©2010 by Jonathan Zap   Edited by Austin Iredale

What is the Singularity Archetype?

Some of the most significant layers of meaning in Avatar are not to be found in the articles available on the web that discuss its underlying mythology, at least from what I’ve read.  Avatar is charged with emergent archetypal messages from the collective unconscious that relate to an evolutionary event horizon which I’ve discussed in my writings on “the Singularity Archetype.” The Singularity Archetype,  a term I coined many years ago, is a primordial image of an evolutionary event horizon that seems to be an implicit potentiality glowing in the collective unconscious of our species.  I first wrote about the Singularity Archetype (though I didn’t use the term at the time) in an undergraduate philosophy honors paper I wrote in 1978 when I was twenty-years-old and which is available on line: Archetypes of a New Evolution. I discovered that there was an emergent archetype that contained crucial information about our future evolution and that manifested itself in dreams, fantasies and religious visions forming a core element in a largely unrecognized contemporary mythology. The most potent expression of this mythology continues to be in science-fiction novels and films.

Before we can discuss Avatar we need a working understanding of the Singularity Archetype. White Crows Rising—The Singularity Archetype and the Event Horizon of Human Evolution is my most in depth treatment of the topic,  while a much briefer treatment can be found in Looking Toward the Event Horizon an article published in the Australian Magazine   New Dawn on December 1st, 2008.

An Example of the Singularity Archetype

To get a feeling for the Singularity Archetype it is necessary to study some of the specific manifestations of it.  There are many examples in the writings linked above, and to really get a sense of it requires encountering several examples.  I’ll provide a very basic one here which comes from one of Jung’s most brilliant colleagues, Marie Louise Von Franz, from a chapter she authored in Jung’s classic introductory work, Man and his Symbols. Von Franz describes two dreams reported to her by someone she describes as “…a simple woman who was brought up in Protestant surroundings…” In both dreams a supernatural event of great significance is being viewed. But in one dream the dreamer is viewing the event from below, standing on the earth, in the other dream she views the same event from above.

(The dreamer’s painting, from Man and His Symbols by C.G. Jung.)

In the earthbound dream, the dreamer is standing with a guide looking down at Jerusalem. The wing of Satan descends and darkens the city. The uncanny wing of the devil occurring in the Middle East immediately brings to mind Antichrist and Armageddon.

But in her other dream, the dreamer is witnessing the same event from the heavens. From this vantage the dark wing of Satan appears as the white, wafting cloak of God. A white spiral appears as a symbol of evolution. Von Franz describes,

“…the spectator is high up, somewhere in heaven, and sees in front of her a terrific split between the rocks. The movement in the cloak of God is an attempt to reach Christ, the figure on the right, but it does not quite succeed. In the [earthbound]  painting, the same thing is seen from below—from a human angle. Looking at it from a higher angle, what is moving and spreading is a part of God; above that rises the spiral as a symbol of possible further development. But seen from the basis of our human reality, this same thing in the air is the dark, uncanny wing of the devil.”

Implications of the Singularity Archetype

In these two dreams we see one of the classic aspects of the Singularity Archetype—what to the earth-bound ego seems apocalyptic, from a cosmic viewpoint is revealed to be a transcendent evolutionary event.  Again, to get a feeling for this archetype requires contact with several examples which you can find in the documents linked above.  In Looking Toward the Event Horizon I summarized some of the implications of the Singularity Archetype as follows:

“As we move toward the event horizon, the physics of the dreamtime more potently interpenetrates the physics of the waking life.  Synchronicity becomes more the rule than the exception, and the way we have become accustomed to experiencing space and time is drastically altered. Matter is respiritualized and transforms more readily to accord with psychic intentions. The new species are changelings and reality transformers freed from many of the mortal and corporeal limitations that bound the older species.”

“The relationship between individuality, ego, and collectivity is fundamentally transformed, and we see many variations of “homo gestalt”—new versions of the species where group telepathies enhance the synergy and symbiosis of individuals.  More visual and telepathic modalities of communication are involved in this fundamental shift.  Members of the new species are typically androgynous and many aspects of gender stereotyping become archaic.”

“To catalyze such fundamental metamorphosis may require planet-wide shocks that punctuate the equilibrium of the species and threaten the entire human genome.  The shocks may need to be of apocalyptic intensity to overcome the inherent conservatism of species homeostasis and to potentiate a will toward metamorphosis. As we move toward the event horizon there is an exponential intensification of novelty as new and unexpected forms are created, latent capacities become manifest, and emergent aspects are revealed. The human ego as defender of the old equilibrium may approach many of these transformations with fear, loathing and violence.  Patriarchal power structures, including religious fundamentalism and the military-industrial complex, may perceive the metamorphosis as a zero-sum game competition of species, with genocide or extinction as the binary options.”

“Because the eschaton of the species and the individual event horizon of death have great parallel resonance, those who are driven by the fear and denial of death will greet the metamorphosis with the same maladaptive strategies that have characterized their approach to life in general. Xenophobic violence, will to power, and territoriality may be exacerbated.  As novelty intensifies, we should expect to see the outer edges of both dark and light intensify.”

“Because of the parallelism between individual death and eschaton of the species, the typically human confusion of inner and outer will cause many prophesiers to anticipate various end dates conveniently scheduled to occur within their lifetimes. This tendency to displace fear of individual death onto a relatively close end date only intensifies the binding to linear time and represents a last effort of the ego to control a transcendent metamorphosis.”

“ The Singularity Archetype is essentially a low resolution map of an evolutionary event horizon.  From my point of view, the future contains formed and unformed elements, and the lack of specificities and exact timelines (though many will attempt to attach these) allows greater room for free will and novel outcomes.  Each of us is hurtling toward an event horizon, and whether the nearest event horizon is personal death or species-wide eschaton, it is crucial to view both as emergences rather than as emergencies.  A threshold of absolute metamorphosis is guaranteed in either case, and therefore the way one lives one’s life requires ultimate values that retain meaning when seen against the backdrop of eternity.”

The Will Toward the Glorified Body

An aspect of the Singularity Archetype that is especially relevant to Avatar is what I call “the will toward the glorified body.”  My essay, The Glorified Body—Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution, explores this aspect of the Singularity Archetype.  Here are some passages particularly relevant to this discussion of Avatar :

“To understand the will toward the Glorified Body we first need to define what I am referring to as the ‘Glorified Body.’ Many Christian writings describe the body of the resurrected Christ as being a ‘Glorified Body’ —-a radiant body free of mortal limitations. Although I am not working from a Christian point of view, I believe that this phrase captures a powerful archetype. We see images and hear stories of the Glorified Body in most or all cultures and periods. There are all sorts of variations and numerous gradations on the Glorified Body spectrum, but the defining characteristics are fairly apparent.”

