Reflections on the Body

in colloquial language, we still refer to a person of no influence or consequence by calling him a no-body.

Mary therefore took a pound of ointment of right spikenard, of great price, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.

~ John 12:3

The Proto-Indo-European root for the English word 'body' is the same as for the Sanskrit word 'buddhi' - meaning ‘to be awake, aware’. This indicates a lost wisdom – for neither ‘body’ implies this awakening and awareness, especially in conventional metaphysics where it is rather seen as a hindrance to be discarded or even an inherently evil or illusory condition, nor does the awareness that ‘buddhi’ denotes include the body, but is rather a disembodied faculty; a loss seen on both sides of the Indo-European spectrum, yet in totally opposite ways – which is an interesting study in itself. But looking at a map, it makes then total sense that the proper value of the body was to be recovered through the middle, in the Hebrew tradition, rather than the Eastern or Western extremes. A cursory look at Leviticus alone enlightens us as to the value the Hebrew tradition placed on the physical body.

Yet, this recovery was more of a bumpy road than a smooth sailing. It is rather incredible – in the most literal sense of this word – that the story and words of Jesus could become the vehicle for a religion which, more often than not, despises or even hates the body and all that goes with it and comes from it. Now, when we say ‘body’ we should be careful, because it is not always synonymous with ‘flesh’. Yet, at the same time, it is this fleshly body that allows us to understand what any body is, just as anything below should allow us to understand what is above. One finds, however, that not everyone who says ‘as above, so below and as below, so above’ really takes it seriously – reminding us of the Christic dictum that «Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven» (Matthew 7:21). In most of this kind of prose, we find that the below really doesn’t matter (pun intended) and the above is really not like unto below, as Hermes tells us, but rather completely unlike it; and when a traditional Christian prays that ‘Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’ it is doubtful whether he really believes that the Heavenly Father’s Will on Earth could be done at all. So when most speak of ‘non-fleshly’ bodies, they mean something which has nothing to do with the fleshly body. Even Christian writers, who must out of necessity believe in a Resurrection of the Body, try to conceive it in the most abstract, less fleshly way possible. And this is the tendency, or has been since the 4^th Century AD, in the whole of the religion. It is more Neoplatonist, or Hindu or Buddhist, than it is Christian. The resurrected ‘body’ is really just a version of ‘buddhi’ – or, rather ironically, of ‘manas’ (mind).

If we truly believe in ‘as above so below’ then we believe that everything that has a physical reality, like the fleshly body, is a reflection and symbol of psychic and metaphysical realities - that is, the physical body is a symbol of the soul body and the spiritual body. The idea of the body in modern times is that of a container or envelope and nothing else: this is the case of ‘materialists’ who consider, for example, that the individuality of man is wholly in his physical brain and that he pilots his body as a driver pilots a car. But ironically, even among those who admit the existence of the soul, the idea is that after the death of the flesh the soul becomes disembodied - that the flesh is, in truth, wholly irrelevant, and hence that the body is really not a body, but the opposite of one. But a body is much more than a container: it is a collection of meaning, a multiplicity in unity – but, a key component of this definition, is that it is a limit. The body is perhaps best defined as a boundary. And this is both repugnant to materialists, who admit of no boundaries whatsoever, especially those of the Earth and the Flesh, as to the spiritualists, including those very traditional theologians and metaphysicians, who always posit that the highest reality is, and must be, unbounded. This shows that they are too taken up in their minds, and are unable to appreciate the value of limit as opposed to limitless. Yet the very essence of definition is limit, since the word implies and includes ‘finiteness’: there is no unlimited Good, unlimited Beauty or unlimited Truth. It is in their very nature to be limited, and it is limit itself that allows us to distinguish them from their opposites. This is also how a very definite person like Jesus of Nazareth could say, of Himself, that He is the Truth: He embodied it.

