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I recognize that it may be helpful to bring the TetraSeed into more familiar terms by looking at each of its features.

However, I will start by making an unfamiliar term, familiar: “the archesoma”. “Soma” refers to any living creature with a sense of its condition and a sense of its environment. The term, archesoma, refers to the underpinnings of all living creatures’ sense of existence. It’s based on four universal functions:

We start with Memory, as I believe it to be the most accessible to you, friendly reader.

MEMORY

IMAGINATION

ATTENTION

INTENTION

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Forty-two years ago, an educator by the name of Thomas Hanna embarked on a course of exploration that led to a major advance in the treatment of people with chronic, non-malignant pain from injuries and aging. This article will give you an inside look at one of the most potent developments in the last one hundred thirty years, or so, of research and development into the origins and elimination of pain in human beings. This development came from a tradition of movement education and sensory development that has come to be known as, “somatic education”.


The key distinction of this tradition is that its methods empower participants to take control of their own physiology, and in so doing, of their physical well-being as they age.


BACKGROUND
In the late 1960s, during the heyday of the human potential movement, Thomas Hanna held the position of chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

In those days, the complexion of the humanities in academic life was different from what it is, today. Unlike today’s climate, which is bent upon the deconstruction of the primacy of any kind of knowledge, whatsoever, in those days, Dr. Hanna’s philosophical interest was about more than mental propositions and positions; he had an earnest desire to understand the human condition in such a way that it would lead to both human freedom and personal competence — not just freedom from all constraints, but improvement in capabilities, the awakening of practical human functions.


That desire drew him more than once into conflicts that embroiled students and the university administration during a time when young people were experimenting with both ancient and new methods of mind-expansion (remember, this was the 60s), and their professors were often caught in the middle. Dr. Hanna tended to advocate for the students.


Ultimately, his interests led him to California, where he served as the first director of the Saybrook Institute (now known as the Humanistic Psychology Institute — HPI). It was during that time that he heard of and became acquainted with a man whose own interests had led him to develop methods of improving human functioning and sensory awareness through movement education. His name was Moshe Feldenkrais, a Russian genius whose methods of education have since come to be known as Feldenkrais Somatic Integration.


Feldenkrais was a man of many abilities and interests — an electrical engineer, a research scientist in high-energy physics, and a black-belt judoka who had founded the first school of Judo in Europe (France). His methods of improving the functioning of the brain and muscular system had grown out of his studies of and training in the methods of F. Matthias Alexander (The Alexander Technique), the methods of Gerda Alexander (Eutony) and judo.


Hanna found Feldenkrais’ methods and views fascinating and, in addition to including a section on Feldenkrais in Hanna’s book, Explorers of Humankind (1979), he invited Feldenkrais to conduct a training in America, a training course that Hanna organized and directed and in which he participated as a student.


That training began Hanna’s sixteen-year odyssey of exploration as a practitioner of the methods of Functional Integration, as Feldenkrais’ method was then known. His experiences during those years of private practice and his ongoing, absorbing interest in developments in related fields (as founding editor of Somatics: the Magazine Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences), led to the advances in the field of somatic education that led to Hanna Somatic Education, a form of clinical somatic education used to end pain and improve mobility.


Hanna Somatic Education developed from the convergence of ideas and discoveries of many individuals. Its methods rest upon a simple principle brought forward by Feldenkrais, and before him, by F.M. Alexander: that improvements of human functioning rest ultimately upon human attention and intentional application of effective methods of change to oneself, i.e., upon education. Hanna Somatic Education freely applies the principles and methods brought forth by Hanna’s predecessors; however, to those methods, Hanna added something more, something that was his unique contribution to the field and that created a major improvement in the speed and degree of improvement possible with somatic education: a technique now called, “assisted pandiculation” — a strange term with a simple meaning.


THE PANDICULAR RESPONSE
The term, pandiculation, comes from the study of animal behavior — ethology. One paper in particular, on pandicular behavior of sheep fetuses in-utero, published by researcher A.F. Frazier, piqued Hanna’s interest and led to his developing a new clinical technique.


The term, pandiculation, refers to something that you have undoubtedly seen cats and dogs do upon arising from rest. It’s something you often do, yourself, before getting out of bed in the morning or upon standing up from a prolonged period of sitting. It’s also something referred to by an expectant mother as her baby “kicking” inside her womb. It’s a sensuous movement of refreshment and preparation for activity.

