Redefining the body (1)

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

5:35 a.m. Shall we dance?

Let’s see if we can make this session “Defining the body,” or something like.

Okay.

The first thing to realize is that “the body” is a term describing less an object than a stretching-over, a considering-as-one what is actually many things.

Not so different from your definition of us as individuals who are in fact communities.

No, not so different. In fact you may wish to consider

Sorry, off wool-gathering. Let me set my switches.

Consider yourselves mind/body/spirit, as was fashionable not so long ago.

• Mind, you know, is community of communities, with no absolute boundaries anywhere.
• Body, similarly, is a community of intelligences working together to allow physical existence. Thus, tissues, organs, mechanisms, each with its own community of animating specific intelligences. Processing sugars, as we say.
• Spirit, from the point of view of the 3D individual (only) may be looked at as a community of souls, each with a lifetime’s experiences, preferences, skills, scars.

Well, within this framework, body is a collection – or, say, a hub – of many forms of intelligence that have to work together.

What you are meaning to say is coming vaguely into view, but only vaguely. Am I being slow, or is it a very foreign idea?

What is foreign to one will be familiar to another. The same holds true of time: What fits only awkwardly with one time will be natural to another. We will proceed, and things ought to smooth out.

Body is

• Flesh, organs, “the physical.” Everyone sees this much. But what is it they are seeing?
• Each organ has its own specialized intelligence, as we said. It also has habits, accustomed ways to do things. Where can those habits come from, but one of two ways?
  1. Memories via the intelligence that animates them.
  2. Patterns inherent in that flesh’s DNA.

As in, influences transferred from one person to another following transplants or stem-cell injections?

Yes, because those physical cells come with their own non-3D attachments. In a sense, in transplanting physical tissue you are also transplanting another stylized intelligence.

I take that expression to mean, awareness that has taken on the coloration of a given person (the donor). You have called our minds habit-systems in the past. Are you now also calling us stylized intelligences?

A little slower. Many a term has yet to be defined, many a relationship sketched, before we can reassemble an understanding.

Okay.

• Body is also the continually adjusting interface between the individual subjectivity (“you”) and the shared subjectivity (“other,” or, “the world”).

This is still too scattered, isn’t it? Even with bullets.

As usual, a fundamentally new bundling of information requires a bit of fumbling before we can find the way to organize the explanation.

I’m not complaining, just noticing.

Perhaps noticing will underline the fact that we are not just dishing up more of the same old New Age clichés, nor the standard “scientific” (materialist) positions, nor in fact any existing model. We are giving you something new, and if (as we have cautioned several times) it is taken to be “only X” or “nothing but X in different words,” you will have no chance of actually learning something. If, having considered it in its own terms, you then see analogies to other things you have read or heard, fine. Well and good. Comparison may help identify. But what kills new understanding is being sure in advance that the new material is “nothing but.”

So now we will go at it again.

• The body is a space-suit, or diving-suit, yes. That is, it is a mechanism that holds you in an alien environment so you may function there.
• As a mechanism, it is complex, interrelated, continually adjusting, gradually ceasing to replicate itself. It is created to have a limited shelf-life. That is, no one is born to live forever.
• However, even as you look at the body as a mechanism, remember that the parts are themselves no different from the materials of the shared subjectivity. That is, the body exists in the way that matter exists, and only that much. All the world is mind-stuff: Should you expect that your body is something else? What would that something else be?
• Now, this mind-stuff collection of mechanisms, connected in so many ways to the shared subjectivity of which its substance comes (that is, its physically transmitted characteristics), and connected therefore to all the intelligences of various orders that connect to physical matter, also connects to and responds to you.
• As always, “Which you?” As your awareness and mastery changes, the “you” in effect changes. Do you suppose the body can be unaffected by the changes on the opposite end of the “mind-body” connection?

We are trying to find words to convey a sense of the body as, not some inert piece of meat that responds to stimuli, and not some localized collection of functions operating in relative isolation from the rest of the world, but a fuller functioning active intelligence connecting and responding to and influencing what is commonly called spirit, and matter, and minds, and environment, in all directions including backward and forward in time.

Smallwood’s back, and mine.

Exactly. The connection was there. It required activating, which was a choice within an awareness, but it was there via the strands. Naturally you didn’t stop to consider that “the body” might have something to do with that transformative event. For one thing, your careless definition of the body wouldn’t have provided any anchor-points for the concept. For another, the massive changes in belief-systems involved in allowing awareness of the event (rather than writing it off to fantasy) overwhelmed any other effect. But you will notice, it was the change in your back that persuaded you to consider it and not write it off. And it was the distress of your back, before that, that let you “fantasize” a contact with Joseph that would not have “made sense” had you tried to justify it. That is, it wouldn’t have fitted in with your predominant belief-systems, hence, wouldn’t have made sense.

A while ago, we contacted JFK and speculated about his repeated collapses of health and spontaneous, seemingly miraculous, recoveries. I speculated that it was because of a continuing pressure within him.

No, say it carefully. This will be important to some.

I thought, on the one hand, Jack grew up with his father’s towering expectations overshadowing his life. He loved his father deeply, and feared his displeasure, and strove to mold himself to meet Joe’s expectations. But Jack was also fiercely independent, continually resistant to any reining-in by anybody or anything. Whether passive-aggressively (if that was the only option) or openly defiantly, he spent years obeying and disobeying, pleasing and defying, following first the one fish, then the other fish, as they say of Pisces people’s sudden reversals. (He was not a Pisces; it is only an expression.)

The strain on his constitution was extensive and more or less unremitting. Periodically, some safety-valve would blow, and there would be young Jack at death’s door again. His father counted four times that Jack had been given the last rites. And then he would bounce right back. Years, periodically at death’s door, then back again. And the result was not a crippled convalescent existence, but an active mental and physical lifetime, lived within his limits – or beyond them, sometimes. Very improbable, all of it.

Yet he concurred with your analysis. Now, consider. Such a pattern cannot be “mental” or even “spiritual” and not involve bodily intelligence. Even a psychosomatic illness is objectively real in its own terms; the person cannot wish it away, but must rebuild structures. (Indeed, that’s that the illness is there for, in a way: It is a signpost saying, “Here’s an area needing work.”)

Jack Kennedy’s illnesses were not psychosomatic in any meaningful sense, and yet they were the indirect result of mostly unconscious psychic stresses. You could say that his bodily suffering allowed him to be himself as an impossible stretch between his father’s expectations (hence his own, at second hand), and his actual bent.

It is almost a shame to pause here, but we are past our usual hour. Shall we continue from here next time?

In a way, we have hardly begun considering the body. But as to what tomorrow will bring, we’ll have to see.

Does “Defining the body” still work?

Might be more accurate to call it re-defining the body.

All right. Till next time, then, and our thanks as always.