The three early pieces of writing on this site - The Principle and Practice of Morphic Resonation and The Eye of Ogumo - the Worldview of the Ungum-Buthu and The New Mesmerism make public for the first time important metaphysical understandings and experiences of Peter Wilberg in the long journey of unfoldment of the new form of close-up, face-to-face pair meditation that he has evolved over a lifetime - the history of which he is currently writing in the form of a personal Memoir of Metaphyical Experiences going back to his early childhood. Those familiar with his later writings on 'The New Yoga of Awareness', his books on Tantra and the practice of 'Tantric Pair Meditation' - and his original understanding of the 'soul body' or 'body of feeling awareness' - will find many seeds of them in these pieces, as well as insights into the deeply shamanistic dimension of Peter Wilberg's work, as expressed in the experience of shape-shifting his own soul body through Morphic Resonation out of which emerged The Eye of Ogumo.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
The Principle and Practice of Morphic Resonation
Preface (2014)
The essay below, was at the time of writing
(1992) my very first attempt at describing a new and original form a pair
meditation, based on sustained silent and close-up eye-contact between two
people, albeit on that I had already been exploring and practicing for over 15 years with
extraordinary results, the skills for which I had been cultivating for 25 years - and the experience of which matches no other
meditational practice that I know of.
In this first account of it, I called this form of pair meditation ‘Morphic
Resonation’ – one of several names given to it in the course of its evolution
(the others being ‘Modulation’, 'Inner Voice Communication' and later
‘Resonation’ or ‘Tantric Pair Meditation’). It needs to be emphasised however, just how many years it took to simply develop an initial theoretical language capable of conceptualising and describing the principles and subtle inner arts and practices behind experiences I was already long familiar with in practice.
To
do so I needed to make use of terminology and insights from a variety of sources;
Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of ‘morphic resonance’, David Boadella’s
understanding body-oriented psychotherapy, Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic
account of early infant-mother communication, John Heron's understanding of the essentially trans-physical nature of the mutual gaze and - last but not least - the ‘Aspect Psychology’ of
Jane Roberts as described in her book 'Adventures in Consciousness'.
My aim was not only to describe the theory
and practice of 'Morphic Resonation' but to invite others to explore and enjoy
the experiences it offers - as an practice that can not only play a powerful role in the therapeutic relationship but can immeasurably enrich all human relationships, allowing us to discover and reveal to each other wholly new faces or 'aspects' of our souls, both personal and trans-personal, through the mutual gaze.
Contents
Introduction –
‘Aspect Psychology’ and ‘Aspect Selves’
In 1963, the American novelist and poetess Jane Roberts
began a series of psychic experiments with her husband Robert Butts that led
her into trance states in which her whole personality was visibly and audibly
transformed. In these trance states she spoke as a being called Seth, who
described himself as an ‘energy-personality-essence no longer focused in
physical form’. Over many years Seth dictated to Robert a whole series of books
which presented an extraordinary new understanding of the nature of reality, of
the human psyche and of the innate multi-personhood of each individual -
replacing traditional concepts of the soul and reincarnation with a new model
of individual identity as a field-structure of different “probable selves”,
each of which was one expression of our own larger soul or ‘entity’. According
to Seth, just as the body consists of countless cells, so is the soul made up
of countless selves. In other terms, what we call ‘soul’ can be understood as
the field aspect of our identity. What we call ‘selves’ – the focal aspects of
identity’ - emerge from and within this field as expressions of it – in much
the same way that different faces and bodies manifest to us within the field of
our dreaming awareness. On the basis of
her own psychic experiences and using the ideas presented by Seth himself, Jane
Roberts formulated her own model of the psyche which she called ‘Aspect
Psychology’. In this model, presented in her book entitled ‘Adventures in
Consciousness’, she presents the individual’s everyday “Focus Personality” as one expression of an
entire field of personalities, selves and identities which she terms ‘Aspect Selves’. The term
‘Aspect’ is significant in itself, implying as it does both a particular angle
or ‘aspect’ from which something – or someone - is viewed or seen, and the
particular side, face of aspect of the phenomenon - or individual - that
reveals itself from that particular way of seeing. Jane Roberts emphasises,
however, that these ‘Aspect selves’ are not mere 'sub-personalities' but have
their own independent consciousness and reality – existing, for example, as
reincarnational selves, or as what Seth describes as ‘probable’ selves, i.e.
parallel selves leading parallel lives in parallel earthly realities and/or in
those multiple non-physical dimensions of reality that we return to after
death. It is clearly a quite different matter if two people engage in close up
eye-contact and face to face meditation as the selves they know themselves to
be in ordinary life – or whether, in the course of their joint meditation, they
comes to perceive whole new faces of themselves and their partner– to the point
of actually re-experiencing and becoming these Aspect selves (for example both
beholding and becoming the selves they were in another incarnation and
re-experiencing in a bodily way the relationship they had in that incarnation).
In this essay, my use of the term Morphic Resonation is an
adaptation and redefinition of Rupert Sheldrake’s principle of 'Morphic
Resonance'. I define Morphic Resonance
as the principle by which, in general, a felt mood, wavelength or patterned
‘tone’ of awareness is automatically amplified by finding resonant expression
in a particular outer form (Greek morphe).
The practice of Morphic Resonation that follows from this principle is
that by using the look in our face and eyes in particular to perfectly personify
the basic mood or feeling tone belonging
to a particular ‘Aspect Self’, our sense of it is automatically amplified
through resonance with this outer form or face.
This principle and its practice may sound complex but it is actually the
simple essence of the actor’s art. For the actor to, is one skilled in seeking
and finding a bodily bearing, voice and ‘look’ that is in perfect resonance with
the basic mood or feeling tone of the character they are seeking to embody and
personify. The experience of morphic resonation as a practice of intimate
face-to-face pair meditation is that through it we learn not only to reveal new
faces, aspects, selves or ‘Aspect selves’ of our own soul – what Jane Roberts
calls our “Source Self” – but also to see, resonate with and mirror back many
hitherto unfelt and unseen faces and aspects of our meditational partner.
In 1975 I had an overwhelming experience of my own
multi-personhood which my particular way of listening to music had, I have no
doubt, prepared me for but which transcended anything I had hitherto experienced.
In the course of about half an hour, I experienced wave after wave of powerful
feeling tones welling up within my soul, each of which permeated by body,
altered my entire sense of self, and formed itself into a distinct face. Each
of these faces then imperceptibly metamorphosed or “morphed” into another face,
with another inner tone. Whole sequences of faces, each with its own feeling
tone would surface, only to give way to another group of faces, expressing a
different underlying “chord” of my being. As I became aware of deeper and
deeper chords, I became aware of deeper levels of my soul, and of the true
nature of my inner being as something like a fundamental tone or fundamental
chord underlying all the others, and imbued with a musical consciousness that united each and all of its distinct but
inseparable faces. Each face constituted an embodied aspect of that larger or
great soul (Mahatma) – the
individual’s “entity” or “energy-personality-essence” as SETH calls it. Yet an
‘aspect’ is more than just a face or facet of the self. The word “aspect”
itself refers both to an “objective” face or facet of something we perceive (a
house or landscape for example) and to the subjective position or “aspect” from
which the perceiver perceives it. Each face of the perceiving “subject”, as an
aspect, is also a way of looking out on and perceiving the “objective” world,
one that allows us to perceive a particular face or facet of that world. Its
inner tone is also a wavelength of resonant attunement to the world, one which
brings particular facets of the world - or of another being - into view. The eyes are indeed windows of the soul. When two people
enter in resonance with one another through the mutual gaze, they literally can
look into each other’s souls and perceive its different faces. A twofold
‘morphic resonance’ is established
(a) a resonance between the form
(morphe) of each person’s facial expressions and the inner tones of
feeling it gives form to, one that allows them to give form to new inner
aspects of themselves, and
(b) a direct resonance of feeling tone
between both people, achieved through either person inwardly mirroring their
partner’s facial expression, thus bringing themselves in resonance with
the feeling tones it communicates.
Through this mutual resonance each partner is thus able to
feel and give form to aspects of themselves – ‘morphic aspects’ - in resonance
those personified in their partner’s look.
To begin with I will outline here in a few words the basic practice of morphic resonation, one which, though extremely simple and straightforward in essence, can bring in its
wake profound experiences.
1. Two people sit face to face and maintain continuous silent eye-contact for anything from 20 minutes to an hour.
2. During the sitting, each partner listens to their own bodies and uses the look in their face and eyes to give form to their changing tone of feeling and inner experience of themselves.
3. At the same time, each partner engages in resonant attunement to the feelings tones communicated through the changing “look” in their partner’s face and eyes, giving form to their inner experience of the
other, with their own face and eyes.
It must be stressed that Morphic Resonation is far more than
simply a prolonged exercise in “eye contact”. It is a shared journey, one which depends critically on
the individual’s capacity to unfreeze their facial mask or “persona”, to communicate with their partner through
the subtle modulation of their look and facial expression, to “resonate” with
their own inner feeling tones and those of their partner, and “ride” them into
new dimensions of their own being. By manifesting and giving bodily form to
their feelings in their face and eyes, what
the individual sees and feels starts to transform their entire bodily sense of who they are. This process of
transformation, both of the individual’s self-experience
and their experience of the other
leads in turn to something quite extraordinary and quite central to the
experience of Morphic Resonation - an experience of other selves looking out through one’s eyes, and/or those of one’s
partner.
Morphic Resonation results in the creation of a
mutually-induced trance, putting each partner in contact with themselves and
their partner at a deep level, and facilitating a type of direct soul-to-soul
communication. Each Morphic Resonation sitting is a unique experiential journey
lasting up to an hour or more, one which often passes through several distinct
stages. Discussing the experience after the sitting, partners are usually in
broad concurrence regarding these stages, and find that their own experiences,
not necessarily the same as those of their partner, synchronistically parallel
or complement them to a high degree.
Some experiences of Morphic Resonation:
“I clearly perceived my wife “morph” into a younger brother
and warrior comrade in an earlier life.”
“My morphing took me, shaman-like, through a variety of
animal forms.”
“I heard a sweet and soundless music at the edge of the
spiritual light that bathed me.”
“I experienced hundreds of different selves looking out
through my eyes, becoming each in turn.”
“I spoke inwardly in a wordless musical tongue - but knew
exactly what I was saying to my partner.”
“I experienced how each inner sound seemed to alter the
whole shape and tone of my bodily soul.”
“I felt as if my
whole body had been inwardly massaged and become again a safe home for my
soul.”
“I learned that we are not “in” our bodies at all, but in
some strange way our bodies are in us.”
“I recaptured a lost
freedom of spirit - the freedom to roam and shift shape at will exploring
different inner landscapes and spaces.”
“Objects in the room
where we did the resonation seemed like dumb stage props - so much less real
than the metaphysical time and space we had entered.”
“My everyday self and its worldly concerns seemed to have
disappeared into the
background, hovering like a thin mirage above the deeper
part of my soul that I
was now resonating with.”
“I resonated with an intelligence within me so awesome, that
the experience completely transfigured me. I knew after that what my inner
being really is - and thus who I really am.”
“I tuned into a gentle, loving aspect of myself that made my
whole body feel bathed in warmth, and allowed my soul to breathe in an
incredibly soft, slow and smoothly flowing rhythm.”
“I perceive a vast, dark field of what at first seemed like
corpses, but I later understood as the deserted, dormant and unhatched
spiritual eggs or “cocoons” of the living.”
“I became a shaman called Ungmbutu, and understood this name
to mean ‘master of body spirits’. As Ungmbutu I performed inner healing on
others several times, and can still embody him, at will, in resonation sittings
by invoking his name.”
“I felt illuminated and blessed with grace in the
beneficent, healing light radiated by the gaze of my partner, who experienced
herself as a Buddha-like being.”
“I saw and knew my
partner (female) as a fierce Samurai I had known in the past whose fiery and
impulsive temperament was still a force in her soul.”
“I entered other dimensions in which I experienced aspects
of my being which I could only describe and visualise as beings on the scale of
planets, behind whom lurked yet higher beings of the nature of constellations
of pure intelligence.”
“I knew my own innermost being as something like a vast
cosmic womb that was a mouth of creation, my soul a vowel issuing from its
awesome voice, and my body a type of unutterable solid “consonant” by which it
spoke me into physical existence.”
“I felt myself entering a weightless, floating realm in
which I entered into communication with a group of ethereal, dancing spirits
like will-o’-the-wisps, together called “The Seven”.
