Consciousness, having reigned supreme for so long, has never had to learn the language of the body. Consciousness believes it’s doing the body a favor by putting attention on something that, to its ascendant agenda, seems as though it can never be gratified. Focus on the things consciousness can succeed at is much easier. In the body are aches and pains and complaints. It is rife with hungers and drives. It makes no sense to consciousness whatsoever.
The body is a good place to visit and—if enough control is employed through focus—not a bad tool in the agenda of consciousness, provided of course there is transcendence. Consciousness is even willing to protect the body as property, to tend to and care for it, to treat it as a “temple” and “honor” it. Consciousness is responsible for the distinctions, “I have a body,” and “I am not my body.”
The body is willing to accommodate and yet it can always hear the subtle message, even in the “honoring,” that consciousness believes itself superior. The mind is willing to do everything, and yet, it is fragile. All of this endeavor is a method of concealing its frailty. With its peacocking control, the mind runs the ultimate con game. Creative though it is, it simply does not hold up to truth, and yet the world has enjoyed this collective trance.
The mind has one real distinction: It is rational, meaning it can disconnect from reality and create ideas and images, and begin to inhabit those images that involve an imaginary future and an imaginary past. It can then build pictures based on pictures, drawing through the multidimensional, nonlinear process of reality a static line it affixes to them. Never mind that reality and the body can cohere themselves just fine without the imaginary line called time.
The mind can imagine absolutely anything. It can build a model, and direct and employ the body as to how to support the mind in bringing this model into the material world. It can even wire into the body through the breath and get a read on the environment.
Anything, that is, other than to stay situated in the moment and be with reality, unless of course it plugs into the body, and because of its fragile nature, convinces the body it is doing it a favor and that the body needs it more than it needs the body.
It informs the body that it is a subset of mind rather than vice versa. In fact, the mind has invented these terms; the mind that refuses to allow the body—with its own customs, languages, and traditions—its own sovereignty. It has colonized the body with the supposedly inclusive term of bodymind, but this is like the U.S. congratulating itself for including Native Americans, or for the generosity it extended to slaves.
The body knows and remembers. It remembers its nobility. The mind has had dominion because it fancies its power of words. It believes words control reality rather than align with and describe it so well there is a resonance, which brings about evolution. The mind uses words as assertions, as if they bring reality into being, rather than as tools of observation that allow reality to feel seen, and as a result, reveal itself.
The mind’s dominion is the temporal because it is the manufacturer of the temporal. Its first and primary question is always, “How does this fit into time?” The mind drowns entirely in the present moment and so needs the buoys of imaginary time and location in order to never sink too deep into the moment.
For the most part, it holds to the side of the pool, using words as the grip. It does not want to be cast into the sea of the body where the only guides are emotion and sensation, and where the lifeguard of the breath is released and allows the body to move and sink. The mind must know. It demands what it calls “logic” or “sense” and uses the spell of its own words to convince itself that any knowing other than this form is not “grounded” in a sense of reality, writing it off as impetuous, childish, or nonsensical.
It cannot admit it does not know how to swim and feels a claustrophobic sense of drowning when in the body. It feels so much demand that it returns—at best—to the harbor of the breath, and—at worst—to the desert of rational thought where there is no water whatsoever to threaten it. Or, more importantly, to reveal it is absolutely, utterly, totally lost.
That no matter how it declares its position as dictator, it knows it is in fact at the mercy of the body. The body can revolt at any time or assert its power. A great deal of effort and language must be constantly and chronically employed in order for the body to submit to the control of a mind that is, in fact, inferior. Because the mind has built the world according to the limitations and needs of the mind, the body has in fact become reliant on it. The body has a challenging time negotiating the artificial trajectory the mind calls progress.
The mind looks at this as a clear signal that it is needed, and that the body is dependent.
It exalts intelligence and then views the wisdom of the body as “stupid”—a pack animal—and yet, the body is bilingual. It has had to learn the language of the mind, to respond to the orders and customs of the mind. The mind has absolutely no idea that in the body resides a nobility with its own language and customs.
The mind has built a world to ensure the body is dependent, a world that has nothing to do with what would in fact bring happiness to both, as well as connection, simplicity, and intimacy. The mind fancies its symbols, due to its distance from the immediacy of what is. It loves concepts like money and time and words, having symbols interact with symbols, convincing itself it has done the world a great and important favor in terms of progress, while confirming that the body, seated in the now and not able to adequately translate or comfortably negotiate the symbols, is inferior and needs the mind.
The mind’s greatest fear is that it is not needed, so it uses what it has to create a world where it is. And like the petulant dictator it is, governing what already had its own governance, the mind demands that the body make sure it feels like it “belongs.” It does this because it always knows everything could all topple at any moment. It is a dictatorship based on lies. The resting pulse of the mind is to treat the body as a nuisance or distraction. It may evolve to treat it as a tool for its agenda. And when the mind is at its best, it treats the body as an honored and even cherished possession that it tends to with great care.
And yet all this is the result of the very creative workings of the mind. The body remains seated and reigning until the mind wakes up. Not the imaginary form of waking up that it so loves to trumpet: transcending the body and “going beyond.” Instead, it must be the true wake-up of seeing that dominion and wisdom rest in the body. The mind needs to learn its language and customs for this to occur.
