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It’s All In Your Head!
My obsessions seem to run in weekly cycles. This one is about a week old and is one of the pieces of the greater puzzle I have been trying to wrap my mind around lately.
It started one evening as I was walking to a friend’s house, trying to practice the exercises I’d recently been taught to still the inner monologue. Briefly, the purpose of the exercise seems to be to pull back your awareness of your visual field, so that you’re taking in more of a gestalt (like a video camera) rather than jumping from point to point visually. Suddenly I had the bright idea to apply this same feeling to not just my visual field but to my body awareness as well.
What I experienced might be best described by way of a video game metaphor. Most video games in the early levels are constructed in such a way that you can learn to move around and act within the video game world. You perform simple tasks that teach you how to run, jump, pick up objects, open doors, etc. And there is a small state of wonder which can occur when you are successfully projecting yourself into this world and are connecting readily with the mechanics of your electronic body therein.
Now imagine this same phenomenon multiplied out to an immersive virtual reality world. Imagine you are entering a fully-realistic simulated world where the designers of the technology have finally succeeded in replacing awareness of your actual physical body with complete awareness of your virtual reality body. Basically the same thing would happen: you would walk around and marvel at how “real” your new electronic body feels. You would probably try to run, jump, pick up and touch objects and you would probably try out some test interactions with other denizens of this new world to see what the limits of the game rules are.
In short, you would be living the life you are living now. Except you would have been dropped into it suddenly instead of having however many tens of years of experience between you and the novelty of the experience, dulling you from actually feeling and being excited by how “real” your experience seems.
In any case, when I was walking that night, I had a spontaneous experience of the freshness and newness of my experience. I was able to walk around and feel how “real” my body felt. I was able to feel the weight of my legs moving up and down, the textures of different trees I passed, the smell of the night air.
This experience coupled with a lot of the research and reading I have been doing lead my worldview to begin turning upside down. I’ve spent most of my life believing that I was more or less a mind housed in a body that walked around in the world. But now I am starting to think that I am actually a body walking around inside of a mind - and that in fact we all are, and that we are all walking around inside of the same mind. We could call this mind the universe, or maybe the earth. I created the graphic above of the skull as the Earth in order to hopefully illustrate the state of our existence in a rather more concrete fashion.
It strikes me that this may be the esoteric meaning as well of the weird head which Sean Connery floats around inside of during the eminently weird 70’s sci-fi underwear romp, Zardoz (which I highly recommend - with emphasis on the word “high”):
I believe you can also see traces of this understanding encoded into ancient texts if you know what to look for. First of all there is Genesis, on which I loosely based my graphic of the skull above. Check out these lines from the first chapter:
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
Is it a spurious interpretation to consider that these “two lights” refer to the eyes? I’ll have to leave that up to you to decide. Many other ancient myths perhaps give us even greater insight into this though. Take for example the Sumerian-Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish, wherein the monster/goddess Tiamat is slain and from her body the world is created.
Slicing Tiamat in half, he [Marduk] made from her ribs the vault of heaven and earth. Her weeping eyes became the source of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
This story also pops up in Norse mythology with the slaying of the giant Ymir:
From the slain body the brothers created heaven and earth. They used the flesh to fill the Ginnungagap; his blood to create the lakes and the seas; from his unbroken bones they made the mountains; the giant’s teeth and the fragments of his shattered bones became rocks and boulders and stones; trees were made from his hair, and the clouds from his brains. Odin and his brothers raised Ymir’s skull and made the sky from it and beneath its four corners they placed a dwarf. Finally, from Ymir’s eyebrow they shaped Midgard, the realm of man. The maggots which swarmed in Ymir’s flesh they gave wits and the shape of men, but they live under the hills and mountains. They are called dwarfs.
There’s also a Chinese creation myth, that of P’an Ku who evolved inside a giant egg (skull?):
After 18,000 years the egg hatched and P’an Ku died from the effort of creation. From his eyes the sun and moon appeared, from his sweat, rain and dew, from his voice, thunder, and from his body all the natural features of the earth arose.
