Emergence Part 4: Knowing With Our Body and Finding a Home in the Physical World
Disconnected from our bodies / We are disconnected from the Universe
This is the 4th 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.
Knowing With Our Body and Finding a Home in the Physical World
In discussing the severance of the soul from the body and arguing that we should strive to re-unify them when this fracture occurs, I am hinting at (but glossing over) a rather fundamental philosophical conversation that ought to be discussed or, at least, brought up. That is the mind-body problem, which strives to determine if the immaterial soul is a distinct entity from the body (i.e., “dualism”) or if the soul and body are actually just aspects of one singular being (i.e., “monism”).
Our personal orientation to this question will likely depend on the relationship between our own soul and body - when we are living as a fractured self, we will feel intensely the division between our body and soul; when we are living as a unified self, we will feel this unity just as intensely. I personally feel the concept of a “soul” is a bit of an illusion - we are trying to name the fact that we are conscious and sentient and we are grappling with the fact that our sentience and consciousness is inextricably tied to our physical form. As such, I have never felt that this “problem” was a very natural one to try to grapple with.
I think the concept of dualism, of a duality between the soul and body, can feel cathartic when we feel like our body is a prison that our soul is trapped within. It can feel cathartic when we do not recognize our body as an extension of our true self.
See, there are many ways of knowing and being, and they are all derived from the capabilities of our physical body to interact with the physical world. To know the Sun is to see it and to feel it. To know a song is to hear it. To know a dish is to taste it. Even to think-a-thought or to experience-a-feeling requires our body, our body capable of thinking thoughts and feeling feelings.
Our mind is a powerful tool for knowing. In this society, we have over-developed the ability of our mind to be and know without tapping into our bodies. We are able to think and comprehend abstract illusions and utilize words in deeply powerful ways, yet we have barely fostered our knowing through our physical senses. It is only natural we would be prone to seeing a distinction between our conscious self and our physical body.1
Yet, there are many ways of knowing and being. Infinite, countless ways. And we step into these ways with our body. Without our body - there is nothing for us to know. When we don’t acknowledge the many ways of knowing, we fail to understand one another. With an over-developed mind, immersed in a rich world of shadows, we think we are wise and disregard the countless other ways of knowing.
Clearly, we are each imbued by some kind of life force that animates us. This is what differentiates a living person from a corpse. This life force is passed to us as the most sacred gift from our parents - imbuing us with our very own. Life is a gift passed down from generation-to-generation - it is not spontaneous, it is emergent. Often when we refer to the “soul”, we are also naming this life force. When we speak of knowing, we speak of what the “soul” comes to understand. I like to think of this life force as a fire that burns in our belly.
When we get caught up in the knowing of the illusions, we get caught up in this one kind of knowing - the knowing of the shadow world. We know about things, not of them. We think about things, we do not breathe and taste and smell and touch of them.
When we open our understanding of knowing and being to include the body as our self, we are able to have a far deeper and richer relation with ourselves and the world. As a musician, I sometimes wonder if the guitar has become an extension of myself, just as much as my hands clearly are. I cannot make music in the same way without an instrument, just as I cannot make music without my voice and my hands - in fact, I visually conceptualize music as if it must be mapped out on the neck of a guitar. It is as if the guitar is both literally and metaphorically a resonance chamber that allows me to amplify the expression of myself. The guitar, for me, has become an instrument through which I can channel that fire in my belly - through which I can make my being manifest.
And, this is what is interesting (and, perhaps, why I find the mind-body problem uninteresting) - we manifest our life force through countless instruments. Be them musical, or mechanical, or culinary, or agricultural - we are constantly channeling our life force, that soul stuff, into the physical world around us. When we do this, we imbue the physical world around us with ourselves, as though leaving our boot prints in the dirt behind us.
Many of us today are very disconnected from the physical world around us. We eat food that came ready prepared - we do not witness the sowing of seeds, the birth of seedlings, the opening of flowers, and the bearing of fruit. We are deeply disconnected from the Sun and Earth that nourishes us. As a result of this disconnection, we rarely have the opportunity to imbue ourselves into the spaces we occupy - as if we are tenants on this Earth and we are not permitted to paint our doors or fix the leaky faucets ourselves. Many of us have never been given permission to imbue ourselves into the environment we occupy - we have never experienced a deep intimacy with our physical environment.
