Biogram Theory

I'd like to talk about Biogram Theory a bit, because I'm emailing someone with a reference to it. So I'm putting it here instead of in email, so I can refer to it in the future. This is a theory, although it has seen some testing, and I've seen layman evidence -- dramatic results in myself and others using this as a model. I'm not going to put in the 1001 caveats a 'theory' requires as it's hard to explain it that way.

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In Biogram, the theory (biochemically testable) is that emotion is biochemical. It is literally the language/words of the body (bio - gram). When you feel happy, even your elbow and heart feel it -- and they feel when you are sad. Biochemical brings our external reality experience into the internal body.

This biochemical that is the chemical form of emotion, goes into the bloodstream and is 'vented' by the actions of the person -- whether it's laughing, violence, crying, a big sigh, whatever. It can also be vented by 'general' cathartic things such as exercise or laughter.

When the emotion is incompletely vented (common in our society, for a long list of combined reasons) it stores under the myelin sheath of the nerves. It stores 'for later', as a survival instinct (too much emotion freezes us. The tiger eats us while we're immobilized with fear, or the enemy or predator gets us while we're overcome with grief over losing a tribe/family member).

The body naturally then 'vents' the biochem in dreams (children and nightmares, work stress and venting dreams).

If it can't get rid of it in dreams (too much, too much other chem, other issues), it will attempt to subconsciously bring about events/thoughts/situations which will actually focus us on that specific thing. In a perfect world this is great. It helps us face it, deal with and release it. But in reality this often leads only to more storage of the same type of chem for the same reason, instead.

The psychology is mapped to the body ("psychocartoggraphy"). When we focus on a given issue/topic/etc., literally our nervous system is 'stimulated' in that tiny (very tiny!) part of the body. Whatever biochem may actually be sitting there is 'invoked' and begins to release into the bloodstream for venting. (So the same circumstance that frustrates you repeatedly, stores biochem, and every time you tune into it, you are tuning into a "larger cache" of stored biochem. Eventually, the tiniest thing happens and you completely freak out about it, vastly angrier/etc. than the individual situation calls for. This is because you're not really dealing with that individual situation. Thanks to the body and incompletely vented biochem, you are literally dealing with a whole lot of that situation at once.)

If the body is still unable to vent it (for the same reasons we store too much in the first place), then it just keeps collecting. Being a biochemical, it has a shelf life; eventually it rots. This basically creates a cache of rotting biochemical that is right against the nerve. When the body 'tunes into that' it is literally a form of pain at the cellular/molecular level. So the body, which is part of the mind, starts redirecting us. It doesn't want to tune into that because it hurts. So when incoming information or focus aims there, it slightly "shifts" our "interpretation" just the smallest bit--so now the body is actually 'looking' just 'near' that area, not directly in it. As more biochem stores, more rots, and the collection grows larger, this psychological side-effect becomes more obvious: people are in "denial" (this is physical, not just mental!), and people "twist information coming in" (again it's physical, not just mental).

If this continues unabated, a few things happen.

The first is that a person can develop literally an "acid rage" -- this is literal, physical, not just metaphorical -- about a given topic. They usually can't tune into it, but IF they can (or when it's unavoidable), then they are almost chronically 'dripping' this 'acid rage' on every level. It pollutes their relationships, their humor, their happiness. You might as well think of this as having a drip-IV stuck in you that is chronically dripping rotting, acidic biochemical into your bloodstream, because that's exactly what's happening. These people are miserably unhappy and their entire reality is colored by the issues that the biochem is related to. Until they can get away from the situation which is chronically contributing yet-more biochem to the storage, until they have a sufficient amount of time to 'vent' that biochemical through chronic rage, dreams and nightmares, etc. while no more is adding to it obviously, they are not going to get healthy. Generally this is going to lead to murder or suicide or both in the end, whether by violence or disease.

The second is that rotting biochemical, collecting and growing, has a side-effect on the nervous system. The nervous system is the brain. It is the brain's way of looking into the body, and it keeps the body clean in that area in part based on information the nerve is providing it. When the nerve is coated with mud--let alone a gradually acidic mud--it can't report on anything. The body can't "clean" itself in that area--which includes venting that biochemical--if it can't SEE it and/or is avoiding it. Now imagine you've got 'rotting biochemical' sitting in a small part of the body which is accumulating toxins that are not getting vented. Eventually this can turn cancerous, or have other seriously negative health consequences.

The MD/Psych who came up with Biogram Theory (Richard Johnson) believed that you could see all this happening based on the symptoms of the body. In other words, that certain kinds of emotions, and emotions about certain topics, could be tracked to a given part of the body--and this was surprisingly consistent from person to person, as if the biological map of a human body was just as much a map of the mind.

