Rolf Audio Tape Transcript

Audio Files and Transcripts From Classes with Dr. Rolf

Ida Rolf Audio Tape Transcript
Tape B6 Side 2C

AUDIO FILE

TRANSCRIPT

(Concept of Entropy continued)

(0:37 student) some connected back to others, others connected onto themselves. They are elements, they are the ordered elements; they might be energies, they might be muscle tensions, they might be fascial elasticities and so forth. Whatever the elements of the set are; it’s a set. A mathematical set. Now associated with these arrows are, well you can call them probabilities, but that word might be “weighing functions”. So the probability, if you start at A, to get to E might be one over a hundred. Where as to go from A to B is going to be 1/5th, from B to A, 1/4th, from B to c, 1/20th, and so forth and so on. Each point now being related to all other points by waiting functions. So in system, like this, to get from A to G, well, you might go from A to G directly, but that would have a very low probability, a very low possibility, so you have to go from A to E, if you went from A to E you could either go back to A or to D or to F, and so forth. Now, in a totally random situation all of these probabilities would be equal, and we’d have a blob ( in a sense). And as a function of these weighing functions one can say how ordered the system is. Now a system like this, you can never say, “this is it. This causes that.” That makes absolutely no sense. You can say “it is where it ain’t sometimes”, and that makes perfect sense. Because you’re not talking about cause and effect, you’re talking about changing a field, and that’s the key concept. You’re talking about the ordering of a field, the ordering of a field of points. Now! The key question is how do you go about making a field like this more ordered? How do you change its order?

(3:24 student) If you put an energy, and sometimes we say, well something is disordered. The shoulders are disordered so we put energy into the shoulders and order them, and this in not true in general, because in general, if we put energy into this system we will tend to make it more random. If however, from the source, we originate a method; and this method has to have energy – one can measure the energy; it has to have a particular amount of energy. However, this has to be a very special kind of energy, and this energy has to be ordered in a unique, or a simi-unique way, because there are many, many ordering. And the whole theory of information now is, what are the optimal orderings, how do you know when you’re getting close to them, how do you know when your converging and diverging? And anyhow, you have to have a code, which corresponds in some mathematical way with this space here. And the correspondence has to be in such a manner that when you transmit the energy you will change the order of this system in a predictable fashion. Not in a “ this causes that” ‘Cause that can’t be done. This theory says such a statement is meaningless. But how can you reorder this field, change the organization of these sets of points in this field. And that is, again, by a very specially coded message, again of probability, of transmissions.

(5:20 student) So, I think it’s not really all that far out to say that the output probability is a transition; are some things about the body, immeasurable things about the body, relationships of the energies in the body, a representation of the sum of the energies in the body and their field.

(1:5:48 student) And the input, of coarse, is the manipulation. But it’s not just the elbow; it’s not just the energy. It’s the very precise, and perhaps unique, set of manipulations, that put energy in an ordered, precise manner, that can rework this field.

(6:11 student) Now let me add one other thing to this. In this kind of a system, you don’t know the code. So you put in a little signal. A little perturbation, (actually would be a better word). And something happens, and you get feedback. And you can tell from this feedback, and from the way this feedback changes, whether you’re on the right track, or whether you’re on the wrong track. This is called actually, the Eric Directing Code. Use the code, that you can take the feedback from here, up to the original message that you sent, and know whether you’re becoming more ordered in the output field, or less ordered in the output field, or ordered in a direction that you want…

(7:13 student) and this is a very large branch of mathematics now dealing just with this kind of a process. I think it’s not unreasonable to assume that this is what goes on in Structural Integration. That this is a process that Dr. Rolf went through unknowingly, or unknowingly that this was the mathematics of it: doing these things, seeing the changes.

(7:35 student) You see, when this started up, there was no information theory.

(7:45 student) There’s something extrinsically and infinitely variable, so what’s put in my head now is, “so what?” There are so many variables, and I think what you have done is explain very scientifically what’s really happening – what’s going down – but I’m wondering now, what are we to do with it? It’s a very beautiful explicit demonstration and explanation of everything that’s happening, but, so what?

(8:15 student) Well I never meant it, really, as nothing that much more than that, but I think its food for thought.

(8:17) Well it’s really more than that. It’s more than that Peter. As I say, I wrote this paper, this contribution to stress thing, and I sent it to 2 journals, and one of them sends it back and says “it’s completely unscientific”. (He didn’t say completely. He said, “it’s too one sided. We can’t publish it.”). You see, in addition to a paper that I wrote, you had something that was developing your - what you have just developed - and you put it next to it, you say,” this is not unscientific.” You demonstrate that it isn’t that unscientific, and you remove this label, and then the dear people can publish it.

