The Body and the Spirit

Inside a dark movie theater sits a father, his wife, and their two young daughters. They are watching The Little Mermaid (1989). The audience gets to the scene in which a sinister sounding voice speaks. Not a minute later, a big beast with pale lilac skin, wretched eyes, and butch lips comes out of a shadow. Slightly prettier than Jabba the Hutt, the antagonist begins yapping about the red-headed protagonist, who is easy on the eyes. She instructs her henchmen, two crooked crocodiles, to keep an eye on the beautiful, slim protagonist.

Forming a face of fear and disgust, the younger daughter quietly inquires the identity of the hideously gelatinous behemoth. She is informed of the identity of the sea witch – Ursula. Unlike the protagonist, Ariel, Ursula was purposely drawn to be unattractive. What’s more? The youngest daughter instinctively dislikes the fat female squid. You notice that in most cartoons, the “good guys” look better than the “bad guys.” Why? The simple answer is that the animators want you to like the former and hate the latter.

However, there exists a deeper meaning to this perpetual occurrence, which applies also to real life. This truth is as follows: the body is a reflection of the spirit and the spirit is a reflection of the body. A healthy body is indicative of a vital spirit; a dis-eased body, a lackluster spirit. 

Indeed. An important quality of spirit, stated by psychoanalysis Alexander Lowen in The Spirituality of the Body (1990), is grace. The question is, what exactly is grace? Lowen, referencing Aldous Huxley, outlined three types of grace: 1) spiritual grace, 2) human grace, and 3) animal grace. The first involves a sense of being connected to a higher order; the second, one’s behavior toward his fellow man; third, gracefulness of movement. The third form of grace comes from working with our animal intelligence. Though sophisticated, humans are still animals at the end of the day.

Grace, health, and spirituality are all linked together. A disturbance in any of these qualities betrays a defect in the other two. In other words, a truly spiritual person is also graceful and healthy. A human being that loses his connection to nature, animals, and other human beings is spirituality ill. A spiritual person is able to extend loving contact with his fellow men. Being childlike in his joy, yet paradoxically without a trace of childish immaturity, the spiritual person is able to navigate this world with awe and wonder, drinking life in as much as the glorious sun pours it onto the Earth. 

Physically, the eyes of the spiritual person are open, lively, soft, and radiate with thrill. The breathing of the spiritual person is full and uninhibited, and the energy of said person is high. The libido of the spiritual person pulsates in a wavelike manner, flowing easily without being blocked. A spiritual person has a warm body that lacks chronic contractions and distortions. This person is extremely rare in the adult population.

The video below showcases an interview of the late Alexander Lowen. He believed that the body is the spirit. Despite the poor video quality, a perceptive viewer will nevertheless be able to tell that the exuberant Lowen was noticeably more enlightened than the average person is today.

Why is such a person difficult to find? Why did we humans “fall from grace,” so to speak? Lowen tackled this question on two levels – societal and individual. For the explanation of the civilizational fall from grace, the author uses the story of Adam and Eve. The biblical story can be conceptualized as an allegory regarding our historical transition from nomadic life to agricultural life. Back when the most advanced civilizations were nomadic, humans, like animals, fully identified with their bodies. Psychological splits between the mind and the body did not exist. Humans were whole, and therefore, graceful. Like Adam and Eve prior to eating the forbidden fruit, humans were blissfully unaware of “good and evil.” 

In the Garden of Eden, separation between man and God was non-existent. Our relationship with Mother Earth paralleled the couples’ relationship to the Lord. We were perfectly in touch with the rhythms of the Earth; fall, winter, spring, and summer; day and night; hot and cold; wet and dry; dirt and sky; seed, sapling, and tree; so on and so forth. The motion of our libidos oscillated in harmony with the expansive electricity of the cosmos. Adam, Eve, and mankind frolicked freely, following their instincts and feelings. They “were not ashamed.”

