Emergence Part 2: On the Nature of The Fracture
You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley / You’ve got to walk it for yourself / Ain’t nobody can walk it for you / You’ve got to walk it for yourself -Traditional Spiritual
This is the 2nd essay in a series of six. If you have not read the first one, you can find it (and more information about the nature of this essay series) by reading the initial essay, linked below.
On the Nature of the Fracture
To heal an ailment, you need to know how to identify it and how to cure it (or, at least mitigate its harms). You need to know how to set a broken bone, or to treat a cold, or clean a wound - if you don’t understand the ailment, how can you hope to cure it?
I am rather focused on this idea of the relationship between the soul and body fracturing and how to heal such fractures - so I think it makes sense for me to try to better describe what I mean when I discuss this fracture. I do not discuss this fracturing to suggest that I have a literal understanding of the ailment. This shouldn’t be alarming though - for most of human history, we didn’t understand the role that bacteria and viruses played in making us sick, yet we, as humans, came up with countless remedies and cure-alls to alleviate the harms that they cause. What is important though is to provide a framework and lens through which to better ground what I wish to talk about.
Simply put, a fracture of the soul and body occurs when we accept an idea in our mind that is purely an illusion (i.e., a “false illusion”) - in other words, an idea that is not congruent with the physical world. It then becomes the souls responsibility to reconcile the contradictory nature of the idea in question and physical reality - as a result, our soul upholds a vision of reality that our body is not living in. That is the nature of the fracture.
I am holding it as an axiom that there is a physical world and that it is what it is1 - while our subjective lens can view and abstractify the world in countless ways, the physical world exists as it is.2 Importantly, the physical world is not static - it is dynamic, fractal, and explosive. A star does not sit in the sky - it is born, it burns, and it consumes itself. As humans, we live in a similar way - so, when I say that our bodies “are what they are”, I do not mean that they are inherently static, stationary objects. I mean that our bodies are dynamic, complex, infinite, fluid entities that even the most modern, advanced sciences struggle to fully comprehend.
The body is what it is, in all of its dynamic glory. Our bodies are complex antennae, capturing an endless stream of energies, flung at us by the universe. Our bodies are machines of action, capable of altering the physical realm around us. The body, as a functioning unit, does not deal in illusions.
The soul on the other hand is well-versed in illusion.3 The body is being bombarded with energy, constantly. This energy is what it is - it is the light shining in our eyes, the sound of the wind rustling the trees, the smell of fire in the distance. To make sense of everything the body is receiving, we must weave an illusion that is comprehensible to ourselves. It’s all energy - our soul tells the story that makes it all make sense.
Each story the soul weaves is an illusion - even if it is accurate, the story is being generated within and from ourselves. There is no story of the Sun and stars outside of those that tell it - the Sun and the stars simply exist as the Sun and stars, they do not weave their own narrative, nor do they speak of themselves. So, in a sense it is our curse that our souls must navigate the physical realm using the crutch of illusion.4
We can never fully understand the Universe - we live within it. Some people may equate what I mean to the idea of God, in that, we can never truly understand or know everything. Einstein once equated trying to understand the laws of the Universe to a lay-person trying to figure out how a pocket watch works just by looking at it from the outside. People can come up with plenty of plausible theories of how the watch works, but, if one cannot ever open the watch, then they can never truly know what makes it tick. In this way, our understanding of the physical realm will always be an illusion of sorts - a set of plausible theories.
A healthy illusion is one that we need not constantly maintain. The idea that the Sun makes us feel warm does not need to be put into words to be remembered, nor does the idea that the Sun can burn our skin - the Sun does make us feel warm and, often, exposure to the Sun does burn our skin. We can comprehend that without weaving an illusion - it is what it is. We don’t have to weave an illusion because we experience the Sun - any effort to put our experience of the Sun into words will, at best, diminish the experience and, at worst, misrepresent it.
That is why so many cultures have worshipped the Sun - because it is quite clear, without spinning any illusions, that the Sun is a source of life. Our body feels and witnesses what the Sun is and our souls trust this understanding. Our souls and our bodies are unified in this way, no illusion needs to be spun to maintain this understanding.
We live in a society, however, where illusions are necessary to comprehend the world around us. We rely on the illusions to understand the world - our souls accept illusions and force them upon our bodies. This is what causes the fracture to occur. The body, as a whole, deals with the physical realm, deals with what is as it is. The body cannot mislead the soul through illusion - for the body simply senses and interacts with the physical realm. Certainly, the body can be tricked, can be misled, can malfunction - but, it does not deal in fabrications and counterfactuals. The soul, however, can accept illusions that do not match the physical realm.5 The body cannot follow the soul down such a path and, as a result, these two aspect of the singular self are rended from one another.6
You see, even the “soul” is what it is. It is clearly beyond our comprehension to know what the soul is or if it even exists. It is a useful illusion that we can weave to help us make sense of the human condition. Throughout these essays, I use the term “soul” with the understanding that it is a part of the physical realm, specifically, that it is an aspect of the body and that it is there regardless whether we name it or not. However, naming it is quite often useful in understanding the reality of our bodies and who we are as people.
When our soul accepts an illusion that contradicts some aspect of the physical realm (i.e., a “false illusion”), then we must choose between trusting our soul or our body. By accepting the false illusion, we are choosing to trust our soul over our body. However, it is our body that is grounded in reality and has the ability to make sense of the physical realm - our soul can only manifest itself through illusions. When we trust our soul over our body, then our body suffers because, when our body tries to communicate issues and concerns, it is ignored.
You may notice that there is a relationship between words and illusions. We live in a society where most knowledge is transferred through words. As children, we are taught that illusions are knowledge. We are taught to trust words conveyed to us over the reality that our body perceives. While most children in history have learned about the world around them through their body, through their senses - many of us learned about the illusion of the world solely through words and images. Many of us exist primarily in the world of words - many of us have lived almost entirely among the shadows of reality, never truly engaging with the physical world around us.
As a result, many of us have not learned to recognize the distress signals that our bodies send to us. Many of us have lived much of our lives with our bodies' alarm systems blaring - many of us even take pride in the ways our body malfunctions and falls apart as a result. Severed from our body, we find ourselves trapped within an uncooperative host. Living in a world of illusion, we fail to listen to or even comprehend the ways that our bodies communicate with the soul - we seek further illusion to ease the pain and discomfort we experience.
When our knowing does not match our being, insecurity wells inside of us. We are forced to maintain illusions that our bodies are actively rejecting. Perhaps, as a young boy, you were told that “men never cry”, “men need to always be strong and crying is weak” - yet, there are days when you want to cry, when you aren’t strong. The illusion that “men never cry” forces you to reject your body when it wants to cry - the needs of the illusion take precedent over the needs of the body. As a result the body suffers - this suffering manifests in your physical and mental well-being, you become ill and sick as you tend to the illusion over caring for yourself.
To this point, I have also seemed to suggest that the fracture of body and soul is a binary - we are either unified or fractured. The reality is that these fractures are fractal in nature, building upon themselves - as if we are a pane of glass that has shattered across the floor. Every false illusion we accept leads to another fracturing. Every false illusion creates a new reality that our soul must maintain, as our body is unable to deal in unrealities.
For example, if someone asks you how you are doing and you say “I’m good”, when in reality, you are deeply suffering - then you have created a false illusion of “I’m good” that you are forced to maintain. As a result, your body falls deeper into suffering as you fracture your soul once more with a new false illusion that must be maintained.
At its core, these fractures are created by ideas that sow distrust between our soul and our body. This is why we are a culture of insecurities - a majority of us actively dislike our bodies in some fashion. We don’t like how it looks or how it feels or how it functions - our bodies will not conform to our false illusions. We grow to despise our bodies.
The body is our gateway to reality - it is equipped with all the tools needed to comprehend reality. When we don’t trust or listen to our bodies, our souls have to work very hard to understand reality. Our soul must weave ever-more complicated illusions to do so. We become well-practiced in over-thinking. Since we exist across time (i.e., reality is dynamic, in-motion), our illusions stretch farther and farther out of the present - we spin complex illusions about the past and the future. We dedicate hours to imagining and preparing for a range of potentialities - in other words, when we become severed from our bodies we become deeply anxious people. We become dependent on the power of our own illusions to help us navigate the world and our bodies begin to feel more and more alien.
The severance of the body and soul does not inherently make us ill. It is the fact that we fail to listen to our bodies when it sends us distress signals. Our ship begins to fall apart and we fail to patch the leaks and reinforce the walls. We try to navigate rough waters even though we are in need of care and repair. There is the story of Jason and the Argonauts - Maggie Nelson wrote in awe of the fact that, over time, the ship, the Argo, had been repaired so many times it is not even made out of the materials it was born from anymore, every part eventually replaced. Yet, the ship is still the Argo and it remains sea-worthy because it is cared for.
When the soul becomes severed from the body, we fail to listen to the body when it is in need and we let our bodies fall into disrepair. Many of our bodies barely function as intended - many of us cannot digest food, cannot purify our own blood, cannot breathe air without struggling. Unifying the soul and the body does not cure these ills, but it puts us in a position where we can once again trust our bodies and, by virtue of this connection, provide our bodies with what they need.
Of course, unifying the self does not make us good worker-consumers. We have all gone to work knowing we need rest. We have all purchased cures to our ills, fingers crossed that this new remedy is not another bottle of snake oil. When we are unified, we are able to listen to and trust our bodies and provide ourselves the things we truly need. A commercial on television, a video on the internet cannot so easily sway our actions when we are grounded in the reality of our bodies. When we are unified, we cannot be compelled to work against the interests of our body.
When a bone is broken, it must be re-set so it can heal. The fracture of the soul from the body must, in a similar sense be re-set too. Each false illusion must be brought to the surface and released - this is often a deeply painful process, as we are forced to accept the ways of knowing we have come to depend on are not grounded in reality. When a false illusion is released, we are better able to listen to the needs of our bodies.7 Like a broken bone, the fracture takes time to fully heal once set. When we release a false illusion, we are able to tend to the real needs of our body, and our overall health improves as a result.
For me, one of the most daunting aspects of this journey has been realizing that the fracturing of my body and soul was not a simple clean break. There have been innumerable false illusions that have scattered the shards of my soul across the floor like glitter. Each false illusion demands we become someone that defends and depends upon (is addicted to) that illusion - and so, filled with innumerable false illusions, we become innumerable people, an army dedicated to defending each one. Our bodies become gnarled and twisted like the surface of a battlefield beneath the boots and tires and tanks of these illusory armies.
Daunting, because each time I release a false illusion, it feels that another rears its head before me. There is the joke that “I wish life would stop teaching me so many lessons” - as long as we maintain and deify false illusions in our mind, reality will have a harsh lesson for us to learn. Which is all to say, this journey of healing is a challenging, difficult road to walk. No matter how effectively I communicate with you, the healing journey is one we must each walk on our own. It is truly terrifying to release our false ideas of reality, ideas which hold our sense of self up like rickety scaffolding. It feels like we might truly fall apart, cease to be, if we do so.
There are, no doubt, days I wish there were not more lessons to be learned, days where it feels like to great a burden to bear. But, there will always be such lessons when we hold false illusions, our bodies will always suffer needlessly when we cling to false illusions. False illusions give us a great sense of safety, but this is because when we live in the shadows we are sheltered from the true nature of reality and ourselves. We are sheltered from the immense beauty that exists across the macro- and microcosms we inhabit.
The Universe we inhabit is one of creation. The Universe gave birth to our Sun and the Sun to our Earth and our Earth to the oceans and the land and flora and fauna. We are made in this likeness, imbued with the great power of creation, for creation is the essence of being - creators of homes and families and farms and art and culture and tradition. Creators of a rich inner world within ourselves as well! When we step into the world unified, we burn as brightly as the Sun and, from the rays of our light, life springs up around us. Our power as people is raw, holy, and majestic - when we are used to living in the shadows, our own light can feel like too much to bear.
This is all to say that there are great gifts to be won if we walk down this healing path. This path is daunting and the idea of the gifts we may receive may terrify us. Yet, to stay consumed by shadows is a commitment to dying in the unknown - like a star, we are born, we burn, and we die. When we cannot trust our body, we cannot trust reality - and when death approaches, we will not understand what we are experiencing, for we have never learned to trust our bodies or reality. Severed from our bodies, we commit ourselves to a living hell and a terrifying death.8
When we re-set the soul so it may heal, when we release the false illusions that disconnect us from our body, we give ourselves the gifts of living and dying well. We give ourselves the gift of trusting ourselves, of trusting our bodies, of trusting the reality around us that we perceive. We give ourselves the gift of living and dying well, even amongst the ceaseless sufferings of reality.
Perhaps not far off from the Buddhist idea of dharma.
I, of course, accept that there are other epistemological vantage points - that perhaps the world is subjectively generated in our minds or [insert some other philosophically dense rendering of reality]. However, in a practical sense, it feels quite clear that we live within the same physical reality.
You may notice that I am not including the idea of the “mind” in this discussion of body and soul - for how I am thinking, it does not make sense to me to include that third dimension. The body is physically what we are (this includes our literal brain) and the soul is the consciousness which our body produces (or, perhaps, the soul is the consciousness that occupies our body). Or maybe, the soul is the microcosm that is born and emerges within us.
This curse has been well-understood by humans for millenia - Eve ate the apple.
I like to play a game when I write about this kind of thing - how long will it take before I explicitly reference the Allegory of the Cave.
It also follows that everything I am writing is, in fact, an illusion. Even conceptualizing the notion of “soul” is an illusion. The “soul” is a construct of our collective consciousness, which helps us navigate what it is to be a conscious, sentient being. We are what we are - it is generally helpful to refer to the notion of a “soul” when discussing consciousness. However, we, as conscious, sentient beings know what it is to be a conscious, sentient being regardless of whether we have ever come across the idea of the “soul”.
We can return to the idea that “men can’t cry” - this illusion stops men from listening to the cues our body gives us that signal that we need to cry. When we release this false illusion, we provide ourselves permission to cry when our body calls for it.
While not my intent to reflect explicitly on specific religions, I think thinking of the severance of soul and body provides an important lens for examining the ideas of heaven and hell. In that, heaven is that state where our body and souls are unified and hell is the state where we are severed. Through this lens, a “sin” is any act which acts to sever the soul from the body - I think the concept of “sin” becomes far more relevant and relatable when understood in this light.