People commonly call it, “stretching” — but it isn’t stretching, and it especially isn’t stretching in the sense applied by physical therapists and athletic trainers. It’s a strong, pleasurable contraction of muscles in particular patterns, followed by a smooth (not sudden) release and then by movement into activity.


Animals and children pandiculate instinctually to refresh kinesthetic awareness and motor control. It’s what they spontanously feel like doing upon arising from rest. The action, which originates in the motor and motor-association areas of the brain, sends a strong cascade of sensory impulses to the sensory and sensory-association areas of the brain from the sense receptors of movement, a cascade of sensation sufficient to refresh the sensory-motor feedback loop by which we regulate muscular tension and movement. Motor control and sensory awareness improve in seconds of pandiculation.


The Pandicular Response, as a feature of neuroplasticity, depends upon an intact nervous system; lesions of the nervous system impair the application of the pandicular response to the affected region.


The presence of contractures that commonly form during injury and that persist long after healing of injuries as distortions of motor control is a sign that sensory-motor integrity has been blown out/interrupted. Voluntary control of movement has been distorted and diminished, and control has passed to the involuntary, subcortical brain level (e.g., cerebellum). Patterns of movement practiced repeatedly, as in athletics or as part of ones vocation, likewise pass to subcortical control, and are triggered by momentary intentions to move in familiar ways and are executed “on-automatic”, fine-tuned by in-the-moment intentions. Typographical errors are are an example of how automatic execution has overridden voluntary control, as most typographical errors involve the correct spelling of the incorrect word!

It turns out that pandiculation is sufficient not merely to refresh the sensory-motor feedback loop, but to reforge sensory-motor integrity when it has been interrupted/blown out by the pain of injury and reflexive movements have taken over. “Reforge” implies an enduring improvement.


Dr. Hanna devised a way to apply the pandicular response deliberately; more than that, he devised a way to magnify the effects of the pandicular response in a hands-on technique called, “assisted pandiculation”; and he devised protocols that apply assisted pandiculation in a systematic way to address three major reflexes of stress that commonly become habituated in human beings: Landau Reaction, Trauma Reflex, and Startle Reflex.

Habituated Landau reaction commonly appears as back trouble, so-called degenerative disc disease, insomnia and tension headaches.

Habituated Trauma reflex commonly shows up as lasting changes to movement and posture following injury or surgery, as TMJ dysfunction, and as the headaches that follow whiplash injuries.

Habituated Startle reflex commonly shows up as the chest-down, head forward posture and movement of the elderly and those who have been through emotionally traumatic times, and as breathing difficulties.

You can find more detailed discussion of these three reflexes of stress in Dr. Hanna’s book, Somatics: ReAwakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility and Health, and in his definitive article, Clinical Somatic Education: A New Discipline in the Field of Health Care.

That “therapeutic/athletic” stretching is an inadequate approach to correcting alterations of muscular control and restrictions to movement can be seen in the long periods needed in therapy and athletic training needed to produce even modest improvements. Its error is in treating contractures as if they are bio-mechanical conditions, alone, that can be treated by biomechanical means, alone.

Assisted pandiculation, on the other hand, addresses such altered functional patterns in a way that is true to their nature as changes of muscle/movement memory (rather than as a bio-mechanical matter), and so it quickly produces the desired results and those results are durable and easily withstand both activities of daily living and vigorous activity.

Hanna Somatic Education fully acknowledges the bio-mechanical aspect of the human body and uses that view in applying its methods; however, it goes beyond the view of the body as a “marvelous machine”. It recognizes that the “memory” of “muscle memory” resides in the brain, not in the muscles; it recognizes neuroplasticity (memory formation and memory dissolution) as the underlying process of motor development and of the alterations of movement that follow injury; it recognizes that coordination trumps strength, that large muscular recruitment patterns trump the action of any single muscle, that inherent movement patterns trump arbitrary movement patterns; and that the feelings and action of the individual trump anything that can be done to him or her. Thus, Hanna Somatic Education integrates the understandings of kinesiology, neuroplasticity, and learning theory to get results faster, more easily, and more comfortably than by standard therapeutic or training methods, and it supports the processes of therapy and of athletic training.

Its effectiveness is so decisive that it usually brings lasting relief from excessive muscular tonus in any area of the body in less than two minutes. (The length of clinical somatic education sessions comes from the amount of territory that must be covered, when addressing altered patterns of control).

