The Body is a Laser
by Douglas Von Kohorn

February 2019

Lasers are purely a function of the material on which they're built. Nothing else. Every material has a natural potential. If the material's natural potential is green photons, then you can only use it to generate green lasers. Once generated, this green laser will travel much farther than any lightbulb of similar wattage -- but it must be green. Anything else will be significantly weaker. For lasers, the material fixes the resonance.

How do lasers apply to bodies? Well, turns out, we homunculi all share the same underlying material. We all grew from the same programming. Our joints and tendons and organs all positioned in the same places with the same ratios and connections etc etc. This means there exists a good, a better, and a best way to recruit the human body's potential. Remind you of lasers? I hope so!

So, if we want to maximally recruit the potential of the body we're given, it means we have to give up significant control over the orientation of the effort. In laser-language, our body wants to be a green laser, and if you make it blue you're going to have to dampen the potential of the entire operation.

Unlike the neocortex, the laser potential of your body system isn't something you create -- it's something you discover -- a property of the material at its most alive. People who misunderstand the principle at the individual level often develop irrational attachments to purist, aesthetically harmonized lifestyles -- but this is a low-recruitment-potential lifestyle designed around adopted beliefs rather than discovered resonances.

What I found out with Katonah: the dissonance between where your body wants to go versus the most resonant internal orientation can be quite large. You'll want to be in your heels or your toes, left or right leg, hips askew, chest twisted forward or back. Often a combo of all. In order to get into a laser-body state, however, you must lose your first nature to find your laser-nature. The key is to mercilessly prune away things that inhibit the snowballing recruitment of body potential. Crud turns exponential (spherical) processes into linear or (ack!) even sub-linear ones.

In other words, focus is a property of the material, not your intentions about how to use it. In informational domains, the medium determines the message. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are all different mediums with different communication dynamics. In physical domains, we're all working with the same body material. We are humans in search of our laser-nature. Like lasers, a single misplaced dissonance can dampen the whole show. But this is not fragility, since you can always identify, eliminate, and replace such false notes with effort. Do it enough and you get a laser-body condition.

The key to learning this art is being willing to make the recruitment-orientation tradeoff: tap more of a system's potential by letting go of attachment to preconceived notions of what the system is for. From the outside, a laser-like body looks like inscrutable magic. But there's no missing it -- you know it's highly alive.