The Tree of Man
and the Fundamental Dimensions
of Biosynthesis
by David Boadella
Introduction
The symbol of the tree of Life, which stood
at the center of the world, is as old as mythology. The tree of life that
stretched between heaven and earth became transformed into the tree of
mankind, the body of the human being, placed between the ground under his
feet and the sky over his head.
In my presentation of the fundamental
dimensions of Biosynthesis I will use this metaphor of the tree as an integrating
framework for understanding the relationship between the different parts
of our common work.
1. Lifestreams: roots of embodiment
A tree has roots that anchor it to the earth,
and provide essential nourishment. In Nordic mythology the sacred world
tree had three roots which were well springs of life, allowing a flow of
energy into the body of the world.
In biosynthesis the three tree roots correspond
to what I have called the three lifestreams. I think everyone in Biosynthesis
is familiar with this foundational concept from functional embryology:
the three tubes of our somatic formation, building inner, outer, and in
between tissues. The three associated affect-streams are: the stream of
feeling associated with being well nourished physically and emotionally,
the stream of feeling associated with free and graceful movements, and
the stream of affect associated with pleasurable contact to the skin and
the sense organs. All three affect streams can of course be negatively
loaded: this is what the somatic ground floor of neurosis is all about:
the contractions, and stresses within and between the organsystems, as
the integration between the three streams becomes split and dysfunctional.
The three streams are grounded in our
morphology and physiology, and expressed in our energetic metabolism: in
the psychological realm they become the three great arenas of concern:
what is happening in the emotional system, what is happening in our behavior,
posture and action patterns, and what is happening in how we sense and
make sense of the world: we call this the ABC of biosynthesis: affect,
behavior, cognition.
The roots of the tree suck up nourishment
that travels in conduits through the tree nourishing the whole organism
at many vertical levels of being. Similarly the three lifestreams are associated
with resonant levels of information at all levels of our being: we can
distinguish three forms of language: language describing events, what happened,
language describing feelings, and languages describing beliefs and attitudes.
This is the lifestream principle mapped on to language. And in the spiritual
traditions we find a basic teaching of the tripartite nature of man. This
has relationship to the trinity teaching within Christianity that goes
back to the Egyptian myth of Osiris, Horus and Isis. Osiris, the dying
king, was symbolized in the body by the backbone, the axis of movement.
His symbol was a tree. We remember that Jesus was crucified on a tree,
but the same tree became a symbol of resurrection, as it had earlier done
for Osiris. Isis, his partner was symbolized by waves, and by wings, connected
to breathing and the lungs. An eye, the eye of clarity, symbolized Horus
their child. When clarity was obscured, one spoke of the mask of Horus,
the false face hiding the true self. In the Buddhist tradition we remember
that Buddha received enlightenment under a tree. The Tibetans have brought
us the concept of the three conductors, channels of inspiration which can
be seen as the highest level of expression of the three lifestreams: They
are compassion, the feeling for the other, compassionate action, good handling
in relation to the other, and wisdom: insight into oneself, others and
the world.
2. Life fields: levels of expression
Out of the roots of the tree grow the trunk,
the vertical stem, and the main body of the tree. The trunk rises out of
the ground and stretches towards the light. In the human body we also speak
of the trunk, and the base of the trunk is spoken of as the root center
of the body. The trunk in the body is held together by the spine, the axis
of the motor system, and the channel for the motor nerves, the sensory
nerves, and the associate vegetative system. The spine has seven natural
nodes where it curves and bends, and on these nodes are situated the centers
of our subtle energy system, linked to the major glands of the body. The
trunk of the spine is the main integrating axis of the body, stretching
from pelvis to brain, passing through the nerve centers regulating digestion
and sexuality, to those keeping the heart imbalance, to the throat and
language, the eyes and vision, the ears and hearing, and finally the brain
itself, the most complex piece of matter in nature.
