Meditations on Mind and Body

Perhaps we are not spirits trapped in a body. Perhaps we are spirit and body, spun together by the master weaver, yet now torn beyond immediate repair. Yet, someday, our threads may be respun, and there will be unity, true unity and what a weaving that will be.

A barely acknowledged philosophy wedges itself between my body and soul, as a recent picture showed me. A photographer herded me into a hallway for a headshot not long ago. When she sent me the picture, I joked that the color was off because, for some reason, my beard was grey instead of its natural blond. When she offered to fix the photograph, I explained myself. My beard is, in fact, going grey. I simply do not think of myself as old enough to have a grey beard. Despite the poor attempt at a joke, the episode got me thinking. Not only is there a gap between my mental representation and my physical representation, but we live in a world where the body is a thing to be fixed. The body becomes a a problem when it does not match our mental self-representation.

Of course, the problem is that I think of myself as someone relatively young — someone more vigorous, less grey, and less inclined to fall asleep during a Netflix binge. I have a mental representation that does not match the physical model. I feel young in my soul, while my body complains about having to bend over to put on socks. Age can create a wedge between body and soul, between our self-conception and our being in the world.

As adults, we may tighten our lips when time takes away our strength. As children, we scream in frustration when our thick fingers lack the dexterity to press a puzzle piece into place. Our culture creates further distance between our body and our concept of self, too. “I am not my body,” some in our culture whisper, “I am who I am, and I can sculpt my body to match.” They argue that if we disagree with our bodies, our bodies should change. Our body is obligated to change because what is real is within. We have the opposite but parallel case: some in our culture argue, “Accept me. My body is irrelevant. It is what it is, and the me that is trapped inside is essential.” These people would argue that we are who we are because of our minds and that the body should be ignored as unimportant and unnecessary to be changed. Thus, they neglect their bodies or ask others to look simply to their souls and cast no judgment on their being in the world.

I tend to view my body with frustration, something that limits me. If only I could avoid or reduce the amount of sleep, spin away from sickness, and be freed from the physical pain, my thinking goes, then I could realize my full potential. My body blocks me from becoming the person I want to be. As a result, I have habitually ignored my body or raged against it by overeating cheese.

These days, we are not human beings, but simple beings — spiritual-mental creatures that only accidentally exist in the physical world. Thus, we twist and contort our odd, inconvenient bodies to the point of breaking or ignore them completely.

In short, we live out a sort of secular Gnosticism that treats the body as a withered approximation of our true selves.

And yet, we are not happy. We find drinks that allow us to stay awake longer, pills to think more clearly, and discover technological means to give the ghost in the shell more strength and limit the body’s limitations. We consider the loss of mind the greatest loss and celebrate those who use their minds overcome their bodily limitations. We are less inclined to celebrate those that use their bodies to overcome their mental limitations, except in some circles. We shape our bodies as we will when our bodies do not match our self-conception or self-desire. Or, we focus on acceptance and authenticity and demand that neither our body nor soul ever change. In all these cases, the spirit denies the body’s essential character as a unified part of our self while affirming that the mind and body are intertwined. Rather than viewing our identity as a conversation between our body and mind, we consider our identity an argument between the body and mind — an argument only one side can win. And the mind almost always wins, for the body whispers before it screams.

Descartes believed in a distinct separation between the “I” and the body; his ability to perceive “I” apart from any conception of the singular world suggested to him an immortal psyche that was “clear and distinct” from the mortal body. (This is, of course, an oversimplification and incomplete understanding of Descartes’ thinking.) We are children of that heritage, so much so that we hardly give it a second thought. We treat movies and shows in which a soul jumps from body to body with a bland disinterest as if we were watching water drip from the faucet on a particularly dull day.

Transformation does not surprise us. We fail to be shocked by how an animal becomes oil and oil becomes plastic and plastic becomes a phone; we are only shocked when the phone becomes broken and someone else must repair it because we do not understand the transformation’s nature enough to be surprised and intrigued by it. But we know — or think we know — enough to believe that if we can change oil into a phone, we can transform ourselves into anything. After all, we live in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: nothing has an essence, and the power of the gods can change anything — and we are gods.

We may not think of ourselves as immortal beings, but we do not think of ourselves as physical beings. The language we use suggests this: “My leg gave out,” we mutter, as if we were speaking something external to us like a table leg, something that we own but is not — and here the English language fails us — essentially who we are.

 “I’m hurt” is an accurate saying. “My leg hurts” misses the point. The distinctive of the possessive is the problem. By creating a separate word to say “mine,” the English language distinguishes between the thing and the possession: possession of something rather than a being-that-is-something. Possession is distinction. What I possess becomes something outside me since it is separate from me. Despite this limitation of our language, it would be absurd for a lake to “possess” a water molecule. Essentially, the lake is the whole of the water molecules, and a lake is not sentient and cannot change what it is through linguistic tricks. Nevertheless, our language causes us to claim to possess ourselves. Our language tells us that our bodies are something we have rather than something we are.

The internet compounds the belief. When we extend ourselves onto the internet, we extend — in our secular Gnosticism — what we view as our essence. We extend our spirit, our soul, our non-material self. And we should be happy since we have sliced off the non-essential body and have become are pure spirits.

But technology separates us instead of connects us, isolates us, depresses us. Descartes believed (or at least we believe he believed) that we are essentially minds. If that were the case, we would expect that the mind would find its greatest pleasure in interacting with other minds. Isn’t that essentially what the internet is? Isn’t it, essentially, two souls communing across a non-physical plane?

