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Aug 23, 2023Liked by Harrison Koehli

🤩 Whitehead and Carpenter, Łobaczewski and Dąbrowski, and McGilchrist for good measure—all tightly meta-tied by Koehli 😊 Wow... img.memegenerator.net/instances/600x600/44728625.jpg

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No studies to verify this. Some people swear by jump-rope though... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AZVOGK2RsJA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=787Y_oRXKcM&t=218s

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That jump-rope video and the fella in it - incredible...

thanks for sharing that and basically I think I agree - jumping rope is a great way to "work" both sides of the brain. I have some techniques I use when stretching some consider a little "unorthodox", but the reality is the value of stretching is that it balances the tissues and the organs and mind and the body before or after exertion and I've come to conclude that stretching is most critical.

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Skipping is an activity best practiced with bare feet, as the sting of the rope on the toes makes for a suitably stern zen-master-with-bamboo-stick as regards attention lapses.

Jump-rope appeared on my radar only relatively recently. It was during one of those moments when all the buses going to all the right places seem to arrive at the same time.

I'd been hanging out on some forum or other and I'd been talking to this guy about Maasai jumping....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MO9B2jLOgw&t=5s

We speculated as to whether the practice was 'just one of those things', or whether there was some instinctually arrived at, ancient practical geo-bio-electromagnetic esoteric knowledge aspect to it.

Frequently, with customs like this, if you ask participants why they do things like this, they have no idea. "We've always done it". Like Maypole Dancing or Morris Dancing in England. If you quiz someone from Berkshire or wherever, they'll either draw a complete blank or come out with a bunch of dubious post-Cecil Sharp pseudo-historical-pop claptrap and you're none the wiser.

Similarly with food habits. I'm digressing a bit here, but I was talking to some Zulus on the internet the other day about geophagia, or clay eating. Why they do it and what it does for them, and they were unable to explain it even to themselves, despite it being a practice they and their forebears have probably been doing for thousands of years. Needless to say, in modern South Africa, clay-eating has become something of a guilty pleasure since Westernised medicine considers the practice at best unhealthy, at worst a pernicious psychological disease.

Anyway, back to that conversation I was having about Maasai jumping, after having chewed the fat over that, another guy chimed in and said that at some point he'd had inoperable cancer of the kidneys and had felt this strange instinctual draw towards a small trampoline he'd kept in his garage for years. Anyway, he started jumping on it for half an hour every morning "to get some exercise" and after a few months, his cancer had miraculously vanished. His theory was: jumping gets the lymph to move around the body and that the movement of lymph had "taken out the trash" in the above regard.

So I'd never thought about skipping before but straight after that conversation, I opened up YouTube and a video appeared of this guy in dark glasses jump-roping in Oxford Circus. I watched the vid and it was like the whole thing + came together for me in a flash...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzmed_Tc-XA

I thought: I'm going to buy a rope off this guy, but rather than buy it online, I'm going to go down to his business unit in Croydon so I can check him out.

Anyway, I went to see him and he was a really interesting fellah. We were chatting over coffee about the ropes thing and what he'd got out of it etc, and I brought up the subject of Maasai jumping. All of a sudden, he launched over the office counter and pulled out a photograph his girlfriend had taken of him jumping with the Maasai on a holiday he had in Kenya last year.

You can't make this stuff up.

