<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The problem<\/b><\/p>\n
Cameron Shayne\u2019s usage<\/a> of the \u201cI am not my body\u201d meme to rationalize his anti-social ethics was far less interesting \u2013 to me at least \u2013 than what happened when I attacked the meme itself. My basic position is that the metaphysical claim \u201cI am not my body\u201d is not only unsupported by the phenomenological sciences by which we actually live our lives, it can provide delusional cover for our vestigial asceticism, blind us to the privileges accrued by living bodies based upon appearance, origin, class, or gender, and promote the very dissociation from materiality that leads directly to our environmental crises.<\/p>\n Merely presenting<\/i> this argument opened me to charges, from writer and teacher Chris Courtney among others, that I didn\u2019t understand the fundamentals of yoga, that I was rejecting yoga in general, that I have no right to facilitate discussion in yoga philosophy, that I was being \u201coverly-intellectual\u201d, and that my lack of lineage disqualifies me from staking out a position. The message of my detractors is clear: let\u2019s assess Shayne\u2019s inner life and attack his behaviors, but not look closely at the metaphysical claims that support him: because, well, we rely on those claims ourselves, and anyone who doesn’t is off the yoga island.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Well, sorry: I\u2019m a practitioner too. All my skin is in the game, and I\u2019m working towards a yoga philosophy in which \u201cI am not my body\u201d is relegated to the antiquary of poetic ideas that give diminishing returns over time, but for which we can be very grateful, because they started a great conversation by mirroring our most vulnerable experiences.<\/p>\n Of course, Courtney and friends are right: \u201cI am not my body\u201d has been central to various streams of yogic practice that seek to envision a life beyond death and decay, and account for the strange dualities between seen and unseen things, as well as the common human experience of being able to disappear into somewhere other than the flesh: into thoughts, dreams, concentrated physical activity, and love. \u201cI am not my body\u201d is written in cold blood in S\u0101\u1e43khya, Pata\u00f1jali, and the G\u012bt\u0101<\/em>, which all propose salvation as disembodied. It\u2019s there in the aching romance of Bhakti sentiment, in which embodiment is ultimately a barrier from the full embrace of the \u201cdivine\u201d. In softer forms, \u201cI am not my body\u201d is laced throughout Hatha and Tantric literature, which tend to position the body as something to be used — by an agent ontologically other than it — in a teleology that progresses towards a higher state than the body on its own can offer.<\/p>\n If we reject this pillar of yoga philosophy \u2013 as contemporary neuroscience, phenomenology and embodied ecology insist we must \u2013 what are we left with? Where\u2019s the foundation for practice? Is there no post-body state to work towards, no body to overcome if the body is the central thing? What unnamables are we feeling within, and what do they signify? What visions of ourselves, not-as-we-are, still haunt us? How do we theorize improvement while hewing to existential honesty? Most of all — what language do we use to gesture to all of these baffling feelings that seem impossible for any single body to produce or contain? I\u2019m going to argue that language itself is at the heart of the matter. Beginning to understand \u201cI am not my body\u201d as poetry<\/i> \u2013 factually untrue, but also a poignant wish and an earnest attempt to describe the experience of bodily absence<\/em> \u2013 can open deeper wells of the empathy that yoga evolves to express. After loosening my hold on \u201cI am not the body\u201d, as a doctrine, I can soften into the fact that while I am my body, I often feel that I\u2019m not. <\/i>It\u2019s an ambivalent realization: sometimes ecstatic, sometimes terrifying.<\/p>\n Perhaps the best place to start with unraveling this poetry-made-dogma is with a more specific idea of where the \u201cI am not my body\u201d meme comes from. I have four ideas here: three interpolated from developmental psychology, neuroanthropology and evolutionary psychology respectively, and the other grafted from the brilliant work of Drew Leder, an M.D. and philosopher, whose book The Absent Body<\/i><\/a> (University of Chicago, 1990) should be a staple on every yogi\u2019s shelf, in my opinion.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI am not my body\u201d through the back-arch reflex<\/b><\/p>\n Firstly, \u201cI am not my body\u201d would seem to echo our earliest neuro-physiological pulsations towards individuation. The Moro reflexes<\/a> of early infancy ground the baby into relationship with unconsciously sparked suckling actions, hand-grasping, and startles that call the attention of the lovestruck parent. But as conscious life dawns, reflexes that root relationship slowly elide into reflexes that define and distinguish the baby within<\/i> relationship, as the Moro vocabulary shifts into a sometimes violent back-arching at anywhere from four to eight months.