







See also entry below, Glossary.



7, VII, (Seven)









A 'western' or European invention, much propelled by colonialism. It is a hermeneutical practice, this act of interpretation of the culture of the 'other' so as to be understood by this, the True Culture. Often practiced under the guise of great humility. Anthropology is a recognized branch of the Academy. The Academy is the keeper of the sacred Library, the Literature.


It blurs a lot with Sociology has a number of sub-branches. I like Visual Anthropology: "the anthropological study of the visual and the visual study of anthropology."


For a long time, it was the way in Anthropology to refer to any of those other cultures as 'primitive.' This word so tinged with its faint disdain. They are all to be sniffed at. In recent years has been recognized as pejorative and the language has shifted. But how long is the lag from language to practice, how deep runs the sense that how-we is how-best?


Here recall the simple unrecognized fact that movement is bidirection. I'm pretty sure there's a discussion going about the somewhere in this maze. Just let it pass as true for the moment. Jump into the subjunctive with me and together let's pretend it's true. If it's true, what can it do? Thus asks the Pragmatist.


Just a bit ago this had me wondering about Newton's Law about every action has equal & opposite reaction. I was struck by the metaphysical implications. Better it may read every action is its equal and opposite reaction, or every action is its reaction.


Movement as information demands reciprocity in hermeneutics. The arrow also points the other way as well. Information flows both ways. As Olive Pink, from her Alice Springs garden, was interpreting these "simple people" into written English these people, with equal or greater sophistication, had their own anthropological processes going. That body of 'literature' is not to be found in the Library, noncanonical. 


I would dub this Apophatical Anthropology. Equal credence and attention. Mutual learning from. Perhaps revive the notion of condescension when it meant a noble thing but that word 'noble' begs the question. 

Apophatic Medicine





















Trauma has its apophatic aspect.




For Baelaeay


Having just heard my friend had died

I sat in my garden

recalling times with her.


Movement in the foliage 

drew my eye

to a newly emerging monarch


First flexing her wings

preparing to fly off 

into the world.


Like my fresh-transitioned friend

on to a new

mode of being


My heart leapt with 

the butterfly's first flight

coincident with my friend's demise.


She is flying free after being

Tied down by

This tiresome body.


In mid first flight

a dark voracious form

swooped down and gobbled up.


Gone into a bulbul gullet.

I heard my friend's raucous laughter.

At least still flying.

Avoidance [see also (dis)Comfort]

Dr. Patricia Ressick defined Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a failure to recover. Recovery is the natural and expected process, an expression of the drive toward well-being. The greatest barrier to natural recovery is avoidance. Wipe away whatever makes you uncomfortable, causes you anxiety. Many ways to wipe away. Alcohol and drugs the most popular. Distract with anger or with humor. Dissociate, check out. Social withdrawal, isolation. 


Management by denial. The irony here is that what is unseeable, undiscussable, unacknowledgeable: these things control the system, drive the train. They are threaded in deeply.


We are witnessing an epidemic of grief avoidance. Escape to nostalgia, a symptom. Examples in popular culture: Nomadland, Wandavision, schlager-like music (Solar Power, Lorde).


Orthobionomy is not a practice of avoidance.


Images from the 1964 experiment show the Bereitschaftspotential (left) and one of the finger-tapping subjects. (Lüder Deecke)

Bereitschaftspotential (Readiness Potential)

Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his doctoral student Lüder Deecke. 1964.

Go to Choice  in Glossary.


Big question: what is actually being measured here? Does this (along with Libet) make a case against Free Will? No, but everyone seems to miss the reason. They identify a person as 'mind,' that continuously running story. If there is a leader part of a person doing something I would say it's body but there I am right back in enforcing the split.









Most usage of this word body (in western writing) either restricts it to refer only to the meat body. Person's body is the fleshy parts of the Person. This is a reductionist perspective. 








Sir Henry Head with W.H.R. Rivers, his research associate

Body Schema 


For Merleau-Ponty the body schema is also the basis of "intercorporeity," i.e., a prepersonal sphere of reciprocal comportment and understanding prior to any explicit consensus and symbolic communication.