“I entered a dark and nightmarish region of soul, which I
visualised as a huge pitch-black, leafless tree trunk rising hundred of meters
from a deep wide pit surrounding it - from whose black depths nameless monsters
spilled out.”
Below I merely list a set of broad and regularly recurring
aspects of the resonation experience itself, most of which are experienced each
time by the practiced Resonator. When these features are not part of the
experience this is usually because people are practising morphic resonation for
the first time or doing so with someone else who lacks practise in it. For such
people, simple exercises have been designed which are most effective in helping
them enter the Resonation process more deeply, with the result that more of the
features listed below are experienced.
1. Messaging A feeling of being
able to silently communicate wordless and intimate dimensions of our being -
not just feelings but highly complex subjective states - and to receive and
understand such communications from our partner. Our own subjective states may
be experienced as having a particular meaning or value for our partner and are
experienced as messages imparted wordlessly to the latter.
2. Visaging The perception of
particular expressions on one’s partner’s face as distinct “visages” - faces
which are quite different in character from their ordinary face, not only in
expression but in age, gender and ethnicity, and which possess an unmistakable
personality of their own.
3. Recognising We may find
ourselves able to recognise and relate to these personalities emotionally as
familiar counterparts to other selves of our own - husband and wife, for
example, experiencing their relationship as one of mother and son or as that of
two brothers.
4. Manifesting The experience
of a different self or series of selves looking out through our own eyes,
altering our look and manifesting in our facial expression. This may begin by
tuning in to a feeling or showing a face which is a recognisable part of the
self we know, but which, when we identify with it completely is experienced as
the feeling and face of a distinct self within us.
5. Shape-shifting This means
experiencing our body in a different way - taller or shorter, lighter or
denser, broader or bigger. The body may be experienced as belonging to another self of different sex and/or
different character. Our bodies can feel as if they are taking the shape of
another species – an animal or spiritual being of some form.
6. Voicing We may experience
ourselves speaking silently to our partner in a voice quite different to our
ordinary voice, in different languages or “in tongues” - using words that have
no counterpart in world languages and whose meaning cannot be translated into
ordinary words.
7. Melding This is the experience
of a common psychic space opening up between and surrounding the two partners,
with a reality greater than that of the immediate physical space surrounding
them. Within this space we can experience ourselves moving through or “riding”
particular feeling tones like waves, creating a physical sense of motion
through this shared space.
8. Visioning This is the
translation of each partner’s subjective experience of the inner space that
opens up within the resonation process into mentally perceived landscapes or
locations. Within these landscapes or locations they may witness or participate
in imaginary events, experience themselves taking on a different form or
body-shape, or meet their partner in a different dimension or on a different
“plane” of awareness.
9. Healing Feeling a bodily
sense of inner peace or relaxation, as if inwardly massaged and melted by warm
currents of feeling, and able to breathe and radiate these feelings. We
experience ourselves as bodies freely breathing our own souls and not just air.
As a result we find ourselves able to directly embody our own compassionate
responses and healing intents towards others, rather than translating them into
words or actions.
My first attempt to articulate the experiential dynamics of
Morphic Resonation was aided by the comments of Winnicott on the mother’s face
and its importance in early infant-mother communication. These provided clues
to what I saw as a fundamentally paradoxical dynamic in all human interaction.
Winnicott wrote as follows:
"What does the baby see when he or she looks into the
mother’s face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is him or
herself. In other words, the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there."
In these few lines Winnicott points to what I began to see
as an implicit paradox in the mutual gaze of mother and child. The paradox is
rooted in the dual nature of the mother’s “look”, for on the one hand, this is
an expression of herself as an individual, but on the other hand, reflects her
way of looking at and seeing another human being - the baby. What she looks
like to the baby is therefore, according to Winnicott “related” not only to
herself but to what she sees - the baby itself. The word “related” here merely
hints, however, at the paradoxical dynamic which Winnicott’s comments bring to
light. For if what he says of the mother’s look is true, then it is also,
paradoxically, true of the baby’s look, or of anyone’s look - which reveals
both a subjective face or facet of their personality and at the same time their
way of looking at the objective world around them, and what they see in it. The
paradox deepens in the context of the mutual gaze of two people, in which each
person’s eyes and face simultaneously reflect and respond to what they see in
the eyes and face of the other. It was with these two paradoxes in mind, what I
call the paradox of the look and the paradox of the mutual gaze, that I took up
Jane Roberts’ concept of 'Aspect Psychology'.
The concept of an 'aspect, like that of a “look” has itself
two sides - two aspects. The word aspect can be used to describe both an “objective” face or facet of something
we perceive, whether a house or a human being, and the viewpoint of the
perceiving subject in relation to the object perceived - their “subjective”
angle of perception. In my understanding, the experience of the mutual gaze in
Morphic Resonation allows different personality aspects of both partners to come to expression in their look. Each
aspect we perceive in the face of our partner is not merely an objective face
of that person but a look - a way of seeing us. The resonant attunement of one
person to another in the mutual gaze thus leads them beyond the subject-object
division. Neither partner is merely a perceiving subject or a perceived object
of the other’s gaze. What they express in their own look and what they see in
each other’s faces always give form to both an aspect of themselves and an aspect of the other. The aspects of
themselves that they manifest in their own look allow them both to express
different faces or facets of their own personality, to perceive different faces
of facets of their partner, and to give form to the aspects of themselves that
are evoked by the gaze of the other or reflected in their face. Every new
aspect we experience in the resonation process is both a new way of
“objectively” perceiving our partner and a new experience of ourselves as
perceiving “subjects”.
In the early communication of mother and child the mother
does not merely mirror her baby’s face or echo its sounds. She allows herself
to resonate with the feeling tones
expressed in those sounds and made manifest in those faces. Her own mouth
shapes teach the baby itself to give a distinct phonemic form such as Aaah or Oooh to its feeling tones, and to
form a facial expression that corresponds to them, and to radiate them though
its eyes. The responsiveness and mobility of the mother’s face, her mouth and
eyes, sounds and look, is central in helping the baby to become a person, i.e.
to express and personify its
subjective states in a bodily way. The word person
derives from persona, which denoted
the facial mask worn by an actor, one which fitted the voice in which they were
speaking and allowed it to “sound through” (per-sonare).
The baby responds principally not to the mother’s voice but to her face, seeing the sound shapes she is forming
with her mouth. The face of the mother, the sounds she makes and the look in
her eyes does not merely communicate her own emotional tone, or mirror that of
the baby. They express her resonation with
the baby’s feeling tones and at the same time give form to this resonation.
This mode of communication can itself be described as “Morphic Resonation”
(from Greek morphosis - to give shape
or form).
Each formed feature of our facial expression - the raising
or lowering of our eyelids or brow, the widening or narrowing of the eyes, the
tension or relaxation of our jaw and the mouth shapes we form, plays its part
in altering our “look”, and expressing different tones of feeling. The language
of the face, including both mouth and eyes, that is made up of these Morphic Features, is what I call our Morphic Alphabet. Different combinations
of letters in this alphabet of Morphic Features - a particular gleam in
someone’s eye, a raising of the brow, a slight opening of the mouth or
loosening of the jaw, combine to bring into view a particular Morphic Aspect - a “look” that gives
expression to a distinct face or facet of our personality. Morphic Aspects are
facets of our individuality, each with its own inner qualities and basic
“feeling tone”. Making these Aspects manifest in our face allows us to feel
their inner qualities with our bodies, and personify
these qualities in our everyday life and relationships. Morphic Features are
the basic alphabet of our personhood, the means by which we manifest our
Morphic Aspects. The breadth and depth of our Morphic Alphabet, the number of
different Morphic Features we can alter or combine in our faces, and the number
of Morphic Aspects we can experience and express through them, is shaped in
childhood. It is through the early communication of mother (or father) with the
child that its flexibility and mobility of facial, oral and ocular expression
is determined. This in turn influences its capacity to resonate with the expressions
it perceives in others, to mimic and internalise new Morphic Features and
resonate with the Morphic Aspects they disclose. It is through the Morphic
Resonation of mother and child that the latter establishes a feeling and bodily
relation to its own mother tongue, learning
to shape its individual sounds and syllables distinctly whilst at the same time
imbuing them with feeling tone through its voice and facial expression, and
radiating these feeling tones through its eyes.
The mother tongue is acquired first of all as a bodily
language and not as verbal language - a set of words, phrases and grammatical
structures. It becomes so only when the child’s parents and caretakers begin to
interpret and respond to its sounds, not as formed expressions of wordless
subjective states and feelings but as words which denote an external or
internal object - a thing or person, an inner need or desire. If this happens
too quickly it impoverishes the child’s relation to language, creating a rift
between the verbal and non-verbal, mental and bodily dimensions of verbal
communication itself. Learning a foreign language can be difficult if our basic
Morphic Alphabet is a highly reduced or rigidified one, or if our relation to
our Mother Tongue is a disembodied, feeling-less or purely mental one. This
will make it difficult to resonate with
the sounds of the new language, develope a feel for its basic tone and subtle
nuances of expression, and attune to the “body language” of its native speakers
- the Morphic Features which not only accompany their own mother tongue but
form part of its very essence. Conversely, learning to hear and pronounce a
single new sound, develop a feel for a particular new word, or learn a single
new facial expression or gesture which is characteristic of the speakers of the
foreign language, can have a knock on effect on our learning - releasing us
from the grip of our mother tongue and widening our Morphic Alphabet.
Morphic Languages
Each of us not only has or speaks one or more languages
however. Each person’s Morphic Alphabet is a language - one which lends its own
cast to the way they use their bodies to speak. It is with this Morphic Language that they speak their
bodies themselves, using its alphabet of Morphic Features to shape not only their
silent “non-verbal” communication or “body language” but the very sounds of
which verbal speech itself is composed. A skilled impressionist need only learn
a few letters of someone else’s Morphic Alphabet in order to give the
impression of “speaking” their Morphic Language - not only successfully
imitating their voice or facial expression but evoking in themselves and others
a complete and convincing “impression” of
the person - as if the latter were
actually there. The same is true in the process of Morphic Resonation. A small
change in one Morphic Feature of our facial expression can evoke or bring into
view a different person altogether - disclose a different Morphic Aspect. The
experience of Morphic Resonation allows us to expand our Morphic Alphabet, combining its letters in new ways, bringing
to expression a broader range of Morphic Aspects in ourselves and allowing us
to perceive new Morphic Aspects of others. These alternate personalities do not
necessarily feel entirely strange to us however. Instead they may feel very
familiar, like long lost members of a family of selves that makes up our larger
identity, speaking in a voice that used to be ours and in a language we used to
be fluent in but have long since forgotten; looking out on the world through
our eyes in a way quite different to that of our ordinary personality.
The Nature of Morphic Aspects
Many people have experienced times in their lives when as
if, out of the blue, they feel “completely” different - as if they are seeing
the world through new eyes. Others may notice this difference too, sensing an
alteration in the person’s overall tone or radiance, feeling that they have
changed in a fundamental and significant way, and remark how different they
“seem” or “look”, even if they cannot pin down this difference on some specific
feature of their appearance or behaviour. Some new “aspect” of their being has
come to the surface, altering the individual’s relationship to themselves and
others, the way they see things and are seen. It is extraordinary how, despite
an abundance of literature on psychology and psychotherapy, and countless
self-help books telling people how they can actively change some aspect of
their lives, next to nothing is written on what it means for the person
themselves to change - not merely to able to say “I feel different” but to feel
the birth of a different “I”. We are not speaking here merely of a change in a
person’s mental self-image, their behaviour or beliefs about themselves, but a
change in their bodily self-experience,
albeit one which may be triggered by a change in their beliefs and express
itself in behavioural changes. Believing as we do in a one-person/one-body
model of identity, whilst we accept that people change significantly over time
as they age and mature, particularly in adolescence, mid-life and old-age, we
tend to regard relatively rapid changes in the adult personality as signs of
pathology - even though they occur as often in people as they come out of some serious illness of
life-crisis as in those who fall victim to one.