Also see the movie The Fountain which uses these ideas quite heavily by way of some Mayan mythology on the same theme. For another fun ride, start comparing this idea of the Earth as skull to the popular and more modern mythology of the Hollow Earth - especially the interpretation that we actually live on the inside of the Earth! And compare this to the geocentric view of the world, with the celestial spheres, etc…
I believe this notion exists as well within the Christian idea of the mystical “body of Christ” which is usually taken as meaning the Church and its members, with Jesus or God as the “head” and the members of the church as the members or limbs of that body. I’m sure it would be a bit of a stretch for the average Christian to take this concept and extrapolate out the “body of Christ” as being the whole universe, and a hold-over from Babylonian myth - but I think it is an entirely valide interpretation.
Especially when amplified with the gnostic text from the Gospel of Thomas (saying 3) where Jesus makes several references to interiority and exteriority, such as: “The Kingdom of Heaven is inside you and it is outside you,” and a variety of others. In fact, that entire text could be read as being very heavily focused on conveying this notion that we are bodies existing inside of mind and not the other way around.
We might also profit from a reformulation of how we think of bodies and of matter. It’s fairly well-accepted that matter is a sort of “slowed-down” form of energy. So perhaps we could tack onto that the idea that both energy and matter are slowed-down forms of mind, spirit or pure consciousness. In other words, our bodies are simply thoughts (of the universal mind) which have slowed down enough to take on a (relatively) fixed form.
- Drill through your head
- Press Here To Keep Going
- Carrying stuff on yer head
- Interior monologues
- Sphinxeses
- Prev: Smash Your Cell Phone!
- Next: Dreaming Yourself Awake
December 13th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
“The gun is good!!!”
December 13th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
What a weird fucking movie… I should rent that again sometime. They just don’t make weird-ass movies like that anymore. It’s too bad.
December 14th, 2006 at 12:26 am
http://www.kybalion.org/kybalion.asp
i feel like its both at the same time.
in a mind, have a mind of our own, and probably totally out of our minds.
one
human?
December 14th, 2006 at 5:17 am
I kinda like where you’re going here. I spent most of yesterday evening thinking about the concept of a distributed self, and basically came to the conclusion that ‘What are the components of the self?’ is an EXCELLENT question.
I can relate an experience similar to the one you describe, driving one night through the town of Salisbury (like that’s relevant, except that it has the most insanely preternatural cathedral spire and Stonehenge sleeps just down the road) - I felt unnaturally aware of my surroundings, and the usual traffic jam just seemed to part around me - really trippy.
Are these experiences common in mystical traditions, I wonder? Is this an astral-plane kinda thing?
Did it feel like you still had a particular point of view?
I fear, however, you’re hinting at the feeling of being a character in a tale. My personal experience of that one is that there’s an effin’ big hole in the ground down that road.
December 14th, 2006 at 8:03 am
What is life but a collection of stories told about itself?
December 14th, 2006 at 10:04 am
Tom O’Bedlam in The Invisibles said “The soul is not inside the body, the body is inside the soul.”
I believe the topic of this post is connected to the alchemical flask or egg, because of the analogous qualities of the experience and because I first experienced this mind/body inversion while reading an alchemy text by Adiramled.
December 14th, 2006 at 10:38 am
What you experienced is called “beginner’s mind” in Zen. Actually it is the whole point of spiritual practice to experience the spaciousness you felt. This spaciousness puts your whole attention in the present moment rather than the “stories” or narrative we mainly live in. We experience the world and our bodies “in our head” as part of an ongoing story of “me”. Spiritual practices can point us to being completely here to the world as it is rather than mediated through a story–at the same time these practices also make us aware of our stories as if they were just another phenomenum no better or worse than a rose or the liquid eyes of our lover.
December 14th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Tim, you might enjoy this recent Metafilter thread, specifically for the discussion of why earnestly weird movies like Zardoz don’t get made anymore (at least not by Hollywood):
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/56744
Also, I just read your post about The Fountain today and just wanted to chime in and say I enjoyed it as well. I found the imagery gorgeous and the them and plot very moving.
December 14th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Yes, like I was fully immersed in my body and the moment… but I knew there was more to it all than just that
Why fear it? What’s the hole? That is only one half of what I am hinting at. The other half totally contradicts it but I just woke up and can’t remember what that is at the moment.
