, with the third — the one that implicates the observer — given full weight:
Longstreet then turns the formulations over and shows their hidden cost. The verb to be — is — is itself a trap. To say that something is anything at all is already to commit a kind of semantic violence: it freezes a process into a thing, it identifies a word with a referent that it never fully captured. Longstreet calls this a trap in the grammar or the geography of language, and the metaphor is exact. The grammar we inherit shapes what we can think, the way the geography of a landscape shapes where we can walk. Ida used this in her teaching constantly, though usually without the technical apparatus: when she told students not to ask what is the cause of this, she was making a Korzybskian point about how the grammar of cause-and-effect freezes living systems into discrete things.
"The map does not represent all the territory. Whatever I say it is, it is not. The word is not the thing. And again, I'm using the verb to be, is, and that in itself becomes a trap. A trap in the grammar or the geography of language. The map does not represent all the territory. And the third notion, the map is not a map of the territory, but a map of the mapper himself in interaction with the territory."
Longstreet presses the formulation further, into the trap built into the verb to be itself:
The silent level
If the map is not the territory, then the territory has to be located somewhere prior to language. Korzybski called this the silent level: the level at which life actually proceeds, the level beneath what we can say about it. Digestion happens at the silent level; the heart beats at the silent level; the body's response to a practitioner's hands occurs at the silent level. Words about it come afterward, at a different order of abstraction, and they never quite catch up. In her 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida walked her students through this idea by way of Korzybski directly, attributing it to him by name and using it to explain why the verbal description of the work was always going to fall short of what the hands actually do. The teaching beat is clean: language is downstream of life, not the other way around.
"that the territory, the fact, the experience was not the words that people used to describe the experience. And he said that in communication there are many levels. That the basic level, the level that keeps every one of you people going is the silent level. The level that goes on without noise, without words, without direction on your heart. It is the silent level. It is the level where the energy does its own thing in its own way."
Ida, lecturing in the 1976 advanced class, brings Korzybski's silent level into the practitioner's frame:
Longstreet, in her own teaching, made the same point with the philosophical apparatus more visible. She quoted Korzybski's formulation directly — whatever happens, happens at the silent level — and added that whatever happens is different in existential quality and richer in complexity than whatever we can say about it. The second clause is the operative one. The silent level is not just where life happens prior to language; it is where life is more itself than language could ever be. Practitioners working with their hands on connective tissue are in the silent level by virtue of the work itself. Their job is not to translate the silent level into reportage but to act on it directly, leaving the words for afterward and accepting that the words will always be partial.
"Whatever happens, happens at the silent level. Whatever happens is different in existential quality and richer in complexity than whatever we can say about it."
Longstreet recites Korzybski's formulation in its fullest version, with the second clause that names the silent level as richer than any description:
The semantic transactor
Korzybski's other major formulation was a picture of what a human being actually is. Where the older Aristotelian tradition defined the human as a rational animal — an animal plus reasoning — Korzybski refused the additive picture. A human, he argued, is not an animal with extra reflexiveness bolted on; a human is structurally a different kind of thing. Longstreet, in the 1974 Open Universe class, called this the semantic transactor model. The phrase is awkward in English, but the point is precise: a human is a being who lives in continuous transaction with language, environment, history, and feeling, and who cannot be decomposed back into animal plus mind without losing what made the human a human. This was the picture of the person Ida inherited and that her practice presupposed.
"Humans are not animals plus reflexiveness. Humans can be seen as more than attempts to make some kind of up to date order or a model of a semantic transactor, which is what Waugh and Kurzepsie call a human."
Longstreet names the alternative picture of the human that Korzybski and Bois proposed:
Longstreet's full diagram of the semantic transactor, presented in the same class, listed at least seven dimensions in which any human is always operating: electrochemical activity in the nervous system, motoric activity in the muscles and tendons, feelings and motivations, language and thought, a physical environment, a cultural environment, and a temporal arc from past to anticipated future. Each dimension is real; none of them is the person. The diagram is an attempt to describe what cannot be drawn — a multidimensional process — using a two-dimensional sketch. Longstreet was careful to insist that the model was not the man, but for practitioners trying to understand why structural work changes more than tissue, the seven dimensions gave a vocabulary for what the work could be reaching.