In biosynthesis we speak of the levels
of expression associated with the vertical segments of the spine as "life
fields". Sexuality is a life field. Language is a life field. The client
who come to us in therapy presents his problems in one or more of these
life fields: the life field give us different ways of accessing his problem:
we can choose whether to work with the life field of movement (the so called
motoric field), or with the life field of belief systems, or with the complications
of transference. Therapeutic work seeks to move up and down between the
life fields, helping the person to gain more integration with himself helping
inner communication and transfer of information, as a basis for resolving
problems, tensions, and knots of personal relationship. The life fields
correspond to the points on what we call the hexagram of biosynthesis,
which is different routes of therapeutic access: for example working with
dreams to reach the breathing; or working through emotional clearance,
to free a deeper sense of spirituality.
3. Lifelines: networks of connectiveness.
The tree does not stand alone: it is an organism
in a forest of other organisms. The tree puts out flowers, and attracts
insects. It sends out spores in the four directions of the winds. It can
fertilize and be fertilized. Its leaves form part of the bed of the forest
and form nourishment for other trees. The tree is part of an ecosystem.
The human being also does not stand alone.
He has lifelines of relationship stretching before him in time back through
parents, and grandparents. Twenty generations of influence, and we are
back in the middle of the Middle Ages. The number of people in this hall,
if each one stood for a generation, takes us back before the pyramids were
built in Egypt, to the down of civilization and culture. We have lifelines
stretching after us: our children, and grandchildren, not only the ones
we generate physically, but also the ones we generate professionally: the
lineages of therapeutic movements, of cultural transmission.
Then we have the lifelines with our contemporaries,
sexual relationships with partners, the whole immense process of forming
a co-territory with another human being, the compromise between autonomy
and dependency, separation and merging.
A former student and colleague of mine
from England outlined a rich model of the therapeutic relationship with
five key aspects, each of which has two polar distortions: I cant go into
the model in detail, but will just outline the five kinds of relationship
she describes each of which is important in therapy, and also in normal
human relationships. Firstly she describes the working alliance, the contactual
frame, in therapy. Contracts can be written, or verbal, but they are agreements
within which responsibility is exercised. Broken agreements are wounds
to the frame. The frame is a container for the other four kinds of relationship.
Secondly there is our old friend the transference relationship. What are
transferred are old attitudes, feelings, and expectations, from the past
to the present: it is a form of conditioning that limits opportunities
to the present. Transference work is work to make the conditioning conscious
and help a person to move beyond it. But not all relationship is transference.
Thirdly there is what my colleague calls the real relationship. This is
the human equality of two people beyond their roles. There is room for
real anger from therapist to client and vice versa, which does not have
to be conditioned by childhood. There is room for real sense of loss when
a client leaves after 5 years of therapy. We must be careful not to interpret
every real feeling as a reductive effect of a childhood cause. Fourthly
there is the developmental relationship, which is a key factor in biosynthesis,
which works with developmental patterns of growth. This relationship helps
the other to evolve new skills. It is future building, not past-searching.
And finally there is the spiritual level in a relationship, the meeting
between two human beings as a unique encounter and opportunity, which has
never occurred before in that way, and will never occur again in quite
the same way. The mystery and magic of presence, the numinal awareness
of a deeper ground that sustains a relationship that is able to contact
it.
4. Lifescapes: patterns of experience
The tree has rings. Every year the trunk expands
and lays down a new ring. The gigantic Californian sequoia, wide enough
to drive a car through, has 4000 rings. Each ring lays down anew layer
of history. The lifetime of a tree is coded in its rings.
The human being, in this lifetime, incarnates
into a fertilized cell, which doubles and doubles, around 32 times, until
there are thousands and millions of cells. From prenatal life the human
emerges through the birth canal into postnatal existence: everything that
happened from birth until Tuesday, April 21st, 1998. But we have fantasies,
dreams, longings, and plans for what is to come: we are building what Stanley
Keleman calls the long body of time, evolving towards some future point,
consciously or blindly driven: this is our pre mortaltime: all that remains
waiting for us in this life. Finally there is the postmortal segment of
experience, which we access in dreams, in archetypal visions, in so-called
past life memories, or reincarnation scripts: our images around death and
what might lie beyond it.