Imagine looking at a number of different photographs of
yourself taken at roughly the same period in your life but in quite different
situations. Though the facial features you display will be much the same in
each case, photographs often surprise us by “freezing” a particular combination
of Morphic Features (dimensions of facial expression) in such a way as to
reveal a distinct Morphic Aspect, a look which expresses a distinct face or
facet of our personality. Looking at different photographs taken of the same
person over time, we see not only a gradual change in their actual physiognomic
features but see an even greater contrast between the Morphic Aspects revealed
by these features, revealing changes not only in the outer appearance but in
the inner personality of the individual, and its faces. Our ordinary or “focus
personality” (Jane Roberts) is composed of a particular set of Morphic
Features, different combinations of which reveal our various faces and facets -
our Morphic Aspects. These may be blended in so thoroughly with one another
that they can hardly be distinguished by ourselves or others. Alternatively
they may appear in distinct form as manifestations of different mental states
and moods, come to the fore in the context of different roles and
relationships, activities and environments, or emerge periodically in what
seems like a cyclic process with its own inner logic. What I call the Morphic
Field is a “probability distribution” of different Morphic Aspects, composed of
primary and secondary Aspects, harmonious and conflicting Aspects, higher and
lower level Aspects. Just as letters can be combined in syllables, syllables in
polysyllabic words and words in sentences, so can the Morphic Features that
make up the lowest level units of our personality be combined in more or less
complex Aspects at different levels. Yet the Morphic Features that constitute
the basic “letters” of our Morphic Alphabet can be permutated and combined in
far more ways that we are normally conscious of, disclosing new Morphic
Aspects. In addition, through conscious or unconscious resonation with the Morphic Fields of others, we may add to our
repertoire of Morphic Features and learn new ways of combining them. This in
turn allows us to make manifest Aspects of ourselves whose reflection we found
in others, but which we ourselves were hitherto unable to manifest in our own
Morphic Language, embody and personify in our lives.
In the process of Morphic Resonation, any given Morphic
Aspect can be:
1. experienced as a distinct
self-state and mode of relatedness to others, imbued with its own unique
quality or “feeling tone”.
2. evoked by a particular
combination of Morphic Features which give form to this feeling tone.
3. expressed as a distinct
face of the self with its own characteristic “look” which radiates this
feeling tone.
4. envisioned as a person in
its own right, inhabiting a mentally projected environment which, like a dream
environment, gives form to emotional landscapes and events.
To get some sense of how Morphic Aspects are experienced in
the resonation process I ask people to make a simple sound such as “Aaah” or
“Oooh” and to modulate their voices in such as way as to imbue the sound
strongly with a particular feeling tone, for example one of delight or relief,
surprise or interest. Next I ask them to mouth
the same sound silently, whilst at the same time miming its utterance with their whole face and letting its feeling
tone radiate through their eyes. Here it is of particular importance that they
not only “pretend” to make the sound, but actually hear themselves sounding
with an inner voice, sensing the emotional resonance of this inner voice in
their bodies and exhaling as they utter the sound inwardly in the same way that
they would if they uttered it aloud. I then ask people to notice how the face
and feeling of a particular sound alters both their sense of themselves and their
way of seeing the world, and to imagine what it would be like if this face and
this feeling were the dominant “mood” of their lives, experienced more or less
continuously. Having done so I might ask them to “invoice” and “insound” a
range of different vowels, imbuing each new sound with a quite different
feeling tone, and sensing how, by simply mouthing the sound and miming this
feeling it too can alter the whole tone and timbre of their bodily
self-experience. Doing this simple exercise can evoke a very vivid sense of
Morphic Aspects, not just as facial expressions but as self-states, each with its own distinctive tone. I then work with
different types of consonant sound
such as Mmm or Rrrr, showing how these too can be silently
mouthed and mimed, used to manifest different Morphic Aspects and felt as
self-states with their own distinctive tone and timbre.
To get a basic sense of what it means to resonate with a
Morphic Aspect a simple exercise I use is to get two people to sit face to
face, make eye-contact with one another and simultaneously
mouth and mime the same vowel sound in the way described above. The immediate
result is twofold - a trance-like and almost magical sense of hypnotic or
“magnetic” rapport with the other person; and with this state of resonance, an amplification of the feeling tones that each partner
communicates through their mouth shape, facial expression and eyes. Another
exercise in resonation is for one partner to mime and mouth a series of
different vowel sounds, while their partner mirrors their mouth shape, look and
facial expression, tuning in to the feeling tone it communicates and giving
expression to it in their way through their own countenance. Mirroring of this
sort is only one dimension of the art
of Morphic Resonation, but the one which most easily evokes a sense of how
inner feeling tones can be given form by our facial expression, and thereby be
experienced as distinct faces of our inner being - as Morphic Aspects.
The dynamics of Morphic Resonation have to do, I believe,
with a fundamental relation between form
and feeling, part and whole, Morphic Aspects and Morphic Fields. Each Morphic
Aspect can be understood not just as a “part” of the self but as a
manifestation of our whole self. It constitutes a localised expression of our
entire Morphic Field of aspects - a particular or “particle-ised” vibrational wavelength of that field. These
wavelengths are experienced as Feeling
Tones in the sense described by Seth (see Appendix 1) - not “emotions” in
the ordinary sense but our basic tones of
being, each of which is a harmonic of our own “Fundamental Tone”. Morphic
Aspects are the formed expression of Feeling Tones. Conversely, Feeling Tones
are the wavelengths of attunement linking us to aspects of our own Morphic
Field and those of others. Morphic Aspects become manifest in our own face and
eyes and the face and eyes of the other. Feeling Tones are the bodily dimension
of Morphic Aspects. Bringing a particular aspect to the fore alters the entire
tone and timbre of our bodily self-experience
in a characteristic way, in the same way that different musical tones do. Our
inner experience of a particular Morphic Aspect is coloured by a characteristic
Feeling Tone, and at the same time colours our perception of others, bringing
particular aspects of them into view. In the process of Morphic Resonation,
however, we learn how Morphic Features can be used to tune our feelings to
different Morphic Aspects, not only those belonging to the limited field of our
Focus Personality or that of others, but those belonging to our larger Morphic
Field, which begins to overlap with that
of our partner and enter a state of resonance with it. As each partner’s Focus
Personality comes within the Morphic Field of the other, its boundaries begin
to break down, allowing each partner to feel and give form to new, hitherto
unmanifest aspects of their own being. At the same time, however, each new
aspect affects the Morphic Field of our partner, allowing them to become aware
of new feelings within themselves and give them form as Morphic Aspects. These
may be either consonant and similar in nature to the ones we manifest, or
alternatively quite contrasting in their countenance and feeling tone. Just as
in ordinary communication one person can echo another person’s feelings in
their tone of voice and countenance or bring a different “tone” into the
conversation, so too in the process of Morphic Resonation. These tonal
differences are not necessarily dissonances, but reveal relationships of
harmonious complementarity and contrast between Morphic Aspects.
One question that many people ask after having experienced
Morphic Resonation for the first time is whether the faces they perceived in
their partner were merely their own “projections” or corresponded to feelings,
subjective states and aspects of themselves which were also experienced by the
partner. The discussions and sharing of experiences that follow a Morphic
Resonation sitting allow us to give an unequivocal yes to this question -
except when a less experienced partner 'calls a blank' and is unable to
experience much at all. At the same time, however, it must be remembered that
any Morphic Aspect we perceive in the face of our partner is always at some
level an expression of our own Morphic Field as well as that of our partner. It
is the eyes with which we behold our partner that allow us to see their Morphic
Aspects, and these eyes are always and in each case the eyes of a particular
aspect or group of aspects belonging to our own Focus Personality or larger
Morphic Field. Morphic Aspects emerge into view within the joint Morphic Field
of both partners.
The perception of Morphic Aspects has a metaphorical as well as a literal nature. On the one hand there is the seemingly objective perception of a distinct facial expression made up of a specific set of Morphic Features. On the other hand, the fact that we perceive a face of our partner or experience a face of our own as that of another person - whether a young girl or old man, a Japanese or an Indian, a Crusader or shaman, an animal or bird, an angel or demon etc. lends our perception and experience of aspects a metaphorical character. Aspects are also “as-spects”, looks and faces of self or other appearing as those of another self. There may or may not be a divergence in each partner’s metaphorical perception of a given Aspect. Sometimes it is the partner who manifests the Aspect through their own face that has a more vivid sense of it and a more detailed metaphorical image of it. Other times it is the partner who perceives that Aspect. But “every act of perception alters both perceiver and perceived” (Seth). Our own resonant attunement to Morphic Aspects perceived in the face of our partner can intensify and deepen their own awareness of this aspect, help them feel it and bring it into manifestation. During the Resonation sitting partners may spontaneously find names for the Morphic Aspects they perceive. Aspects can also be sketched, and Appendix 4 shows a number of sketched Aspects of the same person, as perceived by their partner in Resonation sittings.
The perception of Morphic Aspects has a metaphorical as well as a literal nature. On the one hand there is the seemingly objective perception of a distinct facial expression made up of a specific set of Morphic Features. On the other hand, the fact that we perceive a face of our partner or experience a face of our own as that of another person - whether a young girl or old man, a Japanese or an Indian, a Crusader or shaman, an animal or bird, an angel or demon etc. lends our perception and experience of aspects a metaphorical character. Aspects are also “as-spects”, looks and faces of self or other appearing as those of another self. There may or may not be a divergence in each partner’s metaphorical perception of a given Aspect. Sometimes it is the partner who manifests the Aspect through their own face that has a more vivid sense of it and a more detailed metaphorical image of it. Other times it is the partner who perceives that Aspect. But “every act of perception alters both perceiver and perceived” (Seth). Our own resonant attunement to Morphic Aspects perceived in the face of our partner can intensify and deepen their own awareness of this aspect, help them feel it and bring it into manifestation. During the Resonation sitting partners may spontaneously find names for the Morphic Aspects they perceive. Aspects can also be sketched, and Appendix 4 shows a number of sketched Aspects of the same person, as perceived by their partner in Resonation sittings.
Morphing
Computer technology now makes it possible to “morph” images - transforming the face or whole body of one animal or person into that of another through a series of imperceptible stages that generate the illusion of a magical physical metamorphosis. Part of the art of Morphic Resonation consists in relaxing our facial musculature, dropping our facial “mask” and then allowing our facial expression to slowly and spontaneously morph in tune with our feelings, revealing a series of Morphic Aspects. This type of “morphing” can be compared to a type of slow-motion speech in which each sound that a person mouths and each slight shift in their facial expression, as they make it, reveals an entirely new face of the person speaking, and in which the transitions from one sound and one facial expression to another are slowed down to such an extent that they are experienced as a metamorphosis of one’s entire being, bringing one tone of being after another to the surface, feeling it, and giving it form. The experience of Morphing can be cultivated by spontaneously giving shape to our feelings as simple consonants and vowels in the Resonation process - not uttering them aloud but mouthing them and miming their utterance. In this way we let each sound form its own face and radiate the feeling tone it expresses through our eyes.
Moving through Feelings
Speech itself is a form of physical movement involving not
only our mouth and vocal organs, but our face and eyes, and often our entire
body. We speak because we feel moved to speak. Feeling moved we embody this
movement as a serial movement from one sound and one word to another. We
experience feelings as things that move through us and move us to speak.
Morphic Resonation, on the other hand, is an entirely silent form of
communication in which instead of either expressing our feelings in words or
merely experiencing them wordlessly we speak them somatically - embodying them
in our facial expression and look. Holding a particular facial expression for a
protracted time in the Resonation process allows us to stay with the feeling it expresses much longer than we do when our
faces are moved and animated by ordinary speech. We experience the feeling more
fully in a wordless, bodily way savouring its tone and timbre, whilst
communicating it through our face and look. This in turn can give rise to a
sensation of moving through the
feeling rather than being moved by it. We begin to experience ourselves as
“riding” different tones of feeling - rather like we do when we listen to music
that moves us intensely, but without moving our bodies to it as we listen. As
we do so we may feel “uplifted” for example, not because we actually move -
raising our arms or levitating physically - but because we experience a type of
virtual movement. Movements in physical space are prompted by feelings that
move through us. Virtual movement is movement through feelings themselves,
experienced metaphorically as a movement in virtual space in which we ride the
music of the soul - particular tones and chords of feeling. As physical bodies
we can occupy a common physical space with our partners in the Resonation
sitting. As beings we can experience ourselves entering a common metaphysical
space - not the space that exists between us as bodies but the space that opens
up between and around us as beings as we ride the feeling tones or “wavelengths
of attunement” that link us. The sense of entering this virtual or metaphysical
space and engaging in different types of movement within it, is one of the most
profound dimensions of Morphic Resonation, allowing us to encounter and relate
to our partner not as a body but as a being - a spiritual being independent of physical form.
The Phenomenology of the Mutual Gaze
In his remarkable paper on the phenomenology of the mutual
gaze, John Heron describes its three principle qualities: its luminosity, its streaming quality, and its meaning.
