5 Errors of Embodiment - Error 5 - Failing to Address Our Need for Holism and Vision

Five Errors of “Embodiment”—and How to Transcend Them

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow to Sophia.

In our last contemplation, we considered the importance of cultivating embodiment as ecosensual awareness. We even considered that we should practice becoming more ecologied, more encosmosed, and more ensouled, rather than narrowly practicing embodiment.

This all relates to the error we will contemplate in the next two episodes:

5) Failing to address the need for holism and vision (and why our bodies have become sites of trauma)

We will need two separate contemplations for this error, because we all suffer from a culture of fragmentation, and that makes it especially important to think carefully with respect to holism. When seek holism, we become fish out of water, because we swim in fragmentation, and we need to find our legs again if we want to walk in wholeness.

Moreover, the dominant culture has become very good at producing trauma. That means we need extra care in thinking about trauma too.

We won’t be able to cover everything important about holism or trauma, but we can at least think about a few things that don’t get enough attention in most discussions of embodiment and somatics.

Let’s begin by asking about vision. What is our vision of “embodiment”? Simply that we acknowledge our bodily existence, or try to “accept” it? That we find out how much trauma our bodies carry? That we experience “flow” states, or notice the body as a source of pleasure and pain, bondage and liberation?

Or will we ask about the nature of that liberation? Will we ask, “What shall I embody? What shall I make real, in/through/as this embodied existence—and how?” How do we, for instance, embody democracy, love, wisdom, or justice?

Proverbs 29 contains the famous and beautiful line, “Without vision, the people perish.” This gets at the meaning of our embodiment, and the inherent meaningfulness of the Cosmos itself.

Every political and economic system depends on a vision of human beings, and a vision of the nature of reality—and those visions range from skillful and vitalizing to unskillful and degrading. If we envision ourselves as atomized, self-interested, competitive, and so on, then we will begin to embody that vision. And, in the dominant culture, this happens in a largely unconscious way, resulting in a vision unconsciously embodied.

Part of the challenge we face in the dominant culture has to do with a lack of understanding about the nature of a healthy mind and a healthy world. We lack a vision of robust health, healing, wholeness, and holiness—of mind, heart, body, world, and Cosmos.

We also lack sufficient acknowledgement of, and skill in dealing with, the unconscious, which increases problems of spiritual materialism. In general, the presence of the unconscious means we can sincerely believe—and passionately proclaim—we are doing one thing (in relation to the body, for instance), while in fact something else is going on.

And spiritual materialism means absolutely any practice, idea, philosophy, etcetera, can become a path for the perpetuation and even the elaboration of structures of power and domination both “outside” us and “inside” us. It unfolds in part by means of unconscious processes, as well as group dynamics and cultural habits.

These unconscious and interdependent processes enable us to cleverly avoid asking difficult questions about the health of our bodies, our diet, our lifestyle and livelihood—all under the pretense of “body positivity”. We can rationalize all manner of laziness, craving, self-medicating, spiritual bypassing, and general ignorance under the guise of “embodiment” in its various expressions.

To get more of a sense of how spiritual materialism can function, we can note how readily we may accuse Christianity of emphasizing the duality of mind and body, and even reviling the body and making it sinful. And yet, we could certainly find ways of practicing Christianity so as to realize the nonduality of mind and body and the nonduality of sacred and profane.

For instance, the Orthodox branch of Christianity accepts that God made sex pleasurable as an expression of divine wisdom, and they therefore accept having sex for pleasure (rather than exclusively for procreation), and even allow priests to get married before ordination (which likely reduces the risk of priestly transgressions, even if it doesn’t eliminate that risk altogether).

We also find the following, in a letter Paul wrote to the Colossians:

. . . though I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit and delight to see how disciplined you are and how firm your faith in Christ is.

. . . . in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness.

