Embodiment is Enmindment: Embracing the Monochotomy

(under development)

To a former therapist, and dear friend of mine:

The gender stuff has ultimately become a window for me into understanding what religious thinking is and exactly where is the line between it (illogic) and logical analysis. As you know well, I have struggled in my personal life with the line between reality and not-reality. But finally due to the influence of some amazing thinkers and scientists, I have found my own footing firmly in reality. To borrow the framework of one of them: Not in the trichotomy of soul/mind-body-spirit, nor in the dichotomy of soul/mind-body, but in the monochotomy of… body! Our subjective sense that there is a trichotomy or dichotomy is a result of our biological circumstance… that is having brains that evolved under certain conditions to have certain mechanisms. Mechanisms which we can never escape, and which we are not “greater than” or separate from. Truly, we are biological creatures. Truly, we exist in a material world.

There is no hopsy-daisies, there is no research that will come out that will short-circuit physics. After all the major frontiers in science are a matter of scale, either so minute or so large as to be mostly irrelevant to the human scale, apart from the advanced technologies that we derive from them. Quantum mechanics did not replace Newtonian mechanics, it merely took over on a scale where Newtonian mechanics couldn’t reach. We don’t need to understand the mechanics of ligands to touch someone’s back and have them find relief. 

To me this is ultimately what it means to be embodied. It is not just a physical experience, it is a mental orientation. An orientation that, seeking, turns its sights inward to the conditions of its own limitations. We do not wholesale dispose of irrefutable bodies of evidence that have been established through the scientific process, because we deem them inadequate. (I hear this all the time and it drives me nuts). We say “thank you sir/ma'am, may I have another”, and we find where the pieces fit. Embodiment is an orientation that asks over and over again: “what is(are) the mechanism(s) at play here?” Embodiment includes clear mental boundaries between the material and the religious.

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