The “Hungry Hunter’s” version of the TetraSeed Set-Up Procedure. The order is specific. We put our attention on each face of the TetraSeed, in order (as instructed, step by step, below).

Then, acquainted with each face, we “view” an “item of interest” (what you’re ‘working on’ or ‘playing with’ IN each face), in the same order.

E.G.: “knowing” being the “item of interest”

“HEADS UP” PROCEDURE
FACES


intending knowing
imagining knowing
remembering knowing
attending to knowing

“THE HUNGRY HUNTER” PROCEDURE
FOCAL POINTS
knowing existence
knowing persistence
knowing direction
knowing location

EXACTLY AS SHOWN, REPEATEDLY
Replace “knowing” with some item of interest for exploration, by you.

This is a complete unit of instruction.

Next Unit:
RECIPROCITY SET-UP
This structure corresponds, in the DNA double-helix structure shown below, to the cross-linkages between the DNA strands, seen being unzipped, at the top. The cross-linkages are made of four nucleic acids in patterns of order and sequences of pairs, those patterns constituting “genes”, which are memories of functional patterns that may be turned on or turned of in response to environmental conditions. This, “turning on” and “turning off” is what is meant by the term, “genetic expression”.

Whereas the structure of DNA is based on nucleic acid pairs arranged in a twisted ladder sequence, which is then folded upon itself at structural flex points, the structure of the TetraSeed is based upon sets of three pairs in a tetrahedral (four-point) shape, composed of the following elementals (corresponding to nucleic acid”)

The “backbone” of DNA, referred to, above, as the “sugar-phosphate ‘backbone’, has as its TetraSeed correspondences,

[ EXISTENCE | PERSISTENCE | DIRECTION | LOCATION |

When you contemplate those four, one after the other, the combination does feel like a backbone, doesn’t it?

All eight of the elementals are abstractions, features common to all experience. They are “arrangers of tendency”, “strange attractors”; “fields of influence”, “shapers of fate”, “elemental abstractions”. Every experience experienced by some “experiencer” involves all eight of those elementals, four to be the “backbone” of the experience (to give it “reality”) and four to subjectively experience the experience. You may guess which group, above, is which.

The elemental abstractions integrate into a structure that has no quality of its own, and only virtual reality, but which, like cauliflower, takes on or becomes the flavorings of whatever experience is being experienced. Everything and everyone is pairs of TetraSeeds.

Now, let’s go experiential.

Consider:
Put attention on, “attending”. What do you get?
Put intention into, “intending”. What do you get?
Put imagining into, “imagining”, What do you get?
Put remembering into, “remembering”. What do you get?

You get a different feeling with each one, right?

Something odd happens when you turn them all on, combine and balance them. They all disappear, either by being difficult to get to firm up, or by having only virtual existence — terms whose meaning will become obvious with practice.

The RECIPROCITY SET-UP procedure is a first step to turning them on and combining them.

Here’s the RECIPROCITY SET-UP pattern.

intending knowing
intending knowing existence
knowing existence
existence knowing intending

remembering knowing
remembering knowing persistence
knowing persistence
persistence remembering knowing

imagining knowing
imagining knowing direction
knowing direction
knowing direction imagining

attending to knowing
attending to knowing location
knowing location
knowing location attending to

three times

That’s a complete unit of instruction.

Next Unit:
RHYTHMS
This next pattern corresponds to all the possible flex-points of the TetraSeed spine.

knowing existence
knowing existence
knowing knowing existence
knowing existence existence

existence knowing
existence knowing knowing
existence knowing persistence

knowing persistence
knowing persistence
knowing knowing persistence
knowing persistence persistence

persistence knowing
persistence knowing knowing
knowing persistence persistence

persistence knowing direction
knowing direction
knowing knowing direction
knowing direction direction

knowing direction
knowing knowing direction
knowing direction direction
knowing direction existence

knowing existence
knowing knowing existence
knowing existence existence
existence knowing location

knowing location
knowing knowing location
knowing location location
location knowing existence

knowing existence
knowing knowing existence
knowing existence existence

existence knowing
existence knowing persistence
knowing persistence
knowing persistence persistence
persistence knowing persistence
persistence knowing direction

knowing direction
knowing knowing direction
knowing direction direction
knowing direction persistence

copyright 2017 Lawrence Gold

The four focal points of the TetraSeed, in its variations, are observable, replicatable, verifiable, testifiable focal points that have observable, replicatable, verifiable, testifiable psychoactive properties.