<\/p>\n The baby who arches her back sharply away from the parent\u2019s hold is widely theorized as beginning to feel and give expression to her longing for separation and independence. The back-arching springs out of frustration: baby wants to be somewhere else, doing something else, and within something else. Baby has had enough to eat, or baby has been frustrated by a poor latch on the nipple. Baby wants to break out of the limitations of her embodied condition of dependence upon the parent. She is hungry, she is full, she feels claustrophobic, she is frustrated that she can\u2019t crawl where she wants to, she wants to express agency and solitude. She throws herself hard into an arched back \u2013 rebelling against the basic limitations of embodiment.<\/p>\n Most of all, baby is beginning to assert an \u201cI\u201d structure into which she can ascend from her dependency. An \u201cI\u201d structure by which she may formulate a more self-sufficient narrative that will console her by allowing her to imagine that she could be somewhere else, in a different condition. This is in part what the ego-structure is: a narrative capacity that projects an alternative state. That the ego-structure also often nurtures the belief that it can achieve that state independently is somewhat like the baby believing she can arch her back away from the parent\u2019s grasp without consequences, but really, only because the parent continues to hold her<\/i>. The ego structure in particular, and conscious life in general, is vulnerable to the fantasy of self-sufficiency. Biology, like the parent, is always there to hold the thought, even protecting the thought from its own excesses. Baby can arch away all she wants, and mumma will catch her. You can say \u201cI am not the body\u201d all you want: the body will produce and hold that speech nonetheless.<\/p>\n I believe this back-arching phase might be one experiential root for the transcendent drive that dominates the spiritualities of dualism. Ego formation occurs through the natural frustration of dependence, and then a kind of metaphysical virus hijacks the very same energy (or memory of the rebellion) to create fictions of independence. \u201cI am not my body\u201d might well begin with the baby\u2019s back-arch, and end in Pata\u00f1jali’s K<\/em>aivalya Pada<\/i> (“chapter on blissful isolation”), or Descartes\u2019 Amsterdam garret, to which he retreated to examine his mind in isolation from his flesh, or so he believed. Someone was making his lunch for him.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI am not my body\u201d as an exuberant exaggeration of the early explorers of consciousness <\/b><\/p>\n Julian Jaynes<\/a>, who in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind<\/i> (1976), argued that the Axial Age, from which not only the roots of yogic consideration but many introspective or meta-awareness philosophies and religions emerge, constituted a culmination of the bootstrapping of human neurological development from pre-conscious (bicameral) to conscious states. His extensive survey of paleontological, literary and archeological sources illustrates that the interior life that makes it even possible for a human to conceive of not being a body<\/i> is itself an evolute of a neurological complexity that is relatively recent to our history. In a nutshell: prior to about 2000 BCE, there is little evidence to suggest that human beings were capable of formulating the thought \u201cI am not my body\u201d, because a certain threshold of introspection was not neurologically available to us, owing to the staged development of the corpus callosum, which apparently underwent a species-wide burst of growth at the beginning of the agricultural age.<\/p>\n Jaynes\u2019 clearest example of the difference between the human pre-introspective and introspective eras is his analysis of the early Homer of the Iliad<\/i>, and the later Homer of the Odyssey<\/i>. In the former, the heroes Achilles and Hector do not seem to have any real notion of personal agency. They act as though possessed by storms and gods. There is no circumspection, no doubt, no taking inventory. There is pure action only, fated by forces that lord imperiously over human musculature. In the later text, Ulysses frets constantly with internal consideration, second-guessing his choices and motivations, and most importantly wondering meticulously about the contents of other minds. Scholarship is unresolved on the dating of the two texts: Jaynes proposes that they might be up to 800 years apart, with the Odyssey picking up the Iliad\u2019s threads utilizing a far more evolved neuropsychology.<\/p>\n So what? In the context of Axial Age thought, \u201cI am not my body\u201d is a eureka-statement, the declaration of a new frontier. Its resonance carries the ebullience of a novel discovery. I\u2019m not sure we\u2019ve recovered from the shock. We certainly haven\u2019t had much time as a species to acclimate to this new internal space. From the perspective of the baby-back-arching, \u201cI am not my body\u201d is a cry of frustration. From the perspective of Jaynes, it is an adolescent ejaculation of fearful delight.<\/p>\n I laid out Jaynes\u2019 argument in more detail in Threads of Yoga<\/a>, so I\u2019ll refer you on to that for more.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI am not my body\u201d as a trauma-response <\/b><\/p>\n