Self organisation

The main networks of your body organise themselves. Redundancy provides the basis to reconfigure pathways temporarily or permanently unavailable. Millions, if not billions of chemical reactions happen in the realm of your body every second, facilitating a similar number of electric impulses.

Knowing the details of this torrent of minute transformations rarely helps to solve problems. You can hardly access these with your perception anyway. Cells organise themselves into functional units like organs, blood vessels and muscles, or as mobile carrier or intervention units.

A lot of things happen on a microscopic scale in a human body. The amount of body activity you can actually willingly control, pales in comparison to the autonomous processes keeping you alive.  If you really want to, you can gain a certain level of control even over autonomous functions by using special yogic techniques, but you don’t need to in order to lead a healthy and happy life.

Air, water, food and company keep single cells happy within the body. The body itself acts like a single cell in a larger human organism like a family, community or work place. If cells within a body organise themselves, wouldn’t bodies as cells of the organism of society organise themselves as well? What can you do as a cell of human society, of the body social?

This leads straight to the next big question. What kind of relation exists between ‘you’ and ‘your body’? Ask yourself this question while dreaming or as meditation. As your body rests, you experience it without physical reasons. If you smell the roses which don’t exist you created them.

The idea of matter provides a convenient metaphor for the experiences of a physically manifest universe.  Luckily, matter organises itself into molecules, stars, galaxies and all the rest. What role do you play in this entirely self-organising scenario? Where does self-organisation end and self-determination begin?

Self-determination can interfere with self-organisation early and radically within human beings. Or rather, egocentrism undermines the delicate dynamic balance of self-organisation. Any form of centrism creates implicit hierarchies, and thus skewed perspectives of the interconnectedness of nature.

‘You’ cannot exist without others, and without any company can’t continue the story of humanity, nor would anyone listen to it. You emanated into a body, a cell of a larger organism. This organism inhabits a larger organism as part of a diverse biosphere. You uniquely express your specific consciousness frequency within the spectrum of cosmic consciousness, just like everything and everyone around you.

The body acts as vehicle for the self and as reflection of it. Your body organises itself according your intention, even if your minds sometimes fails to acknowledge this. Your intention hide in your subconscious, programmed into tissue and not easy access for the conscious mind. Never mind, doesn’t matter.

 

 

 

Structural support

Just like any other space-binding creature on this planet, humans have a body to move around. 206 bones float in a network of tendons, ligaments, muscles and connective tissue. The position of the bones determines your body shape, the tension network around it provide its integrity.

Tensegrity governs the permanent shape-shifting of the body. Each joint attaches to multiple tension elements. Antagonistic muscle groups allow for back and forward movement along hinge joints. Ball and sockets joints like hips and shoulders can come apart without activated muscles holding it in place.

Your tonic muscles maintain your body shape most of the time. These muscles use oxygen directly, and can sustain activation for a long time. If you would use only these muscles to stand, you could do so effortlessly for hours. As an experiment, just stand with your feet a shoulder-width apart and ask yourself gently whether you can do it easier. Observe what happens.

Just standing or sitting turns into an opportunity to discover your unique attitude to the world. Slow movement serves the same purpose. When done properly, mainly the tonic muscles facilitate the movement.

Most of the ‘large’ movements involve phasic muscles, which act faster and stronger than red muscles tissue. With impressive names like biceps, latissimus or gluteus and easy visibility this group seems more popular than the core. You don’t need to know the names of core muscles to give them a workout, learn to deactivate the large, phasic muscles and the tonic muscles take over.

Technology has influenced human movement quite significantly over the last few centuries. Laziness has been known for longer, yet only privileged people could avoid even moderate physical activity. The modern world has made humanity quite sedentary, which numbed the bodily feedback most people can perceive.

If you understand the technology of your structural support system (tensegrity), you can regain graceful ways of moving, even if your gait currently resembles a zombie shuffle. As an experiment, have a walk and focus on the constellation of your bones.

Plumbing

Your body consists of up to 60% water. Amazingly, the lung, responsible for air exchange, contains more than 80%. Each cell wraps around a blob of liquid teaming with functional components, each cells bathes in interstitial fluid, the brain and spine immerse the nervous system in cerebrospinal fluid.

Last, but not least, about 6-7 litres of blood circulate through one of the plumbing networks, which is about 100,000 km in length. The heart generates a vortex, pulling blood through its outlets. Expansion and contraction of blood vessels and connective tissue maintain the standing wave generated by the heart beat and regulate the amount of blood reaching different areas of your body.

Blood carries oxygen, the main fuel for your metabolism, but also hormones, nutrients, viruses. Roughly 3 litres of plasma facilitate the movement of blood cells and other bits, and also the exchange of chemical composites throughout the entire tissue.

Your inner liquidness, combined with some air in your lungs, allows the body to float on water. It even lets the bones float in the mesh of connective tissue, muscles, tendons and ligaments. When the flow on the inside gets interrupted, your movement will get less fluid as well.

The plumbing system organises the majority of the physiological components of the body, serving a variety of functions. Each of this aspects deserves a closer look, but as the system organises itself to a large degree, it takes little effort to keep it running.

Keep hydrated. The sensation of thirst warns the operator of a body (you) about the need for rehydration. Try to avoid this. Try to avoid drinking too much, either.

Avoid blood loss.

Move your body on a regular basis.