Ontogeny or Phylogeny?

Ontogeny or Phylogeny?

Being one of the stars himself, Arts view of fame and success as an ephemeral notion seems so right. I have been through it and studied it, over and over again in the fiction and in the psychological literature and in the world of art, yes, wherever there are people. We act out our pain, often propelled by the hope and temptation of fame and success. Mainly we fail, but since the pain does not go away we try again and again and again. It is certainly not only the stars in different segments and niches who suffer, it is a common pattern among all human beings around the globe. 

Art says:

“We thought that once we choose a profession and followed it and succeed at it, becoming an expert and well known, that would be fulfilling. We would feel like a success.  Wrong.  When we have a deep-rooted lack of love, rejection, indifference and missing touch early in our lives we cannot feel like a success.” 

Because Art has felt his pain, he can, fortunately, for those interested, allow himself to reveal that. Most people cannot, of whom some commit suicide. However, is not the neurotic process of  i.e. pursuing a profession / wishing to be successful, the way we interpret evolution?? To make us survive short term and to propel the species to make new, random, adjustments? 

Death is naturally programmed into our cells. The programming is provoked either we get too old or we wear out due to act outs propelled by repressed pain. Then a malnourished immune system can not cope. Especially if exposed to cancerous virus cells which like the terrorists sneaks into our cells, even into the cells of the immune system.

“Symbolic love has to be repeated over and over again because it cannot fulfill”. Yes, that is often a tragedy seen from the individuals, ontogenic point of view. Phylogenetically, mutation, migration, genetic drift and natural selection are the evolutionary conditions for the species. What a dilemma! We are at the same time part of the macroevolution and have a limited human life to live, love or suffer. 

Do not get me wrong. Arts hint of a life with unconditional love and fulfillment is a nice mirage. My basic interpretation of Art is that we can do much more to develop / show our feelings and human relations. Psychotherapy can, in the best case, only temporary affect evolution. Like his Hollywood stars, we will make do with time-limited experiences of fulfillment and, unfortunately, we have to face the consequences when the addictive act outs become our everyday life.

Jan Johnsson

Attempts at clarification of a catch-22

Art says he does not feel fulfilled now as he developed into a skilled, famous and experienced expert / specialist because he carries a perpetual pain since he never received love, touch and attention of his parents. However, his repressed pain developed energy. This pain propelled energy drove his ambitions / act outs, during a long life, to relieve other people's pain, to develop the Primal Principle and at the same time, mainly through his books and blogs, to serve as an educator / tutor and a widely loved expert.

If Art had received love, touch and attention had he developed a more satisfying life? We can only guess and imagine that it could have been so. What we learned is that the brilliant expert who helped / motivated many of us (through and beyond our pain) to a new and more satisfying life, he, Art, sits himself as the loser / the "Shithead" in his own game of life.

It feels unfair and the moral is that we must not become so blinded by the pain effects that we can not appreciate their evolutionary compensating properties. I wish Art a greater sensitivity to the love we radiate. It is meant to be felt as part of his Fulfilment.

Jan Johnsson

PS

Of course, my “attempt” is pain propelled, but certain parts of my pain I love!

How We Breathe Depends On Physical And Mental Memories.

How We Breathe Depends On Physical And Mental Memories.

My breathing, I have often touched on in my blogs over the years. It was dramatically disturbed / affected in the neurotic / conscious, protracted birth trauma caused by my mother. I was locked in the birth canal for 48 hours. Therefore, many of my act outs and subsequent therapeutic treatment experiences have come to focus on my breathing.

For several years, existed a repeated pattern, during my birth primal, that I fell into a deep anesthesia. This was aggravated gradually that I hyperventilated fiercely and suddenly not breathing at all. This condition lasted a good while and I struggled desperately to get air but without success. Suddenly, I gave up and felt myself drowning / dying. Consciousness returned weakly and slowly. I had been through a primal instead of an epileptic seizure. The feeling of anesthetic pressure released slowly. I experienced a total relief and liberation, first physically and shortly afterward emotionally. My breathing was relaxed and parasympathetic.

During more than 20 years, I made early each morning push-ups (2 x 125) at my fingertips with my feet on a table (my way of freediving). During each of the two pushup series, I held my breath. Besides Carbamazepine (Tegretol), these act outs were my way of keeping up my ego and reduce my anxiety of my problems and then especially the epileptic threat. I used my abdominal muscles in combination with my pushups to displace anxiety and tension associated with a stressful and demanding work career. This defense tied to my breathing, which I had developed over many years with great willpower and discipline, was certainly the heaviest reason that my two years at the Primal Institute in LA did not lead to faster visible results.

The physical defense, I felt instinctively and contacted the Rolfing Institute at my regular visits in Boulder, Col. In my files I still have the following statements by Ida Rolf:

“Physical individuality is shaped by the forces of life - how we were born, when we learned to move, our goals, experiences, accidents, mental and emotional sets. All of these leave a record in our mental and our physical memories. The two are in many ways similar - bodies, as well as minds, bear witness to the puzzlements, accidents, unfinished business of our lives.”

“The more you watch people change in front of your eyes, the more sure you are about how people can get stuck in childish incidents, or birth incidents, or for all I know pre-birth incidents. You see it right in front of your eyes. And then change happen through Rolfing, and it begins to be possible for a body to take on what we consider appropriate adult form. Then the person continues on psychologically, and develops.”

