A radical synthesis is underway between the multitude of disciplines and sciences.
Alan Schore (2003) has said that it is at the edges of each discipline that the innovations and discovery of new understanding occur. It has been my attempt to help in creating, participating, and shaping the emerging edges of Somatic psychology and Somatic education, yet as my research continues to expand I find new terrain. We need whole new maps to constellation the exponential unfolding our our ever increasingly complex world. We are going have to practice levels of consciousness that are at the edges of our current consensus or academic and scientific understanding. They are radical shifts, not because other levels of consciousness are new to the human experience, but because what restricts their presence in our daily life are imperceptible boundaries. These are the boundaries of our entire mental, emotional, and physical, social, and sensory ecology. Like the fish who asks all the other fish "what is the sea?" These boundaries are held inwardly by defensive fear, rigid identity structures, protecting our deepest infantile existential terrors and the haunted-ness of perceiving outside of our family or cultural systems. Our deep mammalian need to survive requires interdependence, fitting in and at the cost of the evolution of our species capacity to rapidly respond to a newly emergent world.
Tapping into the consciousness of the body is the gateway, the firm foundational orientation to the present. At this launching point, our perception, guided by the gathered energy of attention, both cognitive and bio-electric, we can then tap the integral field of sensational information. Our complex behavioral systems are unified by embodiment and gives us endless access to states of knowing, perceiving, and consciousness that have in the past be rapidly clumped into the woo-woo, the paranormal, or some other way to categorize reality into black and white, left and right, and good or bad. This classic way to split thought and attention into either or's maintains that we rigidly simplify reality, by dominating perception, both internally and externally, and those of us we are in relation with. Unifying attention through sensational awareness, or body awareness is classic in martial arts, psychotherapy, zen, music, dance, etc. Looking at the various domains that have tapped into this research is vast, but as of late, my train of A.D.D has taken me on this tour of the cyber realms.
The term sensorium (plural: sensoria) refers to the sum of an organism's perception, the "seat of sensation" where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorium
The somatic nervous system (SNS) is the part of the peripheral nervous system associated with the voluntary control of body movements through the action of skeletal muscles, and with reception of external stimuli, which helps keep the body in touch with its surroundings (e.g., touch, hearing, and sight). From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_nervous_system
Somatic psychology, also referred to as Body Psychotherapy, is an interdisciplinary field involving the study of therapeutic and holistic approaches to the body, somatic experience, and the embodied self. The word somatic comes from the ancient Greek somat (body). The word psychology comes from the ancient Greek psyche (breath, soul hence mind) and logia (study).
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology
"Although both McLuhan and Innis believed that media were biased according to time and space, McLuhan paid particular attention to the "sensorium," the effects of media on our senses. He posited that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. For example, the phonetic alphabet stresses the sense of sight, which in turn affects how we think: linearity and objectivity are the results."
From: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/002033-2010-e.html
I have been listening to a group called JEL and in one line they call the media; Weapons of Mass Distraction. The nature of the Sensorium is rapidly changing as attention is more and more gobbled up by the demands of a perceived world and the WMD's. Everyone of my family and friends in TX says that time has been very fast, full, etc, yet they consume the attentional T.V., the blue flicker of "either or" world views. This side fighting that side. From a psychotherapy stand point, this polarization is a function of splitting or dissociating. Like the narcissistic character structure, the thin transparent veneer that is used by our ordinary identity to buffer the empathic information of the sensorium; perhaps grief is driving this WMD. The grief that we are confused and lost in a sea of distraction, no meaning, no purpose.
"McLuhan believed that media exert effects by reshaping the ways in which individuals, societies and cultures perceive and understand their environments. Thus, he saw the goal of media studies as making visible what is invisible."
from: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/002033-2010-e.html
Embodied life unifies perception, so that we can better organize the complexity via higher integral unifying perception that is not bound in the rigid small identity structures, but rather are mirrors of natures high systems. Like a whole eco system, like music that plays attuned and empathic of the living Sensorium that they create together, like a meal that is cooked with attention, time and care.
The Laboratory for Sensory Ecology is a multi-disciplinary laboratory focusing on how organisms acquire and respond to information about their environment. Although we mainly study crustaceans and chemical senses, we are interested in any research at the interfaces between physics, sensory biology, ecology, and behavior. We perform research in a number of different areas and at a range of organizational levels including physics, chemistry, neurobiology, computer simulations, animal behavior, and ecological interactions.
From: http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/honors/LSE/index.htm
969,000 hits for the word Sensory Ecology
The field of Somatics is naturally an integrator, as is our own somatic life, the unifying consciousness, that grounds our attention in the moment, thus opening us to new found resources of higher perception. Not higher as better than, but more like an umbrella of perception.
"The only way to produce a techno-culture of debate at the speed of technological innovation itself is to take up these technologies in the service of aesthetics. Aesthetic contemplation buys us time and space."
From: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/book-review-sensorium-embodied.php
Lets make a beautiful life by making art from all that we do.
Thoughts on this ramble?
scot