Happens behind the scenes of awareness and how the body anticipates and sets the stage for consciousness.


See Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind.

See  Revisiting the body-schema concept in the context of whole-body postural-focal dynamics

for an account of the origin of the body schema concept and some current research directions. From this article:


In summary, we view the body schema as a set of fronto-parietal networks that integrate information originating from regions of the body and external space in a way, which is functionally relevant to specific actions performed by different body parts. As such, the body schema is a representation of the body’s spatial properties, including the length of limbs and limb segments, their arrange- ment, the configuration of the segments in space, and the shape of the body surface; it can also incorporate, after suitable training, the spatial/dynamic properties of tools employed by skilled users (Maravita and Iriki, 2004). As a constantly updated postural model that keeps track of limb position, it plays an important role in the control of action and it involves both central and peripheral neural systems. In this framework, the contribution of cybernetics (in its different aspects, as dynamic systems theory, neural network the- ory, control theory, etc.) is basically to provide a (mathematical) language for representing and understanding the complexity of the dynamic interactions of neuromuscular/neurocognitive processes and to make predictions based on the simulation of the mod- els. Thus, the body schema can be characterized by the following computational features: 

  • It is spatially encoded, in the sense that it represents both position and configuration of the body as a three-dimensional object in space (Macaluso and Maravita, 2010);

  • It is distributed and modular (Haggard and Wolpert, 2005), because it is not represented in a single region of the brain and it involves a number of interacting modules, as fronto-parietal loops;

  • It is intermodal/supramodal, in the sense that it integrates pro- prioceptive and tactile information for maintaining a 3D body representation, variable in time, while preserving its functional identity; moreover, this representation is also modulated by other sensory channels, e.g., vision, as a function of specific task constraints and environmental conditions. This suggests that the body schema is somehow responsible of integrating the different sensory modalities in such a way to achieve an abstract or amodal representation (Haggard and Wolpert, 2005), while preserving an action-oriented overall coherence1 ;

  • • It is characterized by a short-term plasticity and reorganization on the timescale of seconds, as shown by the quick integration of tools into the body schema. 


Body Schema / Body Image

Body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring. Body image consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one's own body.




A boundary is not a line separating but a zone of convergence, of meeting. It is mucus.


Brute Fact















Is there a stillpoint within this everchurn?


Is The Possible Impossible a synonym?




José Ortega y Gassett

Care of the Self


Soy yo soy y mi circunstancia

y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo.


I am I and my circumstance;




Category (see also "Concept" below)




The Chaotic Journey painting by Garnet Bernard LeMaire, permission to use has been requested

Chaotic Journey

I am working out what I mean by this. I am wanting to use it as a title for what/how I teach. The phrase first popped into my awareness from Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. He used it as a synonym for thinking free from cultural constraints. That's how I read it. I found this painting by Garnet Bernard LeMaire while searching Google for images. As noted I have requested permission and I am wondering if I legally or ethically need permission for this use, as in quoting. I feel ethically in balance with her thus far, have taken some effort to point you to her (click on her name above) and more of her creations. Artists need to be honored. Artists wield magic*.


I have been doing some reading and thinking about Chaos Magic(k) and magic in general because chaos and magic have a lot to do with one another. I am in process of defining/describing what I mean by magic*. When I mean magic to mean what I mean by magic that magic* will be asterisked and italicized.


Magic and Science are equally vulnerable to chicanery and quackery though it often seems to be that magic quacks the louder. Grifters drift and settle all along the range. All the laws of physics are probablistic. Inseparable differences, the possible impossible.


Science cannot avoid the taint of magic no matter how much he tries to hoover it out. The discipline is the expurgation of magic. 


Science is One World, Universe, Time. Magic*  is Many Worlds (Real World), swarming, foaming, fractal-coalescing; delighting in the Carnivalesque (this is a reference to Mikhail Bakhtin which see in Sources).


The Chaotic Journey is a title I am using now for some possible series of workshops I would like to lead. All about orthobionomy and some teaching Ortho-Bionomy. 