The human body, contemplated now only from the material point of view, is composed of parts, but it is possible to lose one or several parts without ceasing to be a body and without ceasing to be identified with the integrality of the person who possesses it. In the same way that physical light can be used to understand spiritual light, the same is true of everything else. So we really can and ought to start from below, not from above – despite the tendencies of all traditional metaphysics. All that we can know of the above is from the below – and this is by design. The alternative to this is to believe that the ‘below’ is irrelevant and has nothing to teach us. In practice, if not in theory, most of classical metaphysics is founded on this belief. The visible ceases to be a symbol of the invisible, but rather its very opposite – and very soon, the Heavens are not populated by Beings, nor is God conceived as Personal, but everything is pure abstraction. This of course appeals to intellectuals, but if God really makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on both the righteous and the unrighteous, then He surely made the world to be intelligible both to the intellectual and to the craftsman. And this is easily understood, unless one is closed off in the plastic (no longer ivory) tower of intellectualism. Anyone who has done any kind of manual work, where the body and not only the mind is active and acting, found that the mind is stimulated all the more to think deeper thoughts. One works the soil, or builds a structure, and while his hands are busy the mind concerns itself with the nature of what it is doing, and by necessity the nature of reality. This is the tragedy of purely ‘intellectual’ work which most of us now do - it discards the body and hence it neuters the mind. When the mind alone is stimulated, a big part of the picture is lost: for reality is both above and below, physical as well as spiritual.

Let us continue exploring what the body is, for a moment exploring other forms of bodies other than the flesh. We speak, for example, of a ‘body of work’ to describe the collection of output by a given artist or scientist; we speak of 'bodies of water'; we speak of 'incorporating' an idea into the 'body' that is our worldview. Or, finally, we speak of the Church as the 'Mystical Body of Christ'. In all these cases the same model is applied, and allows us to understand that the body is a category of reality – which, however, has as its most basic expression the flesh. Now both the modern and the classical metaphysician, for different reasons, are unable to take these examples as more than metaphors, but this is only the result of having an inverted or partial view of reality. In the same way as the ‘body of work’ of an author does not have its primary existence in a collection of physical sheets, it is also true that it does not and cannot exist unless it is actually written somewhere. If the ‘body of work’ of an author has never been actually written down or has been totally erased from physical records, then no one can actually read it – it is below the threshold of existence; and if a church has no members then it is not really the body of Christ, all that remains – perhaps – is the ‘mystical’ part.

The same is the case with the human being; his existence necessarily participates in the physical and only in this participation does he really exist as whole. When man exhausts his possibilities in the material world, the fleshly body ceases to participate in the above domains and vice versa - and this is what physical death consists of; just as the pages of a book, if they lose their ink, cease to participate in its telos, and it is afterward impossible to say to which literary body they belong – they have returned, like the flesh after death, to the indistinctness of matter in itself. This is why the central event, and the central teaching, of Christianity is, or should be, that the Word became Flesh – and the work of Jesus is the possibility of resurrection of the Flesh. Not just body, for the Logos already had a body – but Flesh. The Gospels testify continually of how Jesus heals, raises, glorifies and loves the Flesh. The examples are so many, both before and after the Resurrection of Jesus, that we would lose ourselves in quotes – we might as well read the whole thing. It is thus so weird and strange that, after the 3^rd Century and quite suddenly, this teaching is completely reversed. These interpreters, which are considered Fathers of the Church, most assuredly had as a central stance that, when Jesus disagrees with Plotinus, it is the former who should be made to yield. Surely the wise Hellene knows more about metaphysics than the carpenter from Nazareth. Nothing remains of the below. After that, it is mostly ‘as above so above’.

If we were writing in the 17^th of 18^th Century we might perhaps have to stress the above, because at that time the conception was very much ‘as below so below’. But now we’ve shifted back to the view of late antiquity, and the below is despised once more. Yet now it is much more dangerous. It was fine to have a metaphysics completely ignoring the flesh when most men were still subject to the rhythms of nature – they couldn’t escape the flesh even if they wanted to (much to the disappointment of so many metaphysicians). Hence the pious and prudish exaggerations of metaphysicians collided frequently and savingly with the realities of Nature and the Gospel. But now we can indeed escape it, we are no longer subject to Nature – we are Her lords. And we hate Her. And we hate Her in many different ways: whether by abusing Her or ignoring Her, by defiling Her or dissecting Her. So, ironically, the materialist ethos resulted in the most anti-Matter mentality of all time; whereas before it was possible to hate matter yet still be confronted by her limits, now it is possible to hate matter transgressing all limits.

