D H LAWRENCE AND THE BODY

.................................... Discovered by Elizabeth Little

.......Elizabeth has found this stunning piece of writing by D H Lawrence that’s the perfect follow-up to my last blog The Ghost in the Machine. Let’s forgive Lawrence his sexist language – it was the style in his day. Really, he is anything but macho. .......................Stanley

............... On Being a Man
................By D H Lawrence

......Man is a thought adventurer,
Which isn’t the same as saying that man has an intellect. In intellect there is skill and tricks. To the intellect the terms are given, as the chessmen and rules are given in the game of chess. Real thought on the other hand is an experience, which begins as a change in the blood, a slow convulsion and revolution in the body itself. It can end as a new piece of awareness a new reality of being.
.....In order to think in this way man must risk himself doubly. First he must go forth and meet life in the body, and only then can he face the result in his mind.
.....The risk is double because man is double. Each of us has two selves. First is this body which is vulnerable and never quite within our control but the self that occupies that body part of me I can never fully finally know. It lets me in for so much irrational suffering, real torment and just occasional frightening delight. That me that is in my body is like a jungle in which dwells an unseen me, like a black panther in the night, whose two eyes glare green through my dreams. Or, if a shadow falls through my waking day.
.....Then there is this other me that is fair faced and reasonable and sensible and complex and full of good intentions. This is the known me which can be seen and appreciated. I say of myself ‘yes I know I’m impatient and rather intolerant in ideas. But in the ordinary way of life I am quite easy and rather kindly. My kindliness sometimes makes me a bit false. But then I don’t believe in mechanical honesty.’
.....This is the known me having a talk with itself. It sees a reason for every thing it does and feels. It has a certain unchanging belief in its own good intentions. It tries to steer a sensible and harmless course among all the other people and personalities around itself.
......To this known me everything exists as KNOWLEDGE. I am what I know I am. Nothing exists beyond what I know except the acquisition of more things to know.
......So this is how we live. We proceed from what we know already to what we know next.
......Take the case of men and women. A man proceeding from his known self likes a woman because she is in sympathy with what he knows. He feels that he and she know one another. They marry and then the fun begins. In so far as they know one another they can proceed from their known selves, they are as right as ninepence. Loving couple etc. But as soon as there is real blood contact a strange discord enters in. She is not what he thought her. He is not what she thought him. It is the other primary or bodily self appearing very often like a black demon out of the fair creature who was erst the beloved.
.....The man who before marriage seemed everything that was delightful, after marriage begins to come out in his true colours a son of the old and rather hateful Adam. And she who was an angel of loveliness and desirability emerges as an almost fiendlike daughter of the snake-frequenting Eve.
......What has happened?
......Marriage is the great puzzle of our day. It is our sphinx riddle. Solve it or be torn to bits is the decree.
......When man and woman actually meet, there is always terrible risk to both of them.
There is always risk, for both him and for her. Take the risk, make the adventure. Suffer but enjoy the change in the blood. And if you are a man, slowly, slowly make that great experience of realizing- fully totally conscious realization. If you are a woman on the other hand make the same great experience of realizing within you the strange slumberous serpentine essence which knows without thinking.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

...........................by Stanley

......In western depth psychology there is an aspect of what we call ‘the self’ that has been missed; it is an omission that runs through the whole gamut of psychoanalysis from Freud to Jung and Hillman. What we’ve missed in our psychology is the physical body – the body as essentially me.
.....We must be very clear what we are saying here. The body stands at the threshold of both the subjective and the objective worlds. Firstly, the body is an objective thing in the world. We can look at it from the outside and examine it just as we can any living organism. It can be studied scientifically and medically. I can have this objective view of my own body, just as I can with anyone else’s.
......When we refer to the physical body there is a lurking ambiguity. We usually mean heart, blood circulation, brain, nervous system, etc etc. The difficulty arises when we imply by this that our subjectivity, our mind, our soul, is not physical. This lands us in a dilemma because it artificially splits our actual experience. Arthur Koestler called it the illusion of the ghost in the machine.
......But the body is not just a machine that I inhabit; it is also my subjective experience of myself. This is the experience of the body as me, the foundation of myself as a subject; and this subjectivity is mine alone. No one else can experience it directly but myself. It cannot be examined medically or scientifically because it is not an object – it is a subject, the sense of myself.
......There are all kinds of arguments, religious and cultural, that might persuade us that there is a difference between the body on the one hand and the soul or mind. But putting these arguments aside, and going on how I actually find myself from moment to moment, there is no question that I experience myself subjectively as a physical being. It is part of my essential nature that I am located in physical space and time and that I experience seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, loving and hating as a physical being.
.....If one imagines oneself as a ghost without a body it is impossible to conceive, for example, that one would have any emotions, because emotions are both subjective and physical. Both. We only experience our emotions through our physicality. Deaden the body with drugs or anaesthesia and there are no emotions.
......But we have a cultural prejudice against thinking this way. It seems to offend our preconceived notions of the soul or mind. But there is no reason we cannot say that the ‘soul’ is just another name for our embodied experience. Certainly there is the body, but there is also the body of me. There is no way we can get away with a philosophy that does without either – the body as an object and as a subject.
......There are all kind of interesting avenues that flow from this idea. In one aspect, it really does turn psychotherapy on its head. We can now credit the body’s powers that we always knew it had, but never admitted.
.......When a person disowns the body they will never let it inform them, they can never trust it. Sometimes the body becomes the enemy. We can see why they lack vital emotional functions; why their intuition of other people and the environment is shot; also because they are disembodied why they can never be certain of themselves. We say they live in their heads – as though the head is the last domain they can occupy. Obviously they can think – and sometimes brilliantly – but that’s all. They lack the body’s imagination and its own kind of complex practicality, its holistic intelligence that can work without thinking. Of course, people in this state of deprivation do go on functioning because the body goes on doing its job on its own, doing its own thing without permission, help or credit, often against the opposition of the head-centred ego.
......Neuroscience is discovering how we can manipulate the brain and produced all kinds of subjective affects; and we know how chemical substances can do the same. But we forget that the body made the body in the first place and that subjective emotional experience can alter the body’s objective structure.
......The body stands at the crossroads. It is the only thing in the world that is also your conscious self. Our value of the mind has had a good go, but we are incomplete unless we can give the body its due. Not locating the mind in the body, but getting the mind as the body.