Unit Four – Space Embodiment (Giant Body)

Photo courtesy of: ‘Giant Body’, by Artie Navarre – Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/en/panoramic-mountain-landscape-rock-3296573/

Here are my notes on Unit Four – Space Embodiment. I never really worked with the Giant Body group in earnest until recently. I found enormously helpful the essays by Ron Purser on Questioning Space Through Experiential Practice, and Jack’s, Space Projecting Space, both of which are essays found in Jack Petranker’s book, A New Way of Being.

Unit Four – Space and Embodiment

The instruction to ‘entertain‘ the image of a giant body suggests from the dictionary that we consider it; to turn it over in the mind looking at it from various points of view. Ordinarily, this viewing requires space in order to move the various points in order to assume a viewing position. The word ‘giant‘ like the words large or big are spatial adjectives. When you consider it, ‘body‘ is a kind of summary term that is NOT very specific or precise. Even gender is not specified in the instructions. ‘Body’ summarizes in my mind what I have accumulated in memory about my own and other’s bodies, as well as memories of perhaps millions of impressions of bodies and feelings… bodies of water, bodies of land, animate and inanimate bodies…etc. So the exercise and its name seem open and spatial, somewhat non-specific right from the start.

But did I take into account the image of a giant body, and the space it implies just to entertain it, (To consider and contemplate)? Not at first. I looked for the thing… which is what I’m used to doing. I strained to create a thing in my mind as if it were concrete. It didn’t work very well. Not realizing I was inadvertently adding a little space, but to a still very fixed perspective, I then tried comparing images. For example, to get the giant toe, I visualized ‘from memory’ a super-sized earth-moving, dumptruck with 15 foot high tires. If the dump truck was several stories high, then I put the Giant’s toe next to it. This seemed to establish scale, something I was having trouble with. Next, I pictured a 60 story building from memory with the dumptruck next to it, and that gave me the scale and form, or template for a giant body to work with. Using comparisons, ratios and relationships, which were less fixed, seemed to allow more flexibility with the giant body visualization. So I was trying to create something, a giant body that I’d never seen by using images I had seen. The world-making of my giant form was beginning to contextualize. This was really an eye opener; the less concrete and thing focused my visualization was, the more I could see of the contextualization process. And what a process it was… like pulling the curtain back and getting a glimpse of the goings-on back stage. Lightning fast flickerings of layers of processing…

In this Unit I chose to work with, Supplemental TSK Ex 34, The Embodiment of Knowledge, in which the requirement is to visualize energy circulating through the body by ‘feeling’ it more than ‘watching’ it. This exercise augmented and supported my work on the Giant body visualization. The exercise asks us to “add an ecstatic quality” to our translucent outlines. And when I projected the feeling of my own body energy into the somewhat nebulous contextualized giant body, its outlines and images, there was a unification of subject with the visualization. I was struck by the feeling of this, the breadth and sweep of it.

…To restate just a little bit, as I started from a definite thing perspective, a feeling of me-here within a world of continuous changing forms as my senses presented them to me – that was my prevailing contextual awareness. At the time, it seemed that in order to do the giant body visualization, the me-here, a controlling self, had to project the image out there, at a presumed distance, as if to float it like a kite. Projecting the giant image was like trying to spin a context out from me-here to the object-image and back to me-here for evaluation and modification, and so on… a back and forth between subject and object, but less solid, more echo-like. I got a clear view of what was happening through these trial and error steps in the process of understanding. The self was very evident in doing the visualization at first, and was too controlling and tight. It was only after this tight self-setting relaxed enough to allow more space, which allowed for the space for the appearance of relationships, ratios, and feelings between the images to be experienced, thus more understanding was allowed with less doing on the part of a self.

Further work with the exercise, more in line with the original instruction to “entertain” the image, the spatial aspect was very much evident. Images were never solid, never fully defined or crisp; they were always translucent, and fleeting almost like ghostly apparitions except, I could feel some of them. My whole approach became less controlled by fixed positions, but ranged through mental space, like flying over or merging with images that floated like gossamer webs, arising and disappearing in space, like puffs and whirls of smoke that were impressions of summaries of summaries in a knowing awareness. There were short flashes of a totality of feeling/knowing of body energy and space. There were continuous referrings between giant body objects and me, a feeling/sensing being, and they were pre-verbal. Compared to putting together thought meanings, that process is glacial… the nano-second flickering referrals were speed of light fast. And it finally became clear, the giant was not an object separate from me, I had joined it; giant body and the one visualizing were one.

So what was the insight that I came away with from this experience? What did I see not just conceptually, but in a very direct, experiential and most memorable way? I saw/felt it happening, that within aware space ‘I’ and ‘the world’ arise and take form. It is a profound and jolting realization. I may ultimately claim knowledge as the knower, but actually the ‘capacity for knowing’ is available for intimate contact, and it’s prior to the arisings of naming and stories… the stuff from which humans construct identities and worlds.

In the comments below… reference is made to a practice in which I used this same model to merge with a tree and other objects…