“Glad Day” by William Blake

“Although the Glorified Body occurs in endless variations there are two very broad categories in which the term ‘Glorified Body’ will be employed in this article. One use of Glorified Body refers to the inherent ‘energy body’ that all human beings possess. Sometimes I will substitute ‘energy body’ to make clear this first meaning of Glorified Body. The second, and somewhat overlapping, category of use for the term ‘Glorified Body’ is to refer to human or nonhuman entities whose manifest bodies are closer to energy than conventional flesh and blood bodies. This type of Glorified Body hovers in the collective psyche of the human species as a highly charged image and expectation of our further evolution. ..”

“In mythologies, the Glorified Body appears free of some or all of the many limitations of mortality. The Glorified Body may be completely free of cosmetic blemishes, limited vitality, aging, pain, disease, and death. A Glorified Body may be able to transcend conventional limitations of space and time. For example, it may not need technology or an intermediary force of any sort to appear in any location it chooses. It may have transcendent clarity of vision and thought. Often it will transcend ordinary language and communicate through radiance or from the inside of another psyche. A being with a Glorified Body may live in a state of enlightenment and love. Or it could be evil and possess an incredibly potent array of diabolical powers. Visually, a Glorified Body may appear radiant and beautiful—–awe inspiring, numinous—–the body of an angel. But it could also choose to appear cloaked as a mundane, physical body or as a hideous apparition or demon. The most evolved Glorified Bodies are infinitely plastic, able to take on whatever form is desired. This is the quality of the shape shifter, the changeling——like the devil that ‘hath the power to assume a pleasing shape’ or the liquid metal terminator in the popular movie Terminator 2 .”

“In contemporary mythology the Glorified Body appears in a spectrum of permutations ranging from an idealized human material body to a state of omnipotent, omniscient godhood. In our materialistic culture we have Superman , ‘the Man of Steel’, who has a more industrialized version of the Glorified Body.  (‘The man of steel’ seems the perfect Iron Age personification of the Glorified Body—to put this in the perspective of the cycle of ages see The Mutant versus the Machine—the End of the Iron Age and the Galactic Alignment of 2012 ) Superman doesn’t have special radiance, telepathy or most other divine attributes, but leaps tall buildings in a single bound, outruns locomotives, and most helpful in our culture, is bulletproof. At the other end of our cultural spectrum the Glorified Body turns up as the shape-shifting UFO phenomenon perceived by human observers in endlessly varying forms.”

“The human will toward the Glorified Body is not a subtle urge. It is an iron fist pounding on both sides of the doors of perception. It is an urging of such terrible power that it will prompt some to go under the surgeon’s knife, to starve themselves to death, to sell their souls in the hope of having a mortal body that will merely better resemble a Glorified Body for a brief time. The Glorified Body is not a casual, imaginative musing or an episodic blip on the radar screens of various cultures. It is a powerful, emergent archetype. It is one of our most ancient obsessions and one of the most explosively contemporary. It is related to the deepest sources of human suffering, an inextricable aspect of a thousand types of neurotic torment, a companion in some way to almost every form of personal hell. It is also a divine muse, one of the greatest sources of hope and inspiration we’ve ever known.”

“Messages about the will toward a Glorified Body are as ubiquitous in our culture as radio and television waves. Expression of this will can also be found deeply embedded in every religion and mythology, and yet it is rarely named, rarely seen as a highly defined, differentiated and absolutely integral aspect of human psychology. The will toward the Glorified Body is at the center of some of our most destructive and also some of our most creative impulses. This will is a primary urge which can inspire incredible athletic achievement, great art, and technology that blurs with magic.”

“The will toward the Glorified Body is what inspired Michelangelo to carve David. This same will has also inspired the technological magicians of the computer industry to provide us with ‘Avatars,’ animated characters that will represent us in the once visually anonymous world of the Internet. Soon we will be able to boot up our virtual Glorified Bodies and revel in a digital garden of earthly delights. Our bodies will be infinitely plastic and with a mouse click we can be leaner than Kate Moss or have cybernetically enhanced muscle definition that will make Mr. Universe look like the Pilsbury Dough Boy. It’s interesting to note the term the computer industry has adopted for these new digital bodies—-Avatars. The first definition of Avatar in the abridged Oxford dictionary is: ‘(in Hindu mythology) the descent of a deity or released soul to earth in bodily form.’”

“But somewhere behind the ever more glowing computer monitor or virtual reality goggles will be a human being—– a digitally unenhanced mortal/organic version 1.0, who will very likely have bags under his eyes and a pot belly. The Wizard of Oz tells us not to look at the man behind the curtain. But we will look, and will be ever more horrified with the contrast between what we see behind the curtain and what’s up there on the screen. The primary urge will remain agonizingly unfulfilled.”

“However unfulfilling it may be in some ways, technology is one of the central expressions of the will toward a Glorified Body. Technology actually does allow us to extend our physical bodies through time and space. The urge to become a celebrity, for example, is an urge toward a Glorified Body that modern technology can, to some degree, create. In her films, Marilyn Monroe still lives as a youthful beauty. Since she died young there is no aging, mortal body to provide an embarrassing contrast to her Glorified Body projected on the silver screen. She remains a goddess.”

“The will toward a Glorified Body is a primary urge, the urge of our entire species and not just single individuals living in a particular culture. (I’m intentionally using the word “urge” here to blur the distinction between instinct and drive as I think this primary urge partakes of both biological and psychological forces.)  Organisms of all sorts seem to have the primary urge to reproduce, to genetically propagate. Among gendered organisms there is an insistent urge to couple with other individuals of the same species. That urging may be intense enough to be described as “going into heat.” Heat is a state of excitement and increased dynamism, whether it is the material heat of fire or the metabolic heat of a living organism. The organism in heat may appear agitated, even tormented, while in the grip of this urge. In the adolescent stage of development—–the stage of recently acquired reproductive potential—-there may be the particularly urgent will to achieve that first coupling. The unfulfilled urge is antecedent to the coupling event—-an event that in chaos math would be a called an “attractor.” (Very roughly, an “attractor” is an event in the future that is so powerful that it warps causality and phenomena in the present.) Very likely the organism will get to fulfill this urge. But it’s not a sure thing. Some organisms may die before they fulfill the urge—but certainly some individuals of that species must get to fulfill that urge or the species will become extinct. As far as I can tell, urges in nature are always fulfilled by a species, though not necessarily by every individual of that species. Only in human beings could we even imagine the existence of an urge that seems to never be fulfilled. My contention is that the human species has “gone into heat”—-a state of heightened expectation, agitation and chaos. We are nearing the attractor, nearing the place where we can couple with the Glorified Body and fulfill a primary urge.”

