Feldenkrais (1981, p. 24) adds to this evolutionary analysis by considering the status of organisms when they are born:
When we pass in review many of the species it becomes evident that the lower the species’ place on the ladder of evolution the more complete is the wiring in of the nervous system at birth. The connections of the synapses, neurons, or what ever are ready and the apprenticeship is shorter the lower the species are on the ladder. In man, we see the extreme end of this process. The human infant has the longest apprenticeship of all the species, to my knowledge. Although everything necessary to maintain life and growth is already connected in the nervous and glandular systems at birth, the specific human functions are not wired in at all. No baby was ever born who could speak, sing, whistle, crawl, walk upright, make music, count or think mathematically, tell the hour of the day or night, or know what it is to be late. Without a very long apprenticeship lasting several years none of these functions has ever been observed. As far as these specifically human functions or activities go, the connections or the wiring in of the neural structures have advanced already in the womb but compared with those of the adult they are non-existent.
For Feldenkrais (1981, p. 25) there is a strong preference in all organisms for order and an invariant environment – even when organisms (such as human beings) have the increasing capacity to handle change and new environments. This often means that a disorderly environment is made orderly when processed by the brain. All elements of the brain operate in an integrated, holistic manner to ensure this order:
The neural substance that organizes order in its own functioning also makes order in its environment which in turn improves the orderliness of neural function. The neural substance organizes itself and thereby selects and alters the incoming messages from the environment into invariant sets to make repetition possible. It takes many continuously changing messages from the environment before the organism succeeds in perceiving them as unchanging entities. So great is the ability of the nervous system that it creates order where instruments made of any other matter will register a blur of continuous variations. Just think of taking a photograph of a greyhound running toward you while you are sitting on a galloping horse.
Thus, it is not clear that the Tin Man really wanted to be oiled and set free—just as it is not clear that the cowardly lion really wanted to take on the challenges of a disorderly (and threatening) environment. Both the Tin Man and Lion might have been perfectly content to remain in the forest (with forests from the perspective of many psychoanalytic and Jungian analysts representing a primitive state of being). We regress, in other words, so that the world we perceive and that we process can remain orderly.
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