Thursday, August 19, 2021
2 a.m. Yesterday you concluded by saying that Jack Kennedy’s “bodily suffering allowed him to be himself.” Shall we continue with that thought?
It will be an interesting thought-experiment, for those who will do it, to consider physical illness (temporary) or condition (chronic) to be the thing that allows you to exist in an inhospitable atmosphere.
Oh, I see where this is going. Very interesting! But it isn’t ten words or less.
Is it ever? Factors contributing:
- Your basic default positions, your psychic equivalent to basal metabolism. Your body’s composition, energy, biases other things being equal.
- The varying “atmosphere” you live in. The shared subjectivity as it manifests, moment by moment or year by year, remembering that really there is one moment, but it manifests differently as you go along.
- Your own reaction to ongoing changes in relationship between your default position and the shared subjectivity as it throws up things in your path.
- Your willed reaction to the same conditions. That is, your intent as it manifests, rather than your innate biases as they manifest.
Now, we doubt that is clear as yet. Help us by restating it, and we will correct as need be.
Who we are – what we are – as we come into the world is one thing. Who we make ourselves (choosing among threads, putting down these, picking up those) changes our relation to the world. This changes our body’s relation to the (rest of) the world, necessarily. And, at the other end of the me/not-me polarity, changes in the world will demand or invite changes in us. In either case, the body is caught in the middle.
Well, “caught in the middle” is a pessimistic way to put it. Say, instead, the body is the interface between the personal subjectivity (which is experienced as “you”) and the shared subjectivity (experienced as “the world,” the “objectively there sea you swim in).
The world view you were born into considers the body all wrong, as it does, in fact, pretty much every aspect of your (our) life. It thinks of the body as:
- A sort of organic mechanism, cunningly designed to convey you through life (usually considered without much attention to trying to define the “you” being considered).
- Intelligent only in the nebulous concept of “instinct,” or “natural processes,” etc. No sense of the body or any of its organs or systems having their own intelligence.
- Hence, the body is assumed to have no ability to communicate, and only limited ability (at best) to respond to your wishes. Mostly it proceeds on autopilot, so to speak.
- The body’s health is seen as a combination of its nutrition and care, plus special attention in the case of illness or injury.
- Illness or birth defect is ascribed to accident, or mysterious chance, or innate weakness. More advanced medical practitioners recognize that mental attitude is an important factor.
But in fact the body is:
- A community of cells, organs, systems.
- An exteriorization of who you are, in no way accidental or irrelevant.
- Highly intelligent with its own various levels of intelligence appropriate to their functions.
- Continually speaking and responding to the directing “higher intelligence” (you), bothering you only when it needs to, and sometimes misunderstanding the signals you are sending.
- The body’s health is not – can never be – divorced from its two poles, the individual subjectivity and the shared. It lives connecting the two, and a change in either necessarily affects it.
- Illness may seem to arise out of nowhere, or from a given specific cause, but ultimately it is always a question of relationship between the person and the world.
Now, you, Frank, were born into an incompatible atmosphere. We don’t mean your family or your society, but something less tangible. Dirk too, though of course his case and yours differ. But any person inserted into an environment that they don’t quite fit into may experience this. John Kennedy is another example. It may look like his problem was his father’s expectations, and in fact the disparity between composition and context expressed that way, but the real problem was/is/will be that when a person is born incorporating more of the future than is comfortable, illness may be the result. It is the body stretching to allow the disparity. It is the body’s health “taking one for the team,” so to speak. And if the times move on and the person’s basic state of health improves, it may be a sign that the disparity between individual makeup and its surroundings has lessened.
And we can lessen the disparity from our end, if we know how. It isn’t that we are dependent upon things easing from the world’s end.
That is less of a distinction than you may think. What you experience of the shared subjectivity, remember, is the equivalent of the parts of your own subjectivity of which you are unaware and, in the absence of “the world,” probably would continue to be unaware of. That is a major reason for the split between you and non-you and is the 3D: It provides you with a mirror so you can see behind yourself.
Still –
Yes, of course you know that you aren’t helpless victims here. We merely point out that you don’t want to back into the position of thinking of it as “me against the world.”
So I am getting a sense of the body as less a unit than an electrical field.
Not a bad way to look at it. It is highly active, highly re-active, it connects widely separated things, invisibly. It is easily affected by change in your intent or by change in the intent of the world around you. It is intelligent, can be programmed and reprogrammed, can be read in the way sensitive instruments can be read, to give you a sense of what you cannot know directly.
I know someone is going to wonder why we don’t have perfect health.
You have perfect adaptation to the circumstances of your life. That isn’t the same thing.
It certainly isn’t. Say some more about that?
You naturally assume the normal state of the body would be perfect health. But that would assume that the normal state of “you” would be internally in balance and would be in balance, as well, with “the world.”
I guess I have supposed that that is the case for most people,
Hardly. But the imbalance may be chronic or temporary, internally generated (so to speak) or externally. More important to the topic at hand, it may express physically, but it may express emotionally or mentally.
Yes, I guess you’ve told us this, and long ago, in fact. I’ll have to re-read my book Imagine Yourself Well; I’ll bet I find you’ve said it there.
But different contexts suggest different understanding.
All right, enough for now. Since you labeled yesterdays (1), label this one (2), and we will continue next time.
Topic?
We’ll see. It is always a prime difficulty, to pursue a course and not divert in what seems a more interesting or timely direction. Perhaps we should review techniques you can use to exert greater control of our body, only not with the intent to dominate, but to cooperate.
Very well. Looking forward to it. Meanwhile our thanks as always for all of this.