Why organize it this way? Why the confusion and uncertainty? I think about the Korean film Parasite and the father's falling back to the plan of no plan. I think, too, of The Expanse, being in the churn.


What strategies are available for healing in the story between stories? What is the direction of the healing? Remembering that movement is always bidirectional, a thing that can be difficult to notice in our either/or world.


Choice, Free Will

I can't find that this question has been settled. Likely one of those brute facts areas, can't be settled. And maybe this is what keeps things running.


Is it interesting that all these words, 'choice,' 'free,' and 'will' are Old English words, not thrust upon us by the Romans. Is this significant?


Free Will seems to have been taking a bit of a drubbing of late but I would expect it to hang in there. But "which is the right answer" is perhaps not the point. The point is the wobble and quibble of magic*. I will not argue for one or the other. Thee are fat books from mind fare more brilliant than mine. If you think it's important what you happen to believe about this (All in for Free Will!) go find your Authors. Watch "The Good Place."


Wherever you are left hanging on a cusp you are sitting in the possibility of magic*. Say it's the one (Determinism) and act as if it's the other (Free Will).


Personally I keep getting surprised at how anti-Free-Will I find myself. I delight at the Libet experiment. And this may be just because it goes so much against the cultural current. I chose to oppose. Or is it my nature to go au rebours (against the grain)? You see, it can just keep going round and round.


Take this into gender politics. The politically acceptable story is "I had no choice; Nature made me who I am." (Take note of that messy word 'Nature' and recall how messed into that concept we are.) To suggest he decide to be she is taken as a hurt. But how about, "You have made a choice about how you want to present yourself to the world and I must respect that choice, and I do not need a story.



One of the misunderstandings in Ortho-Bionomy. The 'rule' in finding restorative positions is "move toward comfort, away from pain." The problem occurs when this gets turned into a rule for living. Some years ago, looking at the demographically at the Society of Ortho-Bionomy International what stood out is that it is dominated by white women of a certain age. I asked the board if we might examine what barriers we have unwittingly erected for people of color? Shouted back, "We don't have any barriers." A naive retort. Even if they are invisible to the ones who put them there the barriers are real and effective. And here is something embedded as philosophy in the presentation of the work.


"Discomfort is forbidden? This is old white lady territory. I'd better stay away or I'll be doing all her work to keep her comfortable. Can't stand those white women's tears."


An insistence on comfort













Some recent news from the Consciousness front:

Death, Dead

Death is a culturally invented concept. 



Default Mode Network (DMN)

Dorsal and Ventral Attentional Networks



Most dichotomies turn out to be false dichotomies.

Dollo's Law



Dualism and Nonseparable Differences





After an exhaustive exploration of the etymology of the word emotion, Maxine Sheets Johnstone (The Primacy of Movement) goes on...