“The intensifying will toward the Glorified Body is happening at a time of evolutionary crisis when the metabolism of the whole species is heating up. Technological changes and scientific discoveries are fundamentally altering our experiences of self and outer reality. The biosphere that allows the existence of our physical bodies has undergone a global toxification threatening the continuance of our species. To understand the body-image plague we must view it in the context in which it occurs—–a crisis phase of human evolution. Many attributes of the human psyche, from sexuality and body image to spirituality and our sense of relation to the universe, are rapidly mutating. We cannot comprehend symptoms without understanding the general condition of a species that is hurtling toward an evolutionary nexus charged with images of extinction and rebirth. Our intensifying will toward the Glorified Body is more than an urge to reconnect with the inherent, human energy body recognized by all cultures. It is also a species-wide urge to make a quantum, evolutionary jump toward the Glorified Body as our embodied manifestation. We are experiencing an urge to massively redefine body, self and our relationship to physical reality.”

The Will Toward the Glorified Body in Avatar

The will toward the Glorified Body is right at the center of Avatar .  James Cameron seems to be aware of this.  When Larry King asked him why he picked the name “Avatar,” Cameron responded:  “I don’t know. Y’know when I wrote it in 95’ it just popped into my head that here you’ve got people projecting their consciousness into a fleshly body, a biological body, and that’s what the Sanskrit word means, the taking of flesh, the incarnation of a divine being in the case of the Hindu religion.  And although our characters aren’t divine beings, obviously, the idea is that it’s actually a fleshly incarnation.
As Avatar opens, our point of view is that of a Glorified Body, the flying dream body of the protagonist, Jake Sully, a young Marine who is a paraplegic.  His character is perfectly designed to represent the will toward the Glorified Body.  He is an athletic, vital young man with great physical courage and a warrior essence but whose body is half paralyzed.

The next hauntingly numinous scene in the movie is when Jake first catches a glimpse of his avatar.  I pointed out in my essay, “The Glorified Body…”, written in 1996, that “avatar,” a term which had then just been adopted in the computer gaming world, came from Hindu mythology and meant a spirit form descended into the flesh.  From the point of view of my essay, a human being is an avatar, a spirit bound to one body for the entire waking portion of an incarnation.  We also have an intense will to break free of the one body/one psyche rule that dominates the waking mortal life.  The movie Avatar , thanks to both content and the technological enhancements of its form, provides a powerful depiction of what it would be like to break the one body/one psyche rule.  Jake cannot restrain his unbridled euphoria when he is able to enter his avatar, a far more powerful and glorified body than he had even before his paralysis. His new body is bioluminescent, idealized, more androgynous and suited to a world where gravity is less limiting than on the earth.  In actuality it is a virtual body that is a hybridization of the actor’s body moving through space and time and a CGI avatar.

As I point out in the essay, we all get to break the one body/one psyche rule during the dreamtime when we are able to merge our awareness with a variety of dream bodies. Avatar begins with the liberated feeling of Jake flying in his dream body.  The process of merging with the avatars of the movie is very much like dreaming.  Jake lies down in a coffin-like capsule, and analogous to falling asleep and dreaming, his connection to his waking body is submerged and he bonds to a different, enhanced body that lives in Pandora, a place  analogous to the dreamtime. The dreamtime is a place of boundary dissolution.  Everyone who has seriously studied the dreamtime, including both Freud and Jung, has noticed how telepathic it is compared to the waking time.  Many of the reports of mutual dreaming illustrate this dramatically.  Similarly, the bioluminescent world of Pandora is a massively telepathic network. I’ll return to the concept of telepathic networks later in this essay.

The process of merging with the avatar, where you enter this technological sarcophagus, also has many parallels to death .  Jake dies to his waking life, passes through a tunnel of light and finds himself in a glorified body.  Jake’s life takes on a diurnal/nocturnal sort of cycling that undergoes a figure/ground reversal.  The waking life of his paraplegic body recedes with the ghetto life of corporeal limitations, bureaucratic tensions, and intrusions from imperialistic patriarchy.  His eros and enthusiasm for life become far more identified with his avatar/Pandoran life.  He wants to more fully escape the inferior corporeal/waking life into the Glorified Body/dreamtime/afterlife.

Paradoxically, Cathy Lynn Pagano wrote an article entitled “Avatar: The Archetypal Message Is ‘Get Back In Your Body!’” Pagano points out, quite insightfully,

“The freedom and joy of the body moving, leaping, daring is a major component of this story, just as Pandora’s beauty compliments the body’s freedom. The corporate people live in metal boxes, without beauty or free movement; the walking which was such a big part of the game of golf is reduced to putting in the office.”

The paradox she does not recognize is that Jake gets back into ‘the body,’ or more correctly he becomes more vitally embodied by breaking free of the limitations of his damaged human body and merging with his avatar.

Subcreating Imaginal Worlds
“It’s my world, you all are just living in it.”  —James Cameron (referring to Pandora), on the Larry King Show
While from the top layer of Avatar’s mythology, Pandora is an exotic, extraterrestrial world, on both a more literal and deeper layer Pandora is actually the world of the empowered human imagination.  Pandora is an imaginal world created by James Cameron.  Movies, as I’ve pointed out before, are essentially a dream delivery technology.  Cameron, who unlike most of us can command a thousand technicians and a quarter billion dollar budget, is able to make his dream, his imaginal world, into a collective dream.  His world is, of course, more an extrapolation of human psychology than anything extraterrestrial.  For example, since like Cameron I am a baby boomer, I notice a common cultural influence that very likely inspired the bioluminescent world of Pandora.  An early psychedelic experience for many baby boomers, including myself, was the backroom of various hippie shops where black lights illuminated black-light posters and created a little phosphorescent world reminiscent of the look of nocturnal Pandora. The avatar experience of the movie, therefore, represents to me not so much extraterrestrial travel as intrapsychic imaginal travel, which has more to do with the dreamtime, the future of virtual reality, and a human evolutionary event horizon we are hurtling toward.  By my second viewing of the movie, much of the novelty was gone, and I found that what I really wanted was a 3D IMAX immersive visit to another exotic world, which would be much more exciting than a revisit to Pandora.

Apparently there are quite a number of people, mostly young men, who are complaining on internet forums of depression because they can’t live on Pandora, which seems so real to them while they are watching the film in 3D.  For example, CNN, in an article entitled “Audiences experience ‘Avatar’ blues”  reports:

“A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site ‘Naviblue’ that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.”

“ ‘Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,’ Mike posted. ‘I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and that everything is the same as in Avatar .’”