If in Christ the fullness of the divine lives in bodily form, and if Christ has brought us to fullness, then we may find the fullness of the divine in our bodily form—since the divine made us in the very image of the divine. That image is in some sense neither our body nor our mind, and yet the divine clearly made our embodiment, interwoven with vast ecologies of sentience.

Since our bodies and minds come fully interwoven with this world we share, then the world must also exist as the living loving image of the divine, and we may find the fullness of the divine in the living loving world. Hildegard of Bingen and Francis of Assisi invite us to imagine a Christianity oriented in that direction. We thus learn lessons in both spiritual materialism and the creativity and radical honesty of liberation.

Related to this, we have a cultural need for holistic habits of embodiment that empower us to find joy and awareness in, through, and as our embodiment. Vitalizing embodiment has to do with our holistic lifestyle and livelihood, the way we do things moment to moment, day to day, season to season, year to year, generation to generation.

Unsurprisingly, “embodiment” gets thoroughly co-opted so that it doesn’t threaten capitalism, our sedentary lives, our capture in built environments, our degraded soils and foods, our polluted water, our meaningless jobs, our lack of free time and time in wild places, our lack of wild places, our disconnection from the ecologies we depend on, our lack of democracy, our injustice and inequality, and our general domestication and confusion. If we think we can keep the present pattern of insanity mostly intact—just with more “body positivity”—we will end up causing a lot of suffering for ourselves and others.

As one simple example, consider going to the gym. We may go to the gym because we sincerely want to take care of our body. We then put tremendous energy rather exclusively into “me”. It doesn’t go into the ecologies we depend on. Nature doesn’t receive anything helpful from this kind of embodiment practice, even though we might put out an incredible level of energy. It goes nowhere but “me”.

This issue goes far beyond working out at a gym, because we can commute to work and put in 40 or more hours of effort, and none of that effort may benefit the ecologies we all depend on. In fact, it likely degrades them.

Even if we go outside, many of the activities that have become popular involve an instrumental relationship with Nature that includes a range of degradation. For instance, mountain biking doesn’t put nourishing energy into the ecologies where we mountain bike. Instead, we may degrade the land and disturb the beings who live in those places in the same way we live in our own homes.

Both gym memberships and mountain biking can involve a lot of extraction, degradation, and participation in the incoherencies of money. Think of all the materials we need to build a gym, or to build a high-end mountain bike.

And then think about all the expenses involved in hiring trainers, buying supplements, buying special gear, and commuting to the gym or the mountain bike trails.

If we stack it all up, it can appear shocking. And, to pay for all of this, we may have to work at jobs that do nothing at all to benefit the community of life we actually depend on for our survival.

Our non-human kin don’t practice these sorts of lifestyles and livelihoods. Instead, through their embodied practice of life, they give all their energy to making the whole of life possible. Bees give their energy to the process of pollination, and this creates food for countless other beings. Horses, bison, beaver and wolves help to constitute vast ecologies, keeping them healthy and creative. They give their whole embodiment to the activity of caring for life, cultivating the whole of life onward.

We get cut off from all that activity and creative intelligence. We’re cut off from wolves, horses, beaver, and countless other beings. We don’t know how to properly care for the whole community of life.

Conquest consciousness inherently involves getting cut off from our embodiment in so many ways both obvious and exceptionally subtle (though still profound in their impacts). We could say that it most centrally and most generally cuts us off from spiritual and ecological reality. Conquest consciousness interferes with our capacity to engage in the nonduality of spiritual and ecological reality.

Whether we are fans of capitalism or not, what we refer to as capitalism emerges as part of the current manifestation of conquest consciousness. Maybe we could have capitalism free of conquest consciousness, but that seems impossible by definition, and, as of now, they go together in practice. Calls for various forms of “conscious capitalism” arise as a symptom of this infection, and such calls amount to a contradiction in terms.

In one sense, it’s almost as if capitalism functions as the major organizing mechanism of conquest consciousness. In general, ignorance is never formless, but always arises as a particular form. What we call capitalism, and what we can refer to as conquest consciousness in its more general expression, constitutes the primary forms of contemporary ignorance. (It would defy common sense to proclaim capitalism as the major form of wisdom in our time, but those captured by the pattern of insanity can sometimes act as if they would like to make such a proclamation.)