The above various etymological usages strongly suggest that as the word is commonly used and understood today, emotion arises out of or from motion, motion in the sense of felt dynamic stirrings, felt inner commotions –– a bodily "earthquake" as it were, spanning a strikingly varied range of possible magnitudes or intensities. The commotions, being thoroughly dynamic in nature, are thus quite inadequately described as "the welling up of an impulse within" [as described by Evan Thompson in Mind in Life]. Though Thompson goes in to point out the "Close resemblance between the etymological sense of emotion –– and arrow directed at a target, and by extension the min's aiming outward or beyond itself toward the world," concluding that '[b]oth ideas connote directed movement", he remains tethered to language and stops short of investigating emotions themselves and the dynamic congruency of emotions and movement. It is, in short, not enough to connote movement, whether ideationally or linguistically. To begin with, impulse does not do justice to the dynamics of emotions which do not just motivate movement. As indicated above, they inform movement every step, turn, gesture, ching, or quivering of the way. Indeed, the affective quiverings, tensions, lightnesses, shudderings, pressures, constrictions, extensions, heavinesses, and so on, that one feels in a thoroughly corporeal sense in anger, anticipation, compassion, worry, and shame, for example, are ongoing dynamic affective happenings. Hence, whatever the dynamic stirrings and informing, they are qualitatively distinct, which means they have a formally recognizable bodily-felt character. A normal individual does not confuse his or her feelings of sadness with those of embarrassment or pride, for example, those of fascination with those of contempt, those of anxiety or annoyance with those of conviction to hostility. It is important to note explicitly in this context that although there are words for emotions, names that duly label them as those just mentioned, "the things themselves" are not objects like tables and chairs, and indeed are not things to begin with. On the contrary 'the things themselves' –– emotions –– are dynamic processual happenings. They are not states of being but precisely moving phenomena that are movingly experienced, not only in the sense of a dynamic congruency between affect and movement –– real-live feelings of fear being dynamically congruent to real-live kinetic feelings of running away, real-life feelings of joy being dynamically congruent to real-life kinesthetic feelings of running toward  –– but in the sense of emotions themselves, which are not static entities, but phenomena that run their course, waxing and waning, exploding, attenuating, constricting, expanding, bubbling, reverberating, all in ways that can be intricately subtle and complex. In a word, emotions move through the body at the same time that they move us to move. Again, they do so in distinctive ways: fear moves the body and moves through the body in ways different from trust; delight moves the body and moves through the body in ways different from grief. In each instance, we are not simply "acting" or "behaving." We are caught up in the dynamics of the immediate life we are living, even as that immediate life might be focused or fixated on past or possible future happenings or on riveting aspects of our immediate situation. In sum, we are first and foremost animate beings who, in being animate, are alive to our animateness, which is to say that whatever affects us moves through us, permeating the whole of our being and moving us to move in ways dynamically congruent with the ongoing stirrings and commotions we feel. It might be noted that such understandings of our foundational animation anchor concepts such as pre-reflective self-awareness in the dynamic realities of kinesthesia and at affective/tactile-kinesthetic body. [Emphases are in the author's.]


Literally "becoming divine within."  The word was coined from Greek roots in 1979 by an informal group of ethnobotanists and mythologists studying the inebriants of shamans (I would like to know more about this 'committee.' The word is used to refer to substances with certain psychoactive properties. It can include pharmaceuticals (like LSD, MDMA, ketamine) and botanicals (like Peyote, Amanita muscaria and other mushrooms, yerba santa, ayahuasca). They are assuming an important role in therapy and should be considered very carefully for 'entertainment.' Many of these seem to have the ability to change your mind. They have a strong magical* association, as in 'magic mushroom.' They (the botanicals) are also of religious importance in many cultures. Most traditional medicines cannot be known separate from the religion. Wikipedia. has more on the topic.

Escape Distance or Flight Zone



"Moral scar"




Glossary: for readers from elsewhere, who don't deal very well with unknown words or who want to understand everything. But. perhaps to establish for ourselves, ourselves as well, the long list of words within us whose sense escapes us or, taking this farther, to fix the syntax of this language we are babbling. The readers of here are future.


                                  –– Édouard Glissant, Malemort




If one concedes that one knows virtually nothing about God then one can begin to recover the presence of holiness in the flesh of ordinary existence.             ––RICHARD KEARNEY


If I said decisively: 'I have seen God,' that which I see would change. Instead of the unconceivable unknown––wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it––there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian––to which the unknown would be subjugated.                                                  ––GEORGE BATAILLE










I recall having once been asked by the serious face of a devout fundamentalist Christian sister-in-law if I believe in God. I was not up to any pointless theological discussion with her so I simply said yes. This answer was (and continues to be) both lie and truth. 


I am still unconvinced that it's a pretty much irrelevant question to begin with. But having some good idea the God image she asked about I certainly have no sort of belief in. I cannot deny that embryonic trace images are retained from childhood. 


There is a fact of god, that I know. This is not a belief in god. The fact I know is that a lot of people believe in some notion of God. This belief, whatever form it takes, results in choices of action that change the world. In this sense, god or God is working in the world.


Another fact I know about god, from readings in various theological literature, is that god is presented as all sorts of things. We don't need an exhaustive list with citations: The totality of creation. Love. Possibility. Change. Consciousness. Process. A power higher than yourself. A trickster. Deeply involved with humanity vs barely noticing us. Many or One. Unknowable. The list can go on and on.