"Now with biofeedback, this is becoming extremely important. At one time we felt that we had no awareness of what was going on in our nervous system except as the machines were able to detect them. Now we're beginning to know a great deal more. This was done many, many years ago. One dimension of the model of a semantic transactor are our X activities, our electrochemical activities, our glandular activities, activities, our our hormonal hormonal activities, activities. All having to do with what is going on in our nervous system. The second dimension of this particular model are A activities, which the work of Adelaide are self moving, motoric, muscular, heart beating, circulation, tendons, all these having to do with this dimension, A activities. Then our B activities, our feelings, our purposes, our motivations, our drives, our ethics. Lastly, our C activities. Thinking, talking, writing, concerning language. In our Western culture, we have mostly paid attention to are C activities. Language, talking, the left side of our brain according to Onsi. These four dimensions are always in some environment, a physical environment and a cultural environment. Always with a past. This past, to make more sense, should be seen as going back years and years and years. We could name this past 1970, 'sixty, 'fifty, 'forty. This again, gross diagram to point towards something. And an anticipated future. These, at least seven dimensions, are described this way. A man or a human may be described as a thinking, feeling, self moving, electrochemical organism in continuous transaction with a space, time, and environment. A human may be described as a thinking, feeling, self moving electrochemical organism in continuous transaction with the space, time, environment. Although this is chopped up in dimensions, each of us functions as a whole. And nothing that is said here relates directly to what goes on. We are much more than any diagram. Not to confuse what we say with the process human. Another existential order altogether. I am not the accumulation of this."
Longstreet describes the seven dimensions of the semantic transactor model, dimension by dimension:
Korzybski's word for the unique capacity that makes humans human was time-binding — the ability to absorb knowledge across generations, to inherit not only biology but the accumulated activity of every prior human. Longstreet returned to this idea in the 1974 class, connecting it to Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere — that thin envelope of human enterprise wrapped around the earth. The image is grand, and the point is that the human is not stranded; the human inherits. Ida, walking her students through what gravity and connective tissue do to a body, was working with the somatic counterpart of this idea. The body too is a time-binder: it carries the deposit of every prior posture, every adapted strain, every generation's habits. When the practitioner works, she works on a structure that is partly the patient and partly the inheritance.
"Because as we are right now time binders of forty thousand years, we have with the special unique quality of being human, develop the kind of being in the world, we cannot forget what we know, how we learned it, and our humanness. We have been able to time bind all knowings of the past into what Doctor. Keppe presented last week, to the noosphere of Chardin, Thayarte Chardin. That particular thin envelope enveloping the earth, which is made up of all human knowings, all human enterprise, all human projects. It is as material as the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere, which envelops the earth. It reminds me of what Alan Watts said, not we come into the world, but we come out of the world. We come out of this world. We are the emergence from this world, as much a part of what is going on as any animal, plant, or whatever, even plastic. To that early man, all he had were his senses. Eye, ear, muscles, joints, tendons, etcetera. And he found himself someplace he didn't know what. And as time went on, he had experiences. I can't assume they were anything like ours. Our experience had already been fed by all the information we have. We have to look. We have to. We still do have to learn to see."
Longstreet, in the 1974 Open Universe class, describes Korzybski's idea of time-binding and connects it to Teilhard de Chardin:
Ida names Korzybski in the classroom
It is one thing to know that a teacher's framework comes from a particular philosophical tradition; it is another to hear her name it. In the 1976 advanced class, Ida did. Standing in front of practitioners she was training to see bodies as patterns rather than as anatomy-textbook diagrams, she paused and reached for Korzybski explicitly. She introduced him in her own way — as a Russian engineer, though he was actually Polish, who had come to the United States and begun looking at words and verbalisms — and she used him to explain the gap she was trying to teach her students to recognize between an experience and the words used to describe it. The passage is striking because it shows Ida doing what Longstreet did in the Open Universe class but inside her own technical training, where the audience was practitioners learning to use their hands.
