Editor’s Note: This interview was originally done for Brooke Thomas’s The Liberated Body Podcast. You can listen to this interview at www.liberatedbody.com/jaap-van-der-wal-lbp-057/

Jaap van der Wal

Brooke Thomas

Brooke Thomas: My conversation today is with an embryologist and anatomist, one of my longtime personal heroes, Jaap van der Wal. He’s been a professor at various universities in the Netherlands and has also been a researcher. His work stands out, however, because he approaches these things quite differently. He describes himself as a phenomenological embryologist who is looking for the soul via the embryo. He now teaches about this all over the world through his Embryo in Motion project. Thank you so much Jaap, for talking with all of us today.

Jaap van der Wal: You’re welcome.

BT: To begin, could you describe what your work is about?

JV: My usual opening sentence is that I’m an embryologist and an anatomist, but that I am searching for spirit in the human being. That is my mission; to help people to see and to become aware that there’s something more at stake than just the matter dimension or body dimension. There’s something which you could call spirit. Something in this reality which is more than just the matter dimension that we are so used to. That is my mission [I take] all over the world. I use the embryo because the embryo is the perfect domain to ask questions like, “What are we doing? What is a body? Is the body something that is producing us or is the body something we are producing? What is our body actually? Where do we come from? Is my consciousness coming from my body or is my body maybe produced or formed or shaped by me, by myself?” The relationship or the dialogue between spirit and matter, or soul and body, that’s my theme and I try to help people see it in a scientific way. Not by believing in spirit and soul, but that you can scientifically, with a good scientific procedure and methodology, see such things or such qualities.

BT: It’s so beautiful, and I think the work you’re doing is so different from much of how the body is spoken about. I’m curious how you got on this path as an embryologist?

JV: I didn’t start as an embryologist with these questions. When I was still a medical student, I came in contact with what in those days was the Institute for Anatomy and Embryology. In those days, the two disciplines were – in Holland at least – in one institute. I got a job there before actually starting as a doctor, I never practiced as a medical doctor. I became teacher, I became a researcher. I was fascinated by the body, by anatomy. Later on, also by embryology because that was in the same department.

My main work in the beginning was anatomy, specialized in locomotion – the locomotor system or locomotor apparatus. Proprioception. In that domain of what is our perception of body, the questions started – like, “What is anatomy actually telling me about my body?” More and more I became aware of the fact that the body that I am, the body that I experience, is quite another reality than the body that I studied and learned and dissected. There apparently are two bodies in me, or two body qualities. That brought me in contact with phenomenology – the philosophy where you do not start by observing the world or becoming an onlooker and beholding your body as something like an object, but where you primarily start to experience the reality or feel it or take for true what your senses are telling you.

The body that you live, the body that you are, is quite another reality than the body that I had to teach students and that we met in the dissection room. There, my questions came: What actually is the body of science? Is that a reduced reality? Is that a whole reality? What is lacking in it? That brought me to embryology, with the question, Where is this body coming from and how do we live with this body when we are an embryo? What are we actually doing as an embryo? There I found, so to say, that it’s not first the body that is formed, and then we start to live in it or start to be aware of it. I think that from the very beginning on, you can see that your body is a performance, that your body is a process, a lifelong performance. Literally, you are a performer, you perform your body, you shape your body. And the entity that is shaping that is me, and ‘me’ is not only this body, apparently also something else in that body that is the shaper, the realizer of this form the body. Like Descartes said, there are two realities, and the body is the form, the realized reality, and in me as I am living this body, there’s also something else, my awareness, my consciousness, my soul, that apparently is the former, the shaper, the performer of that reality. That’s a lot of words, but that’s how I see it.

BT: I think one of the ways that we culturally reduce the body is that we decide that our brain is running the show. You say that the embryo challenges the idea that we are our brain.

JV: Literally, because for more than eight weeks when you are officially in the embryonic stage, you do not have a brain, at least not in the way we have now as adult beings, a brain functioning, an organ functioning. The first weeks you do not have a brain at all. How do you exist when you’re an embryo? It became more and more clear to me that the way you exist as embryo is, apparently, the same way as you exist in your body in the non-brain part, in the non-conscious part of your body. There’s so much presence and awareness in your body that is not conscious, or let’s say not the brain consciousness.