Let's say I call to mind one of these when asked that unnecessary question and I say yes. Let's say I choose Unknowable God. Let that sink in. Do I believe there is much that is unknowable, inaccessible to human senses and consciousness, and an understanding that being is dependent upon this unknowablity? Yes. Can I call this god? Why not? 


Once unmoored from that God one can still hang on to god as a concept and latch it on to any number of possible words as synonymous. Whatever appeals to you.



Healing, Healer


Healing Presence




Immune System

Among the wealth of cognitive novelties under the modern sun, none are remotely comparable in their far-reaching consequences to the appearance and propagation of immune systems in the biology of the late nineteenth century. From that point on, none of the scientific integrities – animal organisms, species, ‘societies’ or cultures – could remain the same. Only hesitantly did people begin to understand that the immune dispositifs are what enable systems to become systems, life forms to become life forms, and cultures to become cultures in the first place. It is only by virtue of their immunitary qualities that they ascend to the level of self-organizing unities, preserving and reproducing themselves with constant reference to a potentially and actually invasive and irritating environment. These functions are performed to an impressive degree in biological immune systems – whose discovery resulted from the investigations of Ilya Mechnikov and Robert Koch’s student Paul Ehrlich at the end of the nineteenth century. There one finds the baffling idea that even relatively simple organisms like insects and molluscs have a native ‘foreknowledge’ of the hazards that accompany a typical insect or mollusc life. Consequently, immune systems at this level can be defined a priori as embodied expectations of injury and the corresponding programmes of protection and repair.


Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or ‘endo-clinical’ competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and – in higher organisms – adaptively acquired responsibility for the injuries and invasions it regularly encounters in its permanently allocated environment or conquered surroundings. Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a ‘body police’ or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers – and, in so far as these can bring death, ‘higher’ and ‘supernatural’ ones – this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears.


Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life (p. 8). Wiley. Kindle Edition. 


Inchoative (grammar)


Jesus, Trickster Jesus








Laws of Life

As the word 'Ortho-Bionomy' was coined to mean "the correct application of the laws of life" I am surprised to see that I am only now (30 Aug 2021) making an entry here. Though there has been an essay under way for a while. I thought to do it now because, in working on an entirely different essay (Unphased), I made reference to some writing by CS Peirce and I wanted to site a specific reference. In trying to find the particular writing of Peirce's I had read (some time ago) I came upon this paragraph in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Charles Sanders Peirce."





You may see from this that the very notion of Laws of Life is an absurd proposition, which explains why there are no widely recognized 'laws of life.'

Letting Go




















Ludic Space



[maybe someday]




Minimalism (Less is More)








I don't get why Fried thinks theatricality wrong.










Major Premise: Movement is bidirectional.






The term 'Nature' needs to be interrogated.










The Mosquito


When did you start your tricks



What do you stand on such high legs for?

Why this length of shredded shank

You exaltation?


Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upward

And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,

Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?


I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory

In sluggish Venice.

You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.


How can you put so much devilry

Into that translucent phantom shred

Of a frail corpus?


Queer, with you thin wings and your streaming legs




Yet what an aura surrounds you;



That is your trick, you bit of filthy magic:

Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power

To deaden my attention in your direction.


But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.


Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air

In circles and evasions, enveloping me,

Ghoul on wings

Winged Victory.


Settle, and stand on long thin shanks

Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,

You speck. 


I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air

Having read my thoughts against you.


Come then, let us play at unawares, 

And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.

Man or mosquito.



Now then!


It is your trump

It is your hateful little trump

You pointed fiend,

Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:



Why do you do it?

Surely it is bad policy.


They say you can't help it.



But it sounds to amazingly like a slogan

A yell of  triumph as you snatch my scalp.


Blood, red blood


Forbidden liquor.


I behold you stand 

For a second enspasmed in oblivion

Obscenely ecstasied

Sucking live blood

My blood.


Such silence, such suspended transport,

Such gorging

Such obscenity of trespass.


You stagger

As well as you may.

