Not Getting Physical


Being in life is a physical matter. It involves sending and receiving flows of energy, balancing checkbooks, exerting effort through bodies, signaling across space even in the most intimate of moments, and constantly tending to one's fix of Time, the great wonder-drug.

The urges of those who explore the paths to truth to transcend material limitations, to create emotions or even objects freely and to transcend the very laws of entropy and inertia, are urges of the spirit. The body has its own requirements which are very different. It requires low-order energies from a sort of genetic menu -- nothing more rarefied than sunlight, and lower forms such as sexual stimulation, temperature reassurance, pressures and fuel and liquid, a constancy of gravity, and above all a continuity of Space. These are the needs of the physical compound in or around which most of us awake each morning. Bodies get ill when their space-anchors get molested, as in motion sickness, vertigo, sea-sickness, and the wild imaginings of a bad drug trip. It is not just the chemistry, but a violent desire to hold on to dear old 3-dimensional forms.

Avoiding or denying these efforts leads to a physically anchored philosophical wonderland of heartless hopings -- wanting to wish the Lottery into awarding one, or beaming out requests for help from the unfound soulmate. Often these things do work. But they work irregularly.

The problem is one of philosophically denying the Physical Being, while being it.

You cannot talk your way out of situations that you behave yourself into. And you can't spiritually modulate realities that you are creating as physical, while pretending not to. This is just a fancy version of non-experience, something like a Neiman Marcus catalogue of the soul.

This is not to say that there is no way out of the physical frame, because there is. But it does not consist of wrapping one's problems in envelopes of stardust and sending them away to Mars. It consists of discovering how to fully experience each level of construct of the physical being as well as the more fragrant beliefs of mind and spirit, until in all the universes there is no fire you cannot hold comfortably, and no frozen corner where you cannot freely, compassionately Be.

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