All Life Long, Our Body Works
To Bring To Its Full Completion That
Deeply Unique Self We Continue Becoming
You were born a human being. But that only sets someone's feet on the road that leads to becoming a full-fledged person, which is a life-long process -- whether it spans many years or but a few -- and which from then on continues unfolding into a completely individuated Self and its Story.
The chief aim of this website -- and its whole reason for being -- is to enable the experiencing of its readers to surface long enough for them to catch at least a glimpse of it. The experiencing itself, of course, will happen no matter what, but the noticing and grasping of it in action is what is most sought here by going to the length of these pages.
(If and when this discovery takes place here, it will arise as an "internal" event in the life of each particular reader. For that is the only place where any human being's experience exists and can ever be found.)
The Way We Each Embody Our Experiencing
Shows What We Were Born, What We've
Become, And What We're Growing Into
Its Traces Show In
Our Bodies And Behavior,
And Are To Be Found In Those
Meanings, Moments, Music, And Movies,
That Come To Matter To Anyone Most
These aspects of human culture, shared by us all,
are instances of a person's life-experiencing,
which the Self shapes its life in light
of from that point on.
I. "The Meanings We Live By: These spring from the same sources out of which myth arises, pouring itself as molten significance into classic casts of human existence -- which cool, harden, and then endure over time in their countless and varying forms of the Romantic, Tragic, Ironic, and Comic."
Romantic Tragic Ironic Comic
(The exploration of Meanings continues on 'The Blog' page)
II. "In Life-Defining Moments : When some new sense of Self, Other, and World is discovered, formed, and fashioned by someone in a way that grounds him or her more fully in what is real than they have been before."
(The exploration of Moments continues on 'The Blog' page)
III. "While Music Fashions Sound Into Some Specific Form: In pitch, rhythm, volume, pause, tone, tune, and tempo -- or variations of them all -- we then hear as well as feel what it has to say."
What the eye does with motion in space, the ear does with movement in time, as each one determines what it registers in physical spacetime, and in doing this both participate in creating the grand give and take of human experiencing. As Robert Henri stated, "Gesture and music are alike in that they have powers of extension beyond known measurements."
( To illustrate, play just the three-and-a-half minute segment from 17:55 to 21:30. Interpret it personally as you most certainly will. To me, this tiny slice of the work bears the marks of something significant in life reaching its end. There, it slows to have its last say as it summarizes what its life has meant; then, it finishes with a beautiful flourish of chords in parting, pauses for one last look as it turns to go . . . and then, its time fully spent, is gone. )
(The exploration of Music continues on 'The Blog' page)
IV. "When Movies Play At The Local Theater Of Our Mind: Though one cannot control what comes and goes up there on its big screen, you nevertheless remain the only one making whatever sense results of those bits and pieces you choose to keep, take away with you, recall later, and tell anyone else about. "
(The exploration of Movies continues on 'The Blog' page)
To Speak Of Life
Through language --with its countless cultural outlets -- our most rudimentary sensations are wrought into the fullness of
human experiencing,
the sentient activity and ongoing organic life-process
that forms our bodies and fashions our lives.
In English, we mainly speak of life in three ways: as something we have, do (enact and embody), and are.
Though each differs in its lived configuration, the three cannot finally be separated
because they are always aspects of the same single living reality. Each can be there only when the other two are.
In life, we mostly do only what we really want to do; but, at times, we also don't do what we really want to do. To truly say you know yourself, you must be familiar with the specific ways in which you do both of these things. (Until you can do that, you are missing two essential understandings!)
Enactments and embodiments always occur together. Any embodiment is also, simul-
taneously, the physically sustained, real-time enactment of the associated thoughts, feelings, and patterns of the individual all rolled up into one; and these extended events then become the somatic, musculo-skeletal, and ideational behaviors that are repeated whenever needed, as quickly as one blinks their eyes -- so swiftly, in fact, that we no longer even sense we are the ones doing it, and arrive at its end result as if it were something seemingly mechanical, natural, and "automatic."
So the primary aspects of all human life are the experiencer, the experienced, and the experiencing that unites them both and embraces everything they contain. And across time it is these three that usher in the evolving reality of the Self and its Story.
. . . inhabits the world . . .
. . . and makes its way.
Life begins afresh . . .
A toddler, steadied by a child, led by a youth
Life keeps forming itself into the next stage.
Life is "all there" at any age, but you must reach for it in order for it to fully reach you.
