Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath

Thirty-five thousand times. Please. And may our heart thump 86,000 times. Perpetual motion. I wake up, and I’m in motion. But I was moving even as I slept. Blood flow, dead cell replacement. When all goes well we’re unaware of the vast chemical civilization that we abstract into “my body.” It’s odd to be a sort of, kind of chemical machine requiring a constant supply of oxidation to keep our trillions of little cells going. Even a cursory examination of what we really are, as bodies, will prove quite startling, and the deeper the look them more wild it gets. Nearly seven billion of us, but if we look at a single cell of just one of those bodies, we see a structure as complex as a city. How did we get caught up in this vast seemingly fractal structure? When we look at our traditional or modern answers to this question, they reveal themselves as utterly inadequate. Motivation for cosmology—if it is done right. But the task’s too great. A really good starting assumption, however, a kind of Occam’s razor cut, is that we are not this, not this. But keep that breath going, Lord, until it’s time to move on.

"This"

It occurs to me. When we say “This too shall pass,” we are still embroiled in the problem. When we manage to detach from whatever this means, then it has already passed, even when it is still going on. The old proverb (its roots are Persian, Hebrew) in effect says that things change over time. Of interest to me, in the context of detachment, is what this signifies—and what detachment means. Pure observation, all that follows; when it comes to our own states, that is authoritative enough.

In the situation to which the proverb applies, this is usually a situation in which the physical element is just a small part. This points backward and forward in time—backward when something untoward happened and we still “have to live it down.” (Revealing phrase, that.) This points forward when we anticipate trouble, turmoil, or trauma. In either case, this concerns feelings in the present; they intrude to disturb our equilibrium. This  is a tangle of people and what they will or won’t do—or how they will do it or not do it. It embraces unpredictable outcomes, focusing on the negative only. This will involve expenditures of money we either have  but do not want to spend or don’t have; in that case we project hassles and problems in getting the money—which in turn produces another tangle of people…. Buried in there somewhere will be physical things, but these are rarely to the fore. I harp on the relatively minor physical element here because my next topic is detachment.

To see detachment correctly, I start with attachment. We are attached to those thing we want; when things we do not want happen or loom ahead, the body translates our negative view into defensive reactions all of which are quite physical in nature—at minimum tensions and a feeling of stress. The body, as it were, has a mind of its own—signaled to us by the states it initiates on its own (autonomic nervous system). But the body is also a perfect servant of the actual mind—and immediately translates the mind’s state into physical expressions as well: glands start releasing fight or flight stimulants; blood pressure rises; muscles tighten.

This might be a vast structure of mostly mental projections and anticipations, accompanied by mostly negative judgements. But the state they produce, from which we stoically pronounce, “This too shall pass”—almost as a warding-off prayer—are quite physical inside us.

Detachment is a very curious state. It results from a deliberate mental act by means of which we change our mind. And no sooner does the mind change than the body, obeying immediately, sets to work calming the system down. Some hormones stop flowing, others signal relaxation. The stress lifts, the tension eases. This takes on a different perspective. At least as perceived internally, it appears distant—not us. The identification is broken. The body says “Master is no longer concerned—let us therefore restore the status quo ante.” (The body learns its Latin from the mind, of course.)

The practice of detachment is perhaps one of the best ways to demonstrate the transcending status of mind quite viscerally, as it were. The problem becomes an objective over there. Not surprisingly, freed of unnecessary stress, the heart beating at its regular pace, we are always able to deal with this in a much more rational way.

We are blessed with wonderfully well-constructed, very obedient bodies. Alas, they only understand the physical. The body must, by its nature, understand mental threats as physical—and responds as if it were physically threatened. We can get around that by talking to the body. Few people—even those who talk to plants—are very good at it. Hence there is a lot of sighing.

Identification with the Body?

