Man has been driven eternally at a primal level within the core of his being to find the intersection of finite matter and infinity, which energy represents in its most un-manifested form. The energy that animates all matter, in particular living matter, is accepted as either representative of, or a subset of, the infinite creation.
Modern scientific knowledge about the interaction between energy and matter is somewhat understood, although much room for advanced exploration remains.
Human Energy
When I first thought about the problem of structure, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the human body, but rather consumed my thoughts during my graduate work in electrical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. During the academic year 1996, I had somehow interweaved my curiosity in the evolutionary state of mankind into a doctoral research topic, evolvable hardware and gotten my advisor to approve it, ha! Let me explain some of the background lest the reader lose interest completely. A key component on many of the printed circuit boards in the electronics industry is the field programmable gate array (FPGA). These sophisticated integrated circuits were being used as re-programmable devices in many cases and were highly desirable because they could implement algorithms and logic at speeds much faster that a microprocessor could achieve with software. Additionally, one could get the device to function without the logic being exactly right all at once, but rather iteratively develop it. As the FPGA competition heated up, more and more complex arrangements of memory and logic found their way into the integrated circuit design. The primary FPGA manufacturing competitors were Altera and Xilinx corporations. Xilinx introduced an FPGA that had a cellular array structure that had never before been available to the market. This device was essentially a very large matrix of programmable functional elements that also had programmable interconnections. So what you posit? Well, a little more background is needed here. The software industry, and in particular the field of artificial intelligence, had been working with what were termed genetic algorithms. These were algorithms that would create populations of entities and simulate the evolution of these imaginary entities using stochastic processes (randomness) to evolve like a species that had the best ability to adapt to a life stress function, much survival of the fittest made famous by Charles Darwin. Simply put, the algorithms exposed the entities to a fitness test that determined the viability of offspring spawned by the parents. Often times, the problem would be represented as a chromosome, which was mutated and perpetuated much like happens in nature. So, to make a long and boring story more to the point, my idea was to simulate a genetic algorithm inside the cellular array of a very large FPGA from Xilinx. The goal was to “evolve” the correct interconnect structure within the cellular array based on some fitness test or constraint irrespective of the inputs to the chip. This idea would have an interest to anyone in the industry that understood the impossibility of knowing a priori what inputs or circumstances may be encountered by an entity in an unknown environment, like an unmanned Mars rover. Typically what is done in anticipation of as many of the circumstances that are known to occur and logic is created to deal with it, often times in the form of rules. In my research case, the circumstances of the environment need not be known, thus allowing the inputs to determine the internal structure of the device to optimally configure itself to provide the best possible fit for the life function test. In other words, the structure of the FPGA would be established based on its inputs producing optimal function. Structure is function, literally in this case. I won’t get into any gory details about the algorithms or the chip architecture; just hold onto the idea of structure as function as we begin to relate this concept to Structural Integration, sometimes called Rolfing. This is a name Ida did not approve of [6].
Structure is Function and Energy
Structural Integration is a form of manipulative bodywork that focuses on aligning and relating the human body to the gravity field. This work was invented by Dr. Ida Rolf and is described in her book [6]. My son JJ, now 14 years old, was born with a genetic disorder termed DiGeorge’s Syndrome. One of the symptoms he had was loose connective tissue, which made walking without braces difficult for him, even at age 5. During a triathlon race in San Diego in the year 2000, a fellow athlete told me about Structural Integration. Ida Rolf had a child with polio which had incapacitated one leg. She discovered the Rolf 10-series during her quest to find solutions to musculo-skeletal disorders as well as bringing significant attention to the populace pragmatically investigating and understanding the relationship between the human structure and the gravity field. After reading Ida’s book and experiencing the work, I attended the Guild for Structural Integration, Boulder Colorado, to become a certified Structural Integrator in the year 2004, in order to help my son JJ with the multitude of issues he has with his structure. I was in practice full-time doing this work for almost seven years, and am still occasionally sharing the work with folks as the spirit moves me to do so. My wife Christa is also a Structural Integrator. Our current focus is bringing this work to special needs children like my son JJ.
So, how does Structural Integration (SI) relate to energy in the human body? It wasn’t until I began to experience significant changes in my own body that I began to ponder what the relationship between structure and function were in humans and how it was related to energy [7]. Note that I slipped in the concept of energy when dealing with humans as I had trouble with the idea of quantifying function related to the affairs of man. Stated another way, how do you measure the function of a human? Of course, one can compare performance in various events such as athletics to determine degrees of function but it did not seem satisfying to me. As my body began to approach a more structured state, I noticed that my sensitivity to energy became heightened. One day while spacing out during the auditor course in Hawaii 2003 (no offense to Jeff Linn, you were a terrific instructor), I asked, okay rudely blurted out the question to Jeff and the class “what is the relationship of structure to energy?” Everyone in the class gave me a sideways glance to “take it off line bonehead,” so I did. While sitting in my room staring at the lagoon, it occurred to me that as an electrical engineer, I understood the laws of physics but had never really applied them to myself. Here comes the fun part of this paper! Stay with me just a bit longer. So I asked myself, what is the energy of a human? My first thoughts were of measuring the capacitance and voltage of a human body to get E. Actual measurements seemed like work and probably would not be helpful or relevant. Besides I did not bring an oscilloscope to Hawaii, only a bike. This led me to generalize and borrow an Equation from someone much smarter than I, Albert Einstein. See Equation [EQ1] for his more notorious contribution to the field of physics.