Then, as we all know, this story comes to a tragic end. Adam and Eve, naïve and trusting like children, were tricked by the serpent into eating the forbidden fruit against God’s order. The couple, having then gained the knowledge of “good and evil,” were casted out of the pristine garden of bliss and shunned into the sickly wasteland of misery. Here, the knowledge of “good and evil” symbolizes repression, self-consciousness, and the superego. The snake, implied Elsworth F. Baker in Man in the Trap (1967), can be said to represent the temptation to overcome the fear of surrendering to nature. Nature is not all sunshine and Skittles. Leopards, cheetahs, and wolves forage the lands, waiting to tear their victims apart, one by one, from flesh to blood to bone. Natural disasters strike with the might of Zeus. Nature is as brutal as it is beautiful. 

Finally, along with Adam and Eve, humanity had died; not literally, of course, but in terms of vitality and jubilance. We sacrificed our oneness with nature and Zen-like state for conquest and economic wealth; our bodies and spirits for our intellect; God’s commandments for man’s laws and bureaucracy. Our children come to remind us of this purity, but we quash their spirits through our curriculums. 

So, how does one fall from grace on an individual level? How does this relate to humanity’s fall from grace? Unlike Adam and Eve, an individual today does not deliberately choose to fall from grace, nor is he even tricked into leaving the Garden of Eden. In fact, the individual is thrown out of the garden before he develops the capacity for self-awareness. By the time his mind can form conscious memories, he will have already forgotten that the sanctuary exists. 

Babies, along with fetuses and embryos in some cases, fall from grace when they are improperly nurtured and loved. Unlike pleasurable childhood experiences, which foster vitality, vigor, and health, unpleasurable childhood experiences can lead to depression and a diminished flow of energy. However, the distress, in it of itself, does not cause the child to lose grace. It’s the blocked response to the distress that locks the child in the cage outside the garden. 

Here’s a concrete example: Baby A and Baby B are each locked in separate dark rooms. They cry and cry in agony for their respective mothers. Mother A, being in sync with her instincts, comes to the aid of Baby A to check what he needs or otherwise simply soothe him. Mother B, falsely believing that she is instilling self-reliance, lets Baby B “cry it out.” 

What happens to the children? Baby A restores his natural grace and vigor. The graceful flow of energy in his body is replenished. Baby B, left to fend for himself, can bear the torture no longer. The muscles that make up his thoracic cavity, along with those in his cervical region, begin to constrict. Baby B begins to breathe in a more shallow manner. The libido that flows through his body is graceful no longer. Baby B has unconsciously repressed his despair. This repression distorts his musculature and damages the wiring of his nervous system. No longer is Baby B with Baby A in the garden. Baby B is shunned from paradise like the rest of us. 

As stated in the beginning of this post, body and spirit act as mirrors to each other. Disruption to one disrupts the other. What will happen to Baby B as he grows up? He will lack the ability to make loving contact with the world at large due to having a depleted energy metabolism. He will be a walking zombie due to the continual repression of his original conflict with his mother. Yet, this person will be only faintly aware of this archaic conflict, if at all. His cerebral mind will forget about it, but his constricted chest, noosed neck, and sour lips will hold onto the bitterness lest he explodes in rage and drowns in tears. 

How does such an unfortunate person go about resolving his lack of spiritedness? Does he utilize his will? No, said Lowen. Although willpower is useful for performance, it cannot change the inner state of one’s being. Rather, one must be able to surrender to his being. However, you don’t just wake up and consciously tell yourself “I will decide to surrender today!” That simply does not work. The person’s tensions must be worked through gradually, both analytically and physically. He must travel through the purgatory like Dante did in The Divine Comedy (1321) with the help of Virgil, who has traveled through hell before. Lowen used the poem to compare the somatic therapist to Virgil. The only person who can provide the emotional contact and containment that would allow a patient to experience the strength of love and anger needed to integrate his mind and spirit is a somatic healer. 

