ABSTRACT Advanced Rolfing Instructor Jan Sultan outlines his definition of gravity, informed by physicist Dr. John Archibald Wheeler and founder of Rolfing Structural Integration Dr. Ida P. Rolf. According to Sultan, Rolf would talk about the ‘Line’ as a logo of relationship as a teaching tool for practitioners to think about mass, density, and gravity. Rolf taught that humans have a tropistic urge, an innate sense to go away from the planet. Yet Sultan urges Rolfers to think beyond Newtonian terms to Wheeler’s spacetime definition of gravity, where spacetime grips mass and mass grips spacetime. This leads Sultan to inquire if the mind has mass.
Spacetime
This is the gravity problem. As Rolfers®, we are experts in helping people organize their bodies to move in concert with gravitational forces, but how do we actually define gravity? We were taught that gravity is a universal force of attraction acting between all matter. In physics, we learn that gravity on Earth’s surface is weak compared to nuclear forces that hold atoms together (Nordtvedt et al. 2023). Gravity is considered a weak force because it cannot change the phase of matter; it cannot change a solid to liquid, for example, and it cannot change the internal nature of the matter, like shifting carbonite into a diamond. In this way, gravity is weak. And yet, gravity is strong to the extent that it binds matter into forms that become discrete mass units.
John Archibald Wheeler [PhD, John Hopkins University, (1911-2008)] was an American physicist who was involved in the theoretical development of the atomic bomb. Later in his life, he wrote several books about gravity and Einsteins’ theories (Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler 1973; Taylor and Wheeler 1992; Wheeler 1990). Wheeler clarified some things about gravity that is vital to our work. Gravity is not a field. Gravity only occurs where mass is present. By extension, if there is no material body, there is no gravity. He went on to clarify that spacetime is one unified element and not two distinct constructs of space and time.
“Spacetime grips mass, Telling it how to move; And mass grips spacetime, Telling it how to curve.”
– John Archibald Wheeler (1990), page 1.
The interaction between mass and spacetime is a two-directional action, as mass and spacetime dance together. And it produces curves. It’s not the old Newtonian apple falling from the tree along a vertical line to the ground, following the gravitational field. Wheeler’s abstraction takes us way past ‘the Line’ but, by extension, tells us that each of our bodies has a personal gravity that occurs where we are. That is what holds us together, we are mass moving with spacetime as we go about our business.
Ida Rolf [PhD, (1896-1979)] said that the Line was, “A logo of relationship between the Earth and the human body,” between Earth's mass and an individual’s body mass. As such, the Line is not a thing, it’s a symbol. It was a way for her to try to describe spatial organization, and to describe horizontal structures in the body and balance while upright. As we dig down into this idea of Rolf’s Line, what we find is that it’s a Newtonian concept. While some of us make a jump into a mythos about the Line, that kind of thinking doesn’t hold water when applying quantum physics to the equation. And yet, the Line is useful when we understand it as a logo of relationship. It does have meaning, and it is not a thing. It’s an idea that we use to evoke an understanding about gravitational relationships. It’s about how the mass of our bodies behave in motion, and how we express the gravitational dynamics as we dance through spacetime.
Moreover, Rolf also described the relationships of the major segments of the body as “weight blocks” around that Line. This works as an evocative metaphor, but in reality, those segments do not have equal density in the gravity-mass concept. So as a teaching tool, there is merit and we should not conceive of them as having equivalent mass.
Going Down to Go Up
Speaking of education, one of my favorite cues when I’m working with people is to invite them to integrate the sensory information they get when their foot lands on the ground as they transition from seated to standing. I teach that they have to go down to go up. The general direction needed when we are “getting up” is to go down. In other words, you must find your support before you can get your length. This takes us to a key idea in structural integration – the job is as good as the legs.
Rolf said there is something in humans that reaches up, as a tropistic urge, an innate tendency to react to the sense of our mass that leads our growth and movement toward the upward direction, away from the planet. As plants reach for light, humans reach for length and decompression, which is an expression of the tropism built into our system as a response to gravity.
Remember that Rolf was well grounded in Newtonian physics and had the field concept of gravity in mind when she described this phenomenon as a vertical line through the ground and to the far stars. What I have always wondered in response to this idea is, “What happens to this theoretical Line in the body when we accelerate?” You push off with a vigorous stride and start walking briskly. Does the Line not lean forward with you? It can’t stay vertical in the body, or you’d walk right out from under it and leave it back behind you somewhere.
I would put this idea of an accelerated Line to Rolf as a question because I was struggling to understand it, and she never would answer these questions. She didn’t like that kind of poking because her very basic theoretical structure that fit together logically as a good model for teaching. Let’s be real: There were and are lots of unanswered questions that she chose not to elaborate on. But she did anchor into this idea about length and space in the body being an innate tropistic response that humans have to organize spatially in gravity. When asked if one could leave out any part of her theory and still call it Rolfing [Structural Integration], she said, “If you leave out gravity, then you aren’t Rolfing [sic].” To me, this translates into the idea that you must consider spatial organization as a measure of order to still be in her paradigm.