Actually, [I wondered] if I could find in the embryo also something like soul, awareness, consciousness – could I see it there at work? That might explain how in my body, say below the level of my neck, soul or spirit is also working and performing in the body. That’s what I learned from the embryo, that your body is not producing a brain and your brain producing you. It’s the reverse. You are producing – from day one, to day last, to day X – you are performing your body. It’s the primary thing you do. Every morning, you wake up with a new body. It’s not a machine. A machine is built up from parts. A computer is built up from bytes and chips, and it starts to function. But that’s not what you do. You are constantly performing, shaping your body. You do not have a computer in your head. It’s an organ that might function as a computer – which by the way is a very poor comparison, it’s a very poor model – but it’s not a computer, it’s an organ that can function as a computer, and you have to perform that organ from day one until day last.

That’s actually your primary behavior: your body is a behavior and your brain is just an organ of it that is dealing in or mostly involved in consciousness and awareness. It’s not my brain that is moving my arms: I move my arm, I speak here. And for that, I need a brain, I need a guttural fold, I need a larynx, and I need arms and legs and muscles. I move, I’m not moved by one organ that is the leader of all the others, that’s not what I see. I see the embryo, I see a child, I see an adult constantly performing, shaping, primarily acting his body. Actually, your body is an act, is a performance. You repeat that physiologically, psychologically, but it’s not done by the brain. The brain is just one organ that is specialized in awareness or in control. Maybe it’s the leader of the orchestra, but it’s not the orchestra. The orchestra is your body, and that is playing the symphony.

BT: That’s so gorgeous. I want to emphasize one thing you said because I think it gets lost for a lot of us. You said that every day you wake up with a new body, or every moment you have a new body. I think it gets to this point you’re making about your body being a performance.

JV: Yeah. That is the main error in modern biology. The embryo taught me again and again, we are not a spatial structure. We are a time body. Every living organism is a performance in time. You are a process, not a machine built up from particles. The anatomist is wrong. I’m also an anatomist and I had to teach it, that your body is composed from parts. No, it is not composed from parts. It’s not built up from cells. The embryo shows loud and clear that you are organizing your body into parts, and it is a process in time. A lifelong process that you never stop. So you cannot say that at a given moment you are ready, or that as an embryo you are not yet a human being. All the phases of your life, from day one on, belong, are part of the whole performance in time which your body is. The embryo in you never stops, because your body remains a process – lifelong, every day, every hour. There are organs which are every minute changed in their anatomy and their form and shape. So process is the word, we are not a machine.

BT: It really gets to our difficultly, I think, with the present tense, understanding things unfolding in time.

JV: Yes. The problem is that, of course, we also are a machine, but in the sense that our anatomy, let’s say our ‘machinery’, is formed. But it is a constant process in time: you have to shape and reshape it [all the time]. Even when computers come – and they are coming, the robots [that] will look like a human being, act like a human being, talk like a human being, even think and do things faster – the only simple thing that every human being, every little child, can do, that will never be in the capacity of that robot to do, is performing your body. Robots are spatial structures. They are machines. They are computers, and they produce action. We are primarily actions in time. Our body is our primary act, our primary behavior, our primary appearance. That can never be shared by a clever, smart, or super machine – ever. Don’t consider a robot ever as a human being.

BT: One of the other things that we love to point to, I think, right now, are genes as what causes what happens in a body. You reject that completely. I’d love to hear more about that.

JV: Actually, the dogma of ‘the brain as active principle’ is the sister or brother of the dogma of ‘the genes as active principles’. I have never in a human embryo or in any embryo seen genes being an active principle. They do not cause anything. Genes are the most inactive principles in the living organism. They only serve heredity, they only store information, that’s all. They do not cause anything. During the development of the embryo, genes do not cause your properties, they do not cause the faults or shapes in your body. You need them, to perform that, but during your development, your genes are differentiated, your genes have these different states of activity. The thing with the gene is that it’s nearly like a brain. Brain and genes have a common notion: they are almost purely form. The brain is form, a structure. The gene comes to form and structure. The most lifeless molecule that was ever produced by living beings is the DNA. The DNA is not a molecule of life, it’s a molecule of heredity. It is the most structuralized molecule that has ever been produced by living organisms. It is produced by living organisms, like a brain is produced by a living organism, and not the reverse.

How come people nowadays start to think that we are robots, that we are products of our genes? That comes when you change the brain, when you change the genome, then the organism has to follow. That is why genes and brains for me are necessary but not sufficient conditions. But they are very necessary – to give your soul and body shape you need a given gene structure or brain structure. So when you change that, of course the organism starts to behave in a different way. But that does not prove that the genes or the brains cause your body or your consciousness, respectively.