Only your accursed hairy frailty

You own imponderable weightlessness




Away with a pæan of derision

You winged blood-drop.

Can I not overtake you?

Are you one too many for me

Winged Victory?

Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?


Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes

Besides the infinitesimal faint smear of you!

Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!




<< New text box >>













Non-Local Mind

Will come back to this. It refers to the dawning realization that 'mind' does not inhere in an individual but is a collective activity, distributed.



Object (stuff, thing)

What is an object, what is a thing? It is difficult to stay away from metaphysics (and I'll put that word up there now and maybe someday come and flesh it out, starting from Aristotle). Are there different kinds of objects? 


Right now I'm only thinking of objects made out of stuff, in the usual sense, not made out of the fluff that is a concept, such as object as a goal, objective. My ojects are things comprised of stuff, material. The material of my objects leans heavily into the solid phase of matter.


We have started going through our stuff, ruthlessly but not as ruthless as fire or flood. Paring down to the most necessary and the most potent. Some objects we treat as foster children and we must assure they will get good care.


My father died leaving barely any stuff behind. I have become increasingly grateful that he managed this. I managed to scrounge a couple of pajama bottoms, soft reminders. 


My inlaws, a bit before they died, were forced to move into an extended care facility, a tiny one-bedroom apartment. For years we witnessed the order of their lives give way to growing piles of things not sorted and put in their appropriate place. This had been to them a sacred ritual, the management of things, the proper sorting of objects.  All offers to assist in sorting and thinning were politely declined. But then the caterwauling when it was forced upon them and done now not even under their supervision.


Sixty years accumulation in a good-sized solid middle-class suburban home to be disposed of. They had been accumulating the same stuff that everyone else had been accumulating and was now being put into the second-hand market. Things the culture no longer cared much for, with changing fashions. Most of it ersatz to begin with.


I have been determined since then to not leave my offspring such a task if I can help it. I wish to follow my father's example. The longer I put it off the less likely I will accomplish it so today I dug into it in earnest.


Sensation plus meaning.

Lormer Mosley explains in TEDx Adelaide:


A surrender of agency.

Phase (a list of related words) 

Zone, Scope, Sector, Scale, Domain [this list will grow when I get around to it.] Register, that's the word I like best now. The body has multiple registers.

Phases (of Ortho-Bionomy)

See also Unphased below.


(To Be Continued)

Object (thing)   

It would have gone without saying (as so many things do)

and now in thinking about magic* I must consider what I mean in this word. Etymology is a place to start. From Medieval Latin meaning 'thing put before (the mind or sight.' More literally 'in the way of (ob-) throwing (jacere). I find it curious that in the etymology can be found movement in two directions. There is a blocking of movement away from (throwing) and there is a movement toward, into awareness. The object is the thing you are aiming at.


Somehow the category expanded to where 'object' and 'thing' are pretty much synonymous. Read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Object


My inchoate thinking about objects leaks into the scant literature of Philosophy of Technology. I would say that technological artifacts are objects.


In general my objects have a property of solidity. It may be this is some materialist philoposphy but I can't say;  I'm not a philosopher. Agency seems a necessary component of an object. Does hard thing compel me to act in some way in relation to it? Does this mean I am sharing my agency with the object


Technology is a transition zone. Transition zones are magic* zones.


Some objects retain a magic charge or relevance longer than others. Something floats to the flotsam-jetsom pile that catches you attention (shiny!). It says something to you. It is picked. It 'speaks' to you. It becomes part of your clutter. Read Tergvinder's Stone, by W.S. Merwin.


Am I concerned with larger philosophical quibbles about what can go into the 'object' box? Not much. I suppose I do have a category of things that are potential objects. This box, like all boxes, all containers, all categories, is a leaky box. More like a net. Things move readily from the potential to the actual and back again.


Of course we are involved in the creating of objects. No humans, no objects. And they in the creation of us. Autopoiesis would have it that we are not only made out of stuff but we are made by stuff.




