Mind and body must follow one another. Our body lights up but is not followed by the lighting up of our mind. We are challenged by the gap between these divergent reactions. Our body wants us to carve the stone. Our mind soon must follow. Our body is frightened by something, but we don’t know what it is, so we compose a scary short story to fill in the nothingness gap. Our new plans for the project just don’t “feel right,” so we review these plans and generate a creative alternative that feels better. Alternatively, our mind generates an exciting idea, but our body doesn’t’ seem to “warm up” to the idea. We find that this idea generates very little energy and is not something “for which we will get out of bed!” So, we start over again and pay more attention to our physical reaction to the ideas being generated by ourselves—and perhaps other people.
A very powerful example of the body pushing the mind into a new space is offered in the Epilogue to a book that Brugh Joy (1990) wrote about a radical change in his own beliefs. His well-documented conceptions of reality (Joy, 1979) were suddenly thrown out the window, on behalf of a new set of beliefs that his body embraces. In addressing the nature of the major transformation that has occurred, Joy (1990 pp. 332-333) offers a set of insights concerning the mind/body split.
Joy (1990, p. 332) believes that this split can lead to compartmentalization of consciousness.
“The ego, using a defense to resolve the conflict created by its awareness of mortality, imagines itself to be immortal. In doing so, however, it sacrifices wholeness, the body, and the earth. An unconscious ego-rage against the vulnerability of the body and its mortality follows. “This, I believe, is the basis of self-destructive attitudes that reflect both personally as un-healthy life-styles and ecologically as disregard for the physical environment. Certainly the Christian projection of Armageddon reflects this rage against the body. Morality is, though, a fact of our existence and, in my opinion, until the conflict over this primary issue is re-solved–through integration rather than denial–no effort to salvage the body or the planet is possible.
Joy’s (1990, p. 332) body reacted to a sunrise that he witnessed over the desert while standing on the peak of the Grant Pyramid in Egypt. Being pushed by his body, Brugh Joy (1990, p. 332) came to the following realization:
“In my experience, an appreciation of physical mortality can immensely illumine the wonder and sacredness of the body. There is a natural appreciation of and urge to care for the sacred matter that has spawned our bodies … sacred matter that is, in fact, the planet. The body and the planet are inextricably and forever linked in our deep psyches, though a shadow aspect of consciousness itself has obscured this fact and alienated us from our roots.”
