Science fiction?

I've been reading a lot of Melissa Scott's work. Science fiction. Very, very good stuff, intellectually challenging. She has a running scenario in Dreamships in which starship pilots take control of their ship by means of some kind of communication device wired directly into them, under the skin. By means of this they key in to a responding device in the ship and 'feel' that ship, and by means of gestures - or anything they choose - monitor, follow, direct its movements and its internal workings.

When I first read this I was riveted. It sounds exactly like what we do in bodywork. We have a communication device wired in to us - we are born with it. We 'key in' or 'tune' in to other mind-bodies, following, monitoring, supporting and sometimes nudging or directing the self-healing tendencies of the mind-body of our focus. We too use gestures, hands-on techniques, to aid this, often osteopathy or massage, myofascial release, craniosacral therapy, and so on.

Sometimes, when I'm working, I realise that the techniques are more to aid my own cognitive comprehension of what's going on (not unimportant) than necessary to obtain any particular result. So with Scott's world where "Drive" is the counterpart to our familiar and perpetual interplay of energetic rhythms and pulses of the mind-body, sometimes making it into physical manifestation, more often not, she speaks about the pilot's choice in how she perceives, interprets the data communicated via the inwiring.

There's a spell-binding passage in Dreamships where she has her pilot muse: "virtually any image or set of images could be used to interpret Drive data, as long as it called up the right set of reactions from the pilot. She had once known a woman, a small, golden, perfect creature, who had taken her ships into Drive by ceremoniously brewing a cup of green tea..." Rachel often quotes someone, a Rolfer probably: "Good bodywork is 95% perception".

Of course, working with humans and animals is exponentially more complex than taking a ship into Drive: we are not biochemical machines (certainly part-biochemical manifestations of energy, but not machines) whatever orthodox western medicine and the drug companies would like us to believe. And because we are effecting authentic communication with mind-bodies just like our own, we too are affected by each encounter. Each 'treatment' changes both the client and the therapist. All this doesn't have to be new-agey or airy-fairy, or, indeed, without clear cognitive comprehension. In fact, I much prefer to have clear cognitive comprehension. Switching in can take miliseconds and is teachable and practicable. And magical.