He argues convincingly that our awareness of these qualities in another
person’s gaze cannot be regarded as a projection of our own emotional response
to particular physical features of their eyes or facial expression. Firstly,
were this to be the case, we could assume that a more studied appraisal of such
“Morphic Features” would intensify our emotional reaction. In fact the opposite
is the case. For as soon as we reduce a person’s eye to a mere object of our own visual perception (as
an optician does, for example) we cease
to be aware of its luminosity and it ceases to convey any meaning, for we cease
to meet their gaze with our own, and meet each other through the gaze. As Heron
also points out, “whereas non-ocular facial changes express or body forth, say, an emotional meaning, the gaze reveals this meaning.” As a result “a
false reading of non-ocular facial expressions may sometimes be corrected by
careful attention to the quality of the gaze.” As for the streaming quality of
the gaze, this is something we are only aware of when we meet another person’s
gaze with our own and meet them through the mutual gaze. The greater the
objectivity with which we perceive a person’s eyes the less we see. Objectivity blinds us to the streaming quality of
the gaze, as it blinds us to its luminosity and meaning.
Heron picks up on the term “look” as a useful way of
referring to “the whole facial expression including the gaze.” As well as
revealing a way of looking at others or responding to something in the physical
environment, a person’s look may also reveal itself as “far away”,
“preoccupied” or “dreaming” i.e. turned
inward and focused on specific internal sensations and feelings, mental
images and trains of thought. The look, in other words can reveal the nature
and focus of a person’s inner gaze at
well as their outward gaze. In the process of Morphic Resonation each partner
can not only meet the other person’s outward gaze with their own but also use
it to communicate through the language of the “look” - manifesting and
communicating to each other the focus of each other’s inner gaze. Essentially, it is with
this inner gaze that each partner meets and holds the other in their outward
gaze. Similarly, it is through their physical eyes and overall “look” that each
partner can communicate what they behold with their “mind’s eye” as they look
into the eyes of the other. As Heron points out, in the mutual gaze we do not
merely look at each other’s eyes (reducing them to objects), but we also look 'into' each other’s eyes, turning them into 'windows of the soul'. In the
resonation process it is possible to sustain eye-contact and the mutual gaze
whilst at the very same time perceiving inner worlds with our mind’s eye and
entering the inner worlds of others.
The Metaphysics of the Gaze
Morphic Resonation fulfils what Heron calls the optimum
conditions of interpersonal encounter under which “the gaze of the other may be
experienced as streaming into my whole being - I am filled out and irradiated
by it.” But “it is the interaction of the two-fold gazing which is a necessary
condition of the irradiation of each by each being.” Once again, however, it
must be stressed that the light of the gaze, however brightly it shines, is not
a physical light but a trans-physical or “metaphysical one”. It disappears as
soon as we look at a person’s eyes or
face rather than looking at them. It is a result of seeing someone - a being -
rather than merely seeing “some-body”. The fact that I look at your eyes and
face and “see” you with my own eyes does not mean that I see you, nor that it is “I” that see you and
not just my eyes. In Morphic Resonation we
see, not our eyes alone, and what we see is a being and not just a pair of
eyes. Physical reality is a world of bodies in space and time which we perceive
with our bodily eyes. I understand metaphysical reality as a world, not of
bodies, but of beings. The physical body not as a thing but as a living
embodiment of the human being. The luminosity of the gaze is a metaphysical
light because it is the embodied “metaphysical” radiance of a being and not the
luminous property of a physical object. And yet it is a light which can shine
through our physical eyes and transfigure our perception as dramatically as
changes in physical lighting.
Our normal
understanding of “reality” as a physical world of three-dimensional bodies in
space and time is challenged by the
experience of Morphic Resonation, as it is also by quantum mechanics. The
latter posits a multi-dimensional world in which matter itself exists both as
visible particles and as invisible “matter waves”. From a metaphysical point of
view, fundamental reality is a world of beings not of bodies in space and time.
Physical reality is “the face of the
real” (Lacan) - an interface of beings which gives metaphorical expression to
their interaction as beings. Talk of the “luminosity” or “light” of the gaze
may be metaphorical but the metaphors are not merely verbal metaphors but
perceptual ones. We experience the gaze as luminous, its “light” bearing all
the qualities associated with physical light, waxing and waning, irradiating
and illuminating - and altering our experience of the physical light around us
itself. In the last analysis, physical perception itself can be understood as a
type of metaphorical perception of metaphysical reality. By metaphorical
perception I mean the perception of one thing or person as another. Thus in
Morphic Resonation we perceive a quality of the gaze as light, a face as that
of an old woman or young child etc. But physical perception too, has an
intrinsically metaphorical character. In perceving a rose as a rose we perceive
only one aspect - one as-spect - of
what it is, its beingness. The very roseness of the rose is itself one Morphic Aspect of its being - its
manifestation to other beings as a
rose.
The quantum model
of material objects as vibrational structures manifesting as both localised
particles and non-localisable and matter waves, is a way of understanding the
metaphysical nature of reality in physical terms, but cannot be used to reduce
the metaphysical to the physical. After all, even scientific terms such as
“wave”, “field” etc, however precisely their formal properties are defined
mathematically are themselves essentially metaphors
– not, however, perceptual metaphors but purely conceptual ones borrowed from
the realm of our ordinary bodily perception of the world. Unlike atomic
particles and waves, our perception of Morphic Aspects, whilst metaphorical in
nature, has a direct and immediate experiential reality - is “empirical” in the
deepest sense. Morphic Resonation removes the veil of objectivity that blinds
us from perceiving metaphysically and seeing with the “third eye” - seeing beings and thereby perceiving more
aspects of their being than our physical eyes can normally behold.
Perception and
thought, body and mind, both give form to aspects of physical reality and perceived aspects of
metaphysical reality - of beings. But in the last analysis Form as such,
whether material or energetic, mathematical or musical, bodily or mental,
biological or linguistic, though it belongs to the physical world is
essentially metaphysical in nature -
it has no mass or energy. This is
believe, was Plato’s basic insight, deepened much later by the German philosopher
Hegel. It was the latter who first understood what we call “thinking”, not just
as a human way of mentally representing and explaining the perceived forms of
nature and society, but as the active formative principle which in-forms and trans-forms all realities.
The Secret of Morphic Resonation
Morphic Resonation has both a formal dimension, to do with the paranormal modes of visual
perception that it awakens, giving form to different aspects of our being; and
a feeling dimension, the source of
these perceptions. The term “feeling” is a verb as well as a noun. Like the
term “eye-contact”, it derives from the realm, not of visual but of tactile
experience. We get to feel a physical body by touching it - feeling it with our
hands. We cannot feel something in the passive sense of “having” or “getting” a
feeling, without “feeling” it in the active sense - without touching it.
Morphic Resonance is an induced state. Morphic Resonation is an intentional
activity. The secret of Morphic Resonation lies in the nature of human feeling
itself, not in a passive but in an active sense - feeling experienced as a type
of inner vibrational touch.
According to Heron “In the strict sense of the term, actual
encounter occurs only in mutual touching and mutual gazing, for it is only in
these instances that each meets the other meeting him.” But the fact that
people look at each other does not guarantee that they touch each other with
their mutual gaze, just as the fact that two people touch each other’s bodies
does not mean that they make contact as beings.
What I call inner vibrational contact
is a contact between beings that need
involve no bodily contact whatsoever but belongs to the very essence both of
eye-contact and of satisfying bodily contact with others, for it is a contact
that springs from and touches our being. All that we are capable of feeling, as
human beings feeling, understood in
the deepest, most active sense of this word - is a form of inner touch, inner holding and inner handling.
The fear of eye-contact is a fear not of physical touch but
of inner vibrational touch, not of physical intimacy but of spiritual intimacy
- the bodily experience of inner contact with another being. At the same time,
it is the expression of contact deprivation,
the individual’s experience of being ignored or reduced to a mere object by the
gaze of the other - unrecognised and abused as a being in the same way that
occurs through physical abuse of another person’s body. As beings, we do not
merely form or have relationships with others. We are in our essence,
relational beings - for it is through contact with other beings that we
experience our own being in its richness of aspects and of feelings. The
fundamental quest to relate - to seek out and make inner contact with other
beings - is not rooted in libidinal drives as Freud thought. Instead the quest
for sexual contact is one expression of the embodiment of the quest to relate.
Another is the quest for emotional intimacy through verbal communication. But
the quest to relate can be fulfilled neither through talk, nor through physical
touch without the capacity and openness for spiritual intimacy with other human
beings - without the experience of inner vibrational touch. Contact deprivation,
the failure to be met and acknowledged in our being by other human beings, and
the incapacity to meet others in their being, causes our inner being to
inwardly contract and withdraw. The result is a separation between the outer
face we show the world and our unacknowledged spiritual core. This process of
contraction and separation, as Wilhelm Reich was well aware, is not merely a
mental one but a physical one. Chronic muscular contractions become a form of
emotional armouring. But the feelings of anger and rage, loss and despair that
are “trapped” in this armouring are themselves secondary phenomena - the
e-motive charge of blocked motor expressions of primary contact needs. Rigid
facial features and motor patterns inhibit expressiveness and the capacity to
freely and fluidly embody the
different faces and aspects of our inner being - a process naturally encouraged
and facilitated by mutually responsive contact with other beings.
Resonant Contact and Communication
The secret of inner vibrational touch lies in meaning another being with our whole
being - intending them. If I ask someone to touch my hand with theirs, their
intent is enacted through physical movements. If I then ask them to touch my
hand again, but this time to touch me
as they do so, they will begin to experience intentionality itself as a form of
inner vibrational touch. The same result can be achieved by asking someone to
look at my eyes, and then to look at me.
All forms of human intentionality are embodied as patterns of muscular tension
- as inner-tensionings. These are enacted as muscular activities, for
example, the muscular activity of speech involving both our vocal, facial and
respiratory musculature. In the course of muscular activity one pattern of in-tensionality replaces another in a
rhythmic cycle of contraction and release, manifest for example in the movement
from consonant to vowel and back again to consonant. In speech the intent is to
convey a meaning to the other through our words. In Morphic Resonation the
meaning we convey is our being, the aspects of ourselves we embody in our look
and communicate through our gaze. We are
the message conveyed by our intent when we intend the other with our gaze. We
do not convey some-thing to some-one. We convey some-one to some-one,
communicating the richness of our being to another being.
In-tensional patterns are also reflected in our muscle tone
and echoed in our tone of voice and intonation patterns. All forms of human
intentionality are also silent intonations
of our being. Each intent carries its own silent inner tone. These are experienced as feeling tones, embodied in the tone of
our muscles and echoed in our tones of voice. But just as our words ride on
patterns of vocal intonation, so do wordless messages and intents ride on inner-tonings of our being that communicate directly through the
eyes and the tone of our gaze, whilst finding expression in our faces as
patterns of inner-tensioning. The
vibration of our inner touch has its own inner tone. Inner vibrational touch is
also a type of inner toning, felt throughout our bodies but communicated
directly through our eyes. These tones are modulations of our inner voice, given shape not as audible
sounds and spoken words but as wordless inner sounds communicated through our
facial expression and mouth shape. They “speak” not because we use them to
represent a meaning for the other, but because we mean the other with them - in
the same way we do when we frown or smile at someone. What we mean to one
another is essentially who we are for
one another - the aspects of each other’s being that we echo, embody and
resonate with. Morphic Resonation is a communication of being in which our
intent is to embody who we are for one another - to speak our being. We do so
through “inner vibrational touch” and the Resonant Contact it establishes with
one another. This contact is in turn the medium of what I call Resonant
Communication - a communication of the inner
voice based on silently modulating inner feeling tones as a singer does as
she modulates her vocal tones - allowing them to communicate directly through
her facial expression and look. Through this “inner voice communication” we are
able to both resonate with the inner tone of the other’s gaze, and seek a
resonant response to the inner tone of our own gaze.
Inner vibrational touch and inner voice communication form
the basis of the Resonant Contact and Communication established in Morphic
Resonation. They are a type of inner contact and communication issuing from the
silent spiritual core of our being, which is no longer experienced as cut off
from the outer face we show to the world but embodied in our facial expression
and revealed through our gaze. The sustained silence of this communication is
not a reserved silence but a totally unreserved on. It does not restrain the
communication or serve to conceal who we are from others but allows a totally
unreserved revelation of our being to the other.
