New Forest: A Bodymind Philosophy

Question: You have said that the New Forest Way is a “Bodymind Philosophy.” You’ve also said that it is a mystic tradition. Could you please go into more detail? What are your philosophic goals? I am currently studying philosophy in college and am intrigued by your perspective. I am very interested. –M.G. Boston, Mass.


Philosophy, Love, Truth

Philosophy, in my view, is the love of wisdom and knowledge. It is not, however, the act of possessing wisdom or owning knowledge. And it is never about controlling it. The New Forest Way, as a philosophy, deliberately strives to engineer a state in which the force, power and energy of authentic ideas --that is, truth—completely penetrates our bodymind; soaks into our very existence. Thus infused, we are elevated by it.

Being a bodymind philosophy means, by definition, that we use our flesh, bones, blood, as well as, our will, thought and imagination as our primary tools of investigation. We physically move, breathe, dance and gesture our way into the world of experience. But we are not searching for concepts. A conceptualized idea can never be assimilated into the totality of our deeper self; it can never nourish our soul. That is the function of real ideas, alone. Pythagoras, for example, who gave us the word “philosophy,” did not see numbers as concepts. They were, instead, profound ideas that served as guides to self-inquiry. They were not abstract notions to be ruminated over or employed merely to organize other things. He felt that numbers could be used to directly transform one’s fundamental experience of being.

In that same light, a New Forest Cultivator uses their bodymind to engineer a new way of knowing and experiencing. It is an altogether contemporary paradigm that is based in the ancient idea of knowing the cosmos by knowing oneself. This, of course, depends upon developing new powers of perception with which to touch the cosmos. To that end we employ techniques that expand our instruments of perception; the bodymind. The intellect is only useful after perception takes place. Then it can organize the ideas and discoveries that result from our new way of experiencing life. This entire process fosters an intimate contact with the universe unheard of in ordinary quarters and, as a result, the Cultivator is changed forever. A bodymind exploring the consensual realm through the process of New Forest will encounter flashes of intuition and an amplification of the senses. The sensory input and intuitive insights simultaneously interact with the uniqueness of the cultivator’s personality and life-experiences. What is produced can only be described as cascades of wisdom, sensation and knowledge coming from thoroughly non-ordinary quarters. This is an event in which miracles are revealed as ideas and ideas as miracles. Once encountered, all that remains is for the Cultivator to manage the experience through meditation and reflection. We do not rush to certitude, nor do we hasten to fashion answers. We, literally, play with the ideas and symbols we discover allowing each to take us to the center of our experience and not the periphery. Simply put, we allow the miracles to open our eyes. Then, quite unlike most philosophic investigators, the New Forest Cultivator directly implements this new vision and brings it to bear in his everyday life. At this point, the world, de-sanctified by solitary intellectualism, once again becomes sacred.


The Mystical Foundation

I often describe the New Forest Way as a spiritual technology. Indeed, it is a modern mystic tradition with very ancient roots. Early Chinese mystics took for granted something that modern science is only now beginning to accept. Namely, that there is a fundamental unity between an observer and what is being observed. Said another way, we are an integral part of any moment in spacetime that we experience. At its simplest, cultivating the New Forest is the act of mindfully choosing to observe one moment in spacetime. When we approach that moment via the art and craft of the New Forest Way, a mystical joining is engineered. During this process, we are able to glimpse aspects of reality previously hidden from normal perception. Conventional assumptions about time, matter, space and energy, quite literally, vanish. We are able to look deeply into the moment and see elegant connections to past and future events. More importantly, we are also able to look deeply into our own selves and see holographic connections to hidden talents, profound wisdom and sophisticated knowledge. When a Cultivator, initiated and trained in the New Forest Way, makes contact with a given moment in spacetime he knows that he is not merely observing a pre-existing snapshot of reality. Rather, by mystically observing it, he is actually creating an interactive motion picture of reality that relates to him specifically and his place in the universe. This kind of authentic investigation is an act of personal registration in which the New Forest Cultivator is able to access the continuous flux and flow of the energy and potential from which all things arise.

This, at the very least, should be the goal of any philosophy that is worthy of the name.


Sifu John Bright-Fey