"Because it goes against every method of teaching that you have ever been subjected to since you were five years old. Nobody ever taught you to look at the experience before. They taught you to look at the symbol of the experience, at the abstract of the experience. Now, somewhere down through this class, the day will come when I will start talking about general semantics. Maybe I should do it right now. And I should call to your attention that there was a Russian engineer who came from Polish, I guess he was. Anyway, he came from that general area, and he came over here. And he began looking at words, looking at verbalisms. And he suddenly saw what I was trying to tell this gentleman here this morning. He suddenly saw that the territory, the fact, the experience was not the words that people used to describe the experience. And he said that in communication there are many levels. That the basic level, the level that keeps every one of you people going is the silent level. The level that goes on without noise, without words, without direction on your heart. It is the silent level. It is the level where the energy does its own thing in its own way. And then human beings, being the funny animals they are, they're not content. They've got to make a noise about it."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida turns from anatomy to general semantics, naming Korzybski directly:
Ida's reason for citing Korzybski to advanced students was practical. She was teaching them not to ask the wrong question. In particular, she was teaching them not to ask what is the cause of this. In the same 1976 class, returning to the theme several lectures later, she invoked Bois directly — the little Frenchman, as she called him affectionately, who had begun as a Jesuit priest and ended as one of the most readable writers in general semantics. Ida regretted that students outside her direct guidance would still slip into the cause-effect grammar that Korzybski had spent his career trying to expose. The slip was not innocent. It is the grammar that turns a living process into a thing, and a thing is something the work cannot reach. The work needs the process.
"As for example, when you get reflexes to the pituitary gland or the fourth ventricle or something of this sort that has gone askew whose job it is to control our whole system. When you get reflexes which allow you to reach in to get better adrenal Now I'm sorry that most of you get out from under my guiding hand, and I can't give you merry help when I hear you during the rest of the day saying, what is the cause of this? There's no answer to that question. Some of you may have known, I doubt it though, of a very delightful little Frenchman who lived and worked in Montreal, at any rate, French Canada, who was very much interested in general semantics. His name was Bois. He had started in life as a Jesuit priest and he had gotten involved in some of the labor disputes, political labor disputes, where he had been something of a radical. And he had been called on the carpet by Rome, thus himself he had resigned from the Jesuit priests. Being still basically and essentially a teacher of humans, became interested in general semantics. He's a great friend of Placzynski. He has written some of the best of the books journals of all, the most readable books on journals. And finally, he was a man who in his youth had had tuberculosis."
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, links the prohibition against asking for causes to her friendship with Bois:
Structure as relationship, not thing
The doctrinal payoff of all this, for Ida, was a particular way of using the word structure. In Korzybski's framework, certain words operate at higher levels of abstraction than others, and structure is one of them. Structure is never a thing; structure is always a relationship between things. Ida's 1973 Big Sur advanced class made this point with unusual directness, attributing it to Korzybski's system and using it to redefine what students should think they were working on. They were not working on muscles, or fascia, or bones — at least not as discrete objects. They were working on the relationships among those things, the way one part sits beside another in space. Structural Integration's whole name encodes the doctrine: integration of structures, meaning the ordering of relationships.
"what do we mean by structure, what do we think of when we think of structure. In other words, let's learn a little meditation on structure. Well, in the first place structure always means relationship. Structure, as you recognize, is used in many levels. It's used in theory, it's used in metaphor, it's used in discussing facts and their relationship and so forth, but never is it used except as it involves relationship. Structure is one of those what Koczybski's system calls a fourth area word. It deals with relationships as causes, not specific material situations. They're material and they are specific, but only in a sense of relationship. And of course, if you are going to look at what you're seeing, you'll see a relationship in everything you look at, if this is what you're looking for. So we have to start looking at this whole business of relationship and what are we relating."
In an early-1970s lecture, Ida makes the link from Korzybski's levels of abstraction directly to her use of the word structure:
Ida hammered the point again in the 1973 Big Sur class. Every time you use the word structure, she told her students, look at it; see whether you are not always talking about relationship. The injunction was not philological but practical. Practitioners who think of structure as a thing — as the shape of a particular muscle, or the angle of a particular joint — will work on bodies as collections of parts. Practitioners who think of structure as relationship will work on the way parts stand to each other, which is a different intervention entirely. The Korzybskian frame told her why the second approach was correct: structure, as a fourth-area word, is constitutively about relationship. There is no other thing it could be.
"'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. You get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole. If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body which might be doing reasonably well, you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going and the answer is you don't feel so well."