Capitalism—by its very nature—cuts us off from our own embodiment in a variety of ways. For one thing, capitalism functions by means of the manufacture of needs and desires, and this relates to a manufacture of problems. Capitalism creates problems we didn’t know we had, and it creates problems no other humans in history have ever had.

This is all rather nuanced, but we can consider a paradigmatic example. The makers of Dial soap developed an anti-bacterial line of soaps. They first used hexachlorophene, but that was later connected to neurological damage in babies. Dial soap then integrated triclocarban or triclosan into its formulation.

But they weren’t selling as much soap as they wanted to sell. They did some research and discovered that consumers didn’t find it very important to have anti-biotics in their soap.

Dial famously spent millions of dollars on an ad campaign with the basic tagline, “You’re not as clean as you think.” So, we have a manufactured problem, a manufactured need. It’s not a real need, but it affects our relationship with our own bodies, because people started using this soap in growing numbers. Dial’s ad campaign worked.

Eventually, the FDA ruled that soap companies could no longer sell soaps with triclocarban or triclosan. Among other things, they contribute to another problem we didn’t have before: antibiotic resistance. The FDA don’t seem to have finalized their opinion on benzalkonium chloride, which became the replacement ingredient in Dial soap. But that’s another matter.

To review: Capitalism manufactured a problem we didn’t have, which was that we weren’t clean enough.

I’m a big fan of basic hygiene, so I’m happy to have people promote a skillful sense of good hygiene. But this obviously had nothing to do with our well-being. It had to do with manipulating people and selling more soap. And, as every marketer knows, part of how you sell more soap is to make it seem superior in some way to everyone else’s soap, or find some other way to create a need or desire for your brand—that is to say, we sell things by manipulating fear and craving.

Typical marketing works by conjuring and manipulating the embodied experience of fear and craving.

To make their soap stand out, a corporation puts antibiotics in the soap. But then they create another problem we didn’t have before, and that’s antibiotic resistance, as well as a general increase in the level of toxins in our ecologies. Not only do the antibiotic substances get washed into our ecologies, where they behave as a toxin, but producing them in the first place creates over a hundred carcinogenic byproducts.

This kind of soap is, ironically, exceptionally dirty from an embodied ecological standpoint. Capitalism produces dirty soap.

This basic story holds true for many, many products that change our practices of embodiment. The manufacture of needs and desires—the manufacture of fear and craving—infects our embodiment, including our lifestyle and livelihood, how we understand ourselves, how we relate to and care for our bodies and minds, and how we relate to and care for the ecologies we depend on.

As another example, we all like to have a cell phone that works. And we’ve created a situation in which we basically need them. The need for a cell phone wasn’t a problem that existed on the planet before a microsecond ago, in geological time.

This problem didn’t arise because capitalism wants to connect us. Capitalism neither seeks nor functionally facilitates real connection. In fact, real connection poses a threat to capitalism. So, in place of real connection, capitalism seeks to manufacture needs and desires, and then sell us products that seem to fulfill those needs and desires.

Since it must manufacture problems we don’t have, capitalism develops by means of a path of intentional and unintentional problems. In the case of cell phones, we find incredible degradation of human beings and the ecologies they depend on—the ecologies we all depend on.

billion units per year since: 2009

Every year, capitalism produces enough smartphones that if we laid them down end to end, they would wrap around the Earth about 4 times. Every year we make that many.

When we think about the ecological costs involved, we can sense that our phones don’t tend to empower our embodiment. But then we have the lifestyles and livelihoods that go together with those phones. The cell phone itself alters our habits of heart, mind, body, and world.

For instance, using GPS tends to cut us off from our landscapes. Not only that, but the apps on our phone tend to manipulate pathways of addiction, and this leads us to relate to the phone itself in addictive and distracted ways.

