“Gravity is the therapist”
a contemplation on adversity and actualization
Practitioners of Structural Integration do not feel themselves to be therapists. The gravitational field is the therapist. What we do is prepare the body to receive the support from the gravitational field which gives a greater sense of well-being.
—Ida Rolf
Gravity’s expression in Nature initially strikes the perceptive observer as to antithetical to the expression of life there: dry leaves fall, creatures drop dead, and only dead fish go with the flow. How can Ida Rolf’s words, then, be correct? How can gravity be the therapist at the same time?
Shakespeare wrote, “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” Perhaps the dichotomy is not an opposition but a polarity. Without gravitational resistance to organize its structure against, the tree could not have grown in the first place. Trees don’t grow in space for many reasons, but this is one of them that is liable to be overlooked. Similarly, there could be no current to speak of except for the pull of gravity so no manner to differentiate dead fishes from living ones. Stagnation rather than gravity, therefore, is the last enemy.
How can gravity be a therapist? Watch a toddler hoist himself up and balance, precariously, on his two little feet—this feat was only possible for us in virtue of our ability to establish a perceptive attunement to the field of gravity working around us. Gravity is a fact, an element of macrocosmic reality. And in the final measure, all healing is the process of attuning our inner music to the Music of the Spheres (musica universalis). Gravity pulls our structure into alignment with physics, just like it takes hold of the seed and nestles it to the earth while it establishes its foundations. The shoot emerges from the soil, and the flower from the shoot. Physiology grows in the medium of physics, and emerges from it. Psyche blooms from the soil of physiology. The self is the bee that alights on the blossom as its splendor and its crown.
This is a short reflection I originally composed in January of ‘21—sub umbra corona, as we all remember, which is, being interpreted, “under the shadow of the crown”—and published at the website for my Rolfing business, the Way of the Elbow. Reader interested to learn more can contact me or peruse the website for more information.
Einstein drew his assumption concerning the theory of relativity based on the constant speed of light by looking at how light was bent around the sun, which was discovered in his time.
This meant that light was affected by gravity. But gravity as we knew it back then accelerated things towards the center of mass, and light could not be accelerated towards the center of the sun, because light was already at it's max speed. Therefore it had to be time and space that was bending by gravity, rather than the light being gravitationally slingshoted past the sun.
If somebody were to topple the assumption that light speed is constant, or near so, it would break the theory of relativity.
The best proof i can find that light speed is not constant is the need of "black matter" for our calculations to be correct when we look out into space. When we look out into space, light does not behave like you think it would according to relativity. Modern "scientists" have solved this by positing that there must be invisible "black matter" in space that distorts their otherwise correct measurements and calculations. This is very much like when heliocentrists posited that there must be a planet Vulcan behind the sun, to account for the errors in their calculations and theories...
A practitioner (Luke Sheldon) years ago handed me a copy of a 1971 Brown University study showing that ordinary people were capable of identifying the position of Moon Mercury Venus at the point of transit from one astrological sign to the next. This perceptual capacity was attributed to the phenomenon of piezoelectricity, ie the pressure of reflected planetary light upon the human fascia generated electric currents qualitatively distinguishable by the participants each planet from the other-illustrating both the potential impact of touch upon the fascia in bodywork, and a degree of body sensitivity difficult and startling to physically conceive.
There is also the famous Michaelson/Morley experiment of 1915 that was unable to find evidence for the existence of the ether, setting up a ray of light divided and reflected back to the source, looking for the presence of an etheric interference that would hinder the speed of the reflected light. Einstein's relativity then displaced the search for ether. However in 1927 Michaelson/Sagnac did in fact find an ether drift, by testing for interference not laterally/horizontally across the surface as was done in 1915 but vertically, ie a downward movement was found towards the center of the Earth. But relativity had captured the popular imagination and ether was abandoned as a relic.
Today's physics math has unified electricity, magnetism and gravity as different aspects of the same force which may well be the etheric formative force so often described by Steiner, now perhaps accessible by ordinary science, modified and transformed by the planets and stars...and by the human being.