The ‘Naviblue’ phenomenon is understandable because so many in our culture are magically disempowered.  They want to live in someone else’s dream because it doesn’t occur to them that they are dreamers and potential subcreators who can create their own worlds. They have been conditioned to be passive consumers of the imaginal plane, not empowered creators on the imaginal plane.

As I have discussed in White Crows Rising—- The Singularity Archetype and the Event Horizon of Human Evolution on the other side of the evolutionary event horizon, the physics of the dreamtime will be the default, rather than the physics of the waking time, and we will have the ability to subcreate our own worlds without access to a thousand technicians and a quarter billion dollars.  I have also pointed out that unlike Terence McKenna and Ram Das, whom I have talked to a bit on the subject, I do not expect this evolutionary breakthrough to be a cure for human evils. When novelty increases, the outer edge of light and dark both intensify, and I expect that there will be gifted black magicians making potent diabolical use of these enhanced abilities.  I think the name “Pandora” suggests this with its connection to Pandora’s Box .  In the original myth Pandora opened a jar, but a mistranslation has rendered it forever into a box.  Now the word “Pandora” has been remythologized again and will forever be associated with the world of the Na’vi.  Avatar represents an opening of Pandora’s Box in the sense that it is a breakthrough in the technological magic of the movies, and now that the technology has been irretrievably loosed into the world, we can be sure that it will not always be used to deliver collective dreams as benign as Avatar.

Liminality and the Special Role of Hybrids in Evolution

The luminescent jellyfish-like envoys of Eywah, the divine intelligence of Pandora, recognize Jake as a key evolutionary catalyst.  In many ways, to the practical intelligence of both human and Pandoran characters, he is the most unlikely of choices.  He is severely handicapped in both the human and Pandoran realms, is not particularly bright and is woefully ignorant of Pandoran culture as well as foolish about human politics. What he does have, however, that makes him the ideal choice, is an enthusiastic beginner’s mind.  As the Pandoran shaman points out, “It’s hard to fill a cup that is already full.” His lack of knowledge, of course, is also ideal cinematically as we learn things for the first time as he does.  Jake is a liminal figure, a person caught between and betwixt, who is not fully accepted in either realm, a hybrid of human and Pandoran, and it is so often that which is liminal and hybrid which is the most alchemically charged and capable of metamorphosis.

Another aspect of Jake that makes him an evolutionary catalyst is that he is a twin.  His call to adventure comes because of the murder of his twin, who was trained to merge with a Na’vi avatar.  Twins are very significant mythologically, but also from an evolutionary point of view.  As I’ve noted in my work on the Singularity Archetype, a new type of consciousness also means a new type of communication, and the new means of communication can easily be what creates the new type of consciousness. The last quantum evolutionary jump had to do with our ability to think and communicate in words. The breakthrough into a more sophisticated form of communication is very likely to happen (both in the past and the future) between identical twins.  Identical twins sometimes invent their own languages.  (Sometimes called idioglossia or cryptophasia or less technically as “twin talk” or “twin speech.”) Identical twins are a maximal case of rapport that can exist between individuals, and with lessened barriers of difference and miscommunication they seem like the most fertile ground for crossing the communication gap between individuals in novel ways.  In another 2009 CGI film, 9 , a masterpiece that, unlike Avatar , did not get the credit it deserved, we see a brilliant manifestation of the twin aspect of the Singularity Archetype. Amongst a group of prototype rag doll-like creatures there are a pair of twins. While the other prototypes have lens-like eyes that take in visual information, the twins have eyes that transmit information as light between them.  They are also able to project moving images to others.  A visually-oriented telepathy is one of the most classic aspects of the Singularity Archetype.  I discuss this at length in my four hour mp3, Logos Beheld , which will be available soon for free on zaporacle.com. Also amazing is that 9 ends with some of the creatures in luminous spirit bodies merging with a moving spiral of light in the sky, another classic element of many of the permutations of the singularity archetype (see the Von Franz dream study above).

The mysterious Norway Sprial which appeared on December 9, 2009

Jake, because of the murder of his human twin, is invited to merge with a new twin, his avatar, which has been grown to genetically match his murdered twin.  When this twinned being (Jake in his avatar) travels to Pandora he finds himself in a logos beheld kind of world where most or all of the life is bioluminescent, transmitting information about itself through the projection of light.  It is also a world that has much in common with another key aspect of the Singularity Archetype—the telepathic network. All of Pandora seems to be a telepathic network. The human world of the movie, even though it is set in the future, is as ego-fractured as ever, with human psyches encapsulated by their own short-sighted egocentric perspectives.  Like the human characters of the imagined future in Avatar , we have reached an evolutionary cul-de-sac with the ego. Given the lethality of our present level of technology, we may no longer be able to survive the egocentric perspective.  Unlike the Na’vi, the egocentric human is usually unaware, except in an abstracted way, of the living matrix of which he is a part.  Encapsulated by technological exoskeletons—SUVs, gadget filled homes, etc.—he may have no direct sense of how his lifestyle is impacting the rest of the living matrix.  The problem of the insulated ego is already a very familiar theme, and the ego is all too easy to villainize, but the prejudice against the ego so often found in New Age and Eastern circles fails to notice that the ego served many powerful evolutionary purposes.  In White Crows Rising… I wrote:

“In tribal cultures the ego seems less developed than in modern individuals living in industrialized societies. Tribal societies seem to have less individual boundaries and more group consciousness. Earlier human beings may have had less ego, but also less individuality and differentiation. A fundamental aspect or function of the ego is the creation of isolation. An individual perceives him or herself as a separate identity apart from others and the world. This perception creates a degree of isolation and within this insulating bubble an explosion of novelty occurs. A highly complex, unique, differentiated, often pathologized personality develops. Egocentric isolation, like the irritating grain of sand in an oyster, causes the development of a fantastic structure as complex buffering layers are accreted around the irritant and the beautiful pearl of individuality is created.”