The Morphic Body
As beings, we do not simply “have” a body. Just as the term
“feeling” can be understood as a verb as well as a noun, so can bodyhood itself
be understood as an activity rather than the possession of a “thing”. We feel
ourselves to be some-body only in so far as we are able to embody who we are -
to body our being. It is only at death that the human body ceases to be somebody, the embodiment of a human
being, and becomes some-thing - a
corpse. The very life of the body as a biological organism depends on it
continuing to be somebody. And being
somebody means being the embodiment of someone,
a being. In this sense, the very essence of bodyhood is itself nothing bodily
in the ordinary physical-biological sense. The physical body as medical science
sees it is the body as it’s objectively perceived from without, not as the
embodiment of a being but a biological organism that is somehow miraculously
imbued with self-consciousness. The body as we experience it from within is the
body of our lived experience as beings, giving organic shape and unity to our
self-experience as beings. The form of this “metaphysical body”, and the way we
experience ourselves through it does not remain the same but constantly
changes. The metaphysical body is
also a shape-shifting or metamorphic
body. The face is not just a facet of the physical body but the expressive
surface of this metaphysical and metamorphic body, which I term the formative
body or Morphic Body.
As a biological organism, the physical body can grow and
mature normally in the womb and in childhood, without their being a
corresponding growth and maturation of the Morphic Body. If the mother reduces
her baby to an object-appendage that cries and demands to be fed or soothed,
handling it as an object rather than a being, then, the Morphic Body of the
baby remains unnourished - deprived of contact. For it is this body that feels
inner vibrational contact and communication with other beings, that thrives on
this contact, needing it as nourishment to grow and mature.
The Healing Value of Morphic Resonation
Just as we need our physical senses to see, hear and touch
other bodies, so we need the senses belonging to our Morphic Bodies to see,
hear and touch other beings in a bodily way and to feel seen, heard and touched
by them as beings. But many people
grow up into normal human adults deprived of inner vibrational contact and
communication, never having been fully received and responded to as beings by
another being. They go through adult life never having experienced inner
vibrational contact and communication with others and unable to engage in such
contact and communication themselves - to see, hear and touch others with their
Morphic Bodies. Though they “have” a body, and are aware of bodily drives and
desires, states and sensations, they are like mothers pushing their babies in
prams, drivers sitting in their cars or riders atop a horse - relating to their
bodies as to something other than self.
Unable to body who they are and how they feel, they try to be somebody by pursuing a mental idea or image of how they are or
should be. In essence they have not become familiar with their own formative
body, the medium by which they can body their being and give form to the
changing shape of their self-experience. They are aware of their Morphic Bodies
only as a fixed set of internal states, emotional responses, sensory modalities
and motor abilities. They do not allow new bodily states and sensations to
alter and enrich their self-experience, instead identifying with familiar
states and sensations and dis-identifying with others. They may develop a
seemingly stable mind and personality but lack an embodied sense of a self that can grow and transform, responding
and giving expression to changes in
their self-experience. For them as for most of us, Morphic Resonation is the
answer to several basic but unspoken questions of human existence:
- What does it mean to be some-body?
- What happens when we allow ourselves to fully experience and express what we feel to others in a bodily way rather than in words?
- What happens when we allow what we feel to alter our bodily self-experience of who we are, making us aware, not just of self and other but of other selves within us?
- What happens when we allow ourselves to identify in a bodily way with these other selves, expressing them in our faces and revealing them through our eyes?
- What does it mean to meet, see and touch another human being as a being and not just as a familiar “person” with a more or less fixed “identity”?
Morphic Resonation as Meditation
Drugs and music, meditation and therapy are all means that
people employ to get back “in touch” with their inner being, but they do not
necessarily help them to body their being - to embody who they are and what they feel in their relationships with
others, or to make contact with the inner
being of others. Even though people may meditate in the same room, the
goal of each is to learn how to contact their own inner being in a relational
vacuum rather learning to be and body who
they are with others and make a
mutual and enriching contact with each other’s inner being. Morphic Resonation
is in this sense a unique form of meditation, not only because it is a
genuinely shared or mutual meditation
requiring a partner, but because its whole essence consists in taking time be a
body and be with others in a fully embodied way, learning to reveal our being
to others through our bodies, to receive the other as a being, and respond in a
bodily way to the different faces and facets of their being. As such it is not
merely an exercise in “inter-personal” communication of a non-verbal sort, for
at its heart is the understanding that the person and the body we see before us
is but one expression and one embodiment of the inner human being
- one personification of the self.
Morphic Resonation and Reichian Therapy
I believe that Morphic Resonation can become a powerful
medium of therapeutic bodywork in the tradition of Willhelm Reich, but with a
profound trans-personal dimension.
The proximity of Morphic Resonation to Reichian Therapy is well illustrated in
David Boadella’s book on ‘Lifestreams’. Here Boadella, an internationally
renowned authority on Willhelm Reich and somatic psychotherapy, devotes one
chapter to Facing and Sounding. In
it, he quotes an account of Reich’s work with a patient who suddenly began
“seeing the world with new eyes”, the fear and hate having gone out of them. As
a result he also saw his therapist differently.
The process began with Reich noticing a new gleam in the
patient’s eyes, which…
"….together with the shifting of the eyes and head, had brought up
a new expression out of the depths of his eyes and being. It was a flirtatious,
come-hither look, a sort of wink, with a raising of the eyelids, eyebrows and
forehead and a moving of the eyeballs to one side, accompanied by a suggestive
tilting of the head, I the same direction. As the therapist began to imitate
this expression and the patient began to make better contact with it, the whole
face participated in it, at first with a blushing shame-facedness, and then to
the tune of a hearty laugh."
Reich’s acute observation of the Morphic Features of the
patient’s expression revealed an entirely new face of his being - a new Morphic
Aspect. In response to what he saw, Reich did not merely “face” the patient
with the Aspect verbally but used his
own face and eyes to mirror it, thus helping the patient to resonate with it
and to embody it more fully in his facial expression. Later a ‘miracle’
happens:
"Suddenly
the patient was startled and opened his eyes wide with astonishment. While he
was looking at the therapist the latter’s face had suddenly become soft, and
glowed with light…He saw the world differently, as a good and pleasurable place
to be in and as a future place of ‘heaven’ and not the ‘hell’ it had been before."
Boadella comments that this breakthrough
“...was the direct result of the exchange of looks between the two people in the room, a reaching out on the part of the therapist with his own aliveness to contact and excite into activity the aliveness buried in the person he was dealing with. Without this willingness to read the secret expression and to nurse it into life, any therapeutic encounter is gravely weakened.”
“...was the direct result of the exchange of looks between the two people in the room, a reaching out on the part of the therapist with his own aliveness to contact and excite into activity the aliveness buried in the person he was dealing with. Without this willingness to read the secret expression and to nurse it into life, any therapeutic encounter is gravely weakened.”
"Facing is concerned with recognition, with how we see
people, with the qualities of lumination that develop when people really face
each other and with the forms of illumination that flash out of such contact.
Insight develops in step with outlook. If a person can let his inner self be
seen by another, he begins to become recognisable to himself and can then look
within, not in the sense of any sterile introspection, but in the sense of
learning to love and accept who he is, and so recognise himself."
Boadella’s final note on facing is like a simple and pithy
summary of the benefits of Morphic Resonation:
"Clear seeing between people encourages deeper
being."
In the rest of the chapter Boadella acknowledges and
explores the relation of personality and sound, in particular the role of the
voice in letting our feelings sound through our bodies. Whilst he makes no
direct connection between facing and sounding through the role of the mouth in shaping both our vocal tones
and facial expression, these are implicitly linked in Reichian theory through
the concept of different bands or ‘segments’ of muscular armouring -
specifically the ocular and oral segments of the head. In Reich’s
understanding, muscular armouring was “frozen history”, a type of chronic
muscular contraction resulting from parental blocks on the child’s spontaneous
bodily expression of its vital energy, emotions and impulses.
The aim of Reichian therapy is to dissolve armouring, a
process involving the release of trapped energies and emotions, bringing about
a resurrection of the individual’s sense of bodily aliveness. The theory and
practice of Morphic Resonation, however, offers a new perspective on the nature
of muscular armouring. This is the understanding that what it essentially
‘blocks’ is not ‘energy’ or ‘emotions’ as
such, but modes of bodily, vocal and facial expression which would allow us to give form to our feelings. Just as a suit of armour encases a human
body, so does the body’s muscular armouring encase and restrict the movements
of another body - the Morphic Body. This in turn limits the individual’s range
of expressive movements and features - their Morphic Alphabet and Morphic
Language - with the result that the individual is unable to give form to a
wider range of feelings and thereby embody a wider range of aspects of their
being. The expressive vocal and verbal release
of repressed energy and emotions trapped in muscular armouring does not of
itself help the individual to body
new feelings and aspects of their being - to experience them as new faces of
the self and new ways of seeing in the way described by Boadella. Just as a
muscle, relaxed through massage, can begin to tighten up again, so can the
individual’s Morphic Body itself reinstate old patterns of muscular tension -
unless the individual adds new letters and words to their Morphic Alphabet of
expressive Morphic Features, and learns to “speak” their bodies in new ways.
The Morphic Body is the body of our intentionality,
shaping those patterns of inner-tensioning through which we body different
dimensions of our self-experience and thereby experience them as different
faces of the self - as Morphic Aspects.
The Morphic Body and Motor Fields
The physical body acts,
enacting movements in physical space. The Morphic Body forms, in-forming our physical activity. It is made up not of
muscle and bone but of patterns of
sensory-motor activity. It dwells in a virtual or ‘potential space’ (Winnicott)
of possible action, selecting from a probability
field of sensory-motor patterns and engaging in a virtual enactment of the
selected pattern or patterns. Sheldrake describes such fields as “motor fields”
- a specific type of Morphogenetic Field - arguing that whenever a new motor
pattern emerges in an individual or species, it becomes part of such a field,
making it available for physical enactment and increasing the probability of
its being repeated either by the individual or by other members of the species.
Each physical action we make in the course of our lives alters our motor
fields, reinforcing particular patterns of movement and physical
self-expression. This is the basis of learning, allowing certain patterns of
moving (for example walking or driving) to become semi-automatic or
“instinctive”. But it is also the way, in which motor patterns may become
habitual and stereotyped, limiting our range of movement and self-expression.
Our Morphic Language of facial expressions is based on an alphabet of both static and dynamic Morphic Features - the latter being particular acts such as raising our eyebrows which
in turn alter our static Features.
The Morphic Body is in constant resonance with both the Morphogenetic Fields of the Physical body
(including motor fields) and with the larger field of Morphic Aspects that
constitute the “soul”. As such it is layered
like an onion with the resonant trace of all past embodiments, expressions and
enactments of our being. Through it we selectively attune to particular Motor
Fields and Morphic Aspects, expressing them not just as static postures or
faces of the self but as dynamic
features of our bodily self-expression. In the process of Morphic Resonation we
bring our own Morphic Body into resonance with the Motor and Morphic Fields of
our partner, allowing us to expand and rearrange our alphabet of Morphic
Features, using them embody new Morphic Aspects.
Mind and the Morphic Body
Between thinking of getting up and making a cup of coffee
and actually doing it, the Morphic Body forms the intention behind my thought
into a pattern of muscular in-tensionality which constitutes a potential or
“virtual” enactment of the physical motions required. The sensory dimension of
the Morphic Body is multi-modal. With
our eyes we see a cup in physical space. With our Morphic Bodies we see what it
would feel like to touch and handle,
how it would weigh in ours hand, how we would have to comport ourselves to pick
it up and do something with it etc. The physical space around us is perceived
as a formal structure of possible
movements and the sensations resulting from them, facilitating certain
sensory-motor patterns and making others impossible. The thought of doing
something with the cup is itself a reflection of this structure, as perceived
with our Morphic Body - which in-forms
not only our actions but our thinking and imagination. To enact a virtual movement through a pattern of
bodily in-tensionality is not the same thing as to think of doing something or
mentally imagine ourselves doing it. Both imaginary and virtual movements,
however, are expressions of the Morphic Body, whose formative activity in-forms our minds, our thinking and imagination
no less than our bodily actions themselves.
The Morphic Body and the Dreambody
No less than in waking life, our experience of ourselves and
others in the dream state is an embodied experience in which we not only
perceive the faces and bodies of others but experience ourselves in a bodily
way - albeit with a “dreambody” which we may experience as more permeable and
less fully formed or “set” than our physical body, but whose abilities to float
and fly transcend the latter. The Morphic Body is our own dreambody as this is
experienced in waking life - as the “withinness” of our bodily self-experience.