Thesis: The moods of a morning are the moods of the body. That would appear to be true, but my experience is that the dark mood isn’t usually present immediately on awakening. The body is at its most energetic at that time. The strongest sensation is the desire for coffee and something to eat. The mood darkens with looking at the paper. Indeed this morning I came down with the notion that the thesis is correct, but the moment I typed in the headline, the contrary idea presented itself and the mood had already vanished, thus I revised the heading by adding a question mark.

The morning mood may be an unexamined identification instead with my existential condition, of which being in a body is but one element; but at awakening I am in a well-rested body. The paper then reminds me of the cultural projection. A strong element of unconsciousness is present because the darkness I see there is not my darkness at all. If what the NYT projects were an actual situation, a here-and-now and out-on-the street situation, my reaction would be energetic, defensive, active: it would mean that things are seriously out of joint and therefore action would be necessary.

There is an identification behind that mood, but it isn’t with the body. Awakening, alertness, humanity often require a kind of energetic shaking all over, a kind of rising to the surface.

The View from the Body

Dramatic dreams of public transformation, of railway stations, dreams of being lost in cityscapes, dreams of hospitals.... In my case such dreams always mean the body, more precisely being “lost” in the body. When I dream of hospitals, these are the enormous institutions I remember from my Army days: unending corridors. My consciousness at such times appears at the right scale: the body is a vast domain and I’m a mere individual. But the dream-scale is probably not really exaggerated enough. The consciousness seems to me the size of the point as described in Euclid: it has no dimension at all, it has no size, but to make me see anything at all, the dream provides the narrative of little man in the big world. Such dreams wake me up; in them I’m always headed for some destination I perceive vaguely by general direction; or there is a gargantuan task to be accomplished but always with a pressing deadline. And in nine cases out of ten my own absorption in the task keeps me dreaming whereas the point is to awaken; hence problems arise. The environment begins to look more dangerous, desolate, disorderly—or if I am engaged in an enterprise, things start going wrong, then become worse, and at some point it’s actually too much—and I wake up just to escape all this.

Such dreams are invariably very vivid, the emotions very strong; it takes a while to shake it all off and to let the hormones used to rouse me be absorbed. So I’m still mulling the “lost” feeling or its equivalent, the great melt-down of the Important Project, during breakfast, not quite able to concentrate on the equally vivid images of social meltdown presented to me in the New York Times.

For quite a while now the explanatory narrative that jells out of all this is that awakening from genuinely deep sleep is a kind of return from another dimension. But it is a reluctant return. I really want to stay asleep a little longer. But that’s not what I’m meant to do. If the wondrous scenes do not awaken me with their delight, the dream begins to ratchet up the stimulus by turning that world into a much more frightening display. At last it’s done. I open my eyes. But then I have to drag the emotions, which adhere to the hormonal releases, along with the old body out of bed and down, groping for the light switches as I arrive.

Deepsea Diving

A neutral sort of way to understand “The Fall,” thus by a physical analogy, is to think of a radical change in environments. For human beings life at great depths in the ocean is not a natural way to live, to be. When we venture to such places, we need a supply of air and some protection against low temperatures and pressures. The world down there is deficient in the oxygen we need. The diving suit is an additional something that we require—and when we once more reach our proper environment, we take it off so that we can move more freely again, take deep breaths of the plentiful air, and enjoy the light of the sun.

One way to picture The Fall is by analogy. The realm where we rightfully belong may be pictured, walking with Theosophy for a moment, as a subtle world where we have subtle bodies—a world were those subtle bodies are nourished by energies of a kind not even detectable by science, a world where our light—indeed all radiations of the electromagnetic spectrum, the most subtle phenomena we know—would be considered coarse.

Now let us picture a very large community of that subtle realm either voluntarily or involuntarily falling into the coarse dimension of what we call materiality—where the electromagnetic, the most subtle there, is already of such density that it significantly interferes with the people’s proper functioning—as deep water interferes with ours. Suppose that they, deprived of the subtle ethers, can’t even properly remember what happened, cannot orient, get lost in the flux of matter, and even have major problems communicating one with the other.

