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TOUCHING THE MIND domain into which we can enter and positively affect through our touch, if we can learn to speak its language. No muscle can create any movement without neural stimulations, and no movement can occur without consequent changes in the stream of these stimulations. PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY, PRECIPITATION OF NOVELTY The phenomenon of memory is one of the deepest mysteries of biology. No one has found the location in which it resides or been able to fully articulate the causes and effects of its accumulations. This is because it does not reside in a particular place within us and does not function according to linear chains of cause and effect. In living organisms, there is simply no way to separate out any single sequence of cause and effect from all the surrounding streams of events within which it operates. Everything conditions everything else, and ultimately our biological and conscious memories reflect all of the orchestrations and choreographies of the molecular and energetic fabric of our beings—those of water, skin, connective tissue, hormones, neuropeptides, nerves, muscles, and many more besides. Memory is the ghost in the machine, inaccessible to the parsing of parts that characterizes typical avenues of inquiry. It is a systems phenomenon that resides not in these parts but in the ephemeral language of the interactions between them, in the constantly shifting global relationships of the many varied objects and processes of our landscape of perception. It does not consist of the instruments, the notes, the choreography charts, or the steps. It is the symphony and the dance themselves that constitute our minds and our lives. In the words of anthropologist, social scientist, and linguist Gregory Bateson, it is the "pattern which connects," and not the things that are connected. We enter directly into this symphony and this dance when we let "flesh touch with flesh." Novelty is equally mysterious, both to physicists and biologists. Like memory, it is simply not allowed for in our normal habits of thinking about cause and effect: "If A, then B, C will follow." This is because there are an innumerable plethora of As and Bs and an indeterminate number of Cs that may or may not follow. This requires a complete rethinking of how organisms—and therapies—work. For bodyworkers, it requires thinking of the language of touch as an open-ended narrative and not a dictionary, script, or protocol. KARMA AND GRACE These mysteries of memory and novelty are, I believe, more helpfully approached through the concepts of karma and grace. Karma refers to the idea that we are continually depositing our entire personal past upon each succeeding moment of our conscious present, and that these deposits are made up of unchangeable events in that past. We can never escape what we have done or what we have been. These things have made us what we are, and in this sense our karma is our accumulated burden and debt—the conditions that we have created and with which we must move forward. But it is also possible to be stimulated toward new directions, toward that which we have not yet done or become. Grace refers to the idea that every moment of the present includes not only the past but also the invaluable seed of a present novelty, an unforeseen experience that has the power to act upon what our past might become. These novelties in our landscape of perception are occurring constantly, but they are usually overwhelmed by the mass and momentum of karma 66 massage & bodywork january/february 2011