The dreambody is the Morphic Body as this is experienced in the dream state, as
something which the dreamer themselves dwells within. When we dream we dwell
within our Morphic Bodies. Bodily states and sensations we dis-identify with
become manifest to us as other bodies perceived within the dream. Those we
identify with form part of our bodily self-experience as we dream. But the
boundary between the body of the dreamer and the dream is a fluid and open one,
in which the dreamer’s inner states become instantly manifest as outer events
and the latter are also felt and experienced as inner states. The dream as a
whole is a theatre of Morphic Aspects, allowing them to freely metamorphose
into one another, and revealing their complex relationships within our own
Morphic Body. The Morphic Body is a formative or form-giving body, giving
expression to our own Morphic Field of Aspects, both in the process of dream
formation and in the process of speech
formation in waking life. It is the formative instrument with which we both
dream and “speak” our inner being into the language of physical form.
The Morphic Body and the Resonant Soul
In speech and song we not only give shape to vocal tones
with our mouth, lips and tongue but can also allow them to resonate to a
greater or lesser extent from deep within the resonant cavities of our bodies
as a whole. Similarly, by silently miming and mouthing different speech sounds
we can hear them resonating as inner tones of feeling deep within our own
resonant souls, and can learn to modulate these tones as we would our own tone
of voice. If the oral and ocular “segments” of our facial expression are not
rigidified and cut off from one another through a “stiff upper lip”, a tight
jaw, an expressionless or fixed look, then what Boadella calls “facing” is
experienced as a type of inner “sounding” and vice versa, manifesting inner
faces of the self by giving oral shape to inner tones of feeling and allowing
these to reveal themselves through our eyes. What I call the Resonant Soul is
the resonant interiority of our
Morphic Body, vibrating not with audible tones but with feeling tones. A singer
is not merely someone skilled in making use of the resonant cavities of the
physical body. She is someone able to inwardly expand her own Resonant Soul,
echoing different feeling tones in her vocal tones by giving them expressive form with her Morphic Body in
the same way she gives them physical form with her mouth and vocal organs. The
Morphic Body is the body with which we both spontaneously “compose” and “play”
the inner music of our Resonant Souls, whilst at the same time, like performing
musicians, revealing its feeling tones in our facial expression The physical
body can be likened to the musical instrument with which we play this music, an
instrument which can be more or less resonant and well-tuned, like the physical
body of the singer.
Resonant Healing
The basis of Morphic Resonation is the establishment of
Resonant Contact and Communication with the silent spiritual core of another
human being, putting them in touch with their own Resonant Soul and the larger
field of Morphic Aspects with which it can connect them. Resonant Contact and
Communication is not the same as “empathy”. The latter is a felt response to
what we perceive in others - something they say or show to us through their
expression which does indeed touch us and resonate within us. But this
receptive resonance becomes an active resonation
only when we allow ourselves to become aware of how our own resonant attunement and feeling response
to another person’s communication does not require any expression in words in
order to communicate to the latter - but does so wordlessly and in silence,
touching them as we ourselves are touched.
The principal medium of Resonant Contact and Communication
is listening, experienced not as a
passive prelude to some form of
“empathic” outward response to another (whether through talk or touch) but as
an active form of resonant attunement and inner responsiveness which
communicates “telepathically”. The way we hear
another person’s words speaks to
them in silence. The way we understand and respond to what they are saying says something to them, even without it
being put into words or expressed in deeds. The wordless messages we convey to
others through our tone of voice can communicate even without voicing them, if
we are aware of the tones of feeling they echo - for it is these feeling tones
that are the telepathic carrier waves
of the messages. The difference between empathic
resonance and telepathic resonation
can be compared to the difference between empathically perceiving the nature of
someone’s look and actually meeting their gaze and responding to what we perceive in their look through our own look. Both in counselling and talking therapies and
in touch therapies and bodywork, the importance of empathic resonance is understood, yet even in the examples cited by
Boadella, this resonance was not transformed into resonation. Instead, as is
usually the case, the therapist simply expresses
their empathic resonance in word or deed - by verbally questioning or
pointing to something they perceive in the client, empathically mirroring it in
their words or demonstratively miming it with their bodies. That is not to say
that there are not occasions when the therapist’s eyes meet those of the client
and Resonant Contact is established, or that the client themselves does not
feel the therapist’s empathic resonance and experience it as a type of Resonant
Communication. This happens - and the more it does so the better - but this
does not mean that the therapist themselves actively establishes Resonant
Contact, actively engages in Resonant Communication and therefore actively
practises what I call Resonant Healing.
To do so requires that the therapist restrain the urge to express their own
empathic inner response into outer responses - words or deeds - aimed at
“helping” the client achieve a greater self-understanding. Resonant Healing is
not a framework of ideas or techniques designed to help the therapist express
their inner empathic response, and thereby find some way of outwardly
responding to their clients in word or deed. Resonant Healing is the art of
silently embodying our inner
responses to others, knowing they
will touch the client and communicate telepathically and intending them to do so.
Both talk and touch therapies can be transformed into
modalities of Resonant Healing if the emphasis shifts from verbal and/or
physical contact and communication with the client to the experience of
Resonant Contact and Communication, and if the former is understood to be a metaphor of the latter and not a means to it. But Resonant Contact and
Communication is disrupted wherever one person communicates their inner
perception of another in a different modality to those perceptions themselves,
rather than responding to the other in the same modality, for example,
experiencing some aspect of another person in a bodily way and yet responding
to it only on a verbal level. The reason this happens is often simply that we
do not believe that our inner
perceptions of others communicate without translating them into words or deeds,
and as a result they do not become a medium of Resonant Communication. Body
therapists can respond through their touch to how they feel the patient’s body
when they touch it. Talk therapists, on the other hand, often put themselves in
a different position. They respond to what they hear in the client by holding
it up to them or “handing it to them” in words, rather than (a) holding to what
they are hearing themselves and beholding
it more deeply, and (b) holding their
clients through their hearing. It is this that helps the latter to hear and
hold to what they themselves are saying, to feel held in ways that allow them
to behold it more deeply.
The Nature and Aims of Morphic Healing
Morphic Resonation is the embodiment of Resonant Contact and Communication. As such it can be
a powerful medium of Resonant Healing. Morphic Healing is Morphic Resonation
used as a medium of Resonant Healing.
Its main purpose is to:
1. open the patient to the
experience of Resonant Contact with others and use eye-contact and “inner
vibrational touch”, thereby helping the patient to more fully experience their
own Resonant Soul and its spiritual core.
2. liberate the patient’s
Morphic Body from muscular armouring, allowing them to freely communicate their
inner self-experience in a wordless bodily way, rather than expressing it in
words or repressing it in silence.
This is achieved by:
1. using our own Resonant Soul
to inwardly experience the patient’s own Morphic Body, attuning to its dominant
Morphic Features, feeling the inner tone of its dominant Aspects and gradually
getting an inner bodily sense of its structure, layering and armouring.
2. using our own Morphic Body
to respond in a bodily way to what we perceive, using Resonant Communication
through the face and eyes to help the patient give form to new tones of
feeling, and to experience and embody new Aspects of their inner being.
The value of Morphic Resonation as a medium for healing both
body and mind is based on two basic
principles:
2. The understanding that mental distress is also a type of somatisation, the only difference being that it manifests not in the physical body but the mental body of the individual, thus expressing itself behaviourally.
3. The understanding that Resonant Contact with another human being provides the support and “holding” necessary for bodying - helping the individual to feel and face their inner dis-ease and to communicate it in a bodily way.
The Structure of the Morphic Body
In one important account of his work with a particular
client, Boadella describes her as someone who had learned that “her body was
something that was responded to by people who had no feeling for her inner-ness
and for her quality of experience. She had come to distrust it as a bridge for
feelings.” Though she made clear eye-contact the message Boadella felt coming
from her was “So what. You can touch my body, you can work on my breathing, you
can search for my energy, but I will not let you really meet me. I let you look
into my eyes, but even though they remain clear, I am invisible to you, because
I am not really in them.” He then records how at a certain stage he just lay
down on his back and admitted his “defeat in trying to reach the inside of her
experience by touching her on the outside, through working with the body”. This
proved to be a turning-point session, one from which Boadella emerged with a
profound insight:
"It made me realise that just as the mind is the
outside of the body, and the body is the inside of the mind, so the body is the
outside of the soul and the soul is the inside of the body. Caroline
experienced herself before the session as an outside without an inside. After
that session she became an insider who was re-growing an outside."
The question raised by this account was what it meant to
work with a client from the inside out - through acknowledgement of the silent
and invisible “core” of their being - rather than from the outside in, through
talk and touch. Morphic Healing, though it involves facing and eye-contact is
essentially based on an invisible “core contact” between healer and patient -
what I have termed Resonant Contact. The “body” with which the Morphic Healer
works is not the physical body as such, but the Morphic Body. This can be
helpfully conceived as a structure of concentric spheres, each a type of skin
or membrane with both an outside and
an inside, and with its own outer and inner surface. The outermost sphere of
the Morphic Body is what I call the ego-sphere
or mental body. Its circumferential
membrane has both an outer and inner surface. Viewed from without, its outer
surface appears as the brain and nervous system. Its inner, experiential
surface, however, is an “ego-skin” or “thought skin” composed of verbally woven
patterns of thought. Its inner space is what Winnicott called the intellect or mind-psyche in contrast to the psyche-soma. The former is the inner
“meaning space” or semantic space of
language and verbal thinking.
The central sphere of the Morphic Body is what I call the
self-sphere or physical soul. Its
circumferential membrane also has an outer and an inner surface. The outer surface
is the physical body as a sensory surface and emotionally expressive face of the human being. The inner
surface of this membrane is our own inwardly experienced “self-skin” or
“sensory-emotional” skin. Our thought-skin reflects our sensory experience as
this impinges on our self-skin. When we speak of someone being “prickly” or
“sensitive”, or alternatively insensitive or “thick-skinned” it is not their
physical skin or sensory organs we are referring to but their inner
“self-skin”. The inner space of this sensory-emotional skin is the psyche-soma, the body as we experience
it from within, a soma-semantic space
bearing within it a host of different self-states and somatic memories -
meaningful textures of somatic experience.
The innermost sphere of the Morphic Body is what I have
termed the soul-sphere or resonant soul. This is the psyche-logos - the soul or psyche - as described by Heraclitus,
whose wordless inner “resonance” or “reverberation” he called the logos. It was Heraclitus who, by uniting
these two Greek words, made what is essentially the historic founding statement
of “psycho-logy” or “psychology”:
"You shall not reach the boundaries of the psyche by going around it, no matter how
many ways you travel, so deep is its logos."
The membrane that surrounds this sphere I call the
“soul-skin” or “speech skin”. Its outer surface is the oral cavity and the
other inner surfaces of the body - the lungs, stomach and inner lining of the
guts. Its inner space is the experience of the soul itself as a hollow but
resonant interiority of the psyche-soma,
an abdominal cavity or “womb” of the soul filled not with fleshly organs but
with the fluid medium of feeling tone. Its inner surface is experienced as a shaping container of this resonant
cavity, in the same way that the mouth is experienced as a shaping container of
our oral activity. It is mostly only singers and those who have received voice
training of some sort who are aware that when they shape their mouths in a
particular way, they are shaping not only the resonant cavities of their bodies
but the cavity of their own Resonant Soul.
At the centre of the Morphic Body and its Resonant Soul lies
the silent spiritual core of the
human being. Physically, it is the centre of gravity of the human body. It can
be sensed within as a still-point of silence in the abdomen just below the
level of the navel - what the Japanese call the Hara. The Hara is the central
“antenna” through which we can intend,
attune to and touch another human
being from the silent core of our own being, establishing Resonant Contact with
their inner core. As the spiritual centre of the soul-sphere, the Hara is the
spiritual centre of the Morphic Body as a whole; but it is also one of three main loci of awareness, the others being Head and Heart, corresponding
to the ego-sphere and self-sphere respectively.
The Dynamics of the Morphic Body
The diagrammatic schema of the Morphic Body below shows
them as concentric spheres, more or less equally spaced. It must be emphasised,
however, that this schematic representation can in no way convey the inner
spatial dynamics of the Morphic Body. Each of the spheres, for example, can
contract or expand - hence we talk of a “broad” or “narrow” mind, an “inflated”
or “deflated” ego (ego-sphere and mind-psyche)
of “mind-expanding” drugs, or of a bodily sense of energetic expansion or
contraction (self-sphere and psyche-soma).
The soul-sphere, on the other hand possesses a potentially limitless capacity
for inward expansion. This inward
expansion can be compared to the inward expansion of meaning that occurs when we understand a particular word or phrase
in a new and profound way, experiencing its meaning not just in an intellectual
but in a bodily way, feeling it resonate in our souls and touching us in our
core.