Gravity and Mind
Here’s another idea to contemplate about gravity: Does the mind have mass? Let’s say that the mind is a function of bodily being, it co-locates with the body, and is not material, having no mass. Therefore, the mind is free from spacetime. This accounts for many of the extra-somatic phenomena that practitioners experience. We learn that the mind operates beyond the sensory domain, and by extension, we can work at a distance. The mind is not bound in spacetime and can move outside the laws that govern material bodies.
It seems probable that there are ‘laws’ that govern these extra-somatic events that we don’t yet understand. Take the Tibetan tulku tradition of intentional reincarnation where the souls of the deceased monks can return to be birthed as a local child, returning after their death to take their place in the community again, as their former selves (Thondup 2011). This requires that the living monks offer their prayers and chants to provide a sort of beacon so that the disincarnated soul of the deceased can find their way back, returning to their work as a monk for another lifetime. The implications of this are that the mind is a soul function, differentiated from being a bodily function, and has an identity that is beyond the flesh. I don’t pretend to know the veracity of this process, yet I have had experiences of my own that lead me to conclude there is truth here. You can read about it as I did in Chögyam Trungpa’s autobiography, Born in Tibet (1966) where he describes this process in detail.
Another example is from the accounts of the Australian Aborigianl practice of dreamtime travel (Lawlor 1991). Embedded in their cultural practices is collective dreaming, which allows them to travel to other domains. A group of people meet after retiring for the evening and they will have a prearranged meeting in dreamtime. When they return from the meeting, the tradition is to recount the journeys of each member of the group at an in-person meeting with family and extended tribal relatives. There are traditional art forms that record these historical journeys as maps of dreamtime spaces, so they can return again in future excursions.
Interesting to me is that both examples are of ancient spiritual technologies that are highly evolved examples of systematic out-of-body practices. They show the nature of the mind/spirit/soul as a function of, and yet distinct from, the material body. They carry the human essence to non-material domains.
A third example comes from the Vatican archives; a convicted heretic would be given the chance to confess their heresy in exchange for a speedy death. To remain silent would ensure a slow torture to expunge the evil. These accounts were transcribed and stored in the Vatican. There is a constant theme in which members of the community would gather around a fire and dance themselves into a trance. They would then fall to the ground and arise together ‘in spirit’ to do battle with the ‘forces of evil’, thereby ensuring the health of the community, the success of the crops, and fertility for breeding. After these battles, they would return to their prostrate bodies and awaken, to then retire to sleep with deep fatigue. Accounts of these battles would then form part of the folklore of the village.
I'm sure that there are many other ancient practices of soul journeys that are out-of-body experiences that have been lost to time. Being non-material, there are no artifacts beyond the stories in oral tradition and the artworks produced at the time.
In our times, there are many accounts of several varieties of out of body experiences that are activated by ingesting psychoactive substances. These might include specific mushrooms, cacti, as well as the brewing of magical teas from various plants. In their traditional contexts, there are accounts of adventures in non-material domains, and often there is art generated to record such journeys.
Gravity is Relationship
In closing, I’m not a physicist, but an explorer and I have some fifty years of working with people close up. It has been a study in human nature, as well as a practice of helping people get their bodies working better. Here are some of the essences of my inquiries; there is no field of gravity per se. We are not like a fish swimming through a gravitational field. Each of us has our own gravity-informed relationship with the Earth. We are not getting lined up with gravity, we are actually improving internal relationships with the Earth and the sky. I’ve come to think that the sky part is the non-material part of our being that is beyond our flesh, but also part of it. It may be a soul function where mind and spirit reside. Gravity is personal. When I began to conceive of gravity as my relationship with the planet, I reached down to find the ground and moved differently. When I reach into the sky, I have found the “many mansions” referred to in John 14:2 of the New Testament. These understandings have helped me in my various searches and personal rehabilitations over the years, and given me a basis for my work with the human bodily being that is our nature and location. This is the story we are living.
Jan H. Sultan’s initial encounter with Dr. Rolf was in 1967 as her client. In 1969 he trained under her. In 1975, after assisting several classes, Rolf invited him to become an instructor. After further apprenticeship, she invited him to take on the Advanced Training. Over the next ten years, Sultan taught several Advanced Trainings with Peter Melchior, Emmett Hutchins, Michael Salveson, and other faculty members, collaborating on refinements to the Advanced Training. Sultan currently teaches Basic Training, continuing education, and Advanced training for the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® and to the extended SI community. He feels strongly that his responsibility as an instructor goes beyond simply passing on what he was taught, but also includes the development of the ideas and methodology taught by Rolf.
References
Misner, Charles, W. Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler. 1973. Gravitation. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Nordtvedt, K. L., James E. Faller, and Alan H. Cook. 2023. “Gravity.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Accessed April 14, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/science/gravity-physics.
Taylor, Edwin F., and John Archibald Wheeler. 1992. Spacetime physics, second edition. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman and Company.
Thondup, Tulku. 2011. Incarnation: The history and mysticism of the tulku tradition of Tibet. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Trungpa, Chögyam. 1966. Born in Tibet. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Wheeler, John Archibald. 1990. A journey into gravity and spacetime. New York, NY:W. H. Freeman and Company.
Keywords
gravity; organizing human body in gravity; Dr. John Archibald Wheeler; spacetime; Dr. Ida Rolf; Newtonian; gravitational field; the Line; major segments; gravity dynamics; support; tropistic; mind; mass; tulku. ■
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