Infants and children start by grabbing things with their eyes. Later, as they gain control of hands and arms, the eyes can let go of their anxious holding.
At about one year of age, when legs and feet are sturdy and steady enough to make standing upright possible -- thus exposing the soft underbelly and vital organs of the potentially mobile youngling -- the cortex alerts the rest of its bodily being of the postural shift taking place by heightening the overall excitation, and once the walking starts, the organism's newfound vulnerability is then moved about through the world as a now heightened affectability.
One minute they appear as the teenagers they are. Look back again a few minutes later and you suddenly see an adult gazing right back at you. (Clicking on their photos helps you see that they are both.)
From toddler, to child, to youth, does not lead straight to teen and on to grown up. What comes instead is adolescence -- encountered in full force and met head on -- as a burgeoning bundle of extensive growth spurts and internal changes all working together to deepen, broaden, extend, and intensify one's physically embodied sense of self, other, and world from that point on.
And its totality transforms the visibly bustling life of any individual, changing that from being "just the next stage," and instead turning it into a one-of-a-kind passage, which when begun, carries the person to the many other people, places, and events that they'll continue going on to from there.
For life always continues on from wherever it finds itself right now. And at this juncture, what it sets before one is a striking bridge that leads from the shores of adolescence on the one side to the shores of full adulthood on the other -- and for those who traverse it, the awareness eventually dawns that what it covers is the span of a human being's crossing into adult sexuality.
The bridge from adolescence to adulthood
Only those who come to this bridge and willfully cross it ever arrive at true adulthood. Without that, the genetic inheritance is unable to complete the fashioning of itself into an emotionally embodied adult, and from there go on to reach full maturity. Whenever this interruption occurs, then regardless of what the years of such people may be in number, they are essentially still living an unfinished adolescence. (It's impossible to estimate how many millions of human beings choose to remain on the shore of the teenage side, compared to the millions who cross over to the shore on the adulthood side instead-- but the contrast between the two outcomes clearly shows in the distinctly different ways in which the experiencing of both groups is formed, embodied, and lived out from there onward.)
The body that comes after adolescence is complete is the Alpha adult. It reveals the overall physical constitution inherited by an individual (mesomorph, ectomorph, or endomorph); but it also evidences the formative history of one's emotional development up to that point. Since life ever seeks to continue its unfolding, that same adult body also gives indications of both things that are working at present and things that are likely to come. Learning to read these signs in oneself and others greatly increases one's understanding of people in particular and human life in general.
As stated in Stanley Keleman's succinct snippet on body inheritance:
(given here in reverse order to his sketches shown on the left)
"Were you born with strong bones and muscles; a powerful sympathetic nervous system, cerebellum, and thalamus; and rich sensory motor tracts for movement? Do you have a constitution that was made to confront, to hunt, to withstand physical action? If yes to these, you are a Mesomorph.
Were you born with long bones, long fingers, a small head? Are you a sensor, an alert attender, with a rich sensory network of nerves, continually accumulating data? Are you a plotter, a planner, a trapper, who senses and penetrates situations? If so, you are an Ectomorph.
Were you born a pear-shaped person who makes use of what is? A powerhouse of determination? Are you big gutted; do you enjoy bringing people together? Are you slow moving, short legged, and enduring? You are an Endomorph."
"It's true, O man, you little two-legged plucked cock. Don't listen to what others may say! If you don't crow in the morning, the sun does not come up." -- Nikos Kazantzakis
One need not live the pace of youth to bear still all the vigor of its spirit.
Spirit is the soul moving forth to meet and be met by the power of life anew. It can never be conquered from without unless it has first capitulated from within.
From 'Soul' To 'Self' In 2,500 Years
Whatever increases personal knowing is a gift to use often and remain dedicated to. This ever-deeping understanding steadily advances throughout any life, but it most prominently comes fully into play in the later-life stage of maturity -- which greatly alters and expands one's physical knowing of both the internal and external experiencing of self, others, and the world.
Unfortunately, in English the word 'soul' has now been emptied of the meaning it traditionally held in Western civilization for 2,500 years, and today we primarily use this word figuratively, poetically, and in refined literary senses. Nevertheless, the reality it points to is still very much there and remains alive. The one word that comes closest to embracing what it once meant is 'character.' But by far the word commonly used today is simply'Self.'
