Author Topic: Reichian Growth Work by Nick Totton  (Read 1075 times)

truthaboutpois

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Re: Reichian Growth Work by Nick Totton
« Reply #30 on: April 15, 2015, 07:57:59 am »
 
99It would appear that as babies and children we do not suffer from the illusion of being totallyseparate beings. We exist as a particular 'place' or 'focus' in the field of existence; energy anddesire sweep
through
us, move us, and move on. The 'spastic ego' develops partly in order toprotect this wide-open quality from the madness, hate and pain we find around us - to create awalled garden in the desert of patriarchal culture.
The tragic paradox is that putting a wall around the garden also cuts it off from its sources of life. Separateness is itself an illusion, an insanity; the barriers we put up to defend our naturallove and joyfulness also defend us against nature itself. Isolation preserves our sanity, but alsodrives us mad.This is simply a restatement in more 'metaphysical' language of what we have been sayingthroughout the book. Life energy naturally
moves
- and our skin does not constitute aboundary to that movement. One of the forms that this streaming of energy takes is the humanneed and desire for contact: contact with other humans, with our own internal life, and withthe natural world around us. But that natural world is much larger and fuller than our walled-off adult perceptions suggest.As we grow up, our perceptions are trained by what we are
expected
to see, hear and feel.When children show awareness of beings and forces which are invisible to the adults aroundthem, those adults usually respond with fear ('there's something wrong with our child'), anger('stop telling fibs') and incomprehension. As with sexuality, the child learns that this area of life is dangerous and not to be talked about In the long run, she usually learns
not
to see - andto half-forget that she ever could see.When during therapy the armouring softens and starts to dissolve, so our barrier against the'psychic' becomes softer and leakier; we begin to 'pick things up', to be more in touch withother people's thoughts and feelings, just as we are more in touch with our own. 'Pickingthings up' can happen in many other circumstances, especially with the use of certain drugs;some people do it all their lives. The focus on and trust in our own inner life which Reichianwork develops will help dissolve intellectual assumptions about what we experience, andstrengthen our grounded belief in what actually
does
happen. Rather than keeping 'psychic'experiences in a separate compartment of life, either as 'fantasy' or 'special', we are able tointegrate them with the rest of life.This sphere of perception is in fact profoundly
ordinary
, an unacknowledged part of allhuman interaction. People can get into a real confusion of paranoia and self-importance if they fail to recognise this ordinariness - to recognise that 'extrasensory perception' flowers outof the five senses, and no authentic distinction can be drawn between the two any more than aline can be drawn on our neck to separate head from body.All the great teaching systems explain that 'psychic powers' are essentially a side-effect of something else, and that something else is what people often call 'spirituality'; the truerealisation of the unity of all being. As it grows in us, not just as a head idea but as a
reality
,this knowledge brings up all our fear of deep contact. Psychics, spirituality, make us awarethat we are not in fact separate beings, isolated egos in bags of skin. This is simultaneously agreat joy and a great terror; the ego-illusion of separateness struggles to cling on, to saveitself, to maintain the pretence.You may notice a similarity between what we are saying here and our description in Chapters4 and 6 of the eye segment and the Boundary character. It is when we are born that we have toface most starkly and brutally these issues of separation and openness. In the womb, thefoetus is in a state of confluence with the mother's body; 'cosmic unity' is a bodily experience.At birth we must deal simultaneously with
isolation
- being cut off from our mother - andwith
invasion
on sensory, physical and psychic levels. As we have said, Boundary characters,who are constantly dealing with these issues, are also often very sensitive to energy and to