Few Thoughts on Freedom

As should be clear by now, the central premise at the heart of this blog is the unity of body and mind, and resulting from that, the equation that movement is life. In our culture however, the mind-body split is still deeply rooted. (Ironically, of course this very concept of a mind-body split is itself embodied within the human organism, but that's for another day.) Therefore, most philosophical notions that originate from a body-mind unity will differ from classical Western philosophical notions and also from Western 'common sense.' Today, I want to take a short look at the term of freedom and how it may relate itself to an embodied existence.

Both philosophy and religion structure the underlying premises of our everyday lives whether we are aware of it or not. Christianity has taught us that we really are disembodied souls contained in a bag of skin from which we will finally be released after death. Even if they call themselves atheists, many people in our society still understand themselves as being within the body, as being some entity controlling the organism. Scientifically, that is a tough position to maintain, considering what we now know of the connection of body and mind or e.g. the intelligence of the gut. This premise of disembodiment, when employed for generation after generation finally reaches a point of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The son of body-psychotherapist Alexander Lowen fittingly remarked that Western society is in a constant state of an "over-stimulated mind and an under-stimulated body." By spending large chunks of our days sitting in an inert position and constantly using the conscious, analytical part of our mind (or brain?) to solve problems and interact with the world, while simultaneously promoting atrophy in the system as a whole, we have created a sense of separation that we pretend has been there all along.* 

*This is certainly a very simplified presentation of complex reciprocal processes, but you get the point. 

Now, contrary to what may be a first impression, the ever-recurring trend towards fitness or working out does not neccessarily fix this or even respond to it in an intelligent way. Applying the same premises to physical movement, the movements themselves become robotic patterns that are executed in a mind-body relationship of commander and commanded, as opposed to the organism as a whole performing a certain pattern or movement. This split creates a way of being that is in constant conflict. Conflict between what the conscious aspect of our thinking with which we identify thinks there should be, and what, on a body-level, we know there is. For example, if we are angry, we feel that there is anger. Now, instead of realizing that that is what there is we have been taught to evalutate whether that anger makes sense, whether it is reasonable to feel that way. Hence, we judge our spontaneous bodily reactions and even suppress them when they do not fit in with the cultural context. This makes sense in certain situations. If I feel like punching somebody for whatever reason I will restrain myself from doing so, because in our society, and correspondingly for me personally, that is the wrong thing to do. Fully feeling the anger towards that person however, is never wrong and further does not harm anybody else, the only potentially harmful thing here would be to suppress that anger which is harmful to oneself. Of course the reason for suppressions are deeply rooted and vary between individuals, yet the scheme always remains the same. 

Something like that

Reinstating the unity of body and mind therefore, seems to be both a difficult and an unnecessary undertaking. Difficult in the sense that the body-mind split has been deeply engrained within our consciousness for generations, so much so that the split itself has become embodied in the form of muscular restriciton and atrophy which correspondingly affects whole-body blood flow. Unnecessary in the sense that there can never truly or fully be a split of body and mind because that is an unsustainable state of being that will result in, or precisely be the death of the organism and all its parts. 

However, this conflicted state does not have to be our constant way of being. If we can recognize and further actualize that we are in fact the body, reaccessing and reintegrating the wisdom of the organism as a whole, there is the potential for going all the way in one direction, without conflict. A very simple example may be the following: If you sense that you are tired, only you can know that. There is no way of reading about whether you are really tired or asking somebody else whether you're really tired or turning to society to investigate whether you should be tired. This feeling, which is less commonly acknowledged as one may expect, is in a way the expression of the organism as a whole, no split necessary whatsoever. At this moment, there is tiredness. That's it. Even less common would be the oddly natural reaction to..well..go to sleep. This simple process,  if left alone, can happen with the organism acting in unison, no conflict needed. One could say as opposed to a conflicted state, the organism is in a state of peace and integration. Within that peaceful state there is little pressure to be different from the way you are right now, beause that is understood as impossible. The corresponding feeling of alleviation and ease might very well be called a feeling of freedom. We however, under the illusion of the split, tend to try to interfere with this process at least twice. First of all, we may judge the feeling of being tired by either saying to ourselves that we ought not be tired now because of the time of the day, the work we need to do etc. and push the feeling down in order to continue doing what we deem to be so important on an ego-level. Here, the split between what there is (tiredness) and what we think there should be (energy for more work etc.) is introduced. The result is conflict. To make matters worse, we may try to override this 'instinct of the body', as distinct from what 'we', as ego, want to do and increase internal conflict and tension. It is one thing to not always go to sleep when one is tired, yet it is quite another to try to override the feeling of tiredness all together and neglect its right to exist. 

Finally, I want to argue that freedom is found not in dominion over the body and its obedience, but in realizing the untiy of body and mind and acting in unison. When there is the realization that you are the whole organism and not something within it, the idea of what I want as opposed to what the body wants ceases to have meaning. In going along with yourself, tension, conflict and the exertion of will power become largely unnecessary, alleviating the organism of fundamental and chronic strain and allowing actions to happen with grace and ease. Hence when you feel deeply whatever there is right now (tiredness, anger etc.), it becomes startlingly obvious that that is all there is and that it does not make any sense to want it to be different, which would be like wanting to have the cake and eat it. 

I'll close with a short video that touches on this topic and also takes it a little further, for anybody who might be interested. It is an excerpt of an interview with  professor Joseph Campbell who elucidates his philosophy of following your bliss: