Back when I was a graduate student in philosophy, I was internally riveted by what I imagine is still called, in academic circles, “the mind-body problem.” I wondered:

What is the difference between mind and body? How do they interact? Where do they join? (Descartes said the pineal gland. That intrigued me, though nobody else took it seriously.) Or DO they join? Do mind and body run in parallel tracks, somehow, never meeting, but directed by something larger than both? Descartes called it “God”? Huh? But what does that really mean, that word “God,” now that the grip of Catholicism was beginning to loosen?

Confusion reigned, indeed it raged, inside me. I was caught inside my monkey mind. Left to its own devices, my body did its own thing, behaved with mechanical, predictable habits set long ago by powers outside myself. Inside this weird foreign controlled machine, the mind stretched at its traces:

How to get out of the body and fly into the sky as in my dreams? Or, failing that, how to truly connect with the body? In other words, if I can’t integrate with the Above, then I need to integrate with the Below, because otherwise I’m left floating, unreal, dead. That’s how I felt, deep inside: though “I” (my ego) was unaware of it, I was yearning for union, some way of finding my place in the universe, a longing to come home.

The only time I felt fully alive was, oddly enough, when I was pregnant. Then the laws of the universe, utilizing my body as its instrument, were busy creating a new body inside mine. “I” had nothing to do with it. I could interrupt the process (abortion), but I could not direct it. If allowed, pregnancy followed its own laws. The fact of being used in that mysterious manner both thrilled and terrified me. Thrilled? Huh? Why did it thrill me, since I did not want to be pregnant, and had become so “by accident”? I absolutely knew, from the time I was young, that I did not want children, that I (my fiery Sagittarian self) needed/wanted to live free of such encumbrances. (Plus, seeing what my Mom went through with eight of us, I knew I didn’t want that.)

But there I was, pregnant at 20 years old. (And still Catholic, so didn’t dare interrupt it.) And I loved being pregnant!. Why? Because for the first time I felt fully alive, sensuous, my own nature integrated with all of nature, with the Below. In communion with the whole, for the very first time since as a child, I had galloped, bareback and ecstatic, across the fields on my horse towards the rising sun.

One way I could parse my own journey of now over seven decades would be to say that I have been working to reignite and integrate that early feeling of aliveness, and to do so by consciously uniting mind and body, so they work as one, deeply interwoven into the whole of nature. — Above and Below. Through meditation, silence, walks in InDiana’s woods, various yogic and chi kung practices, I am more and more sensing my own body as an antenna of Earth, She who subtly let’s me know what’s going on deep down, underneath the “conscious” rational left brain mind.

Yes, my own body, this small portion of the Below, which I see/feel as co-terminous with my right brain, with the unconscious mind, IS that which knows and feels an all-onement with the universe Above.

It’s been a hell of a ride. Very unlike the ride that possibly mind-controlled puppet Katy Perry endured at the Super Bowl, standing hard and defiant upon the clanking, mechanical Beast.

That one image will haunt me forever, as it was designed to do.

We are supposed to think of ourselves as riding the predictable, controllable (“science” will see that it is so) material mechanics of a soul-less, non-living universe.

Notice that the divine feminine energy, which is so badly needed to balance millennia of masculine overwhelm, is being co-opted everytime She shows up. Whether it’s by using her names (the goddess ISIS, morphs luridly into a crazy-like-a-fox violent sect), or encouraging young women to adopt hard, competitive, in your-face masculine values in order to become “real players” in the capitalist world (Katy Perry) in contrast to the the utter denigration of the nurturing values embedded in home life, family life, child care as a profession — all these ways help to undercut the desperately needed rebalancing of the energetics of this planet.

We are supposed to combine with machines (transhumanism), integrate with AI (through screens), mimic what is (through Disneyeske cartoons, ads, propaganda, and other media, biotech, genetic engineering, etc.) and, simmering under all, there’s Monsanto’s “archonic” takeover.

Monsanto Eerily Mimics Archon Agenda Depicted in Nag Hammadi Gnostic Texts

In order to counter this galloping take-over, there is a growing interest in entheogens, natural plants that help us impoverished left-brain humans re-enter the right brain, and thus the universe. I applaud this development. Here, from the same source, a new one for me, is another article that speaks to the herstory embedded in Eleusis, where the goddess once lived. I visited Eleusis, back in the early ’90s, and was deeply touched by the ineffable power that still emanates from this deeply scarred, ruined land.

No Mortal Hand Hath Yet to Unveil Me — Gnostic Symbolism