Chimps & Water: Watsu & Eliciting Bliss, Hippies & Value, "Chimps: So Like Us"

At breakfast in the Harbin Restaurant this morning after another drop-in Watsu class which is wonderfully easing and attuning, I asked my friends for their ideas about how one might engage Watsu explicitly to elicit the neurophysiology of loving bliss. For me, Watsu is enjoyable, but it doesn't elicit the kinds of bliss with which I'm familiar, and which, for example, music like ragas, some of Mozart's arias, and contra dance music do. {I contextualize this question vis-a-vis evolutionary biology, and with ecstasy (MDMA), naturally, as a reference experience}.


One friend at breakfast suggested just embodying love ... just go there ... makes sense. (I wondered how this might work vis-a-vis words, ideas and symbols).


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Traveling is liberating ... heading to Harbin (yesterday) - the travel part - is so welcome.


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Hippies find value in curious objects ... old collections of this, ... or that junk ... so much value in the unusual, the seemingly valueless ... {an old, dilapidated hot springs like Harbin Hot Springs in the early 1970s}. Counterculture offers a fascinating re-writing of questions of value.


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At Harbin, I saw Jane Goodall's "Chimps: So Like Us" (1990). She suggests unambiguously that we and chimps are very alike. The only difference, she says, is that humans can talk.

But as a remarkable primatologist who has primarily, and path-breakingly, chronicled three generations of chimps (Pan troglodyte) in the Gombe forest, in the field, Jane Goodall engages certain British narratives (kingly narratives to explain male status, as well as male challenging behavior) without critical examination of such narratives in this film (her tome called "The Chimps of Gombe" is comprehensive and may engage different explicatory practices), as well as seemed to suggest that common chimps (Pan troglodytes), which is the species she studies, are the only species of chimp. I'd like to see a parallel film about Bonobo chimps (Pan paniscus) by as experienced a primatologist, like Frans de Waal or Sue Savage Rumbaugh (but her work is primarily in the lab).


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I'm a monkey, a primate, as I think humans are. Jane Goodall begins her "Chimps: So Like Us" with this same observation, as well, observing, too, that from chimps' perspectives, she is just different.


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I'm curious to find out what the primate / chimp / gorilla / orangutan academic and scientific literature has recorded about these primates and water, springs, and hot pools, as well as the relaxation response.


{http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com - July 26, 2009}

MMmmmm ...