the body is a metaverse

“The body is a Universe.

It is a vast system describable through its relative components.

It is blood, and bone, and muscle, and nerve tissue, and digestive organs and sense organs.

It is tongues and eyes.

It is hair pores.

It is T cells engaged in the an almost incomprehensible dance of distinguishing friend from foe.

It is the straggling agglomeration that is the microbiome. More cells that are not you than you.

It is the pulse of cerebrospinal fluid.

It is the rhythmic release of pineal hormones attuned to circadian rhythms of day and night, seasonal change.

It is bone marrow.

It is pain receptors, heat receptors, cold receptors, kinesthetic receptors, in a constant shifting, syncopated glory.

But the body is also more than this.

It is more than an objectively describable Universe.

It is a Metaverse.

The objective physiological description of what the body is says very little about how bodies are actually felt, experienced, envisioned, depicted, painted on cave walls, accessed, harnessed.

It says nothing about states of being.

All the pains and ecstasies that take place within the field of the body.

The battles, the celebrations, the pulses, the waves, the unions, the joining’s, the tearing’s apart. Always at play in this fathom eyed body.

Bodies don’t feel like a composite of mineral salts and connective fibres and contractile muscles occupying a few square feet of space. Bodies feel like much more than this.

You don’t experience your lover’s body as a spleen and lungs and five litters of blood. You experience it as the dynamic center of the World.

How vast is your lover’s gaze?

What thunderstorms it sees swirl in her eyes?

What ancestral oak trees branch through his hands?

Our perceptions of the world, our bodies and other bodies, are dynamic, energetic, poetic, shifting, changing.

Bodies, as they are described in varying traditions, are not static collections of anatomical features. They are pervaded by networks of invisible streams and vessels, tapestries of knots, punctuated with wheels of connected luminosity. Constellated with meridians. Blossoming with flowers and imaginal cities. And populated with deities and spirit helpers.

The body through which all sense impressions pass and all experience filters and patterns itself out, drifts into states of dullness and inertia when not vivified through regular ritual.

But when it is enlivened, woken up, becomes the prime vehicle for connectivity to a greater world.

The body is the Metaverse.”

This text is a transcription from the Emerald Podcast, and narrated by Joshua Michael Schrei.