Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

The Body Creed

Last week sucked. It sucked in three different ways:

1. I was attacked by a pernicious virus that rendered me deflated and ensnotted and sinus-blocked and intellectually worthless
2. I got hit by a shitstorm of problems at work that sucked away most of my time and left me drained and googly-eyed by the end of each day
3. I found it necessary to convince my cable company that they were responsible for certain technical difficulties I was experiencing, possibly one of the most frustrating and time-consuming and futile endeavors in all of creation

The end-result of which was a week pretty much bereft of the stuff I usually do when I’m not working. I read nothing, I wrote nothing, and I exercised nothing but my eyelids and my sneeze muscles. By Friday, my head was like a long-abandoned building with broken windows and peeling wallpaper and empty pitted hallways reeking of piss and ammonia, the ghosts of its former occupants visible in unemptied trashcans and wire hangers in bare closets and faded handprints on dirty walls.

All of which reminds me of the First Law of Spiritual Health: you have to feed your mind, or it withers and dies. Spiritual death is pernicious. You can waste away inside and still appear to be a fully functional carbon-based entity. You wake up in the morning and consume foodstuffs and void your bowels and climb into your conveyance and arrive at work and work all day and climb back into your conveyance etc, but you’re just working off a script. The spiritually deceased are squishy automata executing old programs in an endless loop.

Spiritual death isn’t dramatic or sudden, it’s not drawn out or agonizing, it’s not really even perceptible except as slight twinges of regret or nostalgia or uneasiness, as a kind of miasmatic discontent that settles imperceptibly over the empty places where your dreams used to live.

But the good news is that it’s possible to reverse this kind of death. If you take the view that your spirit lives in the context and confines of your body, that your corporeal body contains your spiritual body, then as long as the meat is around the mind can always come back. Your body is your mind’s universe, and so it gets to make the rules. If you want to be a purely atheist/materialist universe, then the death of your soul is the end of all life in the universe; all that’s left is waiting for time to consume the empty vessel that remains. If you want to be a Christian universe, then your spirit is not gone but simply elsewhere, and you can live the rest of your life in a state of perpetual nostalgia and quiet contemplation of what used to be. But if you want to be a Buddhist universe, if you want to yoke your soul to the eternal turning of the wheel of karma, then your spirit never really dies: it comes back over and over again in different forms, striving through every cycle of death and life toward perfection.

i don’t remember the last time i thought about anything spiritual. i think i have gone beyond the ‘death’ stage…