The three membranes that make up the Morphic Body are
essentially one - three distinct but
inseparable layers of the same skin, each more or less permeable and each an
expression of the others. Similarly, the space between and within them are also
essentially one - three distinct but inseparable dimensions of the inner space
of our mental and bodily self-experience. The soul-sphere can permeate the
psyche-soma and mind-psyche, or be experienced as almost totally occluded and
eclipsed by them, a state in which body and mind leave no space for soul and
spirit in the life of the human being. Similarly, our psycho-somatic state can
totally “fill” our minds, leaving no reflective space within them, or be almost
fully eclipsed by the mind-psyche -
turning the mind into a feeling-less and disembodied intellect ungrounded in
the individual’s somatic sense of meaning. Nevertheless, whatever the internal
relationships of its three spheres, the three membranes and the morphic body
are expressions of one-and-the-same formative
and trans-formative activity. The membranes themselves are the more or less
permeable medium through which activity in one sphere is translated into the
medium of another. The soul-skin, which is at the same time the inner surface of
the psyche-soma, allows inner tones
of feeling to permeate our bodily self-experience, colouring our overall
“mood”. The self-skin, which is the outer membrane of the psyche-soma, allows these feeling tones to reveal themselves in our
face and eyes. The same formative activity that gives rise to patterns of
muscular in-tensionality, in-forming the
expressive bodily surface of our self-sphere also in-forms our thinking and shapes the inner surface of our
soul-sphere, affecting the way we experience our resonant souls as an “inside”
of our bodily experience. The singular formative activity that in-forms and
transforms the different spheres of our Morphic Body can perhaps best be
understood as a type of virtual speech,
involving as it does both body and mind, soul and spirit.
Modes of Communication
The concentric model of the Morphic Body and its three main
loci of awareness allows us to diagram in a clearer way three distinct levels
of human communication - head-to-head,
heart-to-heart and hara-to-hara. Together with these three levels go three
distinct modalities of communication -
mental-emotional, empathic and psycho-spiritual. Though it may at first
sight appear incongruous to link emotional communication with the mind and
verbal thought-skin, this is because the verbal mind serves to reflect our
reaction to events impinging on the sensory-emotional surface of our
“self-skin”. In contrast, empathic communication is based on feeling our way
“under the skin” of another person and letting them get under our own skin,
rather than reacting from our own sensory-emotional surface. Emotional reactions expressed in words are not the
same as empathic responses felt
within our bodies. The psycho-spiritual level of communication is experienced
as a direct meeting of souls rather than a purely somatic empathy, mediated by
eye-contact but grounded in a type of umbilical contact from the belly or hara. The basis of this Resonant Contact
and Communication is not thought or feeling but will and intent - the capacity
to attune to and intend the other as a being. The words tune and attune, tone and
intone, tend, attend and intend all have a common root in the Latin tenere - to “stretch” or “span”. In
seeking to span the gulf between our own inner being and the inner being of the
other, it is as if we stretch out a “tendril of intent” from the still-point of
silence within us, one which, in making contact with the other, vibrates as a
basic wavelength of attunement to the other. Whenever a therapist seeks to make inner contact with an
individual’s core by working from the outside in - whether through talk,
physical touch or eye-contact itself - the individual may experience this as an
impingement - a demand to react to
the outside world which automatically forecloses any spontaneous inner response. This is particularly true
wherever touch and eye-contact are not used alone, as a medium of silent
communication, but combined with attempts to elicit verbal responses from the
client. Asking them to talk about
their feelings, even in the context of bodywork, makes them more aware of their
own incapacity to communicate from
their core and in a bodily way. In Morphic Healing, where eye-contact plays the
principal role as a medium of core communication, this danger is avoided.
Feeling that the client may experience the healer’s gaze as intrusive, the
latter can soften or even withdraw from their own eyes, whilst maintaining
Resonant Contact from the hara.
When the Morphic Healer first seeks Resonant Contact with
the patient, he or she does so from the inside out, extending a “tendril of
intent” from their own core. Whether or not they simultaneously seek this
contact from the outside in - through the eyes - the armoured patient will
invariably respond to the healer’s inner vibrational touch. This response most
often takes the form of reflex muscular actions - for example grimacing or
involuntary movements of the head. They react as if a sensitive point had been
touched in massage, but are unaware of any external trigger for this reaction.
The beauty of Morphic Healing, however, lies in the fact that the healer can
communicate their own perception of the patient’s inner defences in an inner
way, responding to them by subtly altering their inner bearing towards the
client, providing inner holding and finding the “wavelengths” of attunement on
which the client is nevertheless receptive to Resonant Communication through
the eyes and capable of manifesting different inner faces.
The Resonant Soul is the psychic interiority of the Morphic
Body, the womb of our spiritual core, and the medium of Resonant Communication.
Resonant Contact with our own spiritual core turns the Resonant Soul into an
echo chamber which allows us to hearken to the tones of silence beneath and
behind a person’s communication, and to hear the person themselves as one echo of their inner being. In Morphic
Healing this in turn allows us to see and respond to the different inner faces
of the patient. Whatever wavelengths of attunement are established with the
patient through the eyes are experienced by the healer as inner feeling tones
which they can manifest in their own face, mirror in their look and emanate
from their body as a whole, turning the latter into a medium for embodying
their Resonant Contact and Communication with the patient and deepening the
patient’s responsiveness to it.
The Bi-personal Field
Resonant Contact can be present or absent on other levels of
communication. When it is present it facilitates the creation of bipersonal
fields from the different spheres of the Morphic Body. For example, where
Resonant Contact forms the basis of verbal communication, it allows the
creation of a bi-personal field from the ego-spheres
of both persons in the dyad, creating a shared ego-skin of verbal discourse
When this happens both partners in the dyad feel a sense of mutual
mental-emotional understanding and of being at
home in each other’s words - their language is a shared one in the full
sense of this word. In deep psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic communication -
or deep healing communication of any sort - the joint ego-sphere becomes a safe
enough container for the self-spheres
of one or both partners in the dyad to become transparent, deepening empathic
communication and allowing it to find expression in language. The unique
feature of Morphic Resonation consists in the creation through Resonant Contact
of a bi-personal field uniting the self-skin of both partners, surrounded not
by a common thought-skin but a common sensory-emotional skin. In the course of
Morphic Resonation the soul-spheres of both partners become transparent, or
even merge themselves to create a bipersonal field surrounded by a shared
“soul-skin”.
The Subtle Arts of Morphic Resonation
As a healing medium of Resonant Contact and Communication, Morphic
Resonation involves a number of different experiential dimensions, each of
which can to some extent be practised independently and cultivated as an active
communicative art. Many of these “arts” have already been described in the
course of this article and I list them below in order, (a) to provide an
overview of the basic elements of Morphic Resonation as a practice and, (b) to
contrast it with different types of exercise which are based on the mutual
gaze, most of which, however, not only involve far shorter periods of sustained
eye-contact, but are not designed and worded in such a way as to cultivate the
rich amid manifold dimensions of experience opened up by Morphic Resonation.
Dropping the Mask
This means allowing the entire complex web work of our
facial, oral and ocular musculature to relax, as we do so turning our gaze
inward and becoming aware of whatever is going on within us. Dropping the mask
is important in the first stage in Morphic Resonation, in which before making
eye-contact, both partners close their eyes, exhale deeply a few times, and
spend some time with themselves, allowing themselves to feel whatever they are
feeling and to make contact with their inner being. But at any stage in the
resonation sitting, it can be used as a way of reconnecting with ourselves
whenever we feel we have been identifying with a particular inner stance or a
particular face of the self for too long.
Meeting
Meeting is the
ability and active willingness to meet someone’s gaze fully and be fully met in
their gaze. Not simply making and sustaining eye-contact with someone for a
long period, without blinking, moving one’s head or diverting one’s gaze
(something extraordinarily difficult for many people) but making authentic
inner contact with the other through one’s gaze.
Manifesting
This is the ability and willingness to manifest our inner state of being, and our inner responses to
others, whatever they are, in one’s face and eyes, and communicate it through
our gaze, letting them alter not only the whole character of our look but also
our way of looking at and seeing the other. Manifesting is the principle medium
by which we give form to feelings in the resonation process.
Mooding
This means letting the different thoughts and emotions,
bodily sensations and tensions that make up our self-experience at any given
time coalesce into a singular basic feeling tone or “mood of soul”, letting
this emanate from our souls, permeate our bodies, and manifest in our face and eyes. Mooding goes together with allowing
ourselves to fully body our state of being by breathing into our own bodily sensations and feelings, absorbing
them with our in-breath and emanating them with our out-breath.
Mouthing
Mouthing is the ability to use our mouths to give oral
expression to our feelings without uttering any audible sounds, as we often do
in ordinary life when we tighten our lips in concentration or open them
slightly to express surprise. It can be practised by mouthing different vowel
and consonant sounds, sensing their emotional resonance and allowing them to
alter the whole shape of our facial expression and change the whole tone and
timbre of our bodily self-experience.
Miming
This means freezing a particular “look” on our face, with
all its components, oral and ocular - holding it for an extended period of time
in order to feel its basic tone more strongly, and letting it permeate our
being. Miming allows us to transform a feeling tone we would otherwise manifest
only briefly in our facial features into an experience of a distinct face of
our being - a “Morphic Aspect”, and to manifest it more fully to others.
Modulating
This means intentionally altering our inner feeling tone
like a singer or actor does, by transforming our facial expression, mouthing and miming the manifestation of a new feeling tone. In essence it is
the capacity to flexibly employ our own “Morphic Alphabet” - our repertoire of
expressive facial features, in order to freely manifest different faces of our being or Morphic Aspects in
response to our partner.
Mirroring
This means imitating a
particular look we perceive in the face of the other, whether a fleeting look
that suddenly reveals a new aspect of our partner, or a sustained look that we
wish to understand and respond to. Mirroring a look by imitating exactly its
Morphic Features allows us to resonate inwardly with the feeling tone it
manifests, to manifest the aspect of our own being that resonates with it, and
to magnify the intensity of feeling for both partners through resonant amplification.
Mirroring is particularly valuable in helping others to recognise and feel the face they are showing to us
more strongly themselves.
Melding
Mirroring can result in a powerful sense of “melding” or
“merging” with the other - of entering a shared inner soul-space created from
the merger of our Morphic Bodies, and of moving or “flying” together in this
space - “riding” on a common wavelength of resonant attunement. The human eye
is a microcosm of the Morphic Body, and the melding experience can be cultivated
by looking into and “through” the black pupils of one’s partner’s eyes,
experiencing them not just as windows of the soul but as a type of opening
through which one can pass into the psychic interiority of their eyes. The
feeling then develops of this inner space merging with that of our own eyes,
and creating a common soul-space that is felt to envelope the bodies of both
partners.
Imaging
This is the use of the mind’s eye to give imaginary form and
structure to the different “spaces” one enters in Morphic Resonation, and to
visualise Morphic Aspects - both those we manifest ourselves or those we
perceive in others - as distinct entities within the visionary landscapes or
surroundings of our minds. Thus a Morphic Aspect may appear as an animal within
a natural environment, a person within a family or social-historical
environment, or a planet within a cosmic space.
Morphing
Letting a continuous and smooth metamorphosis of our facial
expression take place, as it does spontaneously when we speak, but immeasurably
slowed down. This allows us to feel each subtle stage in the transfiguration of
our look as a distinct persona with
its own unique feeling tone, to explore a subtler and wider range of expressive
features than we are normally aware of, and, like a painter mixing pigments
give form to entirely new colourations of feeling.
Messaging
This is a deep awareness of the communicative meaning of the feelings we manifest to
our partner and the faces of our being that we reveal - what they may mean to
our partners and what we in turn intend them
to mean. My look may communicate a feeling of softness and warm compassion,
radiate clarity, firmness and determination, or manifest the darkest and most
profound depths of my soul. There is a distinct difference between simply
caressing someone softly or speaking to them patiently and, on the other hand,
doing so with the intent to impart to them a sense of softness or patience in
themselves. Messaging means that I am aware of saying something to my partner through
these felt qualities of my own look, whether in response to their own look or
as a spontaneous expression of my own being. In Morphic Resonation, what people
mean to one another is nothing more or less than what they are for one another - the aspects of each other’s being they
manifest not just to but for one
another. When lovers “make eyes” or people raise a brow, frown or smile at one
another they are messaging. In Morphic Resonation this messaging can be so
subtle as to be almost physically intangible, and yet through it we can convey
meanings of equal or greater richness than those conveyed by language itself -
not just emotional meanings but sophisticated intellectual ones, intuitive
comprehensions of otherwise inexpressibly complex relationships.