Poerty, Poetics




Posttraaumatic Stres Disorder (PTSD)


Procrustean, Procrustean Bed


Ortho-Bionomy is a gentle, non-invasive, system of healing that reminds the body of its natural ability to restore balance. Its principles are based on a simple and profound philosophy: allow the body to correct itself. The hallmark of Ortho-Bionomy is pain relief. The name is trademarked in the United States by the Society of Ortho-Bionomy International. The name is used in this website with permission, insofar as that pertains. Permission is obtained through the payment of a membership fee and adhering to terms of the membership.


A different word than Ortho-Bionomy®.




17th Century Icelandic manuscript



Norse mythic Squirrel. A messenger and a trickster, a joppling. Scurrying up and down the Yggdrasil, carrying messages from Serpent at the root to Eagle at the, back and forth. People say he's a gossip. He gets easily distracted on the side branches.



Re-Fusing the World

Just popped into my head as a notion I may want to go further with. I like the wordplay.



Science, Scientific Method

This entry has gone blank too long. I may cleave off Scientific Method in part because there really is not such thing; it's a myth of science.


I recently asked Science, "What do you want?" A bit of pause and Science answered, "Control." There are other things that Science could say he wanted. I say "he" because it is a patriarchal practice but evolving toward a they pronoun.


Science wants to be the only determinant of reality and justified of the dominant culture. This is a view very well described by the biologist Lewontin in Biology as Ideology. Science may make the noble attempt to be unbiased, a true north gold standard, but it never will be nor will we ever be anything but human.


Lower-case science needs a separate entry. I should probably make a similar distinction between scientist and Scientist. Here we are in the bifurcating lands of Real World vs. Official World (a reference to Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World). Once upon a time, there was the concept of citizen scientist (think Ben Franklin). A set of tools to interrogate the world, mining for its Truths that most everyone could play with. Probably still mostly belonging to some privileged class of people. The etymology is fairly simple, from the Latin "to know." Old Homer knew though that this is the sirens' song. The desire to know can lead you to you doom, smashed on the rocks.


Always willing, in fact actively seeking to challenge anything you think/feel/believe is true. Rejoicing (and some grieving) at the loss of a cherished (now false) belief. This can be called science and it is strenuously resisted by many Scientists. Not every Scientist is a scientist.


A search for what is true and what are the limits of truth. Is it all relative and does that thought give you indigestion? Does all truth get milled through the gyres?


Skepticism is a part of science and not confused with negativity. Doubt can never be eradicated, it's a brute fact. I don't doubt this to be true.




Buddhists say the self is an illusion. Nietzsche expanded on it. Neuroscientists are, most of them, nodding their heads, "Yeah, that sounds about right. 


The insistence on the self and the glorification of the Individual Self, then putting full faith in reductionism, has kept the scientists looking in the wrong direction.


A visual metaphor. Shine can be defined by a physics approach. I veer the word into metaphysics. Shine is a relationship of person and object. It is an engagement. It is ironic in that the physics shine is a surface phenomenon; I'm curious about a depth charge. [Are all metaphors ironic to a degree? The idea of irony inherent in metaphor is another topic, for another time, and probably another explorer.] My shine is subjective. What shines at one will be dull to another.


It's an Old English word, coming from the Germanic scheinen. A dictionary says shine is a quality of brightness, especially from reflected light. 





A difficult word. Is it a real 'thing' or a mere concept, will-o'-the-wisp? I am in defense of its thingness. We are sitting here in a transition zone of the Body. This is always the Body's view of the Body (like MC Escher's drawing of a hand drawing itself, or more savagely Saul Steinberg's man fishing). It sits on a cusp of being and not being. My movements are impelled or compelled, outside of any of my control [this is what Science is for, to bring more and more of that under human control, ultimately the replacement of Nature by technology, anthropotechnos]. And my movements certainly feel as if they originate from 'me,' self-willed.  



SOBI (Society of Ortho-Bionomy International)

A mutual benefit society, owns the name Ortho-Bionomy and defines it as a bodywork modality. Membership fees are in essence a licensing fee. SOBI manages training programs. Logo is an image derived from the sanddollar. Go to SOBI website, https// 


Social Homeostasis







The Startle






Tacit Dimention

"We can know more than we can tell." 