My wife had a tumor in her brain, and her personality changed completely. It took many, many years before we discovered it. What was the first thing my colleague said? “Jaap, now you are [surely] convinced that the brain is just an organ producing your personality, your psyche, because look at your wife, if you have a damaged brain, you get a damaged personality.” Yes, yes, yes, but that does not prove that in normal conditions, when I live my body, that my brain is producing my consciousness or my psychology. But of course if you change my brain, I have to perform my body, my consciousness, my soul, in a different way.

That is the problem with modern science. They think that the experiment proves that you are right. No. I am a scientist. I have been an associate professor in anatomy and embryology for forty years. I know what I’m saying now. I say that science is not like they want us to believe. They want us to believe that science is a new way to know everything, that scientists gather objective neutral facts, and that out of these objective facts, they just come to inevitable conclusions. That is false. The truth is that every scientist, including me, every scientist has in his mind, or her mind, a frame of thoughts, a hypothesis, an idea, and they are looking for the facts that are in harmony with that idea. That is what the experiment does. The experiment proves that the facts that you have manipulated are in harmony with your theory, but not the reverse. That’s the problem with modern science. If you think that we are brains, you can prove it by millions of experiments. If you think that the genes are causing our properties, you can prove that by many experiments. But it’s never realized in the living situation. In my primary reality, genes are not active because they are not causing me. Genes do not have properties. Genes cannot be illnesses. Brains cannot think. Brains cannot move. They are necessary but not sufficient conditions for an organism to be ill, to move, to perform.

BT: Going back to the embryo illustrates this. The question I’ll often ask myself, just as a part of my spiritual practice, is, What is making the embryo? If we can say the embryo is making itself, what is the intelligence that allows that to happen? It’s not a brain, because as you said, it doesn’t start out with a brain, and it’s not the genes just going along a program.

JV: The only answer is that apparently, in me and in every one of us, there is what Descartes called a res cogitans. There is something that is not just matter, it’s not the material dimension you can measure. There’s something else realizing itself in us. Call it your soul, call it your self, call it your mind, call it your spirit.

I’m not a dualist. Descartes was a dualist, but he did not separate the two. Descartes discriminated between, let’s say, soul and body, between spirit and matter. He discriminated the two, he did not separate them. After Descartes, philosophers started to separate the two, and then they chose, as scientists, the one and neglected the other. I am a non-dualist monist. I think that body and spirit are always one. That ideal was put forth by Rudolf Steiner of Anthroposophy, Randolph Stone from Polarity Therapy, Andrew Taylor Still from osteopathy. They all three say that spirit and matter, if they exist, they must be one – because it is a polarity, one reality is the complete inversion of the other and they cannot exist without each other. The Cartesian people always separate spirit and matter as if they are entities you can separate. You can never separate consciousness from your body. If you do that, you are unconscious. They are two realities always together. (That’s why I call myself not a dualist, but a polarity thinker or a non-dualistic monist.) That maybe is the problem, that we separate the two domains, and now we gradually evolve one of the domains to be so big and so great that we think we can explain nearly everything with that and that we, so to say, do not need the other dimension as an explanation or a cause.

That is what I’m saying as a phenomenologist. I’m not interested in causes, I’m interested in questions like: What does it mean? Is there finality? Is there something going on? Is there an aim of evolution or is it just all blind causality? That is the topic I’m talking about. Causality is restricted to the body. Finality involves mind, spirit, and future. I think that modern materialism has no future. It’s only the past of our genes and our brains that is ruling our society. I’m very worried about a future that will be realized by such a society that only believes in brains, genes, and bodies.

BT: Sometimes with clients, I try to explain that everything is connected. If your elbow is bothering you, your elbow is not in a separate room. It’s actually really simple, that we’re connected. I think what you’re saying about consciousness and the embryo, if you’re alive then you’re alive in a certain way, but we don’t understand what aliveness is, or that it’s happening all the time.

JV: Another thing I learned from the embryo is that the polarity is not life versus death. We nowadays think that death – inorganic dead matter – is a primary thing, I don’t think so. I think that this cosmos, this reality, is life. So life is actually something primary, and death is secondary. It might be that the polarity of spirit and matter are, so to say, two aspects of death, and that when the two aspects of death are one, you have life. Life, living is always in between. The breath of life is always in between the two dimensions of too much chaos, too much cosmos, too much spirit, too much body, too much death of matter and death of time, space and time. Maybe life is not the opposition or polarity of death, but life is the breeze in between two polarities that might both have an aspect of one-sidedness or polarity and in their one-sidedness they are poles of death. Life is realized in the breeze in between these two polarities. Or is that too vague?

