Our Packaging Matters
I wrote this short essay for my Persian Poetry class, which focused a lot on our relationship to the divine, the make up of reality, and living our lives with presence + soul- topics I responded to in my quizzes. I usually tried to morph all this with my own life, which inspired this response to one of our readings, Green Man, Earth Angel by Tom Cheetham. The book is a deep dive into the Imaginal Realm + connecting mystic ideas with modern life, but this was what stuck out to me the most.
Within "Green Man, Earth Angel," Cheetham goes down the full rabbithole of how a completely scientific view of the world can corrupt and lead to outlandish conclusions. In a fully scientific, technologically-worshipping worldview, Cheetham states that, "The world disappears into ecosystems or fluxes of energy, and persons disappear into information processors, cognitive processes, evolutionary processes, or historical-political processes." It all becomes structured, certain, confined, and definable, something that we can study, assess and optimize. All of nature, its beauty, complexity, and mystery, the sun through the leaves, becomes just sunlight for photosynthesis and set structures, cycles, and chains of command. Worrying, but even worse, this viewpoint completely dissolves all value of the human body. We are nothing but participants and instigators of processes- mental, biological, societal, or otherwise. In the paragraph above, Cheetham illustrates the strain of logical conclusions about the frail, feeble, short-lived human form, asking, well, why not just become machines? "And what kind of matter doesn’t matter. We should remake ourselves into something more durable." As if durability and efficiency are the most important metrics of life, of being human, of being at all. Cheetham's work contains many arguments and thoughts, but the importance of flesh, of being in our bodies, of the matter we are made of is sewn throughout his words. According to Cheetham, our matter does matter. It is all a part of the holistic, embodied, and full essence of being human, something beyond what our logic and reason can explain.
We are given a body for a reason. Regardless of the creator, we all walk around as bags of organs and blood for more purpose than to simply encourage further advancement. Our body feels things, it sees things, it anticipates and holds and nourishes and begets things that no other part of us can. It is us. It is not separate or lower or less important than our mind or our heart or our five senses, it is intimately conjoined and interconnected with every element of our being. Cheetham's words discuss holistic communion between all of our parts, of the evils of compartmentalization, and believing that everything must be separate, distinct, and hierarchical. In doing this, "matter is cut off from spirit, sensation from intellection, subject from object, inner from outer, myth from history, the individual from the divine." This unnatural, horrendous surgery prevents us from fully experiencing and acknowledging the world as it is. It atrophies the muscles essential for seeing the oneness of existence, the way all things are interconnected and how they echo and return to the divine.
Our matter is part of our spirit, sensation is part of our intellect, and our outer being is reflective of our inner being. They are not separate but intimately intertwined, and to ignore these connections is to be blind to much of the richness and crucial reality of being human in this world. We are not compartmentalized, with a head at the top and our lowly, frail body at the bottom. We are not a vessel to be perfected, transferred into unfeeling and cold metal or silicon- less vulnerable while also less human. Sensations- the warmth of touch, the softness of a melody, the way our heart beats and our palms sweat and our fingers feel the smoothness of chickpea skins, hand-peeled for the nourishment our body needs- they are all part of our humanity. Of our embodiment. Even in all our intellect and reason, our skin can echo the stress we feel within, converting worries into pus and pockmarks. Our body can pump fluids and chemicals to push us beyond our typical limits, holding us and supporting us and saving us when the body deems it necessary, even as our mind or heart diminishes the danger at hand. The interconnectedness of relational wellbeing and physical wellbeing, of emotions and stomach sensations, of physical experiences and intellectual conclusions is evident throughout humanity. Our body is us, is part of how we perceive the world.
Cheetham's work holds many dense, wonderful ideas, but this particular notion underpins some of his thoughts. This shift of seeing existence as holistic and interconnected, with no part cut-off, deemed less than, or discarded- is crucial to entering into the rich mysticism Cheetham proposes. To start seeing the mystery beyond, the realms beyond our comprehension, we must first acknowledge and honor the mystery and cruciality of the matter that makes us. We cannot begin to fathom the beyond if we remain blind to the interconnectedness of our own body and being, of what lies within us and makes us human in the first place
