Henry Abbott

Last week, I spoke to a friend about the virtues of meditating one’s pinky finger. We were considering the tyranny that is staring down a horizon with unanchored feet and the nausea that is lightness without heaviness. We elected to let one’s pinky finger act as an anchor when necessary. Meditation features prominently in my adult life. It is the framework through which I have been able to cure a lifetime of severe insomnia, an endless loop of doctor’s appointments and a dependence on heavy sedatives. Meditation’s premises are simple: “You” is just a constellation of sense data. There are perceptions and there’s metacognition, but there’s no need to spin a story out of it. The practice sharpens the difference between thinking “I am drinking tea” and just drinking tea. It is the resolution that a life bereft of mythology is still one being lived.

Maxim Four: Seek physical discomfort, then unite. My most pragmatic maxim articulates embodiment’s stature in questions of personal identity. By facilitating physical discomfort and then ridding oneself of the concepts of comfort and discomfort, one fosters the mind-body union. The principle is a methodology for staving off the dualist creep.

Here’s modern philosophy’s common refrain: Look, this is the world. You can touch it and hear it and taste it and see it. And if you are foolish enough, you can be happy with that. But that is just the world we humans can know. But there is truth just beyond the reaches of our human hands. You cannot know it, and you cannot enjoy it. You may get a glimpse of it through some magnum opus or particularly raucous concert, but such moments are fleeting; they do not constitute ordinary life.

It’s a sullen and ubiquitous proposition. The doctrine of the bifurcated world provides a substantive basis for the essential works of Descartes, Schopenhauer, Kant and Locke. Whether these names are familiar to you or not, their thought projects have needled their way into the public intellectual tradition. Disciples of this doctrine demand that we live in a state of eternal yearning for something better than this, better than all we have and all we know. Existence for soul-believers can be definitionally no better than purgatory.

My body is neither a sack of flesh into which my “self-ness” is stuffed nor a marionette animated by the whims of some flighty spirit. The dualist looks at themself, and they see what they are—that is, the sensory experiences they have access to, the muscles that move them, the brain that invigorates them—and they cast their glances elsewhere. They are strangers to themselves.

For the dualist, the body can be nothing greater than kind of gross. The body is the material conditions for existence, but the body is not you. It is a fleshy, flawed sack.

It’s tempting to wonder what’s so wrong with that, if my soul and “self-ness” are still kicking around elsewhere. But if “you” are in no part your body, then you must not identify with your body. And the alienation commences. If the body is the soul’s gateway to the material world, the dualist needs to pay little mind, for the world is but a waiting room itself. But, alienation from one’s body leaves one stuck in a world of signifiers without knowing what they signify. That is, without muscle spasms and beads of sweat, one’s body remains a symbol or edifice for life. It is barred from being lifeforce itself. Even if your soul-stuff is doing its job being “you,” your nerve-endings are doing the sensing. Your body is the means by which you engage with the world. It is the source of empirical knowledge. It is the site of pleasure and pain.

He who sees his body as clothing for the soul blushes at his embodiment and then blushes again for blushing. When confronted with hunger or lust, he fearfully retreats to a place behind locked doors but will always emerge short of satisfaction and with a seedling of shame. A fear of nudity dies hard. Thus, the dualist project breeds a rigorous, unkind chastity.

Why must the flesh be weak? I can run until my legs burn and give out, and then I can run a little farther. That we can rub shoulders with our physical limitations is a wild affirmation of human animalism—in all of its fleshy, sweaty, ruddy-faced glory. At least, it is evidence enough that the body is not mere sheep’s clothing. Let’s not be charitable to an intellectual paradigm that permits anything less than rejoicement when I climb, or listen, or bow, or shriek or sprint.

The state of liberation is the state of total affirmation of embodiment. This is not self-love; it is the ability to bear oneself without shame. Test your limits. Foster an intimacy with the signified. Sweat often. Get tactile.