When we begin tying ourselves back to the Earth, back to the spaces we physically reside, when we begin to till the land and fix the leaky sinks (whether literally or figuratively) around us - we begin to find that we are able to imbue the world around us with our life force. This is why the mind-body problem can feel a bit silly to me - when we are able to live in communion with the environment around us, the line that divides our physical body with the physical world around us begins to blur. It introduces the individual-environment problem, where it isn’t actually clear if we, as individuals, are truly distinct from the environment we occupy.
For we alter the world around us, simply by being present in it - and, by the same extension, the world around us shapes us. This is a constant, dynamic intermingling. When we live in the world of shadows, in the world of illusions, when we get trapped in the idea that our soul may be an entirely different entity than our own body - we are unable to develop a true wisdom of being, we are unable to witness the dynamic interplay between the self and everything that surrounds it. We are unable to witness that the only thing that actually divides us from the Earth we stand on, the air we breath, the light we see, and the people we meet is the idea in our minds that we are distinct.2
When we live among the shadows, we begin to understand ourselves and reality as static, stationary, indefinite, permanent, un-evolving. Our idea of what is becomes rigid, unmoving. We begin to categorize, differentiate - we use only our words to make sense of a world that we don’t realize we are deeply immersed in, physically. We strive to sit atop some Archimedean mount where we can observe all around us and, in our observation, become masters of the universe.
Yet, when we live this way, we become trapped inside our minds. For life is like a rushing river that we have not learned to navigate. And so we sit on the shore and, from this vantage, tell ourselves we understand the river simply because we know its name - we do not let ourselves experience the river, nor do we let ourselves learn from it. When we live in the shadows in this way, we become greedy - we desire to fill our mind with shadows, such as the names of rivers, the equations that dictate fluid dynamics, a memorized list of all the fish that swim in the water. We seek to capture and imprison the physical world by naming everything we see and we call this “wisdom”.
Like many, I read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha in high school and it played an important role in my spiritual growth. It was one of my first exposures to this kind of more holistic spirituality. At the time, I could grasp the shadow of the river - for at the end of Siddhartha’s life, he joins Vasudeva the ferryman and they gain great wisdom simply living with and observing and navigating the waters of the river. As a teenager, I could intellectually understand the metaphor for the river, I could grasp at the shadow of the idea that the river, dynamic, flowing, always changing but ever-present, represented the very nature of the Universe - but, as Vasudeva informs Siddhartha, one cannot gain the true wisdom from the river from the idea of it, one must sit and listen to the river to receive it in its fullness.
Vasudeva says to Siddhartha, “Look here, I am no scholar, I do not understand how to speak. I do not understand how to think, either. I understand only to listen and be pious, I have learned nothing else.” When Siddhartha encounters problems, Vasudeva encourages him to go to the river and listen - answers will come.
See, there are many ways of being and knowing. One may know the names of rivers, yet they may not know the true nature of the rivers. Even as you read what I say, you may recognize that the shadows of my words may point to a rich reality, but in the end you must step forth and let yourself experience reality for yourself. When Siddhartha works to shield his son from the suffering of life, Vasudeva retorts: “Do you really believe you have committed your follies so that your son may be spared them?”
“I understand only to listen” - to learn from the physical world around us, we must be able to hear it, sense it, experience it. We can only begin this journey when our soul and body is unified. For how can we listen, when we don’t trust our ears? How can we see, when we don’t trust our eyes? To sit with the river, to watch it, to experience it, is a practice in presence. It is a practice in accepting that there is no division between the self and the world around it.
One does not have to sit with a river to practice this either - we can listen to the wind, watch birds in the sky, lose ourselves in the spark and crackle of a fire, give ourselves to song and dance, smell the flowers. The river is but an apt example. For the macrocosm lives within the microcosm - we can come into the communion with all of existence by allowing ourselves to melt into the little moment in it that we find ourselves.
