The mug in the room
In September 1974, Ida convened the Open Universe class at UCLA — a series of lectures co-taught with Valerie Hunt, Ethel Longstreet, and others, intended to situate Structural Integration inside the larger intellectual revolution she believed was underway. The previous speakers had spoken about closed and open universes in the abstract: the closed universe of reductionist science, the open universe of systems and fields, the cycling between them across history. Ida, characteristically, wanted a prop. She turned to her assistant Judy and asked for her famous mug. What followed was the single image around which she organized the rest of her late teaching. The mug sat on the table, three-dimensional, ordinary, capable of holding flowers or coffee. A light was placed behind it. On the wall, depending on how Ida turned the mug, appeared a rectangle or a circle. The mug was the open universe. The shadow was the closed.
" Here's a mug. It's an open universe. See it? Open all around. All kinds of things going on. But supposing you have a light back there, and you hold your mug up here, and you project your light, and you see that its shadow, its projection, the projection of that three-dimensional mug is a two dimensional shadow, a rectangle. Doesn't look like a mug, does it? You do this to it, and the projection of the three-dimensional mug, which can hold water and what have you, flowers too. The projection of it is a two dimensional plane circle."
Ida introduces the prop in her 1974 Open Universe lecture at UCLA.
What Ida wanted her audience to see was not the mug and not the shadow but the relationship between them. The shadow was lawful. It was a faithful, predictable, mathematically describable projection of the mug. But it had been stripped of dimensions. It could not do what the mug did. It could not hold anything. And, more importantly, if you had only ever seen the shadow, you would have no way of knowing what the mug was for. You would study the rectangle. You would measure it. You would write papers about its proportions. You would never suspect that the thing casting it had an interior. This, she said, was what Western science had done to the human being for three centuries — it had studied the shadow and called it the man.
The rule of projection
When Ida returned to the mug in the second lecture of the series, she stated the principle in its general form. A three-dimensional object can throw a projection, but the projection is always of a lesser dimensionality. There is no symmetry. You cannot get from the shadow back to the mug — there is information missing, and the information that is missing is precisely the information that makes the mug useful. This is not a metaphor she was reaching for. It is a mathematical fact about projections: they discard dimensions. What Ida did was take the fact and use it as a lever. If projection always loses information, then any system of thought that proceeds by projection — by reducing what it studies in order to study it — is constitutively unable to recover the thing it projected from.
"hour, that which is three-dimensional can throw a projection, and the projection is always a projection of a lesser dimensionality. In the case of a three-dimensional object, the projection will"
Ida restates the principle of projection, the lecture's second day.
The rule has a corollary that mattered to her practical work. If you want to do something with a thing — if you want to change it, use it, hold flowers in it — you must work in the dimension where it actually lives. You cannot rearrange the shadow on the wall and expect the mug to move. This is not a complaint about how shadows behave; it is a direction-finding instrument. When Ida said the body is a plastic medium and can be reshaped, she meant reshaped at the level where it actually is — the three-dimensional myofascial body — and not at the level of any of its projections, such as the chiropractic line drawing of the spine or the medical schematic of muscle origins and insertions. The chunks in the Open Universe class show her tracking this idea through to its conclusion.
What the shadow strips away
Ida's third statement of the analogy, immediately following the demonstration, names what the shadow has lost. It has lost dimensionality, and with dimensionality it has lost reality — because we live in three dimensions, and a thing of fewer dimensions is, to our experience, a thing of less reality. This is the move that takes the mug from being a clever illustration to being a metaphysical argument. She is claiming that the closed universe is not just impoverished but unreal in a specific sense: it cannot be the world we actually inhabit, because we are three-dimensional creatures and a two-dimensional description necessarily misses what we are.
"One should recognize, shall I say, the fact that a higher order projection that is a closed universe divests the experience of dimensionality."
Ida draws the metaphysical conclusion immediately after the demonstration.
Continuing in the same passage, she extends the consequence: open systems, unlike closed ones, are far from equilibrium and require energy to maintain. A closed universe is at rest; an open one is alive only because it is continuously being fed. This connects the mug directly to her gravity argument. The human body, for Ida, was an open system that needed to be continuously energized by its relationship to the gravitational field. Closing it — by analyzing it into parts, by treating each system separately, by ignoring relationship — was equivalent to cutting the energy supply. The mug, in this expanded version of the argument, was not just an illustration of a fallacy but a diagnostic of why so many medical and psychological treatments fail: they operate on the projection, while the patient continues to live in the open original.