To understand the body as a collection of meanings, it is useful to return to the traditional conception despite its obvious bias against the Flesh: the visible is a symbol of the invisible – thus, all the particularities of the terrestrial body, including the senses, have their correspondent in the metaphysical. This is why it is incomprehensible to a modern person when the Christ says that ‘the eye is the light of the body’, but to the traditional mentality it was perfectly understood that the ‘eye’ mentioned does not refer to the flesh as such, but to the ‘power of vision’ – and that the carnal is a symbol of the eye of the soul and the eye of the spirit. In the same way, when Christ repeatedly says, ‘Those who have ears, let them hear’ He is not speaking of physical ears, but is actually using the visible as a symbol of invisible realities. When the fleshly body dies, then, the Being still lives in a body, but a noetic body, and is equally capable of sight, hearing and all other senses - indeed, the traditional descriptions of the separation of the soul from the flesh are univocal in declaring that our senses are heightened when they are no longer subject and bound to the flesh - something that is inherent and obvious in the terms normally used to describe the material world and the psychic and spiritual world - gross, in the first case, and subtle in the other two. And if this seems doubtful to a modern person, this same modern person can experience something similar in a dream, in which his senses are independent of the particularities of the physical body (in addition to not being subject to other conditions of the material domain). Of course, their tendency will be to interpret such experiences as 'imaginary', in the sense of having no reality, but these experiences have very important teachings to give us.

One will notice than in a dream, or in an out of body experience, or in experiences with psychedelic drugs, one can certainly do things that are impossible when purely within the flesh. But here’s the catch: while certain faculties are heightened, others are completely or partially lost. We can maybe fly within the dream, but we find that our Will is very much impaired, and that certain powers we have while in the flesh are wholly lost. The problem is modern man really aims to be beyond the flesh, and does not mind losing its particular powers in order to find those others that can be accessed in dreams and mind-altering experiences. This is also why psychedelic drugs are so dangerous: they allow our roots in the flesh to be severed, and we can become highly susceptible to what can only be called devilish entities. This is easy to understand when we read the Gospels attentively, for they testify precisely that devils are, if anything, envious of the flesh. When Jesus finds a man possessed by devils, they ask to be reincorporated anywhere, even in the flesh of swine, such is the horror of being disembodied.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, but also some other Patristic authors, consider for example that the ‘garments of skins’ given to Adam and Eve at the time of the expulsion from Paradise really do not refer to 'garments' in the sense in which we understand them, but the fleshly body – where in Paradise Adam and Eve only had a soul and spiritual body. This is usually interpreted as a Fall, but it must not be necessarily so: because it is precisely when eating the fruit that precipitates the physical garments that the gods declare that ‘they have become like one of us’. In a reversal of conventional interpretations, thus, it seems that it is precisely when acquiring the flesh that humans became like gods – which gives credence to the statements, from Hermes to Heraclitus to Joseph Smith, that say that Men are mortal gods and Gods are immortal Men. When we are able to discard the ‘wisdom of the ages’ and read the words as they were written, we see that this is precisely what Genesis tells us. This same understanding of the body as both more and dependent on the flesh is expressed in traditional art when it places Jesus Christ, as we know Him from the earliest depictions, in the Creation narrative. Creation happened before the Incarnation, obviously, but the body of Christ pre-exists the Incarnation – and note that the very term 'incarnation' suggests this very thing: it is not an 'incorporation', since the Logos already had a body – and if He didn’t, He wouldn’t have any power whatsoever to Create - but an ‘incarnation’, in the Flesh.