Oddly enough the majority of people think they check their phone less often than others—but they can’t all be right. This indicates we don’t even see how much the phone affects our embodied life.

Depending on which studies we consult, we will find that Americans check their phone up to 150 times a day on average. More than half of us check our phones a few times an hour, and one lower-end survey result puts us at 47 checks per day—a collective 9 billion phone checks per day in the U.S. alone. We touch our phones 2,617 times a day. We can only guess how many times “body positive” and “pro-embodiment” people touch their phones as they post all manner of “embodiment “ “content” on social media.

The phone has thus co-opted embodiment in countless ways. Do we collectively check in with Sophia 9 billion times a day? That is to say: Do we check in with Wisdom, Love, and Beauty, do we check in with the sacred, do we check in with our highest intentions 9 billion times a day?

Do we caress our loved ones: 2600

Perhaps that’s too much touching. But is it fair to say that many of us might be starved for loving touch and genuine connection? Is it fair to say we remember to check our phone more often than we remember to check our soul, or remember to enjoy our embodied experience—without thinking about how we’re going to post it on social media, but just being there, without tech, without self-deception?

Capitalism infects and commodifies our bodies in more ways than we may at first realize, and encourages us to embody fear and craving, praise and blame. Capitalism prefers anxiety and addiction to peace and liberation. It gains nothing from the cultivation of wisdom, love, and beauty and tries to twist these into anything it can sell.

We can see some of this in so-called “personal branding”. Our embodiment becomes a commodity we sell, whether in the labor market or in the social media market. If we look and sound a certain way, we can find a niche market for it.

The influence of capitalism on our embodiment has taken many a strange turn in recent years, some of those turns arising from social media and cell phone use. For example, capitalism fueled a market for plastic surgery. Once upon a time, people went to a plastic surgeon with a picture of someone else, often a celebrity, and they would say, “I want to look like this person.”

Now we have a strange turn: people go to a plastic surgeon with a picture of themselves, and they say, “I want to look the way I make myself look in my social media photos and videos. I use filters and editing, and I don’t actually look the way I appear in social media, and I want to look like that.”

We could go on and on looking into the ways capitalism infects our embodiment. We may think of ourselves as consumers, but, as we look a little further, we realize we are the consumed. Capitalism consumes our embodiment, and it consumes our life energy, our creativity, our intelligence, and our attention. It does everything it can to suck value out of us and the ecologies we depend on.

Once we reflect on the nature and influence of capitalism, we may begin to recognize that part of how we heal and recover our embodiment has to do with transcending capitalism, and finding an embodied life beyond it. Capitalism isn’t interested in the fuller realities of our embodiment. It treats us like machines, and it treats the world as a machine and a passive source for extraction. Capitalism cuts us off from the natural world, and always has.

The development of capitalism goes together with people being thrown out of the rural landscape and driven into the cities, to be able to sell their body or rent their body out in exchange for wages. The development of capitalism goes with increasing disconnection from the spiritual and ecological realities of embodiment.

And when we think about it, we might be the fittest person on the planet, but when we walk into a grocery store and we hand over money and in exchange get all sorts of exotic foods for our carnivore diet or our paleo or keto or vegan diet, that’s a total abstraction. We likely have little to no intimacy with spiritual or ecological reality in that moment. We may have little to no idea where the food came from or exactly what it took to grow it and get it to us.

And this is just one way of talking about a problem that is diverse, nuanced, and subtle. But, however we look at it, we find that capitalism alters our relationship with the ecologies we depend on, and it doesn’t offer us a way to heal the rift it creates between us and spiritual and ecological reality.

Instead of a way to heal our embodiment, and to heal and engage with the ecologies we depend on, we have a commodification. Spiritual and ecological needs get abstracted and commodified. Instead of a way to heal that rift, we find an increasing recognition of our interdependence with Nature, an increasing recognition of the medicine our relationship with Nature provides us, and that gets sold to us—as a product.