"In doing so, it tells us, by implication perhaps only, that the world we live in and we ourselves are not high order abstractions. They are low order, many dimensional systems. Open and closed universes have certain other qualities significant to us. Open systems tend to be a minimum entropy situation, a minimum of disorder, a minimum of disintegration. Because they are complicated structures. And this complicated structure requires that energy be added or put in constantly to maintain its complication. An open universe can be maintained at a distance from the equilibrium point in what physicists call an improbable state by that continuous addition of energy. None of this is true of the closed universe. Man is not a closed order, not even in purely biological terms. The biological man must be looked at as a collection of systems, not of atomistic aggregates. This in itself takes him out of a closed universe. You can't keep collections of systems in a closed universe. The characteristic of such systems is that relationship is the determinant of what you get out of it. Described in these words, life is not a substance, it is a process. And the determinant is relationship. And I hope that your speaker, Mrs."
From the same lecture, Ida extends the projection argument to the difference between open and closed systems thermodynamically.
Why analysis becomes a closed universe
In the first hour of the lecture series, Ida laid the groundwork for the mug demonstration by tracing the historical lineage of the closed universe. Since the Renaissance, and more aggressively since the seventeenth-century mechanical revolution, Western thought has tried to understand man and world by analysis. Analysis, she said, has a definition: it reduces. To analyze a thing is to break it into parts in order to study them separately. And the breaking-into-parts is itself a projection — a discarding of relationship, which is precisely the dimension in which the original thing lived. She did not argue that analysis was bad. She argued that analysis was, by definition, the production of a closed universe, and that one had to know this when one used it.
"Since the days of the Renaissance, especially since the physical mechanical revolution of that seventeenth century, that important century, men have tried to understand themselves and their world by analysis. The analytic method, by definition, reduces the dimensions of the object which it it examines. Thus, it becomes by definition, that analytic method, it becomes by definition a closed universe, a limited universe. 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. In the language of general semantics, semantics, it is a map and not a territory. The open versus the closed orders can be simplified into something of a metaphor. Where's my famous mug, Judy? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Here's a mug. It's an open universe. See it? Open all around. All kinds of things going on."
Ida traces the historical genealogy of the closed universe.
She insisted, at several points across the series, that she was not opposing analysis as such. She had been trained as an analytic chemist at Barnard and the Rockefeller Institute; she had spent her early career inside the analytic method, and she did not romanticize what came before it. What she wanted her students to see was the directionality of the operation. Analysis goes from higher dimension to lower; synthesis goes from lower to higher. If you only ever analyze, you only ever produce shadows. To recover the mug, you have to add back the dimensions that the projection stripped away. This was her account of what Structural Integration was for — not the production of a new analysis of the body but a synthesis, a putting-back-together, that restored the dimension of relationship to a body that had been understood part by part.
The map and the territory
Ida frequently borrowed Korzybski's slogan from general semantics — the map is not the territory — to make the same point in a more familiar idiom. The shadow on the wall is the map; the mug is the territory. The two are related, the map is useful, but you cannot eat off the map and you cannot drink from the shadow. She acknowledged in the lectures that this was Korzybski's contribution; she credited him directly. What she did with the borrowed vocabulary was apply it to the body. The anatomy book is a map. The medical diagnosis is a map. The chiropractic adjustment of a single vertebra is a map. None of these is wrong as a map, but none can substitute for the territory, which is the three-dimensional living person standing in the room.
"Now, are two basic definitions, I think, which may be of use to you in the summarization of what we have tried to get together for you in terms of an understanding of your universe. It is also worthy of note that when you want to increase the options, what you can do with something, how you can change it, you go to the lower dimensionality, to the higher dimensionality, to the lower level of projection. Because there, in that three-dimensional universe, there are many, many things which you can use for your purposes, which vanish as you make a reflection of it. Now, what has this to do with our twentieth century problem struggling humans? In this course, we have looked at the cyclical alternation of open universes and closed universes."
Ida restates the mug argument in the language of general semantics, the next day.
The directionality she names here is counterintuitive and worth dwelling on. In ordinary scientific habit, we tend to assume that abstraction is where the action is — that the more general law, the more reduced formulation, the more compressed map gives us more leverage. Ida's claim is the opposite. The compressed map gives you fewer options because it has fewer dimensions. The mug can be filled, drunk from, used as a vase, turned upside down, used as a hammer in a pinch. The rectangle on the wall can only be measured. If you want to act on something, she said, you must work in the dimension where it actually lives — and that is always the higher dimension, the open universe, not the closed.