(8:56 student) I think in a sense, this is just the related help that you get from - maybe, perhaps – seeing in terms of this, is you’ve got a slightly larger view, a slightly more complete view of the process that you’re involved in, or, in other words, you get an intuitive feeling for the process you’re involved in from a slightly different angle.

(9:22) I think it’s of value Peter, I really do. I think it’s very valuable. It makes a great big contribution to an understanding, and where Jerry is saying there are so many variables, is true also.

(9:37 student: Jerry) I know for instance for example, there’s a different feeling when you put your elbow in my back, and when Fritz puts his elbow in my back. It’s entirely different. And then there’s my feelings toward you and my feeling toward Fritz. That’s important, all these variables

(9:53) This is true, but the only way you initiate something is to start with large relatively simple blocks, putting them together, and then after you put those large simple blocks together than you realize that within the blocks you have another system, a system made up of smaller and perhaps more complicated situations. But those smaller and more complicated situations are not entirely independent. And therefore you are now able to get into that block, and change that block, (the constituency of that block sufficiently), that you begin to get some more responses.

(10:35) But you see it’s not a hundred percent degree of freedom. You have degrees of freedom only within limitations there.

(10:46 student) just taking everything that he said for granted, he just made it happen.

(10:52) He raised it up so that you see it differently, and understand it differently. What he has said is what we’re always experiencing all of the time. What I have done is what all of us are experiencing all of the time. But as I analyze it for you begin to see how you’ve experienced it, and then, therefore, you can control, what you or the next guy is experiencing to a degree. And I think this is life experience in general.

(11:19 student) I’d like to add a couple of examples to make it a little more meaningful. Another word for organization is redundancy, and entropy and redundancy are reciprocal functions, and everything we do depends on our percentage or degree of redundancy. For example, our language is about 60% redundant. Totally. But if you go to the dictionary and you look in the section Q, it’s 100% redundant in the sense that after every Q that’s at the beginning of a word, there always follows a U, so this is no information. If our language were about 55% redundant, it would be impossible to have anything like crossword puzzles. If it were 65% redundant we could very easily have 3 dimensional crossword puzzles. (12:07) Now what he’s doing, and what we’re doing here, if we get too little redundancy than we’re in a maze. We don’t know what Ida’s doing, I don’t know what Peter’s talking about; this sort of thing. And we have very individual optimum redundancy level. So if I am 60% redundant in my thinking, and you’re only 55%, I won’t understand you. But if I’m 60% talking to you as a 55%, than I’ll be boring to you. And it’s a very close limited thing, and this is what’s going on with an unscientific journal kind of thing. You were maybe too redundant, or not redundant enough for them to get the message through. It’s a very narrow pinhole there.

…

(12:58 student) What this also says to me is that to start, the thing I’ve been unhappy about, and the reason I asked the question is that – I don’t feel entropy as a concept is particularly valuable to the Rolf processing.

(13:08) Oh I think it is, if you substitute for the word entropy, randomness. Oh I think it’s very significant.

(13:14 student) No. I think it’s a question of rearranging processes, rather than changing the absolute entropy.

(13:23student) That’s what you’re doing. They’re synonymous.

(13:26 student) Oh. Well, I asked you before e, and you said no they weren’t. I interpreted your answer that randomness and rearrangement –

(13:33 student) you see they’re precise mathematical reciprocal. The question is, aren’t we better off discussing the depth of the mathematical definition, which has something isomorphic with the concept?

(13:49 student) well aren’t we in fact decreasing entropy with processing?

(13:57 student) yes. Absolutely. Well, no, I can’t say absolutely. It’s certainly possible.

(14:06) I think it’s more than possible. I think it’s probable.

(14:08 student) the key question now is what do we consider the elements of this set? When you look at a photograph, it’s clear that the entropy has changed.

(14:27 student) I see it to the totally opposite direction. I see the person coming into the room as being much too redundant, and that we actually are increasing the entropy slightly by putting him into that middle zone where he’s just right, but not so far that he goes to total randomness. In other words, we limit our de-structuring.

(14:44 student) But rigidity is not the same as order.

(14:45) No. Definitly not. Defiantly not. Order is non-rigid. But order, the same thing follows the same thing. I mean, what follows is predictable in order. It’s too predictable in rigidity.

(15:17 student) I see your code, I mean the way you see this body. You start not with randomness, but the rigidity.

(15:23 student) I don’t think the concept of randomness applies, that’s what I’m saying. I’m questioning the concept “randomness”

(1:15:34 student) There’s certainly a change of organization, and whether the change of organization is from randomness to greater ordering, or it’s from one ordering to another ordering, which happens to be more random - it’s got to be one or the other you know. It can’t be anything else. I suspect that it probably is toward more ordering. It’s got to be one or the other, you either make ‘um more random or less random, and my guess is you make them less random.