BT: No. I think I’d like more detail with a couple of concepts of yours, having read your article where first you talked about how you “learned from the embryo, motion is primary, form is secondary” (van der Wal, 2012). Forms come out of motion and not the reverse. Also, that the embryo is not in the past, it still exists in our human adult organism. So form coming out of motion: could you say a little bit more about that? I think that might illustrate this life/death principle some.

JV: Actually, motion or movement as the primary dimension is related to the other issue that I mentioned: time. That all bodies and organisms appear in time. Time and motion are related. Space, pure space, so to say, is death, as Goethe said. Motion is space in time, time in space. For me, we are therefore not only anatomy, but we are motions, processes producing forms. The important thing is that when you produce a shape, a form, that is an act. Our locomotion is not motion, our locomotion is posturing: it’s a very rapid change of position, of posture of your body. It’s a very fluid anatomy, but posturing. Maybe you posture not only in an anatomical way, you can do it in a psychological way [too]. Look at the structure of your mind, how you think, how you feel, your ideas, your views. It all has a kind of morphology. Everywhere, motion is the primary thing. Therefore, that is essential for living nature, that it is in motion, and that the act of motion produces facts, and facts can be space, can be body, can be thoughts, can be acts. So it’s not that we first have a body and the body starts to move. No. The body is in motion from the very beginning onward, producing bodies, producing brains, producing genes and so on. That’s what I learned from the embryo.

BT: When I interviewed her, Joanne Avison said that you used to always tell people “ask the embryo” when you’re trying to learn something about the human body. That’s been a very helpful anchor for me.

JV: Yeah. One of my great inspirations was Erich Blechschmidt, the German embryologist. He said, for example, don’t consider soul or psyche as something that is added later to the body: you are a psychosomatic being from the very beginning. The first thing you have to do is behave in your forms, in your anatomy. He then said that the soul is pre-exercised in the body. Your body is an act, your body is behavior, and there you pre-exercise acts that you later can perform physiologically. That makes the embryo and the body so interesting. If you want to understand human behavior, let’s say in a psychological way, you also have to look at [the person’s] physiology, anatomy, and morphology, because there he is also exposing human behavior. The way we shape our body is a kind of free exercise of what we later on are capable of doing physiologically, psychologically. That for me was an eye opener.

Since then, I see that anatomy forms and shapes can also tell about psychology and about behavior, maybe about meaning and about what we are doing. What is expressed when I make a fist? As an anatomist and as a scientist, I’m only interested in the genes and the nerves and the muscles in the brain that causes the fist. But the most important thing in me making a fist is that I want to express something with it! I’m expressing something with this body, with this form, with this fist, and that is phenomenology. Phenomenology tries to understand the forms as expression. What is our body telling about us? It is not just that you first have a body coming out of evolution, then it started to be human. Maybe evolution is an act of trial and error, a process of trying to become a human being. Maybe evolution is our embryonic development also, but on a larger scale. Forms as behavior are telling me the meaning of these forms, telling me what we are doing, what we are, what we are going to do, and what we are meant for. Maybe that sounds too religious, but okay.

BT: I’m wondering if I can drop the concept of fascia in here. I saw you speak at the most recent Fascia Research Congress, and I’ve read your work in the compendium book on fascia that Robert Schleip [helped] put together. I know this is something you’re well versed in. One of the things that I think about with fascia is that it’s very faithful to your actions and your emotions. If I’m depressed, I tend to tighten up around my chest. When I sort some of those things out, I present in the world differently, my fascia is different. How do you see fascia weaving into this conversation, no pun intended?

JV: When I met fascia for the first time, the first association I made was with the meso. Blechschmidt was the first and, as far as I know, the only embryologist who said, let us stop talking about these germ layers ectoderm, endoderm, and mesoderm. He said it is too anatomical to talk about three layers. We do not have three layers. We have two body walls, the ectodermal body wall, the endodermal body wall, and there’s an in between. There is an innerness and the innerness is represented by the primitive fascia. The meso is therefore not a mesoderm, it is a meso quality, it is the connective tissue. That is where, so to say, the body processes start and are realized, the body processes that have to do with your innerness. I have two body walls to deal with the world, to act with the world, to perceive the world, and to digest the world. In between the two layers, there is my actual innerness.