What this meant for the body on the table
Ida used the mug analogy in classroom moments that had nothing ostensibly to do with epistemology. Across her advanced classes in Boulder and Big Sur in the 1970s, she would invoke the principle when students tried to reduce a body to one of its anatomical projections. When a trainee named only the muscle, she would press the question of relationship. When a trainee named only the bony alignment, she would press the question of fascia. The closed universe, in classroom practice, was the trainee's tendency to look at one dimension of the body at a time and call that the body. The mug, in the back of her teaching, was always doing the work of reminding students that the body they were working on was three-dimensional and that any single description was a shadow.
"What I see now is that triangulation which is indicated, manifested externally by the lumbar fascia as it makes a diamond shape or triangular shape with the external manifestation that is the trapezius. We have the lumbodorsal junction and right there I feel that that energy flow manifests and will continue up after the connection is made between the lower half and the upper half along that crest. I do feel the need to go into the lumbar dorsiflexion. Your lower triangulation isn't the triangulation. It's a piece of spaghetti. That's what's wrong."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, John offers a multidimensional reading of a student model.
There is a layered exchange in that 1975 Boulder transcript that illustrates how Ida pushed students between dimensions. She would dismiss what she called metaphysics when it floated free of the body, but she would accept the same language when it tracked the body's actual three-dimensional behavior. This is not inconsistency; it is the mug rule applied. Language is itself a projection — a one-dimensional projection of multi-dimensional experience — and language can either gesture toward the higher dimension or substitute its own flatness for the thing it names. The practitioner's job, she taught, was to keep the language attached to the territory, to use words as pointers toward the three-dimensional body and never as replacements for it.
Relationship is the missing dimension
If projection strips dimensions away, what specifically is the dimension that closed-universe descriptions of the body lose? Ida's answer was relationship. Anatomy textbooks describe muscles. They name origins and insertions, innervations and actions. What they do not show — because they cannot, on a flat page — is how the muscle's behavior depends on every other structure in the body around it. The fascia connects everything to everything else. The position of the foot affects the carriage of the head. Pressure applied at the iliac crest reverberates into the seventh cervical. None of this appears in the projections. All of it is the body. Relationship, in this sense, is the dimension the mug has and the shadow lacks.
"'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. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida defines structure as relationship.
This connection — between the mug analogy and her definition of structure as relationship — is the analogy's load-bearing moment in her practical work. The shadow on the wall lacks volume. The medical analysis of a body lacks relationship. The body that walks into the room is a three-dimensional thing whose every part participates in the carriage of every other part, and any description of it that breaks it into parts and discards the relationships among them is a shadow. The practitioner's job, in this framing, is to work in the dimension the projections have discarded — to act on the relationships, on the fascial continuities, on the patterns of cooperation and antagonism that knit the body together as an open system.
Pat's mug, in Boulder
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a senior practitioner named Pat introduced his own variation on the mug. Pat had been thinking about the body as two intersecting helical structures — mirror images of each other, joined by spacers, capable of being described as ellipses or as circles depending on how one took the cross-section. The discussion that day moved between mathematical formulations, three-dimensional sculptural models, and the bodies on the floor. What is striking about the exchange is that Pat was extending Ida's analogy in the direction she had pointed: trying to find a higher-dimensional description that could be projected, when needed, into the lower-dimensional forms used in teaching and publication, without losing the relationships that made the original useful.
"This multidimensional level because no human being is of this level. And in my original discussion in UCLA in trying to make these people understand the silent level plus first order abstraction, second order, and so forth. I used a mug, and I said, now what what we mean by projection is this. I said, now here is a mug. You put a light behind it. You have the first order of abstraction of that mug in the shadow that's on the wall. But you don't have a mug. You can't eat coffee in it. You don't even know whether it has depth. It has lesser dimensions. It has two dimensions. You turn it this way, and you have a circle. You turn it this way, and you have an oblong, and no. It didn't have anything to do with a long 50 k's copy. Let me let me tell you what I'm trying to get at. I'll tell you in terms of an experience."
In the Boulder 1975 advanced class, Pat recounts how he first encountered Ida's mug demonstration.
