BRILLIANT BODY, or: How do dreams come true?

In several recent posts, I have focused on the edge between energy and matter, about dreams coming true. And further: about the necessity, if we wish to live fully, of moving our dreams into manifestation.

But how? You ask.

After all, I’m just an average human being, caught up in the machinations of this culture that calls me to work work work to make money money money in order to buy things things things and/or save save save for “retirement,” or a “rainy day.” The more money I make, the more things I get, the better, more secure, safe I feel.

Or at least, that’s the programming. In actual fact, the more money I make, the more things I have, the more I have to maintain and defend, afraid either they will stop working or others will take them away!

Because, after all, it’s a dog-eat-dog world “out there,” and I’ve got to “get mine.” Because there’s not enough to go around. There’s a scarcity of both money and things. And what money and things do exist, tend to get funneled into the top .001% of a pyramid of humans, most of whom, like me, are on the bottom, slaving away, trying to make it day by day and hopefully, plan ahead. At least a little bit. But it’s hard, because I never feel good; I just feel exhausted, numb, and aching. Always. Nothing in my body works right. I’m too fat or I’m too thin. My back (and/or hips, knees, ankles, jaw, muscles) aches. I’m a complete mess. My heart . . . I worry about my heart. It’s pounding, or its erratic, or it feels like it’s about to burst!

But It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except that keep doing this mindless work that I hate but that I need because of medical insurance or house mortgage, or student debt, or . . . And after all, I have to do it, because that’s what everybody does, what we have to do, to “make it.”

Okay, let’s flip out of the programmiong now.

Then what?

As usual, as a permaculturist, I see edges as  “where the action is.” The more edge, the more action. For example, the boundary between a field and a forest: lots of insects, plants, bushes, animal species there that are not present in either the forest proper or in the field beyond. Edges are where seams knit together by bringing in more elements to do the job, diversifying in order to integrate. It’s paradoxical (as usual): the more variety, the more resilience — eventually; the more that edge can withstand the shocks of yet even more elements being introduced.

So let’s take this idea and apply it to the human realm, and even more specifically, within the individual human. And here, I’d like to focus on the edge between the mind and the body, that edge philosophers, ever since Rene Descartes, began to not only ignore, but to positively deny. For Descartes, the mind was the only real part of the human being. Wby? Because “I think, therefore I am.” Ergo: only my thinking is me. The body, according to this 17th century pioneer of disembodied consciousness, is but an object like any other, made of dead matter, its structure and function purely mechanical.

This morning I went to my regular weekly acupuncture appointment. Wanted to get my body poked with tiny holes in specific points that correspond to the meridians. These meridians — or, invisible pathways within which life force flows, or gets stuck, thus the value of acupuncture, to clear the pathways — have no place in Descartes’ philosophy, or in the still prevailing scientism that resulted from it.

“Those doctors!” The tiny woman emphasizes, her hands flying at a rate of multiple needle insertions per second. “They think they know how the body works. But they don’t! And they will never know. I don’t either. I just know where to poke the holes.” She laughs. I try to laugh with her, through the wincing of each insertion.

This Chinese woman and I got to talking about the body, about how brilliant is the body, how it is so much more intelligent then scientists and doctors who see and treat it as a mere thing, moved by blind mechanical forces, and like a car, either “fixable” (by drugs or surgery, usually) or not. Yes, this view of the body as a thing is still deeply embedded within western culture, three centuries after Descartes.

She and I are alike; we marvel at how the tiny wound in my hand, for example, gradually closes, the body marshaling a myriad of forces way beyond our “scientific” comprehension, all integrated, flowing as one.

Even those of us who think we are bright, if we could only be as bright as our bodies! Or, I should say, if we could only get back in touch with our bodies, truly live in them, we would then remember our own true brilliance. For each of us incarnates here as a unique, irreplaceable seed of awareness, working the edge between energy and matter, moving into material manifestation over time, and participating in the extraordinary ebb and flow of the primal life force as it expresses in all creatures who live upon the Earth’s living body. Yes, if we could only remember, re-member! Put ourselves back together again with our own bodies, these deliciously quivering antennae for the magnificent Earth body!

If only. If only. Meanwhile, I lie on the acupuncture table in the dark, for 90 minutes, with around 50 needles in me, body stilled, and, of course, mind racing. It’s my job to stay aware of the mind stuff as it flashes in and out, and NOT identify with any of it.

Acupuncture, as meditation.

Meanwhile, the meridians are being cleared of whatever gunk is stuck in them after 76 very full years, many of which I lived “on the edge,” in so many ways. Rather than being balanced, mind and body, conscious and unconscious; rather than being integrated, mind and body flowing as one, I was, usually, either racing ahead of my body, and then tripping, falling, or stuck inside the body’s sensuality, its trapped  desire or fear. I flipped from one to the other and back again. Stuck in the body (sexual and other desire: attachment), or stuck in the mind (fear: of abandonment). Either taken over by the body, or taken over by the mind.

Not sure where I’m going with this post, except to say that I want, very much, to somehow inspire others to move our fractious minds into communion with our own brilliant bodies. Because when we do that, then what we are to do next becomes obvious. The body knows. The body always knows. And it’s our job to tune in!

But why do that, you might ask. Well . . .

I can’t. Because my body is full of pain. Unbearable.

Or:

I cant. Because my body feels stuck, dead, numb; I’d just rather keep on trying to ignore it, or to deaden it further, or somehow flush it to fake life through some drug or other. My body is mine to do with what I will. And what I will, more than anything else, is to forget about it, just use it for my own purposes, flog into life when I need it, deaden it to sleep when I don’t. If I could only, somehow, escape the body entirely, fly free!

Oh, but no! No! That means I would die! And I’m even more afraid of dying than I am of actually, and consciously, being inside my body, allowing its pain to move me in directions it knows would help it feel better, even heal! 

So no, no. I can’t do that. I have too much else to do, things to buy or sell, people to see, places to go, schedules and promises to keep. I’ve simply no time for this very weird idea of stopping and listening to the body, what it wants now. For it IS an “it.” Just an object in the room that happens to be attached to me, like a ball and chain. I can’t go anywhere without it, unfortunately. I’d certainly rather. Or I’d rather use it, pretty it up on the outside, to get other people to look at me, value me, love me. For I need love, I feel so empty, empty. There is such a hole in my being. Ugh. I might as well die. 

You do see where I’m going with this, right? I’m asking you, and all of us, to climb back into our brilliant bodies, let them tell us what’s next. Because they will. Through dreams, synchronicities, strange sensations in various places, the body always knows what would be good for it — and therefore us, the passenger — if we would simply attune to it now, and forever. Then we would find ourselves following our dreams. Over time, and little by little, or in leaps and bounds, our dreams would begin to manifest, to “come true.”