During 5 weeks, I received a treatment at the Rolfing Institute. I got a deep tissue massage to restore the body's natural posture and structural integration, which certainly, in time, would have a different, very profound, pleasant and fascinating effect on me physically and mentally. The treatment took place just weeks before moving back to Sweden from LA. Immediately when I came to Sweden effects of Rolfing started to show. January 1980, I experienced for the first time how a potential Gand Mal seizure developed into a birth primal. Thanks to my time in the Primal Institute, having understood the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse I could grasp and handle what was happening to me. Not to forget the Primal Retreats in the 80ies.

The rest is happy history. With the single exception that Dr. Janov, who is well acquainted with the potential of Rolfing, is not for it. He wrote in an email to me on the 10/12 of 2010, when I told him that I started the second series of Rolfing treatments: "Rolfing May help but I am not for it because it pushes the muscles to release tension without proper connection to the brain. The brain should first give instructions and then the muscles release as a result of a memory or imprint. It is mindless and I am not for that”.

Dr. Ida Rolf apparently saw it the other way around.

Personally, I speak for both in combination. I am an excellent example myself and I have friends who have shared my experience.

Saxophone and breathing.

My new "act out", to learn to play the saxophone, reminds me of the many emotions that affected my life, consciously or unconsciously. Breathing is a critical factor in the Woodwind Instruments. Being able to keep the tone even and beautiful over several beats would not work with shallow breathing.

Thanks to The Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse and Ida Rolf's deep tissue massage / Structural Integration I hope one day being able to handle the saxophone for my own satisfaction. Probably at the price of a number of new repressed feelings popping up!

Jan Johnsson

Arthur JanovFebruary 8, 2016 at 10:38 PM

 Jan, most interesting. art

My Sisyphean Task - To Play The Saxophone.

My Sisyphean task - to play the Saxophone.

During the latter half of the 1950s, I was bitten by the jazz bacillus. My main sources were Studio 52, the jazz club in Lund, Sweden, and a night-time program on Swedish Radio "Jazz Glimpses from New York" with Clas Dahlgren. That the founder of Studio 52, Bjorn Fremer was married to my best friend's beautiful cousin Gun certainly had its importance. She was so beautiful that she belonged to the Eileen Ford organization of fashion models in New York, where Björn, with access to his talent and his wife's financial independence, quickly developed both knowledge and contacts in the jazz circles.

Claes Dahlgren and Bjorn Fremer made many Swedes love, especially, the black American jazz music. My stripes have never gone out. But I miss that I never got the opportunity / could practice music, whether jazz or in any other form. I contented myself with listening and playing my favorites on LPs, which still partly exists after several decades. Lester Young, Ben Webster, Stan Getz and Arne Domnérus were among the saxophonists that were closest to my heart. The icon Charlie "Bird" Parker was too great a virtuous and intellectual that I would be able to assimilate his subtleties.

After I, in adulthood, have sorted out my epilepsy, my ability to articulate my thoughts, my physique, and my nutrition, I thought that I, at 75, needed a new challenge. My subconscious demanded, without outside pressure, that I would acquire musical skills. Since Domnerus, Webster, Getz through their great sounding had dominated my daily life (and often even my dreams) my choice was easy. I wanted to learn to play the saxophone. The decision of the tenor saxophone was certainly colored by my weakness for jazz, but there may also be some form of concession to vanity.

It took me a year to find a saxophone teacher. His name is German Molla and he is a music teacher at the local music school in Genovés besides being an active jazz saxophonist. He is an enthusiastic, friendly and patient person who understand and like my late / mature ambition. His personal qualities will be needed. I come from the absolute position 0, despite my weakness for jazz music. At age 75, I have to learn to read music, be rhythmic, learning the saxophone fingering, create great sounding in woodwind and to be capable of, coordinated, performing all these arts with other musicians.

Intellectually / theoretically talking about the different parts of saxophone music is a piece of cake. Then, for the most part, the left half of the brain works because it is about words. In my particular situation, practice the skills of the various operations and synchronize these is a Sisyphean task. Since The Primal Principle / Evolution In Reverse has eliminated most of my automatic repression mechanism, I must put up with deep feelings of powerlessness and humiliation when I fail to play a simple chord with the correct fingering, right notes, and timing. One day, maybe nano research develop nanoparticles loaded with notes and fingerings and shoot spot on the brain's language / music center. Until then, I have to roll my boulder up the hill like Sisyphus.

To master and assimilate the music's elusive harmonies are not my entire truth. I must also experience how old repressions are evident and, like herpes complicate my journey towards music's magical pinnacles. During the first few weeks, I was stiff and inflexible throughout the body and the breath was suffering and anxiety rose. It felt like the whole house shook and the neighbors became irritated and planned to stop my training sessions.

The emotions behind this anxiety rose rapidly to the surface. They are 60-70 years back in time. When I was a boy, my father would often sleep because offset working hours. Then it was said: "Quiet, your father must sleep!" A further trauma has made itself felt. A painful feeling that I cheated if I prepared myself and read my homework. I had misread my parents' pressure to be the best. I interpreted it as if I should know everything without having the opportunity / need to learn. A torment I lived with for decades. It made me certainly smart but cost unnecessary suffering in many contexts.

My experiences with real difficulties in combination with my re-lived repressions which relatively quickly rises to the surface and dissolves my inhibitions are extremely interesting. My question is how many there are who never get the pleasure to get through natural difficulties due to repressed blockages. It's a fairly logical consequence, but I see this problem suddenly from a new perspective.

Much of cognitive psychotherapy is sentenced to the same punishment as Sisyphus. Rolling the boulder up and having to see it fall down again. Over and over again. A treadmill. When will they ever learn?

Jan Johnsson

Gilbert Bates Jan This article is a classic. The best thing I have read in ages.