(16:10 student) He sees them starting with high entropy randomness, and I see them starting with low entropy redundancy, and we’re coming this way…where it’s at the same point, where at the end of 10 hours. But my concept was that we came from the other direction. I see the same thing; I’m just on the other side of the mirror.

(16:35 student) The thing is how we describe the elements

(16:36 student) Yea, and, you know, with the new physical concepts of time reversal and anti-matter, it really doesn’t matter which side of the mirror Peter stands, and which side I stand, we’re both on the same side, or neither of us are there at all.

(16:52) This is what happens to me every time I look at some of these modern theories. And I look at it and I read it and I fight with it, and I finally get to the end of the damned article, and I finally say, “there, I know what he said”, and I say, “oh my god so what? We used to say that this way.”

(17:10 student) We’re a model building society.

(17:15 student) This sort of general systems theory is very applicable now, and it’s very popular now

(17:20) and it’s very convincing now. This is what gets me a little bit irked; it’s very convincing now, if you put it in that idiom they think they understand it, and if you put it in some idiom, they can’t see it, so they’re unscientific.

(17:36 student) You’re not using their code

(17:40) Well I understand all that, but they don’t seem to.

(17:45 student) There’s a danger here to I think, with most human beings, when we name something, we think we understand it.

(17:50) This is true. And when you name it, you really just stop it in its flow. And if you stop it in the wrong place, you’ve got a really serious trouble on your hands.

(18:03 student) I’m really interested. You said you could put this in a code. Are you talking about a physical system, or are you talking about an organic system? Can you put an organic system into a mathematical code?

(18:16 student) Well, in the last 10 years we’ve seen an awful lot of attention to that exact problem. And of coarse, the most striking example given is the DNA business. Which is a prime example of the theory.

(18:31 student) I mean if you put a human system into it. This is a pretty complicated organic thing we’re dealing with.

(18:37 student) I won’t say yes or no. Some say yes, and some say no. But certainly there is a pretty impressive high-level people who say yes.

(18:45) Well, what I think is that to the extent that you can sort of take it into the 1970 jargon, you get more people looking at it, more people being impressed by it, and as they look at it, in there looking they’re contributing energy to the idea and developing it. So that I see it as worthwhile, even though it doesn’t make one darn bit of difference to the way I lay my hands on Jerry or Fritz lays his hands on Jerry. But it seems to me that it’s worthwhile in the sense of, there’s a whole level of pretty high level people who don’t even look at it until you put it in that particular idiom that they like.

(19:34 student) John Kennedy’s campaigns were run on information theory formula

(19:35 student) that’s right I wrote an article on [therapuse] communities, putting it in general systems theory, I think it was very well described.

(19:45) Well I think this could be a decided contribution to the whole situation, to develop that Peter: Put it down into black and white words. When Al comes he’s going to bring the manuscript of that rejected paper, plus their letter…

(20:18) Maybe we rewrite the paper; maybe we write a supplement to the paper, by Peter Levine. Because as I see the progression of this in terms of publication at this point, it’s going to be a first paper which nobody understands, plus a dozen other papers, each one of which throws a little light on it. And nobody’s going to really understand it until that whole dozen papers get written. Then those dozen papers should go into a monograph. But the point is that the field should be defined before we get to that monograph stage, because that monograph stage may not be there for 3 years. And what we ought to do is to put our stamp, to a certain extent, on this field, and say, this is where we’re working. And it should be done by free publication.

(21:22) Ok, somebody got some more to contribute. I think that was a wonderful contribution to the general understanding.

(21:28 student) Did you read that [message] in the similarity people and the differential; the way they see a problem like, administrative approaches it from one point but the scientist approaches it from the other point of view. And if you write an article and you are a similarity person and you give it to a publication. Well most of the editors are differential, then they will not understand the paper unless you put the ending of the article in the beginning, and give them this information first. And then the rest of the paper will make sense to them. And if you give it to the [publication] the other thing is true, they will understand the paper right away. And they found this in the industries, that is they took the engineers report, and took the ending findings, then gave this as an introduction to the administration, then they were much less conflict, because by the time they got through the whole paper, they had lost the administration therefore they did not understand the ending. So you could rewrite… with that in mind…

(22:58) Well there’s also the little bit that we’ve been talking about back and forth for the last couple of weeks, about this 4th area versus 3rd area. And 5th area versus 4th area thing. And what part of the area the guy happens to be in that’s reading your 4th area paper, etc. etc. If he’s way along towards the 5th area, you’re boring him, if he’s way back toward the 3rd area he isn’t understanding it. It’s different. It’s not as practically organized, it’s not as practically [pafrintiated] as what you’re saying.