Ida, in the 1973 Big Sur class, presses the structure-as-relationship doctrine into the practitioners' working vocabulary:
The structural reframe had a cost. It meant that conventional anatomical description, the kind students had absorbed in textbooks, did not get them where they needed to go. A body is not what comes out of an anatomy book; an anatomy book is not what comes out of a body. Ida pressed this point especially hard with practitioners who arrived already trained in medical or chiropractic systems, where the part-by-part decomposition of the body had been drilled in for years. To see a body as Korzybski would have wanted them to see it — as a set of relationships, as a process, as an event at the silent level — required unlearning much of what they thought they knew. This is why, in the 1973 class, Ida warned her students that what they were learning would feel like it ran against every method of teaching they had been subjected to since childhood.
Bachelard, the epistemological profile, and stages of knowing
Bois had not stopped at Korzybski. He drew on the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who had developed what he called the epistemological profile — a description of the stages at which a person can know something, ranging from a primitive direct it-is-cold response, through classifying and categorizing, into the relational stage of the modern scientific mind, and beyond into intuition. Longstreet taught this profile in the Open Universe class, presenting it as the most useful framework she knew for evaluating how people think. Ida adopted it. In her own 1973 Big Sur class she walked through the stages, attributing them to a Frenchman friend of Korzybski's, and used them to explain why students at different developmental levels could not hear each other.
"Now, don't want to take in his general semantics was to apply principles of engineering to ways of thinking. He took what he saw, I mean he took as much as he saw of the revolution that started in the early twentieth century. He took that and started to think about the way people thought and the levels of mental operation to which they went. And he came up with a very interesting what he came out with was a formulation which I think if I give you at this time, you may find useful in transferring to your way of thinking about our particular problems. This Frenchman looked at life and what he saw and what he heard and he came to the recognition that there were various levels of looking, of what you feel and what because you feel it, you say it is. And this is the way primitive people react. And I don't cold. Usually arise from the fact that they have outgrown the situation. True with anything. The marriage is up and down the line. And then they project onto the situation which they have outgrown all kinds of emotional negativities. Going back to their first element, their first classification, not only do they project onto that, their emotional responses, but more than that they say that this is so. Ideas conveyed by words are linear. The life is much more complicated than that. Now so let's go back and look again at this fourth area. It is now. And still there are big areas of our exploration I'll take you from that fifth area and show you how when you are in this area of intuition you say, I know it is so. Now you've gone around the spiral and you're back right on top of the first hole. I know it is so. That little girl knew that water was cold. It was cold. You get a bright idea coming from God knows where and you say, I know know it's so. My intuition tells me it's so. And you're really willing to go screaming higher and higher, find them, but you know it's so. Well, maybe it is, maybe it is."
In the 1973 Big Sur class, Ida walks her students through Bachelard's stages of knowing as Bois had passed them on:
Longstreet developed the profile more fully. In her own teaching, she described stage one as the undelayed reaction — the primitive, ruthless, me-and-what-I-want response — and stage two as the classifying stage, where things are named, reified, and made special. The Eskimo with forty words for snow lives in fine discrimination at stage two; the person who has not named a feeling cannot yet attend to it. Most of Western culture, Longstreet argued, was stuck at stage two: heavy on classification, light on what comes after. The stages beyond — the relational, the intuitive — are where the new century's work was supposed to happen. Ida placed Structural Integration squarely in those later stages.
"We can see the same development in the life of a child, the very young child who only is aware of his or herself and their needs. So Doctor. Boyle has a term for that, Me cookie. Me and what I want. It can be me cookie, me drink, me money, and nothing else is in my awareness. The ruthless ones, the ones who walk all over others, the one ones who jump right in, The ones who just smash all over everything. Not because they are cruel necessarily. They manifest their behavior in cruelty, but they are of this breed. Boyle calls them a breed, an earlier breed of human. And has he's been criticized for that? This man or woman at stage one talks at stage two. It's called the classifying stage. Classifying or categorizing. I name something, and then I reify it. I make it special. I notice that somebody does something. I say, oh, he has ability. Then ability becomes a thing. I say it either this or it is either that. If it is not in the category, it doesn't exist. If I can name it, I know what it is. If I feel something stirrings and I have not yet named it, likely I won't pay attention to it. And different languages have different ways of naming. Usually, we have a fine discrimination in language where the values in that particular area are extremely important. A very good example, would be 40 names or 40 words to describe snow for an Eskimo. Where snow is very important and the variations in snow can mean survival, people finally discriminate in the way they name things. When we have very few words for something or we haven't even named it, we can't even pay attention to it. Until we have a theory for something, likely we don't pay attention to it. Only in these very, very current times are we beginning to pay attention to the stirrings, the nonverbal side levels of our experience and paying attention to it."