Pat's recollection in the class is woven together with a personal account of an experience following his seventh hour, when, he said, his body became multidimensional in a way he had not previously imagined possible. The point of the recollection — and the reason it appears in the same breath as Ida's mug — is that the experience itself was a recovery of dimensions that the analytic description of his body had stripped away. The seventh hour, in this telling, did not just rearrange the muscles of his neck. It restored him to a body that was three-dimensional in its experience, not just in its geometry. The mug analogy was the framework that let him say this without sounding like he was talking about something other than his body.
"closer together. And you have all seen how when the thorax is a circle, you are always having severe symptoms. And like you can get those severe symptoms to disappear completely as you get that circle out into an ovoid. Presumably there is an optimal point and you don't go too far. But you see, Pat's idea of these two cylindrical circles which according to him we were disorganizing and disorganizing was a very useful idea. You mean, imperil also. No. You ellipses. You made an ellipse of two cylinders. The ellipse and then the idea of if you take an ellipse it has nucleus of fulcrum. That's right. It hasn't internally lips. Mhmm. That's right. And Now I don't think you can disregard this idea of pets. I don't either. I think it's And I think that if you're going to get a what you people are doing is really taking the material of fascial planes and in your mind moving it around. Your ellipses are not material ellipses, but I don't think you can disregard them and I think the one can be used as a check on the other, so to speak. And I want to interject this in PRT. It ties up. I mean, if you abstracted what you were talking about, the diagrams, it's Could you say a little more because I I'm following up."
Later in the same class, Pat develops the ellipse model as a higher-dimensional account of the body.
Models, mathematics, and the problem of communication
If the mug rule says that projections are always of lesser dimensionality, then any attempt to teach Structural Integration through words and pictures faces a built-in limitation. Words are a projection. Pictures are a projection. The book that Ida had recently published — her 1977 volume on the integration of human structures — was, by her own rule, a shadow. She knew this. The Open Universe lectures were partly an attempt to give students conceptual scaffolding that acknowledged the limits of the very language being used to teach them. The mug, recursively, was an analogy whose purpose was to point out that all analogies, including itself, were two-dimensional shadows of a three-dimensional thing.
"To this idea of mathematics and not being a mathematician, I don't have the tool to build this model but we've been talking about our work and the theoretical ideal quote unquote which has no true form as yet except it's a vertical horizontal across it around which we organize the body. Now, taking these ideas of ellipses and helical patterns, it would seem that you could develop a model which would be a statement of that form in space in its optimum position that we could use as a grid for viewing bodies or for making a statement about our ideals about bodies to the world. The trouble with that is that statement comes out as a bunch of symbols. Can we take an abstraction and move it along a spectrum of words to symbols? I mean like say just the idea that I just said. Okay, that idea is not that picture. That idea if I was going to make a statement about it is like X squared over A squared plus Y squared over B squared equals one. That's what that means and that means nothing. I mean, what's that mean to you Pat? That means something to me. The words intersecting Yeah, it says me. Trouble is, is see that picture there is not the mathematical statement. That picture is a model for that statement. Can you take I mean, I'm being very pedantic because what happens when you take this and start going to the pictures is when scientists or you know the kinds of people that we want this accepted start laughing."
From the Boulder advanced class, students wrestle with the gap between mathematical model, pictorial model, and bodily experience.
Jen's instinct in that discussion is precisely the move Ida had been making for years: rather than try to find the right projection, you offer a sequence of projections, ordered from the most abstract to the most embodied, and you ask the student to look at the relationships among them. No single map captures the territory; but a family of maps, taken together and held in motion, can point toward the territory in a way that any single one cannot. The mug analogy, in this sense, is itself a map about maps — a meta-projection whose function is to remind the viewer that every other projection in the room is a shadow.
Bob Hines and the energies outside the body
Bob Hines, one of Ida's most senior practitioners and the man who served as practical demonstrator across many of the Open Universe sessions, extended the mug doctrine in a direction Ida found both interesting and uncertain. If the body is three-dimensional and the analytic descriptions are two-dimensional shadows, what about the dimensions that exceed the three of ordinary geometry? Hines, drawing on the energy research being done at Valerie Hunt's UCLA laboratory, suggested that the body had sources of energy outside itself — that the open universe of the body opened into the still larger open universe of the cosmos, and that the dimensions Ida's analogy was pointing toward might be more than three.