He used a combination of hypnosis, biofeedback, and dream therapy to work on 'clearing' this. He had a lot of visualizations which if you did, were astonishingly effective -- it was obvious that simply the visualization was causing chemical changes in your body. I ran into this stuff and studied with him prior to encountering archetype meditations. He had some stunning results with physical problems (such as carpal tunnel and trauma) I saw in patients. I had some pretty amazing results myself, though I had nothing as obvious as disease or pathology to deal with, but I had plenty of experimenting I did with biofeedback and hypnosis in this model to think there's something serious to it.

I think archmeds are really just another direction of approaching this same thing. It's an internal, visualization format using the subconscious via Inner Guide, to deal with these physical things.

I have seriously wondered if even 'past life' memory might 'imprint' on the human body in a way that stores more than just this-life in it. The things that brought this idea are like: in Rolfing -- deep tissue massage which can be painful -- people are said to sometimes have spontaneous past-life memories. That sounds like something being released to me. Holotropic breathwork is said to bring on a variety of experience some maybe relating to that. Again this sounds like something in the body being released to me.

Scientology has a process called 'tracking', related to/part of (I think) 'auditing'. They believe that energy stores in the etheric-body; they call this 'engrams'. They use a coarse, rather oddly simplistic form of biofeedback tech they call an e-meter (probably because that's what they had 'back then' and it got established as doctrine so nobody bothered upgrading the tech!), and a person doing questioning, to work on this, but for tracking, the auditor is basically laying their hand gently on a part of the focus person's body and asking a question.

The point here seems to be (I am not a scientologist, so I am guessing; I knew a woman I studied alongside briefly who studied with Ron Hubbard in the old days before it became the kind of cult it seems to be now, who taught me a minor amount about it), that when the focus person has the hand laid on them and the question asked, it kind of causes them to "focus through" that part of their body -- through the energy in that part of the body, some of which may be 'sparked by' the question or process. The combination of these techs is believed to lead to "clearing" these "energy blocks" in the body.

I seriously think that Biogram is a medically-based approach to what amounts to the same thing. And that you could probably remove all the ancient-alien crap from Scientology (I don't care whether it's true or not, I just don't think it relates much to this), and re-consider the auditing and particularly tracking tech in light of potentially causing people to spontaneously tune into and release/vent stored biochemical. Which might be, in some cases, stored not by 'this' life of experience, but more something 'imprinted on' the physical body via the etheric body (obviously this is only theory). The theory works whether or not this last part is true.

Now, the best way for an individual to work on this on their own is through self-hypnosis, self-suggested dreams, and simple biofeedback. Simple meaning like EDR (Epidermal Response, previously and still sometimes called GSR, for Galvanic Skin Response). There are a couple ways you can approach it.

1. General energy: Rig yourself up and tell yourself out loud, "I'm going to go through my body, and when I get to a part where a lot of stored biochemical needs venting, I want you to make the meter reading/sound go up to alert me." Then you start anywhere and you focus on/in a part of your body -- a small part, and really "feel" that part of your body while doing this -- and then you just move through the body. When you hit a place that reacts, you talk out loud to yourself and say, "OK now body, I want you to release that biochemical into the waste disposal system of the body. Vent it all out. Thanks." Go back through that area several times with this kind of instruction, until you no longer get the response on the biofeedback meter.

2. Specific energy: do exactly like #1 except tell your body "...when I get to a part of the body where I am storing biochemical relates to issue XYZ..." instead. When I did this experimentally, it was fascinating, as my buddies and I were all experimenting. I would often write down the part of my body that reacted to a given topic, and come to find out my buddies had the same reaction (it varied in degree by person) to the same topic in the same part of the body. Which rather indirectly validated the doc's theory about the body being a map of the mind and fairly consistent from person to person. Probably the most severe example of this was the time when we all reacted -- me extremely, all but one of the rest mildly -- to 'homosexuality' when we hit 'the left ankle'. The irony was the one other person who reacted wildly to this actually had his resistance to this as the major issue in his life--and he had an incurable tiny cancer in his ankle at that spot. Helluva coincidence.

It's worth considering that in the body, no matter what the physical problems, everything comes down to the cellular and then molecular level. So, if there is any approach that can affect the body at that level, then there is no body issue that should not be able to be approached from this direction. It's just a matter of being creative enough to figure out how.

I'll post on myPsiche blog shortly the "Cleaning Center" meditations I made up eons ago when I was doing a lot of energy work and archetype meditations. My experience with these leads me to believe that they work; like archetype work and sometimes moreso, you can really feel this stuff physically at times.

Anyway, that is Biogram in a nutshell. It is vastly simplified, to say the least, but I think I got the framework of it decently.