Body of God
I.
What fell, when we dropped like an apple from that sacred tree? There is no escaping the body. It is from our self-hatred that we must be redeemed. The body lives the truth we vainly seek: we are not separate.
We are the gods of the anthropocene, of the end of the world. The body is our work. The body is where the mind lives, and the soul: cohabiting and continuous. The body is the vessel and the message: the cup and the water. We, bloated and lazy, rotting on the compost heap at the end of times-- it is up to us to bring the reign of heavens deep, erupting out this swollen earth.
Holy is our body, the instrument of consciousness, chaos, sanctity, joy. Yet these bodies exist in a world encrusted with hatred, shame, derogation, detachment. Since infancy we have been taught to torture our bodies daily, to poison it at every meal, to plague it and to silence it and to rest content with the screaming of the world around us. We medicate and until the cure turns to a curse, taking our sacraments and rendering them tasteless soulless simulacrums. Whether wheat or meat, caffeine or cocoa, Ayahuasca or Amanita. We are so desperate for the songs of our mothers, we bury ourselves in their bones.
We have been trained since youth to ignore our bodies, to fight them, to restrain them. We apocalyptic post-moderns, we don't know what embodiment means. What is the meaning? There is no meaning, only this grotesque aberration of consciousness, bizarre electric impulse in this other animal body, this desperate self-destruction that is the core of all our gods.
What does it mean to say, the body of god? There is no ineffable you, only the eternal going. Not an act, but an inevitability. We have more in common with vines than rocks. We gods are more like trees than statues. Incarnation is not the Fall. No, it is our rejection of the body, of matter, that constitutes our fall from grace. That gnosis of morality that made us man, creating the mediating fetish of shame. This and only this: this search for something away from the body, this rejection of bloody production and the divinity of flesh: this and only this is the fall of man.
The earliest sculptures that we have are of bodies. The bodies of animals, the bodies of women. Curve and shape formed of dust, dust compressed to rock with the pressure that is god. Holy gods of the caves and of the mountains: all our monuments and temples are mimicries of nature, which is the nature of god.
What is the body of god, when the whole world is god; god in its stagnancy and in its torrent. There is no either/or. There is no separation. God, like humanity, is a matter of both/and.
We are continuous and inevitable. This is the nature of being. The encasement of the body is a limit made to be broken; not broken out of, but broken into. This is the nature of the knowledge that we seek.
II.
Time gives the illusion of progress. But the continuity of being is like the series of circles that echo from a rock thrown in a pool. Or maybe, like a river rushing ever to the sea. Or maybe, like the indeterminate immortality of the mycelium, or the individuation of the Banyan grove.
Life is a great swamp, and we are nothing but mosquitos. Life is a bog, and we are a thousand baby toads on the back of the mother. What is god? The masses sigh. I say, it is analogous with the breaking of skin.
Look not beyond—beyond the fetish, beyond the symbol. When it comes to god the experience, the mediation, the expression—there is no separation from these and the thing-in-itself. There is no beyond—beyond the veil of symbols there is no-thing. God is in the gap, the boundary and the bridge. We seek for god in absolutes—but divinity lies in between.
We create our gods out of stars and planets, for deep down we know the inevitability of cells, and of dust. Oh, subtle magnetism, visible dust carried upon invisible rays. Such is the nature of us, little humans, trapped in the circles of polarity.
Sense turns to no-sense, as do our monuments crumble into dust. But isn't the substance the same? The accuracy of language is a game. Reassuring and world building and ultimately empty—not unlike the vessel, which is the body and the earth and the womb. Sexuality and speech are inevitably intertwined. Both are deeply human things, deeply alien things.
III.
The first moment of creation was when the All receded into itself, creating space for creation. This is called tsim-tsum (and this potentiating bend happens anew at every moment). This space was a vacuum, with a passivity that pulls. Thus the first great phallus broke from continuity into a line, to project forth into the emptiness, to fill. The emptiness, it has walls like an egg, filled with the potential of life. These dark waters, the paradoxical chaos from which we have all sprung. This is the womb of life.
Ave Ave Ave! We were all nurtured by the bird upon the water. We are all broken by the line, which is the word, sound, articulation. The logos was the end and the beginning—but what use is a word in the face of a tidal wave? Thus we arrange ourselves with magical instruments, like rubber ducks on a great sea. Thus our articulations, which are our being, are but ripples on the water. The limits of language are reached—but not, therefore, the limits of thought. For when the word stops the body begins.
The body of god. I cannot do the work for you, not I nor any of my pretty tales. I cannot shovel shit on your behalf; I can only hand you the shovel and point you in the right direction, which is down. This body of god; this shovelling of filth is the Great Work, Nigredo, the rarification of spirit, the achievement of enlightenment; all of which are not out of body, but the subliming of the presence within it.
There is no escaping the body. There is no need for escape. To become still, we must be present; to escape, means only to seek the attic rooms rather than the basement. But we are all one body, and it is warmer close to the earth, that eternal source of fire and life. We see the sun, and think that life descends; but what of the fiery lifeblood of the earth, lurking under the mountain? Deep calls unto deep, and we erupt all force that has not been given an outlet. We can make of the fires of hell a great renewable-energy system, and we can make the centre of the earth a living paradise.
IV.