We are all born, me, you, plants, animals, rivers, oceans, planets, stars, galaxies, Universes. We all exist as dynamic, flowing entities imbued with the gifts of emergence and creation - from a nursery our Sun was born, then the Earth, then the water, then within the water itself living organisms, and from living organisms all the life on the planet we see today.3 Just as we are children of the Sun and Earth - culture, traditions, our children, our ways of life, our ideas, our beliefs, our joy, and our suffering are born from us and take on a life of their own.
So, we may find a reflection of ourselves in the physical world that we reside in. Experiencing the river is a gateway to experiencing both the dynamism of the Universe and of ourselves. When we train our bodies to listen and experience the world around us, we come into communion with all of existence and we learn, simultaneously, about everything and about ourselves.
When we heal the fractures between our body and soul, we give ourselves the opportunity to heal the fractures between our self and the Universe. When we heal the fractures between our body and soul, we can then embark on the rich journey of listening to and experiencing the Universe. You cannot learn these lessons by reading my words, or anyone else’s words. Heck! Even writing these words is not some kind of evidence that I truly comprehend the reality of what I am speaking about - I have no doubt that my understanding of reality will continue to evolve, just as a river carves deeper and deeper canyons, and that this text represents a snapshot of myself.4 Eventually my hair will turn gray, I will not be the same come tomorrow morning. But, just like the river, you will know me by the same name across time, though, just like the river, water will constantly flow through me, ceaselessly, until I am gone. We are all dynamic, ever-flowing, evolving, growing, expanding - for the macrocosm manifests in the microcosm.
All of this is to say that we, as people, truly are one with everything around us. We spin illusions that allow us to categorize the world around us and divide everything up - though we all know, if you try to draw the shoreline precisely, the next high tide will wash it away. We do not need to draw boundaries and classify things to know that water is wet, that plants bear fruit, that bees sting, that the light banishes the dark - these are things as they are and we need only to accept them to know them to be.
When we unify our soul and body, when we heal the fractures that divide our own self into many pieces, we are able to begin the journey of being and listening. We are able to step into true wisdom, content, because we are able to let ourselves melt into that which is real. We are able to accept the Sun, the Earth, and the River as they are - for we do not attempt to control them through shadows, instead we experience them and we accept them.
It is when we accept reality as it is that we are all able to truly know it. When we learn to accept the world around us as it is, we also learn to accept ourselves as we are. When we come to know the world all around us, we come to know ourselves. We can only receive this gift, however, when we first are able to heal the fractures within ourselves.
As an extension of this thought, when we live solely in the illusions of our thoughts, we become far too comfortable thinking we know the reality of parts of the world we have never truly experienced. Our shadow knowledge gives us a false confidence that we know far more than we do just because we know the names of things. We find our minds living in war-torn countries, despite never experiencing war. We find ourselves developing theories and ideas of hungry people, despite never experiencing hunger. We find ourselves passing judgement on things we actually know nothing of - we fill ourselves with the conceit of wisdom and think ourselves wise.
Now, the pragmatist in you may bristle at the idea of not viewing ourselves as distinct from the world around us - it would make navigating life quite challenging if we did not impose some sense of order on the way the world works. Part of what I am suggesting though is that we can deeply come to know and understand the world and, as result, become master navigators of its waters, simply by allowing the false illusions of division to melt away. The garden you tend to in this life grows because you tend to it. The fruits of your labor are nourished by you just as you are nourished by them.
As a side note, we (speaking as a “Westerner”) tend to fetishize philosophies “of the East” - many of us (I live in the US, for context) who have become disenchanted with modern society sense that there is great wisdom in Buddhism, Daoism, and these other religions. This is often because we are able to more easily digest the parables of these religions in ways that feel healthful. Yet this paragraph I just wrote reads note-for-note like the first chapter of Genesis. Whether we are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, or whatever else - our sacred stories were born from the minds of ancestors before us to help guide us to the same reality, the same physical realm that we all share here on this Earth, beneath this Sun, within this Universe. We get lost when we fail to see our sacred texts as meaningful illusions (parables) guiding us to this reality we all share.
This footnote was written months after the text was written and I laughed out loud (lol) at this sentence because even now many of my ideas have grown in new ways. They have not grown into different ideas (i.e., I have not thrown away the ideas present here in exchange for new ones) - it is more akin to a branch of a tree that grows large enough that it begins to split and grow new branches.