History, and the history that will come,
which we call the future, is mingled with images, colorings from the perceptions
of others. Memory is a mixture of fact and fiction; experience means what
we have lived through, it is a mixture of the objective and the subjective
and the intersubjective. This is what I call lifescapes, the stories we
tell ourselves about where we have come from and where we are going, our
dreams, visions of the pasts, vision of the future, the tapestry we are
weaving of our lives, the pageant of our embodiments.
Working with memory, in the middle of
the false memory debate, with its polarization between fact and fiction,
we are trying to tease out the meanings of experience, and to help a client
to reframe those meanings so he becomes a conscious agent in his own drama,
and not just a victim of other people, or a victim of blind forces that
threw him into existence. Lifescapes means the shapes of a person's life
story, including his dreams, his paintings, his poems, and his songs of
triumph and despair. This is the region where poetry and therapy, music
and therapy, drama and therapy, overlap and cross-fertilize each other.
5. Life forms: structures of integration
The tree has branches. Wilhelm Reich wrote:
a crooked tree never grows straight. Trees can be deformed or well formed.
They can be blasted or withered by harsh conditions, or they can be objects
of beauty that take our breath away. The form of the tree is to do with
how it is structured: the proportion of its branches, the balance of its
being.
In psychotherapy we have the concept of
structure, and deficiencies of structure. When there is too little structure
in a person we have a lack of coherence, a tendency to disintegrate. Structure
is missing. The extreme form of this is a psychotic state, full of incoherence.
Intense energies are moving, or congealed, but the person is unable to
structure them, or to integrate the pains in his life. A borderline state
is a state without boundaries. A person without boundaries feels he has
no skin: he is like a tree whose bark has been ripped off, over vulnerable,
easily becoming emotionally sick. Psychotherapy only deals with levels
of structure up to the so-called normal person, who has normal structure,
what Reich has called Homo normalis. Is that all psychotherapy is, a technology
to make us normal? Hopefully not, and we have terms like "individuation"
which means to become undivided. When Alexander Lowen wanted to find a
metaphor for the splits in the human being, he took a tree stump split
in half with an axe. Individuation is healing the splits, bridging the
gaps in our integration, becoming more whole. The tree of man in the Kabbalah,
with its upper and lower, right and left modalities, is a symbol of the
wholeness of man. In biosynthesis we work a great deal with the concepts
of polarities, the extremes of fixations at one pole or the other, and
the pulsation between two poles. Higher levels of structure exist than
being normal, but they are not gross structures made of mass, or ego concepts,
they are fine structures in the subtle-energy system.
Meditation is a way of fine-tuning, and
thus restructuring the energy field. So life forms relates to the different
stages of coherence a person is going through in his life development,
and is related to his personal and spiritual growth, not to his aging on
the time axis.
When working with life forms we are concerned
with helping a person to progress in his life, to evolve on his path, to
become more sensitive to new possibilities and directions and less satisfied
with previous levels of adaptation or adjustment.
6. Life grounds: foundations of support.
The trees roots are deeply embedded in the
soil. They stretch as far underground as the branches spread above the
ground. The tree in anchored in the earth, and sucks up the moisture from
the rain, drinking thousands of liters a day.
In biosynthesis we are concerned with
many forms of ground. The first of these is of course the physical ground,
our stability on the earth, our sense to be rooted on the planet or not.
But this physical grounding is only the first kind of grounding. There
is sexual grounding with the body of the other. There is the home ground
of nature, and associations with a particular place. There is the human
ground of a family or community. There is the conceptual ground of a language
system or a belief structure. And there is the inner ground of faith in
the meaning of ones life.