The psychoactive properties of the TetraSeed appear as an awakening of the different internal connections of oneself so they may be recognized and corrected, as native intelligence indicates on a focus-by-focus basis.

The word, “focus”, pertains to each of the step-elements that constitute the TetraSeed Transformation Procedures, e.g., “Intending | Intending Existence”.

Back to the psychoactive properties: the word, Transformational.

What is being transformed, and how so?

What’s being transformed is the activation-balance between the different focal points of the TetraSeed.

We tend, by our enculturation, to work at a more or less illumined or oblivious degree of development — mostly oblivious. Sometimes, the words,

by themselves, individually, and in relation to each other, seem somehow vague and obscure, not readily recognizable. This starting condition is a good one for demonstrating the potential for a person’s awakening of faculties by contemplating and applying the TetraSeed. Before that process of awakening, all manner of semi-conscious automatic conditioning simply runs the show, with the “monitoring self” wringing its hands over its own craziness.

The transformation consists of

1. awakening and progressively steadying into focus these four focal/archetypes,
   and then 
2. combining the focal/archetypes in every combination of twos and threes
   to awaken and enhance intelligence.

   It feels like an awakening.
    

3. What happens is that submerged patternings of mind emerge in dreamlike perceptual experiences that one may recognize as ones own habitual dreamset of what life is remembered to be — and having recognized, adjust by mere feeling-intention. Many shifts occur.

What happens is a dissolving of semi-conscious and unconscious, automatic habits of mind by recognizing all things as made of the same “ground substance” — the congealing of attention on persistent objects with a location and a direction of change.

What happens is a shifting of tensions by a series of releases, a shifting that occurs merely by contemplating things in terms of The TetraSeed — attending to an object, remembering an object, intending the existence of an object, imagining an object — as taught in the various TetraSeed transformation procedures found under the search-term

In the illustration, “I-AM-I” symbolizes the emergence of all forms of experience from a uniform ground of being-consciousness.

At this point, further discussion depends on your having had experience working with the TetraSeed and TetraSeed Transformation Procedures. To try to understand without that experiential background risks brain-lock.

Having had such experience and found that the TetraSeed is indeed psychoactive, you (and I) may wonder:

External/Right Side Quadrants of the AQAL Matrix

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copyright 2017 Lawrence Gold

Competence may be defined as “consistently getting the intended result”.

Indication of Incompetence: the saying, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions”.

Frankly, this statement is poorly conceived, poorly expressed, poorly understood.

First of all, “paved“?? Pavement is an invention for smoothing the way.

So, “Good intentions smooth the way to Hell”??

Right away, that is topsy-turvy (“everything reversed”) thinking; there’s something “off” about it. There must be an explanation that seems to make sense of it. Let’s try.

One might observe that, very often, despite good intentions, a hellish result ensues or follows. Little fires may spring up that seem to require your attention, time and energy.

A certain kind of thinking would then make the so-called, “a-priori error” — the notion that because one thing preceded another, it caused the other. (“Post-hoc, ergo, propter hoc.” — for all you lawyers) This is very primitive thinking probably characteristic of a three-year-old stage of mental development.

The error may be expressed, “My good intentions caused the Hellish Outcomes.”

It goes along with, “I caused that,” as in, “Wherever I walk, outside, the moon in the sky follows me.” It is a kind of egocentric thinking that acts as if everything that happens has to do with oneself.” — which, by the way, is a good way of defining the word, “narcissistic”. “I caused that and I’m involved with it.” It’s the hypnotic, mass trance that characterizes the bulk of human cultures.

A more mature stage of development recognizes that causality emanates from many places and from anyplace at a given time. One may receive the influences of life as well as influence life. This is called, “being sentient”, all you beings. This recognition allows for a relative degree of rest or ease in the midst of circumstances, and for a decrease of vigilance, in general. Hellish outcomes may seem to come Out of the Blue, but sometimes, not.

So, as a generality, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions” may seem to be true, some of the time, but it says nothing about the causal relation of the good intentions to the Hellish Experience.

Back to, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.”

Where’s the next weak point?