In addition to the active dimensions of Morphic Resonation
listed above, the practice of Morphic
Healing can involve the use of a number of further elements, of which the
following are most significant:
Medicine Sounds
This is the use of silently mouthed vowels and consonants to
evoke particular Morphic Aspects of the healer, and to help the patient to
resonate with and embody new aspects of their own being, both during and
between Resonation sittings.
Mediumship
This is where the healing is conducted by an alternative
personality - a particular Morphic Aspect which the healer can evoke and
manifest at will, and enter into Resonant Contact and Communication with the
patient.
Mesmeric Passes
These are movements of the healer’s hands and arms which are
used to embody and intensify Resonant Contact and
Communication and to perform manipulations on the Morphic Body of the patient.
Manipulation of the Morphic Body
Here, the healer’s inner perception of the Morphic Body of
the patient allows them to perform subtle manipulations using their own Morphic
Body as a medium of inner vibrational touch.
The Meta-Medical Foundation of Morphic Resonation
The efficacy of Morphic Resonation as a medium of healing
can only be understood on the basis of what I call Meta-Medicine. Meta-Medicine
is “medicine beyond medicine” - a new philosophy of health and healing which
acknowledges a fundamental metaphysical distinction between the human body and
mind, on the one hand, and the inner human being
on the other. The human body and its genes can be turned into an object of
medical-scientific research. The human being cannot. Processes of change in the
human body and mind, including pathological processes, can only be fully
understood if they are recognised as the manifestation of a natural and
continuous process of change in the human being. Both mental and physical
illness are themselves the expression of a holistic healing process or metamorphosis through which we become
more whole - learning to body new aspects of our inner being. This process
neither begins at birth nor ends at death. Throughout our physical lives,
however, it is through the Morphic Body that we give physical expression to the
metamorphic process. The external manifestation can be seen in the gradual but
nevertheless marked changes of physical appearance and personality that each
individual goes through as they mature out of childhood, into adulthood and old
age. The internal experience of this process is far more variegated, however,
involving not merely a handful of life phases or hundreds or thousands of minor
or major changes in our self-experience and mode of self-expression - some
conscious, others only semi-conscious, some willed and some spontaneous, some
occurring through illnesses or life-crises, others unfolding naturally through
our relationships with others. Morphic Resonation facilitates an acceleration
of the Metamorphic Process, allowing fundamental changes in our self-experience
that would otherwise require days, weeks, months or even years for us to
embody, to unfold within one or more sittings.
The Metamorphic Process
Only by understanding health as a process and not a state –
as a continuous process of bodying our being, and not merely a generalised
state of “well-being” - can we understand illness itself as one manifestation
of this metamorphic process. When we are ill, we do not “feel ourselves”, but
this not-feeling-oneself is itself a
natural phase of the metamorphic process, allowing the gradual discovery and
integration of other aspects of one’s being. Illness can be understood as a
process comparable to pregnancy, in which these new aspects of one’s being
first find expression as seemingly abnormal mental and physical states. The
stages of this process can be conceived as follows:
1. Feeling oneself (normally identified
with health)
2. Not feeling oneself (the dis-ease
normally identified with
illness)
illness)
3. Feeling another self (health as a
process of self-discovery)
Models of selfhood and bodyhood which deny the intrinsic
multi-personhood of the individual, work to prevent the easy transition from
stage 2 to stage 3, and thus the integration of new aspects of the individual’s
being into the “normal” sense of self that defines stage 1. The experience of
not-feeling-oneself can become somatically tangible through physical illness or
persist as a disembodied and depersonalised mental state of not-feeling-a-self.
Alternatively, both physical and mental illness can be experienced as a state
of feeling a not-self - feeling invaded and threatened by foreign bodies or
foreign beings, malign cells and organisms or malign spirits, intrusive
sensations and pains, or intrusive emotions, thoughts and inner voices.
Morphic Healing and Shamanic Medicine
The efficacy of Morphic Healing lies in helping the patient
to body the “spirit” of those new aspects of their being which are pregnant in
their dis-ease. Traditional shamanic medicine aims to banish these spirits. But
so, in its own way, does modern biological medicine, which simply identifies
them with foreign bodies such as micro-organisms or “non-self” cells. Shamanic
medicine has two other important dimensions, however, which distinguish it
sharply from biological medicine and bring it closer to a meta-medical model of
health defined through the metamorphic process. For one thing, the shamanic
healer understands that because the sick individual is unable to healthily
contain and embody the spirit of their disease, they are in danger of losing their
souls to it - the equivalent in shamanic terms to the experience of feeling no self or feeling a not-self. Secondly, shamanic healing makes use of
different types of sacred objects and different forms of movement, speech and
song to create healing rituals which are isomorphic
with the spirit of a person’s disease and therefore capable of giving form to,
and containing it. What anthropologists used to describe and dismiss as
“sympathetic magic” can be understood as a magical science based on the
scientific principle of formative
causation as defined by Sheldrake, which makes active use of Morphic
Resonation - not through the face and eyes of the healer alone but through
touch and the ritual deployment of sacred masks, movements and mantram, sacred
instruments, sounds and songs.
My own experience of Morphic Resonation
Though I have done my best in this account to give an
objective description of the theory, practice and experience of Morphic
Resonation, it is of course difficult to convey the subjective richness of the
Resonation process without personal experience of it. My own experience with it
began 25 years ago, with a drug-induced state in which, in the course of an
hour, I sensed scores of different selves looking out through my eyes and
manifesting in my face, each of them like the visible crest of a wave of
feeling, whose inner tone permeated my body and mind and radiated through my
eyes. As I crested wave after wave of feeling tone, I began to sense and “ride”
longer and more fundamental tonal wavelengths of my being, and to sense and
manifest the inner aspects of my being corresponding to them, until finally I
felt in contact with the very bedrock of my being - an
“energy-personality-essence” so vast that it embraced countless distinct selves
in its own singular formative activity of being.
After this experience I sought ways in which this initiation
into my own multi-personhood could be reproduced without drugs, so that I and
others too could enjoy it and benefit from its healing potential. What I now
call 'Morphic Resonation' and 'Morphic Healing are the result. Over the decades
my own experiences of the Resonation process have been rich and varied,
culminating recently in the discovery of my own “inner shaman” - a Morphic
Aspect called UNGUMBUTHU which I understand as a ‘personagram’ in Jane
Roberts’s sense i.e. a 'bridge personality' linking my present self with
a probable past-life self. UNGMBUTHU’s inner world and his perception of
reality is not the same as mine, yet each time he manifests as a Morphic Aspect
and works through me as a healer, I receive a new insight into the worlds
opened up by Morphic Resonation, not only in his terms but in mine. My terms,
including the term 'Morphic Resonation' itself, are technical-academic ones
with an abstract ring. His is a fluid ‘metamorphic’ language with no fixed
vocabulary. It is composed of resonant sound-words
which can be plucked from the psychic atmosphere in which he dwells like ripe
fruit, words whose meaning must be felt somatically, sensed with one’s soul and
‘seen’ with the mind’s eye in order to be understood and translated into
ordinary words.
Training in Morphic Resonation and Morphic Healing
For many years I was not sure if my own capacity to use
Morphic Resonation to induce certain deep-level experiences of Resonant Contact
and Communication in others could itself be passed on to others, or whether
instead it was merely the expression of a psychic quirk or gift of my own. More
recently I have proved to myself that with the help of certain types of
preparatory and complementary exercises, along with regular ‘tutorial’
sittings, this can be done. Nevertheless, though on the one hand, Morphic
Resonation is a simple exercise that can produce results for all who try it
out, on the other hand it may be hindered by armouring in a way that inhibits
full experience of Resonant Contact and Communication. To this extent, it
requires an experienced practitioner to help dissolve this armouring from the
inside-out, and to provide others with something like an “initiation” into the
mysteries of their inner being, one conducted through the Resonation process
itself.
The Applications of Morphic Resonation
Despite the necessity for this ‘advanced’ initiatory
training in order to practice Morphic
Healing, I firmly believe that even a relatively untrained practice of Morphic Resonation can bring benefits in
a range of different areas. Paradoxically, it is ideally suited as a medium
both for couple therapy, working as it does to heal and deepen pair relationships,
and as a means for helping
individuals who suffer from a crippling sense of inner isolation. Reich’s
observations on the typical far-away look of the so-called ‘schizophrenic’
personality, his recognition of the basic importance of armouring in the ocular
and oral segments, and the understanding by bodywork therapists of the
importance of ‘core contact’ in dealing with ‘psychotic’ or ‘borderline’
individuals all gives face validity to the use of Morphic Resonation and
Morphic Healing in helping people diagnosed in these terms. I would also
suggest that Morphic Resonation can be a powerful training tool for therapists
and counsellors themselves, offering them a deeper experience of the nature of
Resonant Contact and Communication, and helping them to ground their own
therapeutic practice in them. In addition, I believe that both Morphic
Resonation and Morphic Healing can provide a complementary medium of healing
for therapists and bodyworkers of all sorts - one that can be used both as a
form of somatic psychotherapy and as a form of psychological ‘somatherapy’ to
work with a wide variety of physical conditions.
The application of Morphic Resonation in these areas has
only just begun, and on a very small scale. There is a long way yet to go in
developing Morphic Healing as a therapeutic art, in gathering case experience
and extending the number of trained practitioners. I hope that this
long-overdue ‘interim report’ on the research conducted so far will be of some
value in promoting the development of this very powerful way of ‘rediscovering
the soul through the body’.
Appendix 1: Seth on the Nature of Feeling Tone
"Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes
towards yourself and life in general, and these generally govern large areas of
experience. They give the overall emotional coloration that characterises what
happens to you. Period. You are what happens to you. Your emotional
feelings are often transitory but beneath, there are certain qualities of
feeling uniquely your own, that are like deep musical chords. While your
day-to-day feelings may rise or fall, these characteristic feeling tones lie
beneath.
Sometimes they rise to the surface, but in great long
rhythms. You cannot call these negative or positive. They are instead tones of
your being. They represent the most inner portions of your experience. This
does not mean they are hidden from you, or are meant to be. It simply means
that they represent the core from which you form your experience. If you have
become afraid of emotion or the expression of feeling, or if you have been
taught that the inner self is no more than a repository of uncivilised
impulses, then you may have the habit of denying this deep rhythm. You may try
to operate as if it did not exist, or even try to refute it. But it represents
your deepest, most creative impulses; to fight against it is like trying to
swim upstream against a strong current.
These feeling-tones then, pervade your being. They are the
form your spirit takes when combined with flesh. From them, from your core,
your flesh arises. Everything that you experience has consciousness, and each
consciousness is endowed with its own feeling-tone. Your flesh springs about
you in response to these inner chords of your being, as the trees, rocks, seas
and mountains spring up as the body of the earth from the deep inner chords
within its atoms and molecules, which are living. Because of the creative
co-operation that exists, the miracle of physical materialisation is performed
so smoothly and automatically that consciously you are not aware of your part
in it.
The feeling-tone then, is the motion and fibre - the timbre
- the portion of your energy devoted to your physical experience. Its source,
however, is quite independent of the world that you know.
Once you learn to get the feeling of your own inner tone,
then you are aware of its power, strength, and durability, and you can to some
extent ride with it into deeper realities of experience. It is the essence of
yourself. Its sweeps are broad in range, however. It does not determine, for
example, specific events. It paints the colours in the large “landscape” of
your experience. It is the feeling of
yourself, inexhaustible. In other terms it represents the expression of yourself
in pure energy, from which your individuality rises, the You of you, an
unmistakable, given identity that is never duplicated. This energy comes from
the core of BEING, from All That Is, and represents the source of never-ending
vitality. It is Being, Being in You. As such, all of the energy and power of
Being is focused and reflected through you in the direction of your
three-dimensional existence."
Bibliography
Boadella, David Lifestreams
Routledge, 1987
Heron, John The Phenomenology of
Social Encounter: the Gaze
Philosophy & Phenomenological
Research Vol XXXI No2 Dec.1970
Roberts, Jane Adventures in Consciousness Bantam 1985
Sheldrake, Rupert A New Science of Life Park Street Press
1995
Winnicott, Donald Playing and Reality Tavistock 19
See www.thenewyoga.org
for a new experiential interpretation of Morphic Resonation as a form of
Tantric Pair Meditation.
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