Longstreet, in the 1974 Open Universe class, lays out the first two stages of the epistemological profile:
The deeper move in the profile is from stage three to stage four — from a classifying mind to a relational mind. Ida used this transition explicitly in her 1976 advanced class to explain why scientific funding for the work was so difficult to secure. The boys and girls who hand out the money, she said, were living at stage three: classifiers, categorizers. She and her students were trying to operate at stage four, where relationship rather than category is the determinant. The two stages could not hear each other. The passage is a striking instance of the philosophy doing real practical work — explaining a frustration in research funding by reference to a developmental theory of thought that Ida had absorbed from Bois through Longstreet.
"reality on that fifth area. And you can't talk to a third area person and have them get reality on the fourth area. Now this is part of our trouble because we are living in that fourth area and most of the boys and girls that hand out the money for scientific projects are living in the third area and they can't hear us. You see here's some more that you have to just put where you can look at it in terms of using it to classify people's thinking where these people are. The funny part of it is they all have faces, they all have hair, they all have arms, they all have legs. Somehow they don't have anything else in common. Have commonnesses in the material world, but they don't have commonnesses in the psychological world. Oh, thank you. I think you're trying to shut me up and I think this is a good idea. Pretty psychic. Synchronicity, Okay, so in view of the fact that we have a model, let's call this off."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida uses the epistemological profile to diagnose a real practical problem:
What Bois saw that practitioners need
Bois is the under-recognized figure in this story. Where Korzybski supplied the formulations, Bois carried them forward into something Ida could use. In the 1976 advanced class, Ida described Bois with affection: he had begun as a Jesuit priest in Quebec, become involved in labor disputes that put him on the wrong side of Rome, and left the priesthood to become a teacher of general semantics in Montreal. He stayed in close friendship with Korzybski and, by Ida's estimation, produced some of the most readable books in the field. The friendship was not abstract. In the 1975 Boulder class, Ida recalled Bois personally, describing one of his teaching methods — asking students to feel the seat of their pants as a way of getting them out of mental abstraction and back into the body.
"Because by this time, we're getting so near the edge of metaphysics. But why is it that a balanced body gives you pleasure, you relax as you look at a balanced body. Now feel into yourself at what I'm saying. Feel yourself looking at a balanced body and feel how you relax in your pelvis you relax. Lots of other people use this recognition in various ways. I remember dear old Sam Bois, who was one of the fathers of General Semantics. And his way of getting this used to be used to be to say, feel the seat of your pants. Feel the seat of your pants and see what you do with it."
In the 1975 Boulder class, Ida remembers Bois personally and recalls one of his teaching gestures:
Bois's word for the line of work he carried forward from Korzybski was epistemics — a term Longstreet repeatedly used, often glossing it as the most fulfilled version of where Korzybski's original ideas had gone. Where general semantics had focused on language and its discontents, epistemics broadened to include the whole apparatus by which a human being knows anything at all: perception, language, the body, the cultural and temporal envelope. This was the broader frame in which Ida operated. The diagnosis was that humans had built fine mental tools for one stage of knowing but had not yet developed the tools for the next stage. Structural Integration, in this framing, was a partial answer — a way of working on the body that recognized the body as part of the apparatus of knowing rather than as a vehicle separate from it.