Relationships aren’t products, and they involve a dynamism that depends on the quality of our being. A product comes home with us no matter the quality of our being.

Through this commodification, we get sold fragmented spiritual and ecological experiences, and we don’t get a path for cultivating our lives in such a way that we have more genuine, vitalizing, and comprehensive relationships with Nature. Instead, we rent ourselves out for higher and higher wages, and in exchange for that, we get to buy a vacation to a place where there’s more “nature”.

In the meantime, because capitalism manufactures problems, we’re degrading Nature at the same time as we have begun to wake up to how important it is, and we’re starting to see sicknesses in our bodies that come from this very disconnection from Nature.

Nature and embodiment go completely together, but we don’t recognize the full scope of the problem a lot of times, because of the propaganda of the dominant culture. We have had discussions about the value of Nature for as long as the dominant culture has been cut off from it—and the earliest stages of that disconnection go back thousands of years, depending on where we look.

Today, people tend to emphasize certain aspects of these issues, but not always with the holism we need if we really want to heal our embodiment and the ecologies we depend on. For instance, a lot of people try to address the fact that embodiment has a political dimension to it, and others may stress that it has an economic dimension to it in our context.

The bottom line is that, if we want to heal our embodiment, as far as we can tell, that’s going to require challenging the capitalist framework, and it’s going to require democracy—not because we have to blame all our problems on capitalism and authoritarianism in some fragmented way, but because capitalism and authoritarianism arise as an expression of our ignorance, and they also create ecologies of ignorance.

We don’t get to keep capitalism if we want to fully heal our embodiment and the ecologies we depend on. Of course, this or that individual might feel that they recovered a lot within the capitalist market, that they have paid for all sorts of healing that helped them, that they’re more embodied than they’ve ever been in their life.

But that individualizes embodiment, while ecologically and spiritually we can sense that our embodiment is constituted by interwovenness, and cannot exist outside of interwovenness. The same person who might claim they’ve done all sorts of healing of their embodiment might not have done very much at all to help to heal the natural world. Such an approach will always have limits, and it will always have some of its potential captured by the self-help catastrophe.

That’s what capitalism offers us: That we can feel better, but only if we purchase it—at the expense of the natural world. Capitalism has so captured our science that even some scientists now suggest that money can make us happy, instead of recognizing the truth: That we have created a system in which poverty buys us misery, and relative ease comes with a monetary price. We have created a false system in which money buffers us from many forms of suffering, a system in which money can purchase improvements to our bodies and minds. But that doesn’t make money an authentic source of happiness.

And as we try to overcome that whole tragedy of the soul, as we try to try to dissolve that problem in ourselves and our world, we find that we have to start making more and more gestures that go counter to the catastrophe of capitalism.

All of this relates to our vision. If we don’t reflect on our vision of life, and address the highest values and intentions we have for our embodiment, including its ethical foundation and the interwovenness of spiritual and ecological realities, then our attempts at giving the body its due—a kind of carnal justice—won’t bring us the fullest transformative healing and insight we need, even if it may seem to bring many wonderful benefits. Justice and embodiment go completely together.

So do justice and holism, as well as embodiment and holism. Conquest consciousness seems beset by fragmentation, which means all of us infected by it embody fragmentation to varying degrees. And we find fragmentation pervasive in the dominant culture. This leads to strategies of self-help that involve fragmented and fragmenting tactics, tools, and techniques. It’s a “toolkit” approach that makes use of empirical and emotional findings that lack a holistic ecology.

When we turn to the wisdom traditions, we find holistic ecologies that seem to always contain, and go beyond, the most important findings of dominant culture science. I have encountered nothing in the self-help-industrial complex (including neuroscience and psychotherapy) that doesn’t have some effective analog in the wisdom traditions. Once we put aside the neurobabble, we realize our embodiment doesn’t function on the basis of manipulating our vagus nerve or controlling our reticular activating system. Rather, we have nothing to work with but experience, and that experience functions holistically.