What many fail to realize, both in antiquity and now, is that the physical realm, the flesh, by its solidity and weight, not only provides a myriad of advantages to our sanctification, creativity and happiness, but it also prevents certain dangers inherent to the psychic realm (the realm of dreams and phantasy). Is it any wonder that the Machine, who wholly lacks true Flesh, is aiming more and more to make of humans disembodied beings, connected to the hive mind, lost in psychic dreams and desires and unmoored from any fleshly reality of race, place or sex? Let us say something about the bodies of other classes of nature, for they will aid us in understanding the aims of the Machine for the human species. Minerals have collective physical bodies, collective soul bodies and collective spiritual bodies. We can see this in the fact that even though it is physically separate, all gold can in theory be melted together without losing or gaining anything, much like water or all other mineral beings, along with their powers and their effects. Plants are the first stage of individuation, having individual physical bodies, but collective soul and spirit bodies. Plants can be cloned or grafted but not entirely merged because while having a collective soul which can be transferred to another body, the body is still individual and hence has limitations (which, as we have pointed out, is the very nature and the very blessing of bodies). Animals have individual physical bodies and individual soul bodies (their very name derives from soul – Anima – which is why it is so stupid to say, like many Christians do, that animals have no souls), but collective spirit bodies. Men and Women, finally, as the crown of Creation, the synthesis of all realms of nature and super-nature, and the mediators between Heaven and Earth, have individual physical bodies, individual soul bodies and individual spirit bodies. The objective of the Machine is to remove our individuality, and this individuality depends as much on the spiritual and soul bodies, as it does on the physical body. In fact, it depends more on the latter. Anyone who has been in love has contemplated the face and body of the beloved and knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that that very face and body are an integral part of the being which he loves. And while it is true that the flesh decays, one knows deeply that the very same face and the very same body will meet us on the other side, to be beheld, embraced and loved. We behold pictures, or mentally images, of lost loved ones and cannot conceive them as apart from those very images – because, in the deepest recesses of our hearts, we know that those images are not nothing, but a reflection of their being, their deepest self, and that we will recognize them on the other side by the likeness we have encountered in the Flesh.

The incorrect understanding of the body, and the despising of all that is earthly and fleshly is, finally, one of the reasons for the present confusion related to sexual identity - since, besides the forgetfulness of the Spirit, the total separation of the domains of the human existence, and the identification of the body with something merely carnal, allows the notion of 'being in the wrong body' and, consequently, being possible to ‘change’ the body, since the carnal is not taken as more than a replaceable and unrelated container with another shape above it. This is the only way to understand, for example, that certain physical handicaps traditionally prevent a man from being a priest: because what a modern man considers 'accidental' in his physical body is actually founded in his essence. We will leave the implications of this unsaid, such is the taboo which surrounds this question and the very real threat of censorship that it carries, but it testifies that one’s physical race is not a matter of accident, and it provides a very easily understandable explanation of why the Machine seems particularly interested in destroying Europeans, not just as a ‘culture’, but in their very physical constitution.