One of the great purposes of the ego was to encapsulate consciousness and create a firewall between psyches, greatly reducing the networked telepathy that I believe is more the norm in nature.  We see what looks like networked telepathy, for example, in the amazing synchrony of schools of fish.  The Secret Life of Plants, and some subsequent studies, seem to show that the vegetable kingdom is not only sentient, but aware of human thoughts and changes to living tissue (while remote from any sensory information).  Tribal cultures do seem to be more aware and tapped into the networked intelligence of nature.  The Na’vi, in general, seem in most ways to resemble an idealized version of a terrestrial indigenous tribe, and that constitutes a subtle danger in the mythological resonance of the film. The danger is that the film encourages what Ken Wilber calls the “pre/trans” fallacy.  In Dynamic Paradoxicalism I described the pre/trans fallacy this way:

“Essentially, the pre/trans fallacy notices a common tendency to confuse pre-rational states with trans-rational states, since both are non-rational. The “reductivist” version of this is the tendency of “scientism,” which reduces all transrational mystical states to prerational infantilism, and dismisses authentic spiritual experience as “superstitious nonsense.” Freud clearly fell for this half of the fallacy, especially in The Future of an Illusion. The “elevationist” version of the fallacy, ubiquitous in the New Age, is to elevate prerational states to the transcendent and to demonize rationality.  From this side of the fallacy, babies are thought to be Buddhas, and anything tribal or aboriginal is romanticized and inflated as infinitely superior to anything modern or rational. Promiscuity is seen as a daring rebellion from antiquated taboos, even though it is usually in high conformity to what peers are doing. They recognize as conventional the older sexual morays of the past, but fail to recognize that their rebellion is part of a vast conventionalism of the present, and that this new conventionalism is actually based on a still more primitive level of development than the old conventionalism. Regressing to pre-rational hedonism, indulging every impulse and irrational notion is seen as enlightened, post-conventional and transcendent. This is the state of the typically goofy New Age person who never heard an urban legend or bit of mystical-sounding nonsense without adopting it wholesale. This type of person is fiercely anti-intellectual and anti-rational, so it is impossible to talk them down from their absurdities, even the attempt to do so casts you, in their minds, as this clueless rationalist stuck in their ego. They believe they have transcended rationality, while forgetting that to transcend something you first have to achieve it!”

The glorification of the Na’vi, especially since they appear not only exotic and tribal but are also occurring in a futuristic sci-fi film, is dangerous because it will encourage some people to believe that the answer to our present troubles would be a return to life as warriors in an indigenous rainforest tribe. The Singularity Archetype, however, indicates that the answer has more to do with hybridization—of East and West, of aboriginal with high tech, of past and future. Jake, who appears amongst the Na’vi as a hybrid, is a better personification of the evolutionary message than the Na’vi themselves.  Unfortunately, Jake’s character is disappointingly ordinary, he has a good heart and physical courage, but little else to recommend him as the evolutionary catalyst he becomes in the film. From a marketing and story point of view, however, Jake’s ordinariness makes him easier for young males to identify with.  Also, in many traditional hero cycles the hero is a naïve young male who has to be initiated into a new world, and Jake fits very well into that tradition.  In most of the more inspired versions of stories related to the Singularity Archetype, however, ( Dune , Akira , many others) the evolutionary catalyst tends to be a young mutant with extraordinary parapsychological abilities.

Another way that Avatar seems to lean toward preconventional rather than transconventional is that a kind of hard-wired interspecies bond with various animals is emphasized over the intraspecies, nonlocal telepathic bond that we find in more inspired story versions of the Singularity Archetype. There seems to be a pantheistic networking with nature, but it is imagined in a very primitive, materialist way where the Na’vi have tails that seems to be the organic equivalent of Ethernet cables. Schools of fish, however, don’t need to connect via nerve bundles to synchronize, so the networking model in the movie seems to have a bias toward the concrete, hard-wired connection. The imagined version of nature is actually more primitive than the already existing version of nature we find here on earth. The Na’vi seemed to be imagined in the image of a pre-Wi-Fi computer network rather than in a transcendent version of nature.

In more sophisticated and inspired versions of the Singularity Archetype, the transcendence of ego-encapsulation is not imagined in such a materialist pre-conventional way.  In White Crows Rising… I wrote:

“Collective consciousness turns up frequently in expressions of the Singularity Archetype and merits some examination. In Theodore Sturgeon’s science-fiction novel published in 1953, More than Human , a group of mutants, who each have distinctly different strengths and weaknesses, form a collective consciousness while retaining some individuality and become, in many ways, a single entity where each mutant serves in a specialized role, as if they were organs of a single body. Sturgeon coined the term ” homo gestalt ” to describe this new entity. Similarly, more recent abduction testimony has emphasized the “grays” as having a hive-like collectivity, and this is experienced as another threatening aspect of their alien otherness.”

“There are a number of possible reasons for this collective consciousness motif appearing in so many permutations of this archetype. One is that it may be a fairly literal indicator of evolutionary change. If the ego ceases to dominate the human psyche, then perhaps the boundaries that it creates around the individual will dissipate and we will become more collectively aware. The shells of the oysters dissolve and the pearls lie together.”

The homo gestalt aspect of the Singularity Archetype reflects an evolutionary possibility. Encapsulated psyches become telepathically connected, but without a loss of individuality. For example, in the world of Dune , there is a sisterhood of highly conscious warriors known as the “Bene Gesserit.”  To become a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother one must survive a perilous rite called “The Water of Life.” In this initiatory rite one imbibes a potent psychotropic, mutagenic poison.  If the initiate survives and becomes a Reverend Mother she will retain her individuality, but will also be aware of the memories and all the psyches of all other Reverend Mothers, living or dead, who have similarly survived this rite. The Reverend Mothers don’t need cables or funny tails to be part of this network.  Parapsychological researchers such as Russell Targ (the laser physicist who cofounded the U.S. Government’s remote viewing program) have long recognized that telepathy and many other parapsychological phenomena occur because our psyches exist in a nonlocal field. In other words, no signal needs to be sent anywhere because psyches do not need to be causally related. Early Soviet parapsychologists called telepathy “mental radio” because they imagined the psyche in the image of the current machine, the radio, and had a causal signal model.  But the findings of many well-conducted experiments have shown that the telepathic effect is not lessened by distance (as any energetic signaling would be), nor is it diminished when the subject is in a Faraday Cage (which blocks all electromagnetic signals).  More evolved visions of homo gestalt are based on the emergence of encapsulated individuality into a nonlocal telepathic network.

In the final battle at the end of the film, the military/industrial/patriarchal complex is personified by Colonel Quaritch, who is encapsulated in an exoskeleton.  Jake is in his avatar, but ultimately is saved because of the telepathic bond with his Na’vi lover. Ultimately Jake survives by transcending the technological connection to his avatar—done via something that looks like a cross between an MRI machine and a particle accelerator—and through an organic network permanently merges with his avatar.