We spend our lives seeking control. Control over our bodies. Control over our gods. But control is an illusion. Consciousness is like the sea, frothing on top and subject to secret tides. Our attempts at control are like a little glass ramekin upon the sea. All that you call I is like a little flo of ice upon the ocean. We must learn to melt.
There is no controlling the body. There is only the slow slipping away of the layers of shame. There is only learning to listen. There is no control of mind. There is only arbitrary division, and a choice: embrace all, or cower in the corner.
The body is god. Is god as lonely and confused as I am, trapped in the inextricably of this embodiedness? Yes! What else are the wounds of Christ, but human pains in a godly body, and godly pains in a human one.
All this is a game, for divinity is not a force or quality separate from nature, body, earth: rather, it describes a pressure pervading all these things. Thus, perhaps the mushroom really is the best image of the Christ, a god-body infinitely interrelated. Thus does it teach us the nature of god.
There is no god where I am. Divinity is found at the dissolution of ego. There She waits. But who will ever approach Her? It is easier for a laden camel to fit through the eye of a needle.
God is nonsensical. Common sense is the least divine of all things. God is staunchly, drippingly, deliciously human. There is no distinction between any one thing and any other thing in the body of god. Cats are god, and roaches too, and menses and pus and the sound of screaming. Joy and pain and all life and all death exist in the womb of the Mother, in the body of god. Thus all matters of ethics and morality are only a matter of perspective.
But what can all this metaphysik mean for these bleeding, burning bodies? These bodies that ache and orgasm, these bodies we fight with, indulge and engorge. These interfaces with the outside world that make of us such lonesome things. Better to be bees: yet still, all this is the body of god.
V.
The body is not a vessel, to be emptied and filled. It is a vast ecology, an eternity of interlinked communities, from the smallest elementary particles to the great organ systems, to the colonies of viruses and skin mites and memories. These units we propel through space: in the eyes of the world they are indistinct, great meshes of intermeshed things, like velcro for the soul. The vast ecology that makes up a body in turn but a numinous monad among the infinitely vaster ecologies of the world, the universe, and the soul.
What is the body of god? It is this earth, and all that is in it. Sand and stone and rock and mud and blood and water, salt and clay and the rocks and the small grains of sand are as cells in the great god body that is this earth. Nature; not in opposition, distinguished from the divine but recognised as the very site of divinity, godhead, and all that has ever been called spirit; all this numinosity is a phenomena indistinct from the physical world. There is no distinction, no opposition, no dualism, no dichotomy. The body is god and it is infinite; that is to say, it is continuous.
Consider, if you will, the consciousness of planets. As each slug and mouse and cat and monkey and tree and mountain and sea have consciousness (that is to say, have spirit), so too do these interlinking consciousnesses create and are created by the great god body that is the planet earth. This consciousness interacts with its siblings, the planets and the stars, in its own way, with their dance, in reverence and worship of their Great and Terrible Star; and all these, this whole solar system are only one tiny cell in the great god body that is the infinity of the universe, and all that only one insignificant member in the vast community of alternative universes, all held within one tiny pocket in the infinite expanse that is ALL. And this too is the body of god.
As above, so below; and all of the world is like a vast Jacob's ladder. Yet the angels run not between heaven and earth; rather they are currents and tides that flow through the scale of things, tunnelling like water and refracting like light. There is no up or down in the body of god: there is only depth. The abyss that yawns between each of our elementary particles is analogous with the abyss of space and the abyss in the hearts of man. There is no difference, only perspective.
VI.
We ask ourselves, what does it mean, to be? What is being? What makes us us? What is our centre, our purpose? What are we? Why are we here? The eternal angst, is existence itself bad, is it wrong? Are we, who are not animals, we with this torturous consciousness, an aberration? Must we penalise the body and the earth, or else give into it? What is being? Existence does not, cannot, be solitary. We exist as ecologies, within ecologies. A human infant cannot survive without care. We exist in communion. What makes us us? The torture. The choice. All that we long for and fear in all we deem other to humanity; an escape from this endless, terrible choice. Do I kill, or be killed?
But this choice is only so terrifying, so final, because we have forgotten the trick of immortality, the most ancient magic trick. We humans, with our gods, we can choose to offer ourselves to the other before us, choose to bare our chest to be killed; and thus to be reborn; reborn a god. This great truth of magical rebirth, the church tortured and tangled and delegated power to an ineffable thing; but remember baptism is in water, and water is the Great Mother of us all, and the moment of kill or be killed is not only the moment of salvation and sacrifice but the moment of sex too. Unnecessary sacrifice is the most exquisitely human of things.
What does it mean to be human? It means, to have been granted the possibility of the experience granted by sacrifice, by unnecessary, magical sacrifice. It is self-sacrifice that separates us from animals. We can die and be reborn, neither human nor animal but both and god. But to attain this, to experience the ecstasy that is ours alone in all of nature, we must give our very selves. We must bare our chests; this thing that feels so primal, yet is the least animal of all the instincts we possess. To actively, willfully deny self-preservation. To look the godhood of the other in the eye, and die.
Why are we here? The question makes no sense. To ask why of a becoming-god is like asking a plague of locusts to form an orderly queue. And yet, the answer is simple. We are here to be destroyed. We are here to love.