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Great comment Highland Fleet Lute.

~~~

Not to get off-topic, but two additional thoughts -

* When barefoot on a carpet or just wearing socks it really "feels good" on occasion to gently "roll" ones curled toes on each foot (top face down) forward - it bends the tissues in the opposite direction versus normal.....I think it keeps the toes limber.

** Sometimes in what might be viewed as an "erratic and overly energetic" manner I "fling" my "connecting tissues" in my extremities (it is a little hard to explain succinctly but it is mostly arms and sometimes legs)...and this if not done too forcefully seems to keep muscle, ligament, tendon, bone, and that "stretching tissue" (fascia I think it is called) healthy with good blood flow. It also just feels good - watch a wrestling match sometime and see how the athletes warm up - I think sort learned this technique then, but one time the "office yoga guru" saw me do it and he said this is a known technique.

~~

Balance is the key I think.

Thanks,

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Oh. Just as a bit of an add on to this conversation, I came across this PRI guy's channel on YouTube. It has a lot of interesting related material as per left brain/right brain, posture, the vagus nerve, motor expression, balance, etc... https://www.youtube.com/@NealHallinan/videos

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Is there a video there specific you recommend?

As for the term "fascia" - this is the meaning as I understand it:

~

What is fascia? Fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber and muscle in place. The tissue does more than provide internal structure; fascia has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin.

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Well, I haven't been through it all yet, but there's a lot of material about fascia on YouTube as 'conscious' body glue. Some of it is better then others... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ4h9OTS-Ek As ever, the fascia people don't know what the jump ropers know, who don't know what the Northern Soul dancers know, who don't know what the Tai Chi people know, who don't know what the Shao Lin boxers know, who don't know what the 4th Way people know, and round and round it goes. As ever, the thing to do is sift for the most resonant data and see if you can get it in tune with the rest of your orchestra.

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Balance, balance, balance in the bodies muscles, ligaments, tendons, nerves, bones, and fascia.

You ever do a stretch in the "opposite direction" and realize how good it feels to your muscles mostly to be stretched the other way?

When a wrestler is fixing to fight the match it is best for the body to be limber and that is why the wrestler typically prior to the match is jumping up and down the way the wrestler does letting his or her shoulders get some good blood flow and then........

Tis time for the wrestling match!

Thanks,

BK

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Oh OK. I never wear socks. I came back from a holiday in Greece one year and thought "Do you know what? I don't like wearing socks". Einstein never wore socks, and that, apart from the fact that I smoke an awful lot of tobacco, is about the only significant thing I have in common with Einstein.

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Sometimes socks don't diminish the sensation the foot feels and really sometimes socks are worth it from a safety standpoint, but I won't deny when I stopped wearing socks in bed, that is when my athletes foot diminished. That must of been damn near 40 years ago...holy moly...time moves on.

I remember when it happened, a fella named Roland I seem to recall said to me - Ken....why you wearing your socks in bed? I realized it was a fair question and I said to Roland - you must be correct - that is the root cause.

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Oh boy; this is too much for me!

I am not asked to answer these theory questions, and I don't normally try to.

I have an understanding of the theory I was taught, and that serves as sufficient for me (for now).

For the researcher I study, this all started when he began to run into past deaths on his cases. He was using a trauma-based therapy, to this was an important thing to understand. He decided to take these incidents seriously, which was a big leap of faith. But he had a lot of confidence in his technique, and that's where they were pointing him. He felt compelled to part ways with traditional psychology, which was not too difficult for him as he had never been much invested in it, though he had studied Freud and others in his early years.

To begin with the assumption that the personality is essentially a non-physical being who can have opinions, attitudes, ideas, and make decisions produces a significantly different approach to psychology than starting with the assumption that the personality is an animal with special features, and resides (somehow) in a brain.

We can imagine, then, that the personality starts to develop its own uniqueness with no reference to a body or biology at all. Indeed, the most fundamental attitudes and abilities of the personality may well have developed pre-biology (or at least before the personality began to identify with biology). The personality can make things by having an idea and solidifying (or energizing) it. It can communicate with other beings directly, or using these energetic manifestations. It operates by taking its attention on and off of things. It can create and destroy the things it thinks of, or the things others have thought of. And as you might expect, if one being destroys the creation of another being, that other being could have bad feelings about it.

Psychopathy, in this context, must have arisen at some point in the development of the personality. It has been described to me as originating in a conviction that one is "bad" and that to survive one must, essentially, avoid detection. It was never totally clear to me what sort of event could result in this conviction. But we can assume that such an event might contain a lot of force, and that the being, to continue to be convinced, must continue to have most of its attention stuck (and largely out of its control) on this event. All the skills and attitudes that such a personality has developed since they became convinced that they could never fit in or trust anyone are based on this conviction. Thus, to "cure" such a being involves not only unsticking their attention from that event, but also a major relearning process.

My basic understanding of human psychology involves the interplay between what the being consciously puts their attention on, and what they unconsciously put their attention on. Recovery is generally seen as achieving a better balance between conscious and unconscious attention so that one can deal more appropriately with the present time environment.

Because of the essentially non-physical and creative nature of the personality, "magic" in its many forms is in fact possible. The impossibility of "magic" in the context of the physical world is one of the big barriers to understanding the human condition. In the physical world, you can have physical certainty. In the spiritual world, all you have is non-physical (spiritual) certainty. This leap constitutes a big barrier to dealing with the spiritual. I hope more will be willing to take it, at least in its intellectual form.

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It isn't clear to me how Carpenter can explain blind people. If the brain has access to everything all the time, and only selectively pulls things to pay attention to which results in our cognition of the world, it seems that the eyes are both unnecessary yet "seeing" is desirable, since people do it all the time. If Carpenter's theory is correct, people would never go blind from say having their eyes damaged, as pre injury their brain liked what the visual aspect of understanding was providing but then afterwards loses it. Put another way, if the brain can access all information in reality without auxiliary sensory organs, why does it have them, and why does it stop accessing the information when those unnecessary peepers get removed?

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You're going to have to read the book, because I didn't lay out the theory, let alone the data its based on - only a couple of its features. In the case of a blind person, he would process implicit data just like everyone else. Potentially "visual" data would only be perceived implicitly, just like visual priming is only perceived implicitly (but a blind person would lack even that). Perhaps implicit data would heighten the other senses more than they would otherwise be heightened, but I doubt that has been studied. Though there is this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8340899/

For Carpenter sense organs ARE necessary for conscious awareness (and physical survival).

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I'm pretty sure the senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and feeling sensation direct (touch) are fundamental and inherent in what it means to be a human.

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I am not quite sure what you mean by that in this context. Could you please elaborate?

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Well in your comment you expressed doubt about "the imagination of the brain to create things independent of senses" and I was affirming that I have doubt on that concept as well.

Does that answer your question?

~~~~

With that typed being you inquired, one could suggest that all creatures on earth (at least mammals) have the 5 senses mentioned, so then it is fair to ponder what separates humans from animals.....but I put forth too much imagination and speculation amongst the humans is often harmful especially if it gets disconnected with the soil of the earth that our feet typically reside upon - unless for brief moments when one is jumping rope I reckon!

~!~

BK

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Ahh, I see. What I was actually pointing out is that Carpenter goes farther, claiming that the brain has access to ALL information everywhere, but then chooses what to pay attention to which is almost entirely the extremely bounded awareness we are familiar with. My point wasn't about imagination (the brain can make stuff up, although I wouldn't be surprised to find that it can only make things up for which it has reference points for) but rather that Carpenter seems to be saying that the brain doesn't need any organs to gather information about the world, because it already has access to that information. Even if one takes that as true and makes the claim that the organs merely clarify to the brain what information is most immediate and relevant, it still leaves the problem that the information is seemingly lost along with those organs. The brain without eyes doesn't just work harder to decide what to see or focus on, but rather can't see anything at all.

(I don't want to jump only on Carpenter, as Whitehead's theory seems silly too, but then quantum physics always seems silly and detached from reality. Hard to tell if it is wrong, or just so strange it is hard to comprehend.)

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I agree and I have doubts regarding many things quantum.

Warm Regards,

BK

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