Well I am starting to think that’s the least important part of life!
Oh awesome! I never did get to read the Invisibles!
Could you expand on this more? The weird part is that last night I was working on my novel and ended up incorporating a scene based on that symbol of the snake coiled around the egg…
December 14th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
I guess part of where I’m going with this is that you can be both a soldier and a general, if that makes any sense…
December 14th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Congratulations Tim. You achieved by both grace and effort what those in my “line” sometimes refer to as “The Third State Of Consciousness” - that is, true self-consciousness. Normally we as we are in “waking life” are only in the second state, another form of sleep, and believe that we are conscious of “self,” although we have no idea what that “self” is to begin with.
Don’t believe that you can get it back at will, although you may have picked up some important clues. But an important experience. Some never have it unless given grace and they forget and don’t place any importance on it.
December 14th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
What do you mean by your “line”?
December 14th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
[…] Since somebody else brought this up in the comments, I thought I would just dive right in. The topic of the moment is the notion of living your life as though you were playing a character. […]
December 14th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
The Orphic Egg, right? I don’t know what else to say really… there are some interesting consequences:
1) The practice of physics takes place exclusively inside the sensorial sphere. It will be self-evident that this is so, it needs no proof. It is clear.
2) The domain of metaphysics should also be clear. Physical phenomena are the manifestation of in-visible metaphysical principles.
—
Talking about this with a friend (irl) some months ago, I was trying to get him to see it: “people think that “metaphysics” is about ghosts and spooks, no, the metaphysical dimension is not “out there” somewhere, it’s not. I’m going to point to it, I’m going to point in its direction. Ready?”
http://tinyurl.com/wdw65
(he saw!)
December 14th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Yup!
http://altreligion.about.com/library/glossary/symbols/bldefsorphicegg.htm
It’s the symbol of the AI-technocratic company/government in my novel. From the egg are born the “dyadic admins” of the company (called TOTU) who run a television show which is broadcast into everyone’s minds so that they can all be hooked into a consensus consciousness (consensciousness)
December 14th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
www.gurdjieff.org
December 14th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
Don’t have time for lots of commmentary, but here are a couple of additonal possible leads for you:
John the Baptist has a huge collection of head-related lore. According to some orthodox traditions, his head was found three times!
http://www.goarch.org/en/Chapel/saints.asp?contentid=440
In the gnostic tradition, the Secret Book of John has some enlightening things to say:
Then I asked him, “Lord, how shall we be able to prophesy to those who request us to prophesy to them? For there are many who ask us, and look to us to hear an oracle from us.”
The Lord answered and said, “Do you not know that the head of prophecy was cut off with John?”
And, there’s a cryptic quote told to PKD by the AI: “The Head Apollo is about to return.” Some interesting theorizing can be found in that Black Knight Satellite article from a while back:
http://www.excludedmiddle.com/valisknight.htm
December 14th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Ah, very interesting! Thank you!
December 14th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
And… now that you bring up the whole Baptist Head thing, that reminds me that Orpheus’ head also supposedly still sang and prophesied after his death:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus
Which nicely connects us back to the Orphic Egg!
December 15th, 2006 at 3:51 am
‘Feeling like a character in a tale’… I get it sometimes (especially reading threads like this!) and basically it just scares the crap out of me. Feels so wrong, like a short-circuit in your mind. I followed the thought briefly at University and it led me into a dark scary sort of place. I try not to go there right now. All to do with the strange effects of point of view. Brrr…
December 15th, 2006 at 4:21 am
… ok, just for you (deep breath) … I ran into this thought that said, when you’re writing a story, you can’t kill a character off /from their point of view/. Which just scared the bejasus out of me and I ran away screaming.
But then I was spending my time watching films like ‘Flatliners’, which does mess with your head. Good to see Keifer’s career is doin’ well, tho.
December 15th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Become Headless!:
http://www.headless.org/
December 15th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Zardoz is one of my all-time favorite movies. When I was only about 12 I was immediately attracted to the movie when I saw a commercial for a television airing of it. I get something new out of it every time I watch it.