It is impossible to deny that there are certain kinds of spirituality that the Machine has no problem with, some quite overtly so and others at least tolerated. What is tolerated or promoted is, once more, a certain idea of transcendence. Sure, it is primarily promoted through an affinity for Eastern (especially Indian) concepts, not so much the Christian God. The problem arises for Christians however in the fact that God the Father (if not the pre-incarnate Son) has been traditionally conceived, at least by theologians and metaphysicians, as the same Absolute of the East – an abstraction which not only lacks a physical body, but any kind of body at all. It lacks all kinds of limitation whatsoever. But if as we’ve seen, power and Grace are found precisely in limits, then either this abstraction has no existence, or it is not to be worshipped at all: it has no Will, it has no Love. This God, if it can be called that at all, cannot logically desire or demand anything: and hence morality is not, and cannot really, be His (or rather Its) concern. It is absolutely Beyond and Other, to the point of not being of any trouble at all to the Machine. It is an impersonal Force, rather like the one popularized in movies. Therefore, the Machine has no problem, really, with spirituality of this kind, as one can see in the popularity of the Eastern conceptions which, outside of their natural milieu and their natural constraints, are perfectly compatible with the Machine’s objectives. The taboos of the Machine are really those of the body itself, specifically as they refer to Sex and Race. And this ’oneness’ spirituality, whether sophisticated as with metaphysicians or crass as in the ‘new age’, can give no positive significance to either. According to both the sophisticated and the crass, and despite differences in expression, our ultimate aim is precisely to transcend the body in all its limitations, which include both our sex and our race. And related to this is also the destruction of Nature, another one of the limitations of matter. Once again, there is absolutely no ultimate significance to the Earth, which just like our bodies, we must leave in order to be ‘enlightened’ or achieve ‘unity with God’. How can the Christian, which seems above all concerned with morality, even to the detriment of all other questions, affirm that sexual difference is important and intrinsic, that marriage is fundamental, when it is believed that neither will be part of the ultimate picture of reality, when the New Jerusalem is envisaged as a genderless and marriageless abode of neutered spirits? How can a Christian object to the destruction of nations or really affirm the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, which is central to the whole mission of Jesus, when all that makes the body is to be left behind?

There was perhaps a time when the emphasis needed to be on transcendence and the Spirit as such, but now the emphasis needs to be rather on the opposite, because the Machine has achieved enough technical power to provide sufficiently convincing versions of its own, even if they are – as they will always be – mere psychic imitations and frauds. The spirituality of ‘oneness’ was not a threat to humanity as long as man was firmly established as a natural being, subject to the rhythms of nature and the limitations of the body – if for no other reason because he was still awakening to the possibility of full personality. Yet this is the central theme of the Christic work: Jesus opened the possibility for every man to say, with Himself, I AM. But this is only possible through the resurrection of the body, for the body is an inherent part of the personality. The devil knows this, and that is why it is under attack in our time.

Understanding then that the body is more than the physical, and that the physical bodily aspects are reflections of non-physical powers, we can understand why the celestial hierarchies are traditionally represented, in the first place, with wings - and this is the representation symbolic of its relative lightness when compared with the density of the material world; and in their two lowest ternaries, they are represented with whole human bodies, but in the highest ternary, closest to God, they have only faces – because outside the face, the powers of the body concern action, and within the face they concern contemplation and communication. Thus, just as the human face on earth corresponds to its capacity to contemplate and communicate, to apprehend 'subtle matter' and in opposition to the rest of the body whose objective is to act and integrate 'dense matter', the highest ternary of the hierarchy does not act, it only contemplates and communicates with the Divine. But we should not take from this that such is inherently superior, because Life – the one that Jesus promised to give us abundantly – is more than contemplation and communication: it is communion. And this is a whole-body experience. There is a reason why not just words and music and pictures are given in religious rituals, but experiences of scent, taste and touch. In this respect the Christian sacraments, whatever the theological formulations which may have distorted them beyond recognition, testify deeply to this reality: incense, immersion in water, the laying on of hands but especially the Eucharist. The ‘hard saying’ that most could not receive was the valuing of the Flesh as a whole. Most mysticism speaks of 'sight' and 'hearing', but we know now these things can be mimicked and stimulated by machines. Taste, scent and touch cannot – they depend on that very despised reality of the Flesh. But this precisely testifies that they are deeper and more vital - physically and spiritually. That the central sacrament of the Eucharist is a meal is highly significant, because a meal partakes primarily of those three senses: taste, texture and scent are all fundamental to the ritual of eating and drinking, sight and hearing much less so if at all. The Word of God could be heard and seen from the beginning, but it had to become Flesh to be touched, tasted and breathed in.

Maybe the reader can now recognize the ultimate value, the precious blessing which is the body, and treat it as it was always meant to be treated: as a temple of God, a tabernacle for the ultimate worship of the Most High. Not to be defiled but also not to be despised, to be loved and nourished. And by doing so understand why, in colloquial language, we still refer to a person of no influence or consequence by calling him a no-body.