"the main thrust of of the consecrated model is to consider the whole and not the part. Right. Bob Hines, you got some thoughts that apply to this? I've had a lot of them. One of the things that along the lines of Jack's thinking that occurs to me is that the zero points in establishing the function are the bony surfaces. When you come down to it you want to actually start the program that wants to describe the fascial plane. The zero points are the attachments of the fascial planes to the bony surfaces. That's where you get something that you can tie down and limit to some extent in your approximation of the overall function. The other thing that I think about when I think about these patterns are some of the things that are occurring to me in terms of energy from the project over at Val Hunt's place, and that is that these energy bodies that constitute the whole man seem to have sources of energy outside the man. In other words, there is the contact with the cosmos. Maybe. And some of the older texts talk about vitality of some sort coming from the sun and kundalini or that sort of energy coming from the earth. And that these two energies are flowing through man in both directions and somehow play into the energy unit man."
In the Boulder 1975 class, Bob Hines extends the mug analogy toward energy fields beyond the body.
Ida did not, in the available transcripts, fully commit to this extension. She accepted that the body was an open system that exchanged energy with the gravitational field; she was less certain about kundalini and the sun. What she did insist on was that the analytic description of the body had to be opened up, not closed down further. Whether the opening went to three dimensions or to more was, in some sense, a question for the next generation of practitioners to answer. The mug, as a teaching device, set the direction: away from the closed projection, toward the open original. Where that direction ultimately pointed, she was content to leave somewhat unspecified.
Mind as a closed universe
One of the most striking applications of the mug doctrine came not from Ida herself but from a colleague speaking in the same lecture series. The argument, drawn from general semantics and from a strand of consciousness research Ida found congenial, was that the mind itself — the analytic, language-bearing, model-making mind — is a closed universe. The mind makes maps. It assigns coordinates. It draws grids over experience. What it cannot do, by its nature, is be the experience. To mistake the mind for the person is, in this framing, exactly the same error as mistaking the shadow for the mug.
"And that's kind of a man's viewpoint. And so he's learned about his mind, thinking that he is his mind. And the mind as I see it is a representation of a person. It isn't the person. It's kind of as Doctor. Rolfe said in her introductory remarks, I guess it was last week, it's the map and not the territory. And if you think that the map's the territory, you get into very big trouble because if you walk across a piece of paper, you don't have any you don't know what mountains are like. Even though you walk across a piece of paper that is a map of the mountains, you don't know what mountains are like. I don't know what mountains are like. So I see the mind as a part of the whole. I see whatever it is, I don't know what to call us, but whatever we are, I see us as the open universe and the mind as a part of that or the closed universe. And the damage that I see that gets done is that people attempt to function in this closed universe and define the open universe. And the problem with defining the open universe from inside the closed universe is that you deal with it conceptually only. You don't deal with it directly, you make models of it because modeling is the way you deal with things which are bigger than you. And so what I'd like to do now is to get off that, talk about my notion about what the mind is, and then perhaps come back and see how it fits into the whole of whatever it is that you and I are."
A colleague in the 1974 Open Universe series applies the mug doctrine to the mind itself.
Ida did not always go this far in her own voice, but she did not contradict the move either. What she did do, in the same lecture series, was return repeatedly to the idea that the analytic mind — the mind that thinks of itself as the man — operates inside a closed universe and produces work whose limits track the limits of that closure. The body she worked on, by contrast, lived in the open universe. The mismatch between the two was, in her account, much of what ailed the modern person. The practitioner's job was to act on the open-universe body in ways that the closed-universe mind would only afterward learn to describe.
"and he's blown it in more senses than one. He has stressed the recognition, you see, that a man is not his mind, nor is his mind the man, though it may be the measure of the man. Certainly, this concept of mind, the one we have been subscribing to that the mind is the man, is a highly closed universe. Now, the epistemological profile introduced to you by Ethel Longstreet is a more appropriate measure of the quality of the man than this closed universe trip. The quality and the development of his mind are indicated in this profile. To recapitulate this map briefly, Bob, how about a nice little drink of water? To recapitulate this map briefly, the meaning superimposed by a man on his experience, his thought, falls into five categories, said Mr. Bachelard. First is the view of the primitive man, and is the view of the child, children throughout the world, namely that that which he experiences is necessarily the fact. The original illustration of this was a little girl who goes down to the lake, and she sticks her toe in, and she says, Oh, it's cold! And nothing and nobody could persuade her that it isn't cold."