Although I’ve been critical of what seem like failures of imagination in Avatar , I’d like to close with an appreciation of its immense significance for the collective.  Elsewhere, I’ve speculated that technology would provide a potent catalyst for our evolution into the imaginal realm when there was enough distributed computer power to provide real-time mapping of human facial expressions onto CGI avatars.  In other words, at our present level of technology, people from various parts of the world can interact in a networked computer game like World of Warcraft through their individualized digital avatars.  The richness of this virtual social experience, however, is greatly lessened because the avatars are not capable of the complex visual communication enabled by the microsecond-by-microsecond changes of human facial expression. When we reach the point that your webcam can record your facial expressions and map them onto your real-time avatar, we will begin to approach the complexity of face-to-face social contacts in the virtual world.  Avatar takes a crucial half step toward that because it advances the ability to give pre-rendered CGI avatars the complexity of the human form.  In the making of Avatar, each actor had a miniature camera with LED lights on a little boom in front of their face capturing minute changes of facial expression. The Na’vi avatars, especially since they were 3D, were a very significant advance from earlier live action into CGI films like Beowulf . With the well-handled bonding of Jake with his avatar, and the powerfully immersive medium of 3D IMAX, we had the best so far collective experience of what it would be like to merge with a different body in a different world.  Avatar represents a huge cultural milestone though necessarily it is a mere phosphorescent shadow of what awaits us at the event horizon.

Out of respect for the accomplishment of Avatar I’ll close with the testimonial blog I wrote the week it came out,

“I have a time-sensitive recommendation that everyone prioritize seeing the 3D IMAX version of Avatar.  This was a life-changing experience for me and the three friends that were with me yesterday.  This is a time-sensitive priority because once this film leaves the big screen you’ll be able to see it at home, but not in the venue that gives it overwhelming power—3D IMAX.  This opportunity represents the most potent attempt in human history to (without psychotropics) give you the sensory impact of experiencing another world.  Although Avatar represents a key, watershed event in the history of cinema, it may be many years before someone else is able to get a budget this size (approximately 300 million) and a thousand skilled people from several special effects studios to pull something like this off again. The 3D IMAX experience is so immersive that it creates a real participation mystique with another brilliantly realized world.  Forget the trailers and any reviews.  The trailers didn’t impress me at all, quite the opposite, because they are flat low-res representations of something not meant to be perceived that way.

Avatar is the most impressive sensory experience yet created of what it would be like to break out of the oppressive, monotonous one psyche/one body rule that currently dominates life here on the Babylon Matrix.  Notice that I’ve been careful to add the word “sensory” to my descriptions. The Ring trilogy and the Dune books are far more powerful evocations of the fully realized cultures of other worlds, but they are not sensory except in your ability to convert words into sensations.  No question, but the 3D IMAX format is giving you the most sensory information about a world that is currently possible, and this film advances the leading edge of that possibility very dramatically. Don’t miss this opportunity, because there is nothing even currently in the works, as far as I know, that is going to equal it.”

Your feeback always welcome.  Send to: jonathanzap@hotmail.com

© 2006, 2008 Jonathan Zap

Edited by Austin Iredale

(On May 31 of 1996, a morning of intense intuitions drastically changed my view of corporeality, beauty, sexuality, and eros. This experience is described in “The Path of the Numinous” and the intuitions of that morning are developed in “The Glorified Body—Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution,” and that work serves as a foundation for the present reflections. In writing the following reflection, I use the pronoun “we,” by which I mean “me,” but also the many others who have parallel feelings. There are some for whom the experience of beauty may be quite different, especially those who have been conditioned by pornography, those who view sex as reducible to concrete actions on the genital level, and those most attracted to the human form when it is earthy, explicitly sensual, and unetherealized.)

When we look at a person that has numinous physical beauty, there are so many layers of projection; archetypes like the anima and the eternal youth may be evoked.  But what we also project is the intense inner urge to be phase-shifted to a plane of existence where matter is more animistic, more imbued with spirit, more interactive with psyche, and transformable by will and psychic intention.

The suffering and anxiety associated with the present plane of existence are almost too obvious to be stated.  Most of us are at war with time and corporeal limitations in many ways.  The oppression of bodily circumstances that defies our will ranges from a bad hair day to a crippling disease.  When we see numinous physical beauty we feel a soaring sensation; it is as if we are seeing the soul freed from its corporeal imperfections and  metamorphosed into a perfect form. The soaring feeling of perfect grace and beauty may also be accompanied by a contrasting feeling of intense desire, which in itself may not feel soaring, but rather is marked by an enslaving appetite, a sense of incompletion, and an insatiable hunger for sexual transaction.  If the beautiful other is related to us in a loving mutual romance, then there might be more soaring and less hollow enslavement. But if jealousy enters such a union, then the soaring too becomes a hellishly earthbound suffering.

Many people, at different times and places, have described what I have referred to as the “Green World”(see “A Splinter in your Mind.”) It is a world alike ours, but phase-shifted to a more animistic and idealized plane.  We see some of that in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, especially in the elf realms of Rivendell and Lothlorien.  Inhabiting these phase-shifted places are immortal elves who are more physically beautiful than mere mortals; their bodies are the uncorrupted manifestations of a divine image.

On our much more messy plane, when we encounter numinous physical beauty, it seems as though we’ve found a beautiful gem sparkling in the gutter, one that arouses our delight and sometimes our greed.  It is as if a secret has been revealed that deeply concerns us, and we may feel the illusory projection that this beautiful person belongs to us in some way, is destined to be ours.  (If this feeling is taken literally, we might become a stalker, etc.)  The beautiful person glows, shimmers, and lights up in our mind’s eye like an angel, a being that is human but phase-shifted from corporeal limitation.

What exposes this projection is a realization that the actual human, temporarily gifted with such a form, is still chained to corporeality, to the likelihood of sickness, the inevitability of aging, to fatigue and indigestion and so forth.  But at the first moment of perception, it is as if they were Botticelli’s Venus stepping out of the clamshell, as if they were light streaming the through stained-glass windows of a Gothic cathedral. If we could only merge with them we would be complete, we would be in heaven. In other words, we project and interpersonalize our urge to merge with the glorified body, our urge to phase-shift to a greener, more divine world than our own.  We sense that there is a slider switch—and there absolutely is such a switch—that shifts the matrix from coarse and vulgar to more subtle and divine.  If you doubt that there is such a switch, try the following thought experiment: You spend three or four days in a small cabin by yourself near a wildflower meadow in the Rocky Mountains. It is late June and the days are long and glorious, the nights clear and filled with stars.  During your stay you fast on fresh fruit or fruit juices, and spend much of your time meditating. Next you spend three or four days in a seedy motel room in Newark, New Jersey, watching pay-per-view porno on the motel television, drinking Night Train Express and buying all your meals at the greasy spoon across the street from the motel.  These two poles of experience give a rough idea of how much play there is with the slider switch on this plane. Circumstances, outer circumstances, bodily condition, emotional state, etc., move the slider switch.  But we want to be able to move the slider switch even more; we want, sometimes, to be able to move it into a greener world, a world where we, and the human forms we behold, have the beauty of Tolkien’s elves.