See Polanyi in Sources.









Things move through us.

That’s what they are doing.

Not just sitting there.

Whether taken hold of or not.


‘Taking hold’ is what we are doing

as things move through.


Some things move through

ungrapsed ungraspable

some grasped to some degree.


Like a rock in the path know

enough there’s a thereness

so not to stub or to stumble.


Like mushrooms in Hawai’i,

neither good to eat

nor poisonous

seen as unneeded

seen as unseen

no name for mushroom

in Olelo.


Like the black face

where the beauty wears a mask

an indictment,

and I don’t even notice

the mask is worn on my face

scarred in my mind

the unfathomable cruelty

seen as a reminder of the horror

was inflicted.

Ragged words





Avoidance is the deeply taught practice of the culture


Things move through us

and in the slowing of the moving

is the meaning.

Things metabolize into meaning

when not resisted


to flow through.



Slowing down the movement of the thing

Moving through me

or blocking it (almost) entirely.



There’s a story in a book

(not a storybook but a sciencebook)

about a juvenile female monkey in a lab

where monkeys are used for study.


This jejune monkey lived in an

‘enriched environment’

that is a cage furnished with

caged toys

a monkey might enjoy

don’t confound things with boredom

and boredom leads to shit-slingingx.


But there was one toy,

something contrived of cloth

along vaguely simian symmetries

that she would have nothing to do with.

No emotional display of fear or disgust

nothing her watchers could find or define

She simply gave it no regard.

Her reaction a precisely manicured

no reaction, the toy exiled to the land of nonexistence.


There is no knowing the story

for her

that led to this banishment

what engaged the monkey imagination enough

to cause her to call down such strong magic


mystery hers


to keep




Here’s the fun of the story: Analysis of the video record of her movements,

bounding creeping flying — all those energetic movements a lively and curious young monkey would do — through the space of her cage, revealed constraints, limitations, confinements,

where there were no bars. Her cage was doughnut-shaped (really more a hollow sphere, doughnut in a two-dimensional cross-sectionx).


She could only get so close to the toy (which she never looked at) and she could only get do far away from the toy (which she always watched) because don’t you have to watch for where a thing is in order not to look at it, not even be seen to be seeing it?


And lo this toy has transformed

for this monkey

to fetish.

It is a power object

a bidirectional

leash of non-molecular rigidity



In what register are we regarding a thing?

Solid material hard

a thing in that sorting

can’t move through me,

of a sludgier hardness

but hard enough to offer a resistance

that can ramp up to breakage.


As information it runs a clearer course through me.

Information moves molecules.

The semiotic nature of a thing

is reflected from an animate thing

(I’ll call an anima).

It is purely relational

and can only happen within limited range of scale.


[will continue to edit and add on this one, soon, I hope]

Theory of Mind


Thoughts and Feelings 

An essay is in the works.

Transition Zones (see Boundary)


A highly regarded value, similar to authenticity.


We'll get to you.







We go deeper HERE and THERE.














Unphased is an ongoing action of generosity and wholing.












Workshop (see also Ludic Space)



Write a comment


  • AM (Friday, September 18 20 10:01 pm EDT)

    Hi Richard! It was a delight to spend time on your website. The glossary part was my favorite, it reminded me of a lot of ideas that I received or discovered in high school. I would remember from time to time about them, but never be able to discuss those again with someone. Dollo's Law for example it is a great idea that lines with my vision of the life: every single thing we do now changes our future that cannot be the same. Then minimalism is a great practice but a difficult one for most of us. What reminded me of a lot of things is the word "ludic" - I learned a long time ago that by playing we learn. But I've also learned that people forget how to play when they are adults...

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Richard Valasek BA BS RN OP

I am I and my circumstance;


Changing the Conversation



Now, more than ever . . . our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship. That is more than a scientist's credo. The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, my politics,  clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.

             —JEANETTE WINTERSON                Gut Symmetries


The Story Teller



Yes, there is beauty

There is love

There is joy.

All you who suffer from

the world's miseries

Defend them.

                         ––EEVA KILPI

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