These various grounds actual, or remembered,
or imagined, are part of a person’s resources, they are sources of strength
to support him in crises, they are well springs of healing to nourish him
in times of stress. In neurosis we remember the traumas and forget the
lifegrounds. The most important aspect of working with trauma is to reanimate
the life grounds. A woman deprived of her father at the age of one remembers
the earthy comfort and support of his hand in the first year of life. A
woman doing a guided fantasy into the volcanic hole in the center of her
heart discovers at the bottom of the hole a bottle containing the message:
at the bottom of every black hole there is milk and honey. A man has a
dream in which his death father expresses forgiveness for his punishments
in childhood. A woman dying of cancer puts a bird nest on her table. A
person who suffered traumatic abuse remembers and rediscovers, imaginably,
a dog that can help her run to a safe place where she can for the first
time feel secure. The most touching example comes not from a therapy session
but from a newspaper cutting from the second world war: a ten year old
girl, imprisoned in Auschwitz, kept a diary which was discovered after
she had died during the holocaust, in which she had written the following:
"everyday I look through the barbed wire and I see a tree. This tree helps
to remind me of the beauty and power of life."
7. Life rays: qualities of inspiration and
incarnation.
The top of the tree is called the crown, as
the top of the head of the human being is called the crown. The crown of
the tree consists of leaves sucking in air, and bathing in light. The photosynthesis
of the tree provides the energy for the biosynthesis of its body. In our
form of biosynthesis, we are dealing with our access to spirit, which means
breath, and to light, which is a symbol for our qualities.
Modern psychotherapy tends to distrust
and fear spirituality, as something esoteric and cultic. But I have shown
in a recent article that all forms of psychotherapy have from the beginning
been inspired by spiritual sources, as well as by their psychodynamic or
behavioral or body psychothetapy concepts. In biosynthesis the spiritual
nourishment of the human being is given a central place, in contrast to
the spiritual homelessness which characterizes all forms of existential
despair.
In some forms of esoteric teaching the
qualities are symbolized or understood as rays of light descending on us
from a spiritual dimension of being. In an earlier article I referred to
these as light streams, in contrast to the life streams at our roots.
Wilhelm Reich wrote that at the bottom
of every neurosis, under every painful state and tortured condition, there
lies a simple decent clear state of being human. He called it the core.
We call it essence. Christians call it the soul. Spirituality is in essence
very simple: the Danish spiritual teacher Bob Moore calls it the feeling
for what we are doing. It is the mystery behind the problem, the healing
behind the wound, the true face behind the mask of Horus, the qualities
that are needed to manifest if the life stresses are to be dealt with in
clear ways.
In Buddhism the quality dimension of being
is symbolized by the open or clear sky. Clouds can obscure it, but it is
always there. Sometimes we glimpse it, and forget it again. Sometimes,
like people who live in a city and had never seen the night sky, we have
no sense of it, but it works invisible over us. Sometimes this clear sky
becomes a resource we can contact daily: at such time we feel "enlighted",
but it is not a permanent state, but a reminder of the unclouded nature
of our basic being. From this unclouded nature come out basic qualities;
the capacity for love, for insight, for courage in the face of demons,
for faith in spite of the tortures of war, for trust in the force of life.
The quality dimension of being, as understood
in biosynthesis, is transsomatic but embodied, transpersonal but personally
incarnated, indestructible, yet capable of being forgotten, overlaid and
clouded. We can forget our qualities, but they do not forget us. The tree
is constantly gaining the benefit of the sun’s rays from the clear sky,
even when no sun in visible. From the depths of schizophrenia comes the
image of the black sun, and the healing of schizophrenia involves transforming
this image of the black sun, into the sense of human warmth unfreezing
the qualities of a person out of their state of hibernation.
Conclusion
I have tried to give an outline of fundamental
dimensions of biosynthesis, using the tree metaphor. It is my vision of
the work we are involved with. I have not spoken of methods, techniques,
therapeutic principles, but pre therapeutic and transtherapeutic. They
underlie the work in hundreds of fields of application.