I'm still musing at the moment on chakras and all-things-tantra as found in the writings of those whose understanding of the body is informed by readings of "sacred" Hindu texts; an understanding which is ultimately not only lacking in scientific legitimacy but comes close to being nonsense at times (and dangerous nonsense at that).
It's a view of the body I'm vaguely familiar with thanks to my knowledge of D. H. Lawrence and his interpretation of the Irish theosophist James Pryse, author of Apocalypse Unsealed (1910), a work that significantly influenced Lawrence's thinking on physiology and the material unconscious which, he argues, is rooted primarily not in the brain, but in the solar plexus:
"This is the great centre, where, in the womb, your life first sparkled in individuality. This is the centre that drew the gestating maternal bloodstream upon you ... for your increase. This is the centre whence the navel-string broke, but where the invisible string of dynamic consciousness, like a dark electric current connecting you with the rest of life, will never break until you die and depart from corporate individuality."
- D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004), p. 75.
Thanks to Pryse and others, Lawrence is led to the conclusion that esoteric doctrine is fundamentally a mapping of the body; not in terms of organs and anatomical function, but in terms of hidden centres of power and spiritual potential. And so, whilst Lawrence is prepared to admit that our medical-scientific understanding of the body is fine as far as it goes, he also insists that it by no means explains everything and invariably presupposes a corpse; i.e. it fails to consider life in terms of vital experience.
And so, contra objective science concerned with observable phenomena, Lawrence posits his own subjective science which proceeds in terms of intuition and the re-imagining of an ancient body of knowledge which has, he says, been repressed for thousands of years. Via the awakening of the seven principal nerve centres and the snake-like force of kundalini latent within the lower body, Lawrence believed mankind could restore the balance between the spiritual and sensual planes of being and thereby discover what Zarathustra referred to as the greater health.
Now, time was when I would have been enthusiastically supportive of all this. Indeed, I still think that the best way to counter idealism is to relentlessly emphasise the corpo/real; I still share Nietzsche's suspicion that all philosophy to date has been a misunderstanding of the body and that nihilism is first and foremost a pathological condition; and I still believe that the schizoanalytic project of building a body without organs is of import.
However, I now have zero-tolerance for New Age therapies, alternative medicines, or any anti-scientific quackery that purports to cure all via faith healing or other magical means. In as much as Lawrence's pollyanalytics and prejudices lend support to these things then shame upon them, and him, and his readers who let his opinions pass unchallenged without comment.
For advances in medical science have produced genuine miracles; from the eradication of smallpox to cochlear implants inside the ears of tiny infants so that they might hear their mother's voice and smile. I wonder if those shamans and gurus who subscribe to what is a mystical notion of the body (more often than not based upon ignorance and religious superstition) have ever made people healthier, or a single child happier ...?
Now, time was when I would have been enthusiastically supportive of all this. Indeed, I still think that the best way to counter idealism is to relentlessly emphasise the corpo/real; I still share Nietzsche's suspicion that all philosophy to date has been a misunderstanding of the body and that nihilism is first and foremost a pathological condition; and I still believe that the schizoanalytic project of building a body without organs is of import.
However, I now have zero-tolerance for New Age therapies, alternative medicines, or any anti-scientific quackery that purports to cure all via faith healing or other magical means. In as much as Lawrence's pollyanalytics and prejudices lend support to these things then shame upon them, and him, and his readers who let his opinions pass unchallenged without comment.
For advances in medical science have produced genuine miracles; from the eradication of smallpox to cochlear implants inside the ears of tiny infants so that they might hear their mother's voice and smile. I wonder if those shamans and gurus who subscribe to what is a mystical notion of the body (more often than not based upon ignorance and religious superstition) have ever made people healthier, or a single child happier ...?