Then I started to think, isn’t that what Andrew Taylor Still is also talking about? That your fascia, your connective tissue, is much more than only your connective tissue, your skeleton, it is also your blood, and it is your locomotor system. Fascia as the organ, the world of your innerness, not your insides but your innerness. There where you weave, where you dwell, in between your body. Over this enormous matrix of blood and connective tissue, including sense organs and nervous tissue, you can organize your inner world, your inner metabolism, your innerness, in a morphological, physiological, psychological way. Why isn’t the meso considered as the domain of soul or my innerness or my psyche? That’s just a general notion that I’ve tried to work out during the last years.

BT: I feel like that illustrates to a certain degree this idea that the embryo is not past tense that it’s still unfolding in our adult organism.

JV: It also is related to my view that it is not in the ectoderm alone, it is not in my brain, my nervous tissue alone, that I live or where I am conscious. There is also consciousness, on a lower level of consciousness, there is awareness in my heart, in my liver, and in my muscles. I worked for many years with athletes who had to perform and they said, “Jaap, you never perform with your head. You have to get rid of your head when you do your jumps in the stadium.” People always think, “I have to concentrate in order to perform.” No – I have to ‘de-centrate’, so to say, to get rid of my head. In my innerness, that is where I know exactly how it works, what to do. And there’s a lot of mind and knowledge and awareness in my body, in my muscles, in my stomach, in my liver, whatever.

Soul is not only in the brain; in your brain you get the possibility to become aware of your body, aware of your soul. I think that our brain is the organ where we can have the most distance between ourselves as participants in the body and ourselves as observers of ourselves. There’s the old duality again, that is the duality of being an observer and being a participant. The participant is the body that you are, and the observer is the body that you have, and both realities are there. Scientists and neurophysiologists try to convince us that there is only one reality, the reality of the observer, and then you have to think that all your soul processes are taking place in the brain. We are processes in the body and there’s another reality that we get lost from if we go on thinking we are walking brains or whatever.

BT: It’s so interesting that we’re at a time in our culture where we’re always looking for the one ‘important thing’.

JV: We are addicted to causality. Why? Because if you find a cause, of your motion for example, then you can manipulate. That is the only motive. We are addicted nowadays to genes, brains, and body because if you can find out what causes our disease or causes our behavior, then you can manipulate it. That’s what we love. Of course, that is very helpful – it saved the life of my wife, so to say. I know how important that can be that you can manipulate and influence things. But it’s not the only reality.

BT: Right. We lose something when that becomes the only thing, the only focus. You have a very potent phrase that I read, where you said, “the body does not have a soul, the body is a soul”. To close, I just wanted to ask if there was any part of that you wanted to dive into a little more.

JV: I think that many people think that you have a soul. I think that is related to the fact that many people experience themselves as two entities. On the one hand there is the body and they talk about my adrenaline or my brain or my hippocampus is doing this or doing that. And on the other hand, they have their consciousness or they have their soul. They live it as two separate domains. Are we souls? With that I mean that soul and body are not separate entities or separate domains, it is one. There are only two polarity dimensions, let’s say dimensions of space and time for example, but it’s one. Therefore, it is not a body producing a soul, it’s a soul producing a body. It is constantly a dialogue between the dimensions. We do not have a body. We are a body. And when you are a body, you are a soul that is that body. It’s playing with words but I want to express with that that we are one and not two. We are of course a duality, but we are a non-dual duality or a non-dual polarity. That is important for me, that you think in twofoldness, and not in duality as separate entities.

BT: Thank you so much. I honestly believe that if your work could be more digested by culture, the world would change. I’m very grateful for the work that you’re doing.

Bibliography

van der Wal, J. 2012. “The Embryo in Us – A Phenomenological Search for Soul and Consciousness in the Prenatal Body.” Available at www.portlandanthroposophy. org/the-embryo-in-us-article.

Brooke Thomas is a Certified Rolfer who has been practicing for over fifteen years. A selfadmitted body nerd, she teaches movement and hosts The Liberated Body Podcast as a continuing-education resource for those in the manual and movement therapy fields. Visit www.liberatedbody.com for more episodes, or visit www.newhavenrolfing.com for more information about Brooke and her practice. Jaap van der Wal is a physician and scholar whose contribution to the field of embryology has included describing the bridge of science and spirituality. He is self-described as an embryologist on the search for spirit. His current focus is his work on Embryo in Motion (www.embryo.nl).From Embryo to Adulthood[:it]From Embryo to Adulthood[:pb]From Embryo to Adulthood[:]