One finds it necessary to do a little surgery on the word before using it, however, to boost its size and strengthen it enough to "carry the freight" and signify most of what it once conveyed. And the surest way to tie it to any existing substance -- and go on from there -- is to connect 'Self ' to the embodied experiencing of an actual human being, so as to then see the totality of an individually distinct human being, and view that as the complete living and unfolding whole it always and inevitably is. And there's no need to define the word 'self' any further. For whatever you use the word to stand for and refer to, is the same thing we're doing in using the word in these pages too.
The Abiding Ground Of What Exists
" That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?"
-- Ecclesiastes 7:24
Learning to see existing things in relation to each other -- like land, sea, and sky -- is necessary for understanding anything natural, such as the environment, but it's absolutely indispensable for understanding anything alive -- as in the ongoing life-process of a human being.
The Primary Contours Of Any Self Arise From
The Interplay Of Forces Found In The "Three Selves"
At Work Within Everyone
With all you've been and done, at any moment you are always more what you are becoming. For life is not a fixed, set, or static thing. It already contains both your genetic life and the lived-experiencing it obviously enables, plus the leading edge of what you are presently growing into; and either you are now also actively involved in shaping the whole of this or it's left to do that all by itself.
With all you've been and done, at any moment you are always more what you are becoming. For life is not a fixed, set, or static thing. It already contains both your genetic life and the lived-experiencing it obviously enables, plus the leading edge of what you are presently growing into; and either you are now also actively involved in shaping the whole of this or it's left to do that all by itself.
The life-process of any person (from ovum, to embryo, to fetus, and so on) starts off and remains a living organismic whole, burgeoning into its profuse layers of tissue and ulltimately into its many ensuing bodily forms -- all of which keeps right on unfolding itself into the ongoing self and story that then becomes any human being's actual life. This is how it is for everyone.
The overriding challenge of this life-long unfolding, of course, is to account for and understand just how the particularity of it actuall emerges and makes its way into being. But this much is certain: Whatever any person turns out to be, his or her unique experiencing is undeniably at work in it.
And right there at the core of this extended process of a life is where the three different selves come to merge into that distinct identity of any existing self over time. Each one is a force with inclinations that are its own, and these three can either range ahead in the same or different directions -- but all three are always powerfully alive, in motion, and on the go.
The black one in the back moves steadily onward manifesting the inner-directed powers of the natural and instinctual (the prepersonal self), while the mottled gray in the foreground is more readily affected by those other-directed forces of society that come from without (the postpersonal self), and the white one's power comes in between the two of them, running shoulder to shoulder with both as it makes its own way on (the personal self). All three forces, regardless of how idiosyncratically they may be fashioned, merge into one -- as the identifiably distinct Individual that anyone actually turns out to be.
Experiencing The Self Is What Leads Directly To Steering
One's Own Course, Which Thereby Turns Life Into
A Continuous Self-Forming And Renewal
Most people miss so much of what they are, but the tragedy is that they miss it without knowing that they missed it. How does this occur? It happens because of how we experience life itself.
We do not create the instinctual, social, and personal forces found within ourselves. They, and their emerging capacities, are already alive in us all. But we do configure them! People are too quick to think they grasp all this sufficiently, and can direct and fully control them -- but they can't. All that is possible is to use each and discover them all, and then to shape these into an integrated whole (for without this, there is no unifying center for the pulsating interactions of the experiencer, the experienced, and the experiencing to merge in an embodied understanding of what is at its very core, and the usable vitality it unceasingly organizes, maintains and furthers).
This discovery, of the how the three merge into a person, doesn't sufficiently enter the picture until adulthood is reached and gets underway. Though it was the aim from the start. For from that instant the sperm and the egg met and became one, everything immediately set about busily growing itself into a fully adult reality. And it will never stop until it finishes this task.
And at the core of this, where one draws the firm boundary lines of these three selves, actually sets the defining edges of a person as a whole -- which may appear as only a slight or incremental shifting -- in fact ushers in enormous changes.
Yet as complex as the physical forming of a human being sounds and is -- it nevertheless remains something astonishingly clear and visible that we all utilize day and night our whole life long. It's there in everything we do, standing right before our eyes. It's what we employ whenever we "read a person" to get a sense of who they are in order to respond to them. We use it long before we are ever able to speak and use words. And it's necessarily in full play in each of the site's videos, otherwise it could never explore what it calls The Personal Dimension.
The key notion of how the formed body of an individual (which, of course, is the center and source of all his or her experiencing) emerges and then develops over time, is so essential to our topic, that it's implied in every one of the website's sections -- and is particularly paramount in the pages of its ongoing link to Stanley Keleman and his life work in the founding of Formative Psychology.