Can a child be raised to stay in the Garden of Eden? It’s possible, albeit difficult. The child must be allowed to maintain his unconscious integrity throughout his childhood. Unconscious integrity allows the child to behave based on what feels pleasurable or right. This is the default manner by which the young function. Since the rules of human societies are complex, kids must learn to couple unconscious integrity with conscious integrity; that is to say, principles. 

A spiritually healthy person is guided by his inner sense of right and wrong; his “inner voice,” so to speak. He elects not to lie, even if the dishonesty would benefit him in the immediate run. Principles function to increase fulfillment via delayed gratification. For a set of parents to raise their children to have integrity, they must embody their own value systems; teach by example.

From the perspective of people who believe that children are “born bad,” the paragraph above may seem like nonsense. Children are not “born evil,” nor are they “born obedient.” However, as social animals, humans are born with what Austrian psychoanalysis Wilhelm Reich called “a natural decency.” Reich was a teacher of Lowen. Much of the latter’s perspectives were inspired by his experiences with the former. Reich was a student of Sigmund Freud, but came into conflict with Freud due to Freud’s failure to respect the soma as an important part of psychology. Many people accuse Freud of “being obsessed with sex” and “overpathologizing everyday experiences.” Perhaps these criticisms are valid. That said, it’d be more precise to say that Freud’s theories lack grounding, since he based his findings only on dreams and abstractions.

Reich, in contrast to Freud, formed his conclusions from the ground up on a solid foundation, using his patients’ bodies as the basis for treating their psychological illnesses. Freud divided the mind into two – conscious and unconscious. Reich divided the psyche into three – social façade, secondary layer, and biological core. The secondary layer is equivalent to the unconscious. The biological core is the nucleus for the prosocial, humane “natural decency.” Those who lack psychological integration – the “normal,” well-over-99% of people on this planet – have all three layers. In contrast, the integrated person has only a biological core and, possibly, a paper thin social façade. The secondary layer is the seat of all the wickedness, “sins,” and degeneracy of humanity.

The social façade is the layer that keeps the corrupt secondary layer at bay. Polite society as we know it could not exist without this top layer of the psyche. Without this uppermost division of the mind, normal humans would tear each other apart no less ferociously than a group rabid hyenas rips the limbs of an innocent, lost lion cub. A glimpse of this wretchedness can be observed in the third world. The social façade of the average third world person is a crude, grainy layer of sand compared to that of the average first world person, which is analogous to a sophisticatedly-patched stretch of soil. Nevertheless, the first world citizen, like the third world inhabitant, requires the façade to function in civilization.

On the other hand, spirited individuals – the Jesuses, Buddhas, and Kristnas of the world – need only a silky slim façade layer, if any such layer at all, since the secondary layer is nonexistent in their psyches. 

Due to Reich being persecuted by the German government, slandered, and misrepresented, his teachings are not well known today. Read more about this in Peter Fritz Walter’s short biography of Reich. 

When Reich transformed unintegrated patients into integrated people, he was taken aback by his observations of such clients. Not only did their pathological symptoms of mental dis-ease disappear, their entire personalities changed. Their attitudes toward work and love changed as well. Based on such observations, Reich was able to outline a handful of basic characteristics of the integrated (i.e. spirited) person: refusal to stay in a loveless marriage, disgust with the punishing children via beatings, unwillingness to associate with prostitutes, powerful desire to work in a field that can capture his passions, etc. 

With regard to the spirit, only the integrated person fulfills the moral law of true religious ethics, said Reich in The Murder of Christ (1953), which, in spite of the misleading title, has more to do with psychology than religion. Reich stated that Jesus was the son of God not because the historical figure was special, but because we are all sons and daughters of God. God is truth, nature, and grace. God is Life. The spiritual person is simply the person that lives for Truth and affirms it in his fellow men. He consumes air with deep breaths and reflects light with tranquil eyes. From the time he is conceived to the time he floats to heaven, he maintains the divine glow that is bestowed upon all of us, sinlessly walking step by step in the Garden of Eden with perfect grace from womb to tomb.