"As I I I haven't been wrong personally, but as I hear her, as I read the little booklet on structure integration, as I hear what she says, her approach is towards the whole functioning person with body awareness as one very important dimension. I myself, before I ever heard of Doctor. Robb, had introduced Charlotte Selva's work, Jacobson's work, and Alexander's work in her classes. I had it never occurred to me to think about body. I became aware that perhaps one of the most direct ways, almost a shortcut toward becoming aware of language and our behaviors and our attitudes and our assumptions was through awareness of what is going on in ourselves. No easy matter. And I'm I'm very interested because of what I asked you the question, I think, a few weeks ago. After the ten weeks, and you leave people alone for a while, I was interested in knowing, do the old patterns, the old assumptions begin to build up again the same particular bodily attitude that took a lifetime to develop when you when you have these people. Because without that awareness, I wonder. Say the young man comes to you and there is some particular area that you work with as I watched you. Now that that particular situation in his organism was developed throughout a lifetime. Isn't that what you said? Yes. In ten weeks, there is a loose loosening of various buildup of muscle and tension, whatever. Okay. I can see that. Now that you have so manipulated and moved into a position you feel where there is an openness and an easiness for heightened awareness, for greater ease in living. Without a holistic, which is an awareness of values, assumptions, language, is it likely that there will be a repetition? Well, would say this, that I'm sure that there are convictions that a person can hold through the series of 10 raw things, which still have a hold on them afterwards. However, what seemed implicit in there, which I don't think happens, is that they're separate, that they don't have a lot of necessary changes in their assumptions, convictions, opinions, and decisions about life as a result of their body changing."
Longstreet describes the question she had been pursuing in general semantics for years and explains why Ida's work converged with it:
The body as map and territory
Longstreet's question to Ida — whether the changes of the ten-session series would hold without the broader semantic work — is the question this whole inheritance forces. If the body is part of the apparatus of knowing, then the body's restructuring should change knowing. But the body is also embedded in language, assumption, value, and cultural map. The change reached through the hands has to contend with the maps the patient brought into the room. Ida's answer was instructive. She refused the dichotomy: changes in the body would not be separable from changes in assumption, conviction, opinion, and decision about life. The cultural assumption that bodies do not change is itself blown, she said, in the first two minutes of the work. Once that assumption goes, others follow.
"on them afterwards. However, what seemed implicit in there, which I don't think happens, is that they're separate, that they don't have a lot of necessary changes in their assumptions, convictions, opinions, and decisions about life as a result of their body changing. This is the this was the question that I asked. That just the very fact that a body can change shape within thirty minutes, you know, or two minutes really, is a tremendous cultural assumption. The kind of thing you're talking about, bodies don't change except they get old would be another way to put in that test. You see? That one is a a very strong one in our subconscious, I think, and that one is blown, you know, in the first two minutes of raw. Mhmm. At least blown the first time, and it continues to be blown throughout the This 10 was the only this was the question that I had when I asked Yes. Yeah. But I I don't I am completely open in wondering about the human let's say we use a biological model rather than a mechanical model. The person who's not functioning well and who who practiced could be a moron, and a few drops of iodine can make this person a functioning whole."
Longstreet and Ida work through whether structural change implies semantic change, in the 1974 Open Universe class:
Bachelard's term for the matrix that does the work was prism — the prism of language and the logic derived from it, through which we conduct any self-analysis. Bois quoted it constantly, and Longstreet did too. The point is that we are immersed in a world of energy manifestations of which we abstract a small fraction; the prism we use to do the abstracting is language. Structural Integration changes one of the components that feeds the prism — the body, which is part of the apparatus of perception itself. It cannot replace the work of changing language and assumption, but it can shift what the prism is given to work with. This is the precise sense in which the work participates in the semantic transactor model rather than merely paralleling it.
"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. But this process world, this relationship world, is the world, the stuff with which we deal in structural integration. In our case, it is the relationship of body systems. That additional dimension of relationship has become important in the thinking of man since the work of Klasebski. So the problem becomes, in terms of structural integration, what can we do to improve the relationship of man to the to his world of energy, to the world of energy? And the answer is that we need to continue with our relationship to relate within that group of systems that we call man to the point where the man himself, the small energy field, can transmit, can accept the energy field of gravity as a supporting framework. This is what structural integration is about."
Ida, in the 1974 Open Universe class, names the moment when Korzybski's work changed the question of what relationship even is:
Korzybski in Ida's teaching of seeing
All of this becomes practical in the moment a student tries to see a body. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida talked about looking at five practitioners sitting together in a San Francisco living room, all sitting straight, and a reporter remarking on how strange it looked. The reporter, Ida said, was a random body — meaning a body in which the parts had not yet been ordered into the kind of vertical relationship the work produces. The reporter did not know anything about random bodies or Rolf bodies; she only knew that something about the row of straight-sitting practitioners appealed to her aesthetic sense. This was Bachelard's stage one: the immediate, pre-classificatory recognition that something was right, before any of it could be named.