(And yet, as Neil Postman noted, Socrates argued that writing would destroy the heart of learning — which was conversations between two souls, physical, tangible, standing face-to-face in the marketplace, on the road, in the house, in the garden. Christ spoke in person, was flesh and blood, and asked us to remember him as flesh and blood, not bit and byte. Thus, conversation — physical conversation, deep conversation — was physical, not simply psychic.)

We surf the internet: we interact with purely psychic information using our minds. In a sense, we are experiencing another mind with a directness that is impossible in ordinary life. We message others on social media: these are pure souls, disembodied, spiritual, and non-physical. Bereft of body, we are encountering ideas, and since ideas are the prolegomena of the mind, we are experiencing the mind in its pure form. We should feel less lonely, not more, as the mind basks in relationship with other pure minds.

But we are not happy. Had Descartes been correct, if there was such a clear distinction between the body and the soul, the material and immaterial, then the internet should have brought the soul joy, pleasure, comfort, pleasure as it fulfilled its ends apart from the constraints of the body.

Instead, the internet has brought us division, radicalization, anger, rage; even more, the internet has elevated the body while at the same time diminishing it. We visit Instagram for illusions of other people’s bodies and physical space. These images diminish our self-perception via comparison and compel us to change our bodies to reflect some absurd and impossible ideal. We visit Twitter for snippets of soul that make us hate other souls and love other souls to the extent they reflect our soul. Thus, we beat our bodies into submission, beat our souls with regret, and beat other souls with hatred.

If the internet is the pure medium of the soul, we should question the soul, interrogate it about its nature. Is the soul purely corrupt, as some versions of Christian theology would have it? Thus, does the internet reveal the soul’s true nature — that the soul, distended from the body, forgets self? Can we say that we’ve rejected humanity’s essential nature — soul and body — through the internet’s shattering what we are and reduction of what we can be?

Human history is a tale best told in the sun, for our story is too frightening for the dark. In that story, we find that the more people abstract a conception of humanity from the human next door, the more cruelty can be poured upon their neighbor. When a beaten and bloodied human becomes unclean, he can be passed by priest and pastor. When that unclean thing becomes a person, we have an obligation to him, for he is like us in body and soul.

But if we recognize humans as both body and spirit, we must acknowledge that there is something essentially the same inside no matter the appearance. No matter the ideology, that being shares an experience with the rest of us. My neighbor’s bodily pain is something we can understand because I have experienced it, too. It is not simply an idea and not simply an abstract, disembodied experience.

Society has elevated the mind while killing the mind. We have elevated the body while denying the body. We can claim that our essential self is inside because the internet allows us to express a vision of our essential self. But if we truly believed this, there would be no need to shape our physical body. Thus, we live out strange dualism, suffering all the pain that this particular deception entails — for we deny our essential unity and worship a part rather than respect the whole and suffer for embracing both body and soul and neither body and soul.

Instead, we should view our bodies and mind as in dialogue with each other. We are neither mind nor body, but minds and bodies conversing with each other. Neither can be wholly trusted, but neither can either be wholly distrusted. Instead, both speak, and both must be heard. The “me” must be found in the tension between the two. My beard may be grey, and my mind challenges the idea. But rather than deny my body’s claims, my mind must integrate what the body knows, and the body must incorporate what the mind knows.

(But, even here, language fails me — for what I just wrote creates a linguistic separation, as if two the are separate entities in fact, rather than abstractions of an essential unity. Perhaps I should say that we should be and integrate phenomenon through multiple lenses while carefully experiencing our unity through our senses and allowing those lay with our souls for fruitful procreation that produces a richer conception of self.)

Does my self-conception point toward an eternal soul, youthful compared to the soul’s ray, which extends brightly ever-onward from a fixed starting point? Yet when the body speaks, my mind must listen and be careful not to exercise too hard, overeat cheese, or sleep too little. And in the same way, my body must listen to my mind, which reminds the body, too, that its fading desires can be excessive at times or that its sufferings, at times, may need to be accepted rather than avoided. What is essential is a conversation between the two, for I am neither body nor mind but some alchemistic admixture that I cannot fully grasp.

We will not find happiness in the war between body and mind. Peace is found in deep, loving, physical relationships — those sweet, painful hours and days and years of deep listening and deep speaking, as two — which were always one — dialogue together and discover themselves in themselves and uncover truths about what is, what should be, and what will never be.

My children often ask about death, the afterlife, their bodies when the world is remade. They wonder about their new bodies. My children remind me: do not neglect your body. It, too, is a gift. The body is not something external to us — that way is the way of the gnostics. My children help me recall that I am my body, but not just my body; to be bodiless is to be something less than what we are, a wraith hungering for substance, trapped in an eternal scream. That is why Christian salvation is not salvation from a body but to a body and from this earth to a new earth.

When I moved from the east coast to the midwest, a friend and I had a final cup of coffee. As we sat across the table from each other, I said, “It’s not a big deal. We can still talk on the phone.”

“Our friendship will change, diminish,” he said. “There’s no substitute for living life together.”

When my soul separates itself from my body, I expect God to say the same. There is no substitute for living life together.

Perhaps we are not spirits trapped in a body. Perhaps we are spirit and body, spun together by the master weaver, yet now torn beyond immediate repair. Yet, someday, our threads may be respun, and there will be unity, true unity — and what a weaving that will be.

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