IN BODY-MIND practices, there is a strong sense of tai chi’s
metaphor of human life as the “little universe” within the “larger
universe.” With such a view, for
optimal human life, the task to optimize human life then involves bringing human
life into harmony with the larger universe or cosmos. But in general human activity, there is a tendency to
reference human life as somehow separate from the universe, often as having
come into the physical universe and leaving it upon death. Human life seems far more cultural than creatural, and sometimes more negatively artificial or positively civil than
natural.
The focus of body-mind practices primarily engage the body
in specific activities, and in that sense can be experienced as more natural
than everyday routine. But
body-mind practices can reflect and reinforce the popular sense of human life
as separate and above nature. As
such, body-mind practices aspire to control the body—to control nature--to
ultimately optimize and free the spirit that is referenced as temporarily
housed in the body.
In ancient civilizations and pre-literate societies, the sun
was not a physical star as we understand it to be today, but rather was a god
who crossed the sky. Similarly,
stars, the seas, the mountains, as well as flora and fauna were gods, or
intermediaries or the architecture/furnishings of landscapes of spirit rather
than events with standing in their own right. The sacredness of place came from an essence that was beyond
the events rather than from within the events. Again, the beyond—the apartness—was often culturally
reinforced.
There have been periods in cultural development that have
marked quantum shifts in human perception and action. These renascent periods, such as the Italian Renaissance or
the Industrial Revolution, markedly shifted cultural life. In the post-industrial, cybernetic
context of contemporary human life, there may be a new renascent task. In The Great Work, Thomas Berry suggests that the renascent task of
human life involves integration into the larger global ecosystem. And this would not be a begrudging step
back in human development to address environmental degradation that now feeds
back on human health in a now-peopled Earth. And it would not be a Romantic step back into a
pastoral. Rather, it would be a
step forward to advance and optimize human life.
The biggest challenge to integration within the larger
ecosystem is the predominant sense of separation from the natural world. We become our words. And if we imagine ourselves to be
separate, it is difficult to integrate.
IN 1970, we saw Earth form space, and our image of the Earth
from desk globes was changed forever.
We were inside the thin, membranous biosphere. And we have not really caught up with our eyes. Our ecological literacy is still in its
infancy and it only vaguely includes human life. Our languages still only vaguely express Earth even though
the origins of our words may have their origins in the natural
landscape/processes as Emerson posits in his essay Nature. As we
advance as a species, we are finding that we are more deeply in nature, not
apart from it.
In body-mind practices, we listen to the body. It has a voice, and it is our deep voice.
Our hands are in a very real way our ancestors’ hands. And so, in body-mind practices, we
aspire toward stilling and calming cultural bias and everyday chatter to listen
to wisdom. We should remain
critical of the voice, as it is likely to be strongly colored by our cultural
biases. But when we repeatedly
calm, there is a sense of something rich and authentic and optimizing to which
we attune. We begin to find that
the body is both natural and that we are more than our body. The landscape is the longer reach of
ourselves, not a stage-set in which we act out our lives but an ongoing
creative process that is both expressing us and designing us. Not separable islands as we might come
to believe, our respiration and digestion and our thirst are currents that
reach everywhere. And this
landscape extends into infinities of largeness and smallness. And the more
subtly and rationally that we measure, we find the influences of oceans and
subtle influence of stars and of galaxies and likely of an
infinity/multiplicity that we cannot begin to comprehend. Our culture is valuable, but
small. To imagine ourselves as
primarily cultural is to express our limitations.
In a now-peopled Earth, it may be more important than ever
to integrate with the larger Earth ecosystem. How might the Earth express itself in us? What if the waters and atmosphere and
mountains and even tiny blades of grass were temples, events not to be lost,
stolen or strayed from human life?
Throughout human development, there has been a tendency to
go out into nature as if it were external/outside. But now, with fresh eco-literacy, attending to the landscape
of the body is the most intimate ground of nature. Restricting nature to unsettled wild places is another
measure of our limits. Our
eco-literacy is beginning to reveal an inherent wildness in both the
destructive aspects of contemporary human life and in adaptive features of urban ecology. [See blog: “The
Manicured Wilderness,” http://cityasecological.blogspot.com] We remain fragile
and far more wild and creatural than artificial and cultural/civil.
But perhaps we can first begin by challenging our words and
beliefs, or just let them go for some moments. And then attend to the body as something that we aspire to
free and follow rather than as something aspire to control, as if it is really
not us and something that gets in our way. And see what gate might open.