(23:33 student) Two people that are the same level in the approach… the person with the mind that starts here; you and Peter are a very good example of this, if you think about it. The person that sees similarities has a very different process of thinking from the person who sees the differences. Like, I see most of the time the differences, and I think you see the similarities more than I do. Therefore, we may be on the same level, but very difficult to communicate, because I start at the ending and you start at the beginning…

(24:16) Anyway, it’s an awfully good point. You know I don’t think this class should be ended next week, because it’s getting much better day by day. So who’s got another contribution?…

(24:00 student) I’d like to say something about the finer body. I mostly worked with the finer body in my work, and I think that when a person has gotten to the place where they are capable physically of keeping their head up, they may not be able to do it with the finer body, because the finer body is still stuck back in the –

(25:11) No. this isn’t the way that it goes. The finer body initiates it. I’m sorry, that’s the place I’m not compromising. The finer body is the pattern to which the coarser has to come along.

(25:29 student) Fritz is capable of physically putting his head where it belongs, and somehow he doesn’t look as though he knows yet.

(25:40) He doesn’t know in his flesh. He knows in his head. He knows in his finer body.

(25:47 student) Ok. The finer body infiltrates the flesh, the heart. You cannot separate the two. And if you can use a different code to give this knowledge to Fritz

(25:58) You do. You use the code with your fingertips. That’s the code

(26:00 student) but you may need another code

(26:06) [Evertalisms] you mean?

Or, you say, you cannot get it through his thick scull. Maybe it has to come from in

(26:16) That we’re agreed on. That business of, you can’t get it through his thick scull is just a good old fashioned

(26:21 student) - It’s just a metaphor. Or it may be a chest actually that you’re talking about.

(26:30 student) I’m saying that, it may be that it has to saturate him from within, and the message to get within goes a different way then through your fingertips. And you can shorten the time it takes… his body to find this place

(26:58) Well now, what do you think we’ve been doing in all these 10 hours? In the 1st hour I started explaining to him, “now get your waistline back, and look out with your head up…no, that’s not the top of your head. The top of your head is a little further forward, or a little further back than that.” This was my practical application of your particular words at this point.

(27:22 student) You give people the bodies to live in, and maybe they need to learn how to live in it too.

(27:29) Yea, but they’ve been hearing about it every hour that they’ve been in this room

(27:34student) This is a habit argument a little bit. There is no such thing as habit.

(27:40 student) The concept I hear you struggling with, the question of whether or not the finer body, or instinct in complete gestalt, whatever you want to call it, the question is, whether left to itself, it will always make the right choice, or not. And there are people who believe that if you leave the finer body to it’s own resources, without extraneous crap put on it, like bent out of shape or head forward or whatever, that it will make the correct choice. And in that respect, the conclusion is that if you put the physical body into a place where it can respond to the finer body, the finer body will always choose the correct structure, and will continue to evolve. And there’s another theory that says that’s not true. And I think that’s what you’re discussing right now: whether you teach the finer body, or whether it already knows.

(28:30 student) I’m not saying teach the finer body. I’m saying the finer body already knows. What I’m saying is I don’t think the finer body realizes that it knows. And this realization I think can be done faster, when it’s done with medition, or it can be done with deep relaxation, or a lot of different methods. And I think that you can shorten this period by the finer body realizing that the body is changed, and therefore it can now rely on its own knowledge.

(29:09 student) Then we’re getting into a semantic question of, what are the limits of the finer body; ‘cause if it doesn’t know that it knows, then you’ve got hierarchies, egos and super egos.

(29:15 student) You have to believe that. If you believe it you believe it, and that’s where a lot of the disagreement is. Some people just don’t even believe in the existence of the finer body.

(29:27student) Just to make it more concrete even than that; somebody who carries a lot of tension, in their neck and in their back, there is no doubt, that after they start getting uptight, they’re going to start doing this business. But if for 1/2 an hour in the morning and 1/2 an hour in the evening they lay on their back and feel these places, and feel as they breath and as they relax that they’re coming back to the place where they were when they got up from the elbows that that’s an important thing, and it’s something that can’t be passed over.

(30:03) Well it seems to me that the thing that’s lacking in this whole discussion is recognition of the fact that people are in different places along the spectrum. Therefore, one guy’s finer body can handle a thing and another’s can’t; it’s not as well developed and what have you. But I do think that in all this argument that I’ve heard in the last 5 minutes, we’ve been making the assumption that the finer body equals the finer body, which I doubt.

[End]