Loss of Forgetfulness

Hi All,

Sometimes your greatest fears come true, and for me, it is how intensely meaningful it is to return to this work. You can escape your responsibilities, but you can't escape your work. After our class last night, I stepped outside and took a walk to grab ice cream. The sky was the color of sherbet, cotton candy pink and orange, and it rendered all of the buildings the appearance of being on a film set. It felt like vindication, as it always does, that I was not only back home, but back home -- in the work.

Before the class, I'd been reading about Stanislavski, the grandfather of the method, and how he was heavily influenced by the NeoPlatonic school of thought. These groups themselves were influenced by Pythagoras and various groups who practiced mysticism and ritual mysteries. Two main sort of practices they'd been concerned with were what was called "metempsychosis" and the other, "anamnesis". The former, was called the transmigration of the souls. It was not only the idea, but the active practice of awareness around multiple lives and reincarnation, and that we have residual and often unresolved experiences, stored as imagery, that are inherited to us in subsequent lives. The practice aimed to as Jon described, relax the physiological experience of the mind and body, so that the blockages (often so subtly stored in the fascia and hidden terrains of the body) could break apart, and those memories could arrive to the surface. Our work, it seems, as I've read through others' posts on here, is to really give those images their due, to allow them to come into camera-like focus and "be seen", so as to be released. Those releases become catalysts to body insight that not only inform us of the motivations of the unconscious, but actually anchor us into relationship with it.

A few years ago, I came upon the term "anamnesis" for the first time, and it completely changed my life. It relates to our word "amnesia" which describes a process of forgetting. But the prefix "an" describes the absence of what it precedes. So the term describes "a loss of forgetfulness". I think it relates specifically to the work that we are doing with Memory Streaming. We talk a lot about not really forcing ourselves to remember or to form memories - but instead to allow them to sort of fill in the conscious space, from the deep and dense unconscious that lays the psychophysical basis of our bodies. In other words, we're not really experiencing "memory" -- those things happened. We're experiencing a loss of forgetting them. I think that in order to come into the present, and really attend to all of that information, we have automated processes that turn off whatever constitutes the old experience (that we then term memories), and over time, these experiences cake upon the other, and form strong but inert structural bases of our bodies. But when we're doing streaming, we're basically "resurrecting" those dead strands of our interior body. A loss of forgetfulness is basically taking the finger of the conscious mind and strumming along the fascia until the whole body begins to work as a sensory faculty. When we're in the liminal state, where our eyes are closed, we are practicing that sensory phenomena throughout the whole of our body.

Last night during our class, I couldn't help but feel the experience of my body as if it were a camera, and what we were practicing was strengthening our apertures. Jon said it takes a lot of focus and struggle to be constantly conscious -- we drift in and out, we start to yawn. In our Audition class, I remembered how this would translate as a myriad of unconscious ticks that would show up on camera -- and we were completely not in control of those idiosyncratic events, and had to work to get them more in order. The idea, I think, was that it was less about control, as it was more about reducing the "leakages" of the conscious mind into the unconscious. If you could secure the exchange between these two states, then they would be more likely to work in partnership, where the unconscious processes could inform the conscious and vice versa. The image of the apertures came through strong last night, as in order for me to really understand the photograph of my childhood bedroom, I had to give enough time for the light to enter the lens, before I snapped the photo -- otherwise, any work I'd do into that "memory" would become blurry or there wouldn't be enough information for it to be valuable to the work. Just like a photographer's process, you have to allow for the composition, the general terrain of the objects, the "face" of the landscape of the photo to emerge, before you could take the photo. It's kind of like we're subconsciously saying "cheese" and the memory summons into blurry view. Then, once there, once the main markers or articulations are established, the rest of the details can be "felt" or sensed into view.

