When closing our eyes and lying down, different parts of the body dialog with the waves of the playlist which, more than just the overlayered songs and sounds mixed by facilitators, is composed by all the other waves present in the room: people’s laughter and tears, the wind, the touch, musical instruments, insects and the rays of sun or drops of rain. Everything becomes a mirror to the paradigmatic space from which consciousness emerges.
Like a kaleidoscope, reality turns into the perception of multiple aspects of one’s story. Emotions, memories, sensations, visions, everything invisible to the literal eye becomes audible and sensible to the body-mind that experiences the process.
Often, participants have experiences from which all they can remember is either a dark space or the deep sensation of having passed out and lost all recognition of the process. From explosions into movement to visions of other dimensions and passing out, the innerdance journey accesses different aspects of the human body-mind that have been studied for centuries among linguists, psychoanalysts and others from western lines of thought, but also practiced and understood in tribal and ancient knowledge.
From the linearity of the stories written within the timely words that tell and organize our existence into a set of events, we travel to new stages of consciousness bound by different arrangements: within space, all stories are now intermixed into one big causation.
from time to space, from story to energy
Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst of thirty years of active contributions to both scholar and clinical practices in the 20th century, was the first to perceive the structure of the unconscious, which would be that of language. Inspired by Structural Linguistics, he sought to understand the makes of reality and how the human mind is shaped by underlying arbitrary systems.
Structuralism is a philosophical movement that analyses the structures that form nature, society and the human psyche. In Linguistics, which focus on the scientific study of Language, we would be looking at the fine lines behind meaning and its correlation to words, as well as how sentences and texts are formed.
Ferdinand de Saussure, often taken as the father of linguistic structuralism points out two aspects of language that would later on spire lacanian thought:
The notion of a signifier, which is the word, the sound/image attributed to a concept, the signified. The word tree, for example, is then the place holder of what is commonly agreed to be the concept of tree itself. Meaning is then, mostly, if not entirely, conveyed out of negations: we know what things are from what we know they are not - a cat is a cat, because it is not a tree.
The relationship between signifier and signified, word and meaning, is arbitrary. There is nothing but social conventions stating that the word tree is really a tree, the thing which provides shade, shelter and food for humans and other creatures from its surroundings.
When stating that the unconscious would be structured like language, Lacan was seeing the commonality between these two aspects and the human psyche. From here, he then coined the notions of the registers: The Real, The Imaginary, The Symbolic.
The Real is an implication of everything that is our innermost and unspoken truth. All that which is most likely to be masked by language and our social/accepted norms. As humans, we would be constantly trying to project the Real onto this reality, since that is the space where we would have derived from, our state of completeness from which we separated when immersed into language. This is the space of our needs, the unreachable layers of the self.
The Imaginary is linked to the notions of holographic reality and mirror state. Since our early stages, we are constantly projecting an image of ourselves and of the world in an attempt to perform and create an identity that would be the most complete version of us. This register begins when we, as babies, begin to identify our image outside of us – be it through our caretakers or by recognizing our bodies in the mirror – and by seeing completeness and harmony in such image, one that is definitely different from what is inside of us, we grow a narcissistic relationship with that which is outside. From the needs in the Real to the demands and desire that grow out of our mirror state, there is some sort of second level of separation from source: we are now aware of the dissonance between our existence and its materialization in the world. It is then here, in the imaginary register, that we begin to create and perform and idea of an “I” that will be driven by the constant pursue to an illusory perfection. Our social environment plays a big part on contributing to what images should be reinforced and sought for.
The Symbolic order marks our immersion into language and cultural codes and is the third and final stage of early development in lacanian theory – it is here that narratives and stories are created. When a baby learns how to speak, its relationship with the caretaker/mother widens up to the world around it. We are now able to develop interconnections with other people on different levels, expanding our intersubjectivities and navigating through waters of ideologies, knowledge, norms and belief systems. Farther away from the Real, the ways in which we perform our identities is now bound by the rules of language. The Symbolic can then be considered a third level of separation between us and the natural world, as we fall into the graces of the big Other - virtual regulator of the social world. It is through language that we can also find assurance and validation of the identities created in the imaginary register.
Since the relationalities between signifier and signified is of an arbitrary nature and given that meaning is formed from the relation between signifiers (words and words: a cat is a cat because it is not a tree), there would be a possible gap, a veil of unseen, unspoken meanings that would cause a rupture in the symbolic chain. If since early years of childhood, we learn how to behave/speak in order to thrive in the social world, and if in this process we negate whatever is intrinsic to our inner nature and belonging to the Real register, the unconscious could then be consider, as per Lacan, as that which is not grasped by language, it can not be put into words, yet, it still provides meaning to the individual and collective psyche. This is to say that the unconscious would not be of an individual, but rather, something that emerges from the collective experience of the subject: symbols, images, feelings that emerge from the interactions between a person’s identity, the social world in which they are immersed (its language) and the state of absence from the Real.
During the innerdance process we go back into a stage prior to language acquisition – the baby mind – we are once again swimming in the waters of the Real: a space where language and image are not present, that proto-natal stage in which the body-mind is not familiar with separation and there is no need to struggle with identities, images, or to be careful of what we say, how we behave, how we move.
At the same time, regressing also offers us a glimpse of the symbols (signifiers) imprinted in our unconscious through diverse ways due to that altered state of consciousness in which we experience hypersensitivities. Everything that is behind the meaning of a word and can not be placed on it becomes visible, audible, tangible. People see colors, visions, entities; they hear things, go back and forward in time reviewing memories and accessing events that haven’t even happened yet; they talk to their emotions, to their organs, to their higher selves, to their most repressed feelings, desires and needs in what can almost be described as opening a Pandora box to the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers, all at one.
By going back to a state prior to language, some will visit a space prior to the conception of our own story as a subject: a place where words are not present anymore, therefore, a place prior to time and far from what can be perceived by the human mind, the underlayers of a universe where we, as consciousness that becomes aware of its own existence, reclaim its infinite conceptual potentialities and begin, once again, dreaming of a world with different and diverse narratives.
additional audio material
Stages of development - by Pi Audio that brings some integrations on the Egocentric Speech and the Three Registers
Mediation and the Symbolic - by Pi Language as a medium