Unlike us they do not suffocate in the material flux. They’re immortal, actually. They retain their subtle bodies but these lack the necessary force to influence the vast coarseness of matter much at all. But they find ways of adapting—although it takes millions of years. They begin to build themselves some diving suits beginning at the atomic level, where they are able to nudge the atoms this way and that. These suits—we call them bodies—gather and concentrate coarse energies—and they discover that these energies also carry residuals, to be sure, but still some real traces of the subtle ethers they once “breathed” as it were to energize their subtle bodies and used in other ways to maintain their memories and to communicate one with the other. This effort to make sense of The Fall, indeed to cope with it, becomes Job 1. And it grows in extent until, today, we call it life on earth. The object of that enterprise becomes—although vast numbers, having experienced confusion for so long, cannot all unambiguously grasp it—is to get back to the subtle world by gathering up enough of that subtle ether, call it grace, to make the trip back again.

Could be turned into a rather exciting TV series, actually—although, in season two or three, I’m fairly sure, the original theme will have been lost. But these higher beings, although greatly challenged by the environment, and vaguely remembering that they might have been guilty of some kind of disobedience, recklessness, or foolish curiosity are still immortal beings. And despite many failures along the way, still destined ultimately to succeed.

Having Trouble Fitting this Odd Piece

The older I grow, and the more I get used to the strange realities all around me, the more a single aspects of “the puzzle” comes to the fore. It is the purpose of bodies. If we accept the reality of disembodied living beings (angels, immortal souls) then what purpose do bodies serve? No matter how I twist and bend, I cannot but conclude that bodies are machines, ingeniously engineered from chemical components making good use of the elements’ electromechanical properties. I mean all bodies, from single celled living beings on up to the highly complex such as ours.

Materialists have it easy. In their definition life itself is these machines. It is whatever they do, those machines, while they function as they should. A little circular. When they stop functioning, life disappears—because life is that functioning. Now that functioning itself first, eventually always ends. Second, while bodies are still working, their only real purpose is to keep on working. I search in vain to find any meaning in this rigmarole. It has no more meaning then the formation and temporary maintenance of a wave-form in the ocean started by some external cause like wind or gravity. Good explanation for bodies, but meaningless beyond that.

Meaninglessness is not a puzzle. It is just a big fat nothing. The puzzle arises when we contrast bodies and immortality. The problem is as real in the east as in the west. In both realms an immaterial real entity remains after the body gives up. In the east, if its illusions continue, it will be reborn. But it is difficult to imagine that “ignorance” and the resulting “illusion,” supposedly the causes of bodily existence, could have created the intricacies, say, of the blood-clotting cycle when, for hundreds of thousands of years people didn’t even know that it existed, never mind grasping its incredibly complex feedback loops. Maya is not an engineer. In the west we have to believe that an omnipotent creator must have engineered bodies, in the most sophisticated sense by arranging the fundamental aspects of matter at the lowest level, in a less sophisticated sense by imagining divine interventions in created nature. And then, in our case, the immortal soul is super-added, as it were. Why do those immortal souls need a “vehicle” to express themselves, to manifest will, motion, intellect? Why this duality when angels—even fallen angels—don’t need them?

The Gnostics gave all this a negative interpretation—much as the east does (illusion, ignorance). They thought of souls as captured by the Evil One and holding them here in a kind of prison. But, for my part, having at least looked at biology deeply enough to see its magnificent engineering, what I see there is something positive—not always elegant (the blood-clotting cycle is not very sleek)—but not a prison. The body is an enabler.

Our cosmologies are missing something. The piece meant for that hole in the logic doesn’t fit neatly. And using scissors isn’t allowed. Well, comes the time when we shed the chrysalis. Maybe then I’ll get the briefing I’ve not encountered on any lecture agenda as yet.