re-fr eng artikel: De gebaren van het mens worden.

THE POET AT WORD:

I cannot yet be born.

The firmament extends from my forehead on,

a membrane, part of me while growing.

My feet dance in the pain

that is called labor. Look, I am tied

to cords, as long as life.

A grand Madonna-blue

inside this woman me completes.

G. Achterberg (Dutch poet)

This picture is by Robert Fischer and is called 'A new day'

If you can spot an embryo hidden in this landscape, you are on the right track.

Embryo in Motion - a Journey into ourselves

Nowadays many people have pitifully little knowledge about our - which in fact is their own - embryonic existence. Yet there are so many ethical, medical and moral decisions and choices being made, so many judgments being pronounced nowadays about embryos or - if you wish, about 'human beings still finding themselves at this stage of their development' - . Who knows how many people there are, who still honestly believe, that an embryo of three weeks old is a sort of ‘cluster of cells’, which can be regarded as nothing but a bit of tissue and a few cells. There also is a category of people who, in the framework of their professional training, have at some stage been introduced to embryology as a discipline of science, and who have been left with the impression of it being a useless bulk of knowledge consisting of many incoherent facts and many difficult words. Maybe left behind with the question What does this all have to do with me as a person?

I had the privilege to meet the embryo in a different manner. In the human embryonic development of the process of becoming human fascinated me above all. If you immerse yourself into the journey of the embryo as being a thrilling process of becoming a human being and you ask yourself the question ‘WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO WHILE BEING AN EMBRYO?’, the way I do, you first have to wipe off ‘the dust’ of the contemporary scientific embryology. That does not see anything but ‘cells, genes, hormones, proteins etc. etc.’ anyway. Fascinating, off course, but far from home! That has precious little to do with becoming a human being.

If, however, you open your heart and try to put yourself into the position of the embryo and join in experiencing the gestures of growing that are taking place there, all at once the embryo will tell you a very different, and then well very profound story. It will tell you the story of becoming a HUMAN BEING, of the struggle of the person and his spirit to come to light through the tough resistance of cells, genes, tissue. A human being performs so much work and lives so intensely while being an embryo!

The only instrument you need are a different 'pair of glasses', however. 'New eyes' so to say. Don’t worry, you don’t have to start floating or ignoring the perceivable facts like cells etc. But by looking at the embryo through a so-called ‘phenomenological pair of glasses’ you can ‘see’ GESTURES (Gestalt if you wish), and getting to know the embryo suddenly becomes a journey into yourself. Nothing human is unbeknown to the embryo. To say it without much ado: “Did you know you had already walked and breathed before you were born?”. The embryo tells the dramatic story of becoming a HUMAN BEING. Surely the greatest essential of a human being is that he/she has (retained) the characteristic of BEING an embryo! This fundamentally distinguishes him from the animals. We carry a unique potency within us, which we owe to our BEING an EMBRYO.

Embryo - a Key to the Mystery of Man

Nowadays science gives many answers, many explanations as to HOW and BY WHAT MEANS. But what about the questions as to WHY and WHERETO? Natural science (including the current embryology) gives no answers to questions concerning SENSE and MEANING.. And how could it? Such questions are not part part of its methodology and its paradigm. It does not consider it to be its business. The only problem with this attitude comes in when ’science’ (including the current embryology), as it often does, claims to have the one and only answer about reality. As if there were no other (scientific) ways and means of acquiring insight into and understanding of man and reality! In my view, after four and a half centuries of so-called positivistic science and Cartesian attitude we have no need for further horizons but for ‘new eyes’.

Personally I can’t be satisfied by arguments like ‘It’s all coincidence’ or ‘It’s nothing but genes, cells and matter’. Not that I shouldn’t want to, or should not be able to THINK in that way, but I EXPERIENCE (daily) life and reality differently. Science and people who are convinced that only the hard and rational reality is THE realty always look at things, the world, man, as if these were outside myself, as if they were objects. Today’s science turns me into an ONLOOKER ('spectator'). "I experience, I feel, therefore I am" is my slogan. As well as "Take for true what you sense, not only what you thínk". I want to TAKE PART in life, the world, nature! I can’t help it, that is the only way I experience it. I experience sense, meaning, mystery, miracle, secret, spirit, creation. And then I should have to suppress all that and deny it as being figments of the imagination, because I should not be able to ’see’ it or ’make it tangible‘? Yet I also want to remain scientific in a modern way. How can that be possible? What to do?

Within the human embryo I have found answers to questions regarding the mystery of man. Questions like Where do we come from? and What could be the meaning of our existence? ? It’s really quite simple. If you don’t enter the marvelous world of the embryo with the detached and cold contemplation of the onlooker, but you open your heart and your soul and join in to EXPERIENCE what’s happening there, you will be able to discover behind the facts nothing less than the activity of SPIRIT. There is nothing illusive or floating about this. You are just left with the enormous satisfaction to discover that it’s possible to RE-UNITE the domains of science and religion, of explanation and understanding, which have been kept more or less strictly separated for so long!

