part 3. personal gestalt dreamwork on a picture instead of a dream. FRANKLYN WEPNER JUNE 2009 fwep@earthlink.net LM 5. HEIDEGGER & NACHMAN REFERENCE: MARTIN HEIDEGGER, "THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART", IN "PHILOSOPHIES OF ART AND BEAUTY", ED. HOFSTADTER & KUHNS (1) THE "OPEN" & THE PURE PROCESS MODE (2) THE TEMPLE, PLATO & MASHIACH (3) CONSECRATING THE TEMPLE AS RITE OF INITIATION (4) NACHMAN'S TEMPLE IN BRATSLAV (5) CLAPPING HANDS AS ALCHEMICAL MAGIC (1) THE "OPEN" AND THE PURE PROCESS MODE H 681. Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work is the fighting of the battle in which the unconcealedness of beings as a whole, or truth, is won. FW: The above is a typical sentence taken from Martin Heidegger's essay, "The Origin Of The Work Of Art". This sentence is loaded with Heidegger technical jargon: world, earth, battle, unconcealedness, beings and truth. Also in this sentence, these terms are laid out in an interlocking manner such that words that we thought we understood suddenly become very strange to us. We are mystified. But let us try now to decode this knot of dialectical jargon. Decoding even this one sentence will reveal much of the underlying logic of Heidegger's philosophy of art. Our project in this short essay is to see whether Heidegger's recondite reflections about art can shed valuable light on the work of Nachman of Breslav. We have been approaching Nachman mainly from the perspective of Isaac Luria's dialectic of conflict, which was Nachman's own reference point in 1800. But doing so required jumping right away into the tsimtsum theory, and we risked explaining something very obscure in an even more obscure manner. Fortunately, we have available a magic carpet tool from the performing arts which in one quick, painless stroke will land us in the middle of the dialectical universe of both Heidegger and Luria and allow us from those two starting points to converge on our primary target, the work Nachman of Breslav. This tool is a world class technique with a long history. It constitutes a major foundation of the dance theaters of Asia, and in today's avant garde theater world it is known as the "pure process mode". Again I express my gratitude to the Mabou Mines Theater Company for initiating me into this bit of esoterica. FW: The pure process mode as performed looks a lot like Tai Ch'i, but then again you might not know about Tai Ch'i either so I'll start from the basic idea. A group of performers is told to focus on awareness rather than thinking. Like in Gestalt Therapy, awareness here includes contact with one's environment using senses, with one's body using proprioception, and with one's fantasies. The stress in this exercise is on environment awareness. Along with work on awareness, the group is instructed to begin a holistic, total movement of all body parts, very slowly and very relaxed so as not to let the movements or body tension interfere with the awareness. All this is here and now work, passively responding to what is happening in one's awareness. What to do next stems from passively reacting to what already is happening, and going with that flow in a non-deliberate manner. Philosophically, what we have here is "induction" or Platonic collection, or gestalt formation, in the sense that from the particular details the performer infers a single new encompassing idea which then becomes the rule that guides his next choices. From the ground of what is happening arise potential figures, weak gestalts, until one of them becomes the strong gestalt or monad which then is the new world of that emerging moment. And here we have Heidegger's key term, "world", emerging as a product of inductive, intuitive thinking. The world that worlds, using Heidegger jargon, is the emerging gestalt or figure that then is the organizing center of the organism's existence until the next strong gestalt (world) takes over. For Gestalt Therapists a neurotic is an individual who interferes with, who interrupts his natural figure/ground process such that strong gestalts do not congeal and the ground keeps churning up weak gestalts aimlessly. FW: So far we have presented half of the pure process mode concept, the side of passivity and induction. The other, complementary side of the pure process mode is the active, deliberate, deductive side. Here is how that works. As I am doing my awareness and movement exercise, I am instructed also to allow any particular focus that emerges strongly enough from the ground that it attracts my conscious attention to continue to develop, and then I see where it takes me. In other words, I am looking for associations, or what Nachman would label "behinot". This is an aspect of that and that is an aspect of the next thing, endlessly. The main motor of the pure process mode is the passive, induction side, but riding on it is a series of deductive moments or deliberate active choices to accept the h