Ida names the closed-universe view of mind directly.
Why analysis cannot be abandoned
It would be easy to read Ida as anti-analytic, anti-scientific, even anti-intellectual. She was none of these. The mug was an argument about the limits of projection, not against projection. Analysis, she said repeatedly across the Open Universe lectures, is necessary; it is the preliminary form of synthesis. You cannot put a thing together until you have first taken it apart enough to see what its parts are. What you must not do is mistake the parts for the thing. The history of ideas, in her telling, is the alternation between phases of analysis — when the closed universe expands its grip — and phases of synthesis, when the open universe is rediscovered. We were, she believed, entering a synthesis phase. The mug was its diagnostic image.
"A scientist not too long ago by the name of Bragg has said, the important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to obtain new ways of thinking about them. This is the crux of our confusion, of our perception of the revolution which is being presented to the layman as the Aquarian age. For we are in the midst of revolution, and we try to measure our new world by our old standards. Seen in the new perspective, the old order was limited and a limiting viewpoint. Its critics have called that scientific order from which we are now emerging reductionism. Think it was 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."
Ida names the historical position of Structural Integration inside the open-versus-closed cycle.
What this historical framing means in practice is that the mug is not an attack on science but a navigational aid. Ida wanted her students to be able to recognize, in any given conversation, whether they were operating in an open or a closed universe — whether they were looking at the mug or at its shadow. The analytic moment was legitimate when it was acknowledged as analytic, when its products were treated as projections rather than substitutes for the original. The practitioner who could hold this distinction in mind could read an anatomy book, use chiropractic vocabulary when communicating with chiropractors, satisfy a medical doctor's request for a diagnosis, and still know that the person on the table was a three-dimensional thing none of those projections captured.
The mug and the gravitational field
The deepest reason the mug analogy mattered to Ida's practical work is that it underwrote her central claim about gravity. The standard medical and orthopedic view of posture treats the body as a static stack of segments to be aligned. This is, in Ida's terms, a closed-universe view: it takes a snapshot, names the relations between parts at one moment, and treats those relations as the truth about the body. The open-universe view, which she insisted Structural Integration required, treats the body as continuously engaged in an energy exchange with the gravitational field — taking in support, transmitting it through the structure, expressing it as movement. Alignment is not a posed stillness; it is the condition under which an open system can receive its energy. The mug shadow does not exchange energy with anything. The mug does.
"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 closes the loop between the projection doctrine and the practical work on the body.
This is why the mug image returns again and again in her late teaching. It is not a clever party trick. It is the conceptual ground on which her practical doctrine stands. If you accept that projections lose dimensions, and that the dimension most often lost in descriptions of the human body is relationship, and that relationship is precisely what makes an open system open, then the case for Structural Integration follows: a practice that works on relationships, on fascial continuities, on the connections among segments rather than on the segments themselves, is the practice that addresses the body in the dimension where it actually lives. The mug is the argument. The body on the table is what the argument is for.
Coda: opening, not open
At the start of the second lecture in the series, Ida made a small but pointed correction. The course was titled Structural Integration and the Opening Universe, she reminded the audience. Not the open universe — the opening one. She preferred the gerund because, as she said, you would understand why before she stopped speaking. The reason, by the end of the lecture, was clear. Even her own work, even the practice she had built across forty years, was still a partial recovery of the dimensions that closed-universe thinking had stripped away. There was no final mug. There was the continuous opening of the closed back toward the original, and the practice of Structural Integration was one strand of that opening among others. The shadow on the wall was not the enemy. The mistake of taking the shadow for the mug was the enemy. The work, in her telling, was the slow recovery of the dimension that projection had lost — in the body, in language, in the mind, in the practice itself.
"I have got myself, oh well, I've got myself stuck, and I'm going to have to come unstuck if I want to use it on those pictures. 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."
Opening the second day of the lecture series, Ida names the gerund.
See also: See also: the open universe doctrine in its broader form is laid out in the early Open Universe lectures by Ida and her colleagues, particularly the discussions of cyclical alternation between open and closed periods in Western thought. UNI_021 ▸UNI_053 ▸UNI_101 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's argument that fascia is the dimension orthodox anatomy textbooks have not adequately described — a practical corollary of the mug doctrine, where the dimension the projection loses turns out to be the dimension the practitioner most needs. CFHA_02 ▸