"first hour first ten hours of processing the whole first ten hours of processing deal with a freeing and an ordering of the girdles with respect to the trunk. And only when the girdles are ordered with respect to the trunk is it possible to get your vertical in. And as your vertical comes in, your horizontals will come in. Because your horizontals really are only a different aspect, a different view of the vertical. And you see you're dealing with a very strange set of phenomena if you come down and really think about it. You are dealing with a peculiar peculiar aesthetic and artistic projection or what you estimate as an aesthetic and artistic projection on the surface of the body of internal structure. Why do we consider that vertical something to be desired? Beautiful. Why do we consider those horizontals to be desired? I don't know. The fact is we do. The fact is that long before we were Rothes, it gave us a curious satisfaction to see bodies that had that type of order, that were approaching that type of order."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, frames the work of the ten-session series in terms of the relationship of girdles to trunk:
The pedagogical move Ida was always trying to teach was the move from naming to seeing. In the 1976 advanced class, she warned her students that nobody had ever taught them to look at the experience before — they had been taught to look at the symbol of the experience, at the abstract of the experience. This is the Korzybskian point in its most direct pedagogical form. The student who has been trained to name what she sees has been trained to operate at a higher order of abstraction than the bodies in front of her, and the higher order of abstraction has cost her the lower one. To learn to see bodies as practitioners of this work must, they have to undo this training and walk back down the ladder of abstraction toward the silent level, where the body actually is, before they can do anything useful with their hands.
"the pattern, then we put them in the hospital and we say, Oh my God, his heart is gone or his lungs are gone or his disorder is that, it's gone. And they haven't gone at all. The pattern has gone astray. And your job as rauffins is to understand what pattern gives you good function. And you look at a guy and you say to yourself, What is it in that man? What is it in that woman that in its deviation from the pattern that I know gives good function is giving him trouble? Your job as auditors in this class is learning those patterns, seeing those patterns. Now, in order to help you see, we have to look in books and see what other people have done. But did those pictures that Lewis showed you yesterday look anything like any of the pictures that you see in the anatomy book? This is what we were trying, Lewis and I, trying to present to you: that a body is not something that comes out of an anatomy book, and an anatomy book frequently isn't anything that comes out of a body. Now this is just your hard luck, but this is why you will find gralphing something that is difficult. Because it goes against every method of teaching that you have ever been subjected to since you were five years old. Nobody ever taught you to look at the experience before. They taught you to look at the symbol of the experience, at the abstract of the experience. Now, somewhere down through this class, the day will come when I will start talking about general semantics. Maybe I should do it right now. And I should call to your attention that there was a Russian engineer who came from Polish, I guess he was. Anyway, he came from that general area, and he came over here. And he began looking at words, looking at verbalisms. And he suddenly saw what I was trying to tell this gentleman here this morning. He suddenly saw that the territory, the fact, the experience was not the words that people used to describe the experience."
Ida, in the 1976 class, describes the unlearning required by the work and links it directly to general semantics:
Korzybski beyond Korzybski
Longstreet kept emphasizing that the work did not stop with Korzybski. After his death, she said, she followed the people who had taken his notions further — Bois above all, but also Bachelard and the broader epistemological tradition. Korzybski's original framework had been called general semantics; what came after was epistemics. The distinction matters. General semantics had focused on language; epistemics broadened to the whole apparatus of human knowing. Ida absorbed this broader frame, and it is the broader frame that shows up in her own teaching — not just the map-territory distinction, but the full apparatus of stages of knowing, the silent level, the semantic transactor model, the doctrine of relationship as the determinant of structure.
"What Korzybski called our neurolinguistic, neurosemantic worlds."
Longstreet describes the neurolinguistic and neurosemantic worlds Korzybski mapped, in the 1974 Open Universe class:
Longstreet drew the full diagram of these neurolinguistic worlds on the board in the 1974 class — seven major language families, only one of which (Western Aristotelian) operated on the two-valued, this-or-that logic that dominates ordinary scientific thought. The rest are non-Aristotelian, non-identifying, multi-valued. Korzybski's whole project, like Bois's after him, was the introduction of non-Aristotelian thinking into a culture that had been operating on the older grammar for two thousand years. Ida's structural work, in this larger frame, was a parallel project: introducing non-Aristotelian thinking about the body into a medical culture that had been operating on additive, part-by-part, this-or-that logic for almost as long.