It’s the inherent, “I can’t help it,” of the saying. “No matter what we do, things turn out badly.” Has to be that. After all, good intentions are all about “helping it”, and if they end up under our feet, our “hero” has failed. (Heros are all about “shared good intentions”, good intentions shared between and among us. A hero is a champion of our good intentions. In this anti-hero culture, villains are called, or positioned as, heros. This is an Orwellian perversity.) For all of these reasons, “I can’t help it,” is a common pose. It’s the pose of “excused resignation”, excused mediocrity. “I can’t help it,” sets the stage for incompetence.

So, “mediocrity and incompetence, I can’t help it,” are the sagacious meaning of the saying, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.” How sagacious?

Here’s another meaning:

Creative movement in any direction creates a contrast with our memory of the state of things. Contrast intensifies experience. You go for the right and you perceive everything that’s in the way of things going right; you perceive everything that’s wrong. (Let’s not get captived by the wimpy argument that, “there is no real right or wrong; everything’s relative”. Not altogether true.) Everything that’s organized for an outcome different from the one we intend (including our own automatic reactions and emotional conditioning) we experience as unwelcome, as friction, as opposition, as frustration. There’s both an external and an internal burn.

The contrast-burn may be a hellish experience.

So, the saying, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions,” is incomplete, in itself, and therefore, misleading. Another line is needed: “When you are going through hell, keep going.” (Winston Churchill) His saying implies emergence out of hell. It completely changes the thrust of the saying.

The thrust of this saying, when understood this way, points to increasingly higher degrees of competence paid for by an ordeal of transformation (the contrast-burn). I can help it if I persist, learn, remember, attend to it, and stay purposefully intent — in short, evolve awake) — that’s one part — and, with that, also recognize that I am working against forces that may make things rather unpleasant, especially if I fail to groom myself regularly of those befouling effects.

Thus, the deck is stacked against the evolution of humanity by our own aversion to the burn of transformation. The burn of transformation is the price paid for competence and superior competence. Thus, the expressions, “taking pains,” and “paying the price” or “paying ones dues”. The only ones willing to experience that are those with a compelling creative drive; the rest cower — or oppose.

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A Vignette in the Spirit of Thomas Hanna
for those who recognize his voice in writing
and a point of interest to those who don’t …

The Wave 1 training was held in a large, carpeted lounge room on the
campus of Dominican College, in San Rafael, California. The walls of
the room were lined on three sides with lounge chairs. A low, padded
“Feldenkrais” table stood at the center, a low, four-legged stool, next
to it. The stool had a circular cushion on it that always made the sound of escaping gas as one sat down on it. That was Dr. Hanna’s stool.

“The open-close valve of experience exists at the eros end of things.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuBe93FMiJc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS4aiA17YsM

You might view the entire film.
Full film: ($2.99)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDzr4BaNU-A

more:

Humanoid Self-Gratification Laid Naked: The Morlocks and the Eloi

http://lawrencegoldsomatics.blogspot.com/2017/11/humanoid-self-gratification-laid-naked.html

The TetraSeed is an intelligence-virus, a “meme” that gives rise to all forms of experience and the consciousness of them. Its two sets of four parts (inner and outer aspects of the same thing) are:

The top row facets are subjective faculties (1st person).
The bottom row points are objective aspects (3d person).

(Second person results from combining 1st and 3d person perspectives:

• 3d person = the sound of words or body-language
• 1st person = the internal meanings of words or body-language 

The combination and coordination of inner and outer gives rise to the totality of all possible experiences, both subjective and objective.

The TetraSeed Transformation procedures have psychoactive properties that allow self-resequencing of our programming by using the four facets of the TetraSeed in particular ways. The “programming” in question is all of the belief systems and conceptual structures by which we recognize the world — inherited from family, social scene, education, and the mass media, as well as by somatic contagion (what makes yawning contagious).

Psychoactive means just what it seems to mean.

As a virus (or meme), the effects of working with the TetraSeed are communicable from person to person at both verbal and non-verbal levels.

The verbal form of communicability is teaching TetraSeed Transformation procedures in which one is proficient, to others.

The non-verbal form of communicability is a kind of contagion: the awakening of higher intelligence merely from being in the company of — or better, interacting with — someone who has been activating his or her own intelligence by means of the TetraSeed Transformation Procedures.

Without doing the work, oneself, I think the non-verbally-caused boost of intelligence diminishes with time, though never completely; on the other hand, there may be non-local effects of working with the TetraSeed by means of The TetraSeed Transformation procedures.

Time will tell.

The Gold Key Release
CLICK FOR INSTRUCTION

CONTACT:

copyright 2017 Lawrence Gold