Some imagine those with beautiful bodies to be phase-shifted and unbound from this world, and long to be amongst glamorous celebrities arriving at the Oscars with  flashes strobing around them. If only they lost weight, had plastic surgery, and were a wealthy celebrity, then they would live in a world of light and beauty.  It is easier to see through such delusions when they manifest in someone else, rather than when they are present in ourselves, just as it is so much easier to see when a close friend is getting involved in what is likely to be a disastrous romantic relationship, etc.

When we see a person of numinous physical beauty, it seems as if they are made of finer stuff, as if a light were shining through them.  Some of this perception can be explained objectively.  A young person with a perfect complexion and glossy hair is an objectively contrasting form to a person with wrinkled, blemished skin and dull, thinning hair.  Although we constantly hear that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”—and there is some truth to that: different people are attracted to different type s— it actually turns out that there is wide agreement across cultures as to who is good-looking and who is not. Studies show that photos of people are ranked almost identically based on looks, by people of all types and from the most varied of cultures.  Objective qualities of beauty have even been codified mathematically, and it has been shown that those consistently ranked as more beautiful have superior facial symmetry and proportions that conform to the mathematical ratios of the golden mean. Human beauty is not merely subjective and observer dependent; some bodies are objectively  more perfect realizations of the human form than others.  But even a person who has such a body, has it only on loan, because unless they die young—a wise career choice for those who want to be, like Marilyn Monroe, an enduring object of projection—they will outlive that perfection.

But when we encounter a beautiful person in such an idealized form, it seems as if they have found a magical secret, have drunk from the fountain of eternal youth, and in our psyche that person appears like a shimmering portal—if only we could enter such a portal we would be transformed and released from the suffering of corporeal incarnation.  If we form an actual ongoing relationship with such a person, however, we become aware of the temporal fragility of their beauty, and the suffering of corporeality will now include the suffering of watching the beautiful beloved lose the perfection of their divine form.  This state of poignant loss was expressed in a perfection of words a few hundred years ago in Shakespeare’s Sonnet XV. It was written, like all of his sonnets, when Shakespeare was in love with an androgynous male youth, probably the most temporally fragile form of human beauty.

Sonnet XV is an impossible act to follow, so I will close with it, but I would like to suggest that the reader, after reading XV, consider the many ways and layers in which we individually, and as a species, in our contemplation of our own bodies, and in the ways in which we behold the bodies of others, are “…all in war with Time…” and on a misconstrued personal quest to reach that phase-shift which shimmers beyond the portal of death, and also at the evolutionary event horizon of our species.

Sonnet XV

When I consider every thing that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment,

That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows

Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;

When I perceive that men as plants increase,

Cheered and cheque’d even by the self-same sky,

Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,

And wear their brave state out of memory;

Then the conceit of this inconstant stay

Sets you most rich in youth before my sight

Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,

To change your day of youth to sullied night;

And all in war with Time for love of you,

As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

>
“Glad Day” by William Blake

(Note: this is the article form of what was originally a book proposoal.  The Glorified Body book proposal contains some important information that is not presented here.  You could read this as an introduction and then skip the similar overview in the book proposal and read the remaining sections.  To find out what inspired this writing, and why it remained a book proposal read The Path of the Numinous )

The metabolism of our species is reaching a feverish intensity as we approach an evolutionary event horizon.  One symptom of this feverish metamorphosis is our mutating relationship to body. Suffering associated with body image has reached such epidemic proportions in our culture that it must be counted as one of the greatest spiritual plagues ever to be visited upon mankind. Media bombards us unceasingly with images of ever more idealized youth and beauty while vast portions of our population undergo voluntary starvation, grueling exercise regimens and surgery in an effort to control their body image. Attempts to control body image often result in collapsing self esteem, intense suffering and premature death through self imposed famine.
The temptation is to view body image problems as an isolated illness, rather than a phenomenon that points right to the core of our evolutionary predicament. What from one vantage seems an illness in need of eradication, from another is an evolutionary process in need of understanding and continued transformation. The purpose here is to explore body image problems in their actual context—- the spiritual/biological evolution of the species. Viewed from this depth, body image disorders come to seem part of a difficult birthing process. This process involves risk and suffering, but may also result in the creation of new life.