I feel that the "visual" aspect of this practice is so important, because light demands so much of our attention. But there ARE other senses. In that way, light likes a lot of attention, and you kind of have to give it that attention, you have to "hear it out", before moving into the other senses. Jon said, when we're doing the dream work, to attend to the most "powerful" or impactful part of the dream. The work we're doing with memory streaming seems to acknowledge that we have loads of memories or forgotten parts and splintered parts of ourselves that "feel" important, but that if we give enough witness and attention to where the light wants to cluster the most in our subconscious, the most pivotal felt or emotional motivations will reveal themselves, as did with the first actor that went last night (forgive me I've forgotten your name, and I'm bad at names at the beginning!) We saw how the harvest is really just the act of the parents, who, after a long work day, and tucking their children into bed, take a moment to gaze lovingly at a photograph of their family. The harvest is how all of that work becomes a vivid re-membering, the same way that Jon described that dreams really only happen a few minutes before we wake, and then the struggle of coming into waking consciousness activates all of those images as if into a movie. It seems like everyday experiencing in the conscious is actually constantly shattering us, breaking the body into splinters -- and this is why this work is so powerful, because it is actively working towards integration of the events that we couldn't consciously "remember" as they were happening, we couldn't feel them in their emotional or felt fullness, because the present moment is constantly demanding our attention to new information, new events and often new trauma.

I did the dream practice before bed last night, and I don't know if it was the "Girl Scouts Gone Wild" ice cream I ate or the reentry into streaming with you folks, but I had at least 6 dreams last night, and I was actually able to write some of them down. I look forward to this work, because honestly, I haven't felt experiences and work or practice that is as embodied as this anywhere else and I've known and seen a lot. I work as a medical practitioner, and how the general public tends to view not only the body, but being a person who is existing in the world tends to be extremely two-dimensional, and I'd suggest almost unreal. In other words, most people don't actually experience their lives as real and happening -- and I think this is because we are so used to attending to the trauma of the present moment without practice of its meaning, its feeling especially, and its integration -- that we are kind of semi-people. I think dreams work part in "calling back" those disparate parts, but what is so powerful about memory streaming, and sense streaming is that it turns this into the most basic work you can do to ground into the "imaging" of reality.

This morning, before writing this post, I went back into some of the exercise we were working on before the end of class, with our bedrooms from childhood. I noticed that the time of day, my age, and even the layout of my room were different. I won't get too much into it, and I also stopped at some point because I wanted to save some of that work for our next class, but ultimately I realized that per usual, while we worked in class, I had a tendency to jump too quickly into the image, and because of that, I actually had "chosen" an image that was relatively "safe" rather than allowing the image to reveal itself. In what I saw during class, the room was mostly dark, and I couldn't quite make out the edges of the majority of items in the room. My eyes kept drifting out of the window, I wanted to go play hide and go seek outside with my neighborhood friends, but this was testament to me that I was safe in escaping the streaming practice, safe by escaping the image. So this morning, I did the exercise again, and it was mid afternoon, and I could feel the presence of the objects in the room a lot more considerably, and it wasn't until long that objects sort of just appeared from my memory, I experienced that loss of forgetfulness, and I couldn't help but hold one of them in my arms. As that happened, I remembered vividly the exact angles and pressure that I'd held that object -- and that seemed to be the anchor point. It completely anchored me into the room, and suddenly I was not where I "thought" that I was, observing the image of the room, but instead realized I was laying in my bed. I allowed that event to inform me of all of the sensations from thereon. What was most profound to me, was that this happened in the course of a few minutes. It actually took a minimal amount of effort to get there. But the key, as everyone keeps saying, is to take your time, and give it the space and the light that the image is owed. In some way, the reason it is residual and splintered in us is because we didn't have enough time when it first happened to really feel, take in and integrate those events. What feels exciting is that this feels like an actually accomplishable skill. It feels like it is something whose benefits completely outweigh the cost. With practiced focus and witness, and following a developing process, these regions of of subconscious can be readily accessible and utilized to anchor ourselves more in conscious living, and to me, this seems worth it, because it strengthens the body as a sense organ, and one that not only is less likely to be bullied by the sensory and splintering environment, but more likely to make you an active and feeling participant in the living environment. In other words, the environment creates you as much as you create it, and working together, whatever work you are doing and whatever meaning you're trying to accrue as a person becomes that much more embodied and realized.

I look forward to working with you folks on Thursday.

Josh

Ahhhh, I feel understood. A masterpiece in the dissemination of Streaming. It would be so wonderful if everyone absorbed this post. Thank you, dear friend for your contribution.

WOW thank you for sharing your knowledge and take on all this. Really appreciate your thoroughness
my favorite Josh quote - A loss of forgetfulness is basically taking the finger of the conscious mind and strumming along the fascia until the whole body begins to work as a sensory faculty

Jon suggested that our 3 pm streaming class read this post. So glad I did. The idea our body is a camera and this work is strengthening our apertures resonates. There was so much nuggetry in this post. THANK YOU!!