Embryo - a whole evolving World on its own

All you need to do , is to learn understanding the ’language’ of the embryo. Then all at once you can read there about the evolving of the human being and mankind. Old myths will appear in quite a new perspective. As well as that, your own story may gain in depth and perspective through this. The blueprint of every person, the essential ingredients of your existence you can read there within the embryo almost literally(!) and in still the purest form. In image, in gesture the microcosm of the embryo contains a whole macrocosm. “He who does not recognize the small form, will not be able to grasp the larger picture”.

Your whole life long it’s a matter of ’taking off coats’. Thát is the gesture of de-velopment. To be born will turn out to be a gesture of ’dying out of…’. The philosopher Mansukh Patel says: “When we die, we just take off a coat. Actually we don’t do anything else right through our lives. We shed the body of the baby to step into that of a toddler. Next we put on the body of a child, adolescent, adult and so on". The embryo can teach you a great deal about the real dynamics of growth and development, about dying and being born.

In this way your attitude towards the human embryo will undergo a revaluation, too.It won’t be a matter of ’clusters of cells’ or ’nothing but a code on a DNS chain’ or ’just a coincidence’ any longer. Off course, you may still (have to) decide or make choices regarding the life or death of an embryo, or make judgments about sense or nonsense of the embryonic existence, but you will be able to do it with more insight, once you know: What are we actually doing (an who are) while being an embryo?

Want to learn to see with 'new eyes'?

There is a course (seminar, workshop) about 'THE OTHER EMBRYO' (or 'EMBRYO IN MOTION'.) During this seminar you will follow the actual events which mark our embryonic existence embraced by fundamentally getting to know and co-experiencing the mysteries of CONCEPTION and BIRTH. (Hopefully) you will be amazed to learn that a human being does NOT ‘reproduce’ himself, that conception is NOT a matter of ‘making children’, that to be born is a gesture of ‘dying out of a different dimension’, that ‘God’ and 'Spirit’ are no abstract concepts but tangible, recognizable and active principles in human (embryonic) development. If you like you can 'see' incarnation of the 'spirit' into the 'body' as reflected in the gestures of embryonic development. That for instance, if you so wish, you can ‘see’ the incarnation of the ‘spirit’ into the body during the third week of development. It will come out that it is possible to make all this visible by looking at the facts of embryonic existence with ‘new eyes’. It is not true that the human embryo ‘doesn’t have a soul yet’ or ‘still has to receive a soul’, but that it IS soul!

Do not have fear that we are going to 'float' in this seminar. A lot of modern ‘New Age’ thinking moves NEXT TO the factual world of science and biology and hardly looks for any connection with it. Or it appropriates scientific findings to itself without being aware of the paradigm which encompasses these findings (and which consequently belongs to these findings). And in this way it still gets entangled in the disastrous separation of spirit (soul) and body, which the Cartesian philosophy has burdened us with, or the idea, that spirit (soul) is a kind of product of the brain and subsequently of the body. The approach in this seminar has its roots in embryology (as starting point) but tries to enhance ('enlarge') it to become insight ('embryosophy'). In regard to approach and method: we will try to link feeling and thinking, intuition and knowledge, a kind of ’empathetic understanding’, better known as Goethean phenomenology.

About the author

I am Jaap van der Wal. Officially: J. C. van der Wal, MD, PhD. I was born on the 17th of February 1947. In 1973 I graduated from medical school. After that I specialized in anatomy and embryology and lectured in these disciplines at the medical schools of the universities of Utrecht and Maastricht (The Netherlands) and at various paramedical training colleges (such as for physiotherapy, nursing and midwifery), but I have also worked in medical research. I received my Ph. D. for a dissertation on human propriocepsis (sense of posture and locomotion). This concerns my other main interests, i.e. the question: What moves us? What motivates us to move? My main interest, however, is the development of the human embryo along with everything related to this, such as evolution and genetics, and all that in context with the image of man and philosophy of science. I regularly publish articles on these subjects. I was co-editor of the report ’Zit er toekomst in ons DNA?’ (’Is there future in our DNA?’), 1993 and of ’En toen was er DNA’ (’And then there was DNA’), 1999.
Important sources of inspiration for me are the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and the work of the Dutch professor in phenomenological history ('metabletics') Jan Hendrik van den Berg and other phenomenological philosophers. But most of all it is especially by applying the phenomenological approach of Goethe that I manage to bridge the chasm between spirituality and the humanities on the one hand and positivistic natural science on the other hand. Above all I employ this method on the domain of the pre-natal development of the human being.
A third area, which has had my interest for many years, is that of the human body. I published ’Lost Death’, a critical essay about the current image of the body in medical science. At present I work as senior lecturer for anatomy and embryology at the University of Maastricht (The Netherlands) and as free lance teacher at various training courses in the field of ’alternative’ or ’complementary’ medicine, such as yoga-schooling, schooling for art therapy and ante-natal support, moreover the training in osteopathy, Craniosacral Therapy and Polarity Medicine. I give seminars ’Embryo in Motion’ for laymen as well as for professionally interested people as doctors, midwives and other therapists.

If you want to find out more about the course Embryo in motion, please click on the tab 'Course'

If you like to to read something about the PHILOSOPHY BEHIND, I refer to the article 'The speech of the embryo' under the button 'Articles'

Please , send me an e-mail if you have any comment to this page. Go to the tab ''Contact':

Gestures of becoming a human being