"He had his senses, and I'm going to put a model on the board. Before I do, I want to show you what you cannot say, I'm sure, from here, which I wish I had a large one of. The worlds of language, logic in which we live, east and west, linguistically, scientifically, emotionally. What Korzybski called our neurolinguistic, neurosemantic worlds. And you will notice one, two, three, four, five, six, seven main language and the eighth being our own Western Aristotelian. The rest of the languages are non Aristotelian. We'll talk about that. Non identifying, multi valued, not too valued as our owners. I'll put the diagram I want to put on the board, and then we can we have to talk about it. We call the diagram the world in which we live. Let's assume a process world, not much"
Longstreet, in the 1974 class, draws the distinction between Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian language worlds:
Coda: the work continues beyond words
What Ida took from Korzybski, in the end, was permission to do what her hands had already told her was right. She did not need Korzybski to discover that the body responds to relationship rather than substance, or that a description of the work is a different order of thing from the work itself. She had found those things at her own table, with her own hands. But Korzybski and Bois gave her the grammar for what she had found — a way to defend it against an Aristotelian medical culture that wanted her to name a cause for every effect, isolate a part for every problem, and reduce a process to a thing. The grammar mattered because without it, the work could not be transmitted. Practitioners trained in stage-two thinking could not be brought into the work; they had to be brought into stage four first.
"And this, in short, is like raising levels of awareness and expanding consciousness, and that's an awful lot of people who have been trained. In addition to this, he studied, to introduce me in that way. Actually, I've heard a great deal about her and from Ida and sincerity about her from Ida. I've heard about her from other people, and she's as I told her when I walked in, her reputation I also have a reputation, but it means something different when you say I have a reputation and when you say that the doctor has reputation. And I'm I'm interested, whoever chose me to speak about the mind, because my work is blowing people's minds, and I don't know why I would be considered as qualified to speak about the mind."
Werner Erhard, speaking in the same Open Universe class series Ida co-taught, names the operative limit of mind in a way Ida would echo:
Ida's last word on Korzybski, in any working sense, was her insistence that practitioners not let the words get in the way. She talked about Korzybski explicitly in three of her advanced classes — 1973 Big Sur, 1975 Boulder, 1976 Boulder — and she relied on the framework constantly without naming it. The deepest tribute she paid to Korzybski was not the citations but the pedagogy. She refused to let her students operate at the symbol level. She kept dragging them back to the body, to the hands, to the relationship between parts, to the silent level where the actual work happens. Korzybski had told her, through Bois, through Longstreet, that this was where the territory lived. Ida had known it from her own practice. The two confirmations met, and the result was a practice that took the body as both map and territory — and worked on it without confusing the two.
See also: See also: Werner Erhard's full lecture in the 1974 Open Universe class (UNI_021), where the inheritance Ida shared with the Esalen-adjacent thought community is most fully articulated. UNI_021 ▸
See also: See also: Ethel Longstreet's full sequence of Open Universe lectures (UNI_061, UNI_062, UNI_063), which constitute the most extended presentation of general semantics and epistemics in the Rolf archive — the closest the recordings come to a textbook of the framework Ida used. UNI_061 ▸UNI_062 ▸UNI_063 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Open Universe class lectures by Valerie Hunt on energy fields (UNI_032, UNI_041, UNI_073), which extended the Korzybski-Bois framework into experimental research on what the work was actually changing in the body. UNI_032 ▸UNI_041 ▸UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1973 Big Sur advanced class material on pain and perception (BSPAIN1), where the sensory-perceptual framework Bois had developed is brought directly into the technical instruction. BSPAIN1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class discussion (T1SB) where Ida traces the continuity of the ten-session work — the first hour as the beginning of the tenth — using the relational, non-additive frame she inherited from Korzybski and Bois. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder tape (B3T11SA) where the Korzybski reference returns in the context of how integral, multi-dimensional approaches differ from analytic part-by-part approaches — an extended elaboration of the map-territory and structure-as-relationship doctrines for practitioners. B3T11SA ▸