From the illness point of view, body image is a problem neither hidden nor unstudied, and especially in the last decade there has been an explosion of studies, articles and books which have attempted to understand and ameliorate this collective illness. Eating disorders are the most lethal of psychiatric conditions.  Much of the most profound and valuable work on body image/eating disorders has been done by feminist historians and psychologists who have done incisive studies of how the oppressive force vectors of a patriarchal society, particularly the media, have distorted womens’ expectations of their bodies. This work is entirely valid as far as it goes which, unfortunately, is not to the core of the problem. The body image epidemic is greatly exacerbated by media and patriarchal forces, but is not entirely reducible to those forces. What is perceived as the cause of the illness is actually a set of pernicious symptoms created by a deeper, more primary cause. Hiding the primary cause of the collective illness are symptoms and secondary forces that are powerful, highly visible, and capable of acting as seemingly independent prime movers. But at the true center of the epidemic and its vortex of symptoms is an absolutely primary human urge, which I have termed the will toward the Glorified Body . This primary cause, unlike the secondary forces mistaken as primary, is a force capable of creating growth and transformation. When we look to the actual core of this problem we see both the reasons and the means for creating an unexpectedly positive outcome.
To understand the will toward the Glorified Body we first need to define what I am referring to as ” the Glorified Body.” Many Christian writings describe the body of the resurrected Christ as being a “Glorified Body” —-a radiant body free of mortal limitations. Although I am not working from a Christian point of view, I believe that this phrase captures a powerful archetype. We see images and hear stories of the Glorified Body in most or all cultures and periods. There are all sorts of variations and numerous gradations on the Glorified Body spectrum, but the defining characteristics are fairly apparent.
Although the Glorified Body occurs in endless variations there are two very broad categories in which the term “Glorified Body” will be employed in this article. One use of Glorified Body refers to the inherent “energy body” that all human beings possess. Sometimes I will substitute “energy body” to make clear this first meaning of Glorified Body. The second, and somewhat overlapping, category of use for the term “Glorified Body” is to refer to human or nonhuman entities whose manifest bodies are closer to energy than conventional flesh and blood bodies. This type of Glorified Body hovers in the collective psyche of the human species as a highly charged image and expectation of our further evolution.
No mystical leap of faith or willing suspension of disbelief is required to accept the reality that we all possess an energy body.  This type of Glorified Body has been recognized by secular and religious traditions throughout human history. Eastern models of the energy body from Chinese and Ayuvedic medicine, and Western scientific studies of human energy fields by psychologist and physiologist Valerie Hunt at UCLA, are examples of systematic studies of our energetic anatomy.
Although the intense materialism of our culture has caused us to lose touch with our real nature, in many other cultures and periods the existence of an energy body existing in parallel to the flesh and blood body was accepted as medical, everyday fact. Chinese medicine has for thousands of years recognized that we have a body made of “Chi”, or life energy, and that it is composed of an intricate structure of energy meridians. Acupuncture works with “virtual points” located along these energy meridians which are not in any way discernible in the dense, physical body. Western medicine has gradually come to recognize the validity of acupuncture, though it is as yet unable to explain how it works. In other Eastern traditions the Glorified Body is referred to as “Shakti” or “Kundalini.” In Western occultism it is referred to variously as the “astral body,” “subtle body,” “light body,” “dream body,” “fine matter body,” and “etheric body.” Soul, psyche, self, mind, ego and consciousness can all be considered energy bodies or aspects of the Glorified Body which materialist science has failed miserably to locate or explain in terms of the physical body.
Parapsychological phenomena are also difficult or impossible to explain in terms of a physical body. Materialist science tends to react to such phenomena with agitation and denial. But these supposedly anomalous phenomena become obvious and expected when we recognize that we have an energy body. William James once said that, “All that is necessary to disprove the notion that all crows are black is one white crow.” A single occurrence in all of human history of a person, for example, being aware of another person remote from sensory information, just one mother in all of human history being able to accurately visualize her child in trouble at a distant location, would  be sufficient to disprove the notion that we are only physical bodies. And we’ve had whole flocks of such white crows pass over our heads. For example, very large numbers of people in different cultures and periods report out-of-body and near death experiences. OBEs and NDEs involve the experience of consciousness remote from the physical body. Increasingly, these phenomena have been subjected to serious and systematic study. NDE researchers have found that people who are revived from states of arrested bodily function describe strikingly similar, life changing experiences of departing their physical bodies and discovering their awareness existing as an energy body—-a Glorified Body which many describe as possessed with extraordinary vitality, capable of seeing and hearing with dazzling acuity and sometimes able to travel anywhere in space or time at will. Frequently, near death experiencers are able to view panoramically and remember specific details of the scene in which their body died and was revived though ordinary, anatomical eyesight was not possible at the time.
Although the Glorified Body may exist in all of us, some people are able to manifest it in different ways and degrees than others. A charismatic person, a person who seems radiant or has a powerful presence may be a person better able to manifest their Glorified Body. There are apparently rare cases of human beings who have shifted their energy body into the foreground of manifestation to such an extent that, for a period of time, they appear to be closer to light than flesh and blood. Much well substantiated evidence has accumulated that certain yoga masters, saints, religious ascetics, etc. achieve incorporation of the Glorified Body in ways that conventional, materialist science fails to explain. For example, there are numerous accounts of such persons being able to live for years on little or no physical nourishment. A couple of these cases of “inedia” or “breatharianism” have been verified by scientific studies.
In mythologies, the Glorified Body appears free of some or all of the many limitations of mortality. The Glorified Body may be completely free of cosmetic blemishes, limited vitality, aging, pain, disease, and death. A Glorified Body may be able to transcend conventional limitations of space and time. For example, it may not need technology or an intermediary force of any sort to appear in any location it chooses. It may have transcendent clarity of vision and thought. Often it will transcend ordinary language and communicate through radiance or from the inside of another psyche. A being with a Glorified Body may live in a state of enlightenment and love. Or it could be evil and possess an incredibly potent array of diabolical powers. Visually, a Glorified Body may appear radiant and beautiful—–awe inspiring, numinous—–the body of an angel. But it could also choose to appear cloaked as a mundane, physical body or as a hideous apparition or demon. The most evolved Glorified Bodies are infinitely plastic—-able to take on whatever form is desired. This is the quality of the shape shifter, the changeling——like the devil that ” hath the power to assume a pleasing shape ” or the liquid metal terminator in the popular movie Terminator 2 .
In contemporary mythology the Glorified Body appears in a spectrum of permutations ranging from an idealized human material body to a state of omnipotent, omniscient godhood. In our materialistic culture we have Superman , “the Man of Steel”, who has a more industrialized version of the Glorified Body.  (” the man of steel” seems the perfect Iron Age personification of the Glorified Body—to put this in the perspective of the cycle of ages see The Mutant versus the Machine—the End of the Iron Age and the Galactic Alignment of 2012 ) Superman doesn’t have special radiance, telepathy or most other divine attributes, but leaps tall buildings in a single bound, outruns locomotives, and most helpful in our culture, is bullet proof. At the other end of our cultural spectrum the Glorified Body turns up as the shape-shifting UFO phenomenon perceived by human observers in endlessly varying forms.
An interesting mythological place to observe an evolving spectrum of Glorified Bodies in contemporary culture is in the rich fantasy world of Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. These novels also have much to say about the intensity of the modern will toward the Glorified Body. As Rice develops her vision, particular vampires grow more powerful and their bodies become more glorified. Fledgling vampires don’t age, are stronger than mortals, more energetic, have superior mental clarity and memory, are superb mimics and have a number of telepathic abilities. But they are also dependent on living blood and can be destroyed by fire, sunlight and older, more powerful vampires. Vampire bodies go through a kind of reverse aging—-they become stronger, more impervious, and they develop an array of powers that seems to be evolving toward omnipotence. Significantly, the most advanced vampires are no longer fully dependent on drinking blood and become less and less constrained by the organic world. In Rice’s mythology the first vampire was created when a spirit, driven by jealous discontent at not having a body, is able to enter a human being and merge as a kind of symbiont with body and psyche. In the fourth book of the Chronicles, The Body Thief , the Vampire Lestat is tempted to trade his glorified vampire body for a mortal one by the “Body Thief”—-a man of dark psychic gifts who has learned how to transfer his psyche into the body of a vulnerable human being. Lestat agrees to a three day exchange of his vampire body for the body of an exceptionally handsome, vital young man. As soon as the exchange is made Lestat is horrified by the clumsiness of the mortal body, its vulnerability, slowness, tendency toward fatigue, poor vision and lack of telepathic abilities. He feels the most extreme revulsion when he has to suffer through eating, indigestion, bowel movements and illness. It takes a desperate struggle for him to regain his Glorified Body from the duplicitous Body Thief and he is never again tempted by mortality. In the Chronicles you can feel the deep urge in Rice to have a Glorified Body herself, a body not limited by predetermined gender, unwanted body fat, limited beauty and power. Through her characters Rice displays the gifts of a talented body thief in the imaginal realm as she projects her awareness into one Glorified Body after another. And of course there is her cult following—-those folks who write her all the time begging to be made vampires so they can escape their mortal bodies.
The human will toward the Glorified Body is not a subtle urge. It is an iron fist pounding on both sides of the doors of perception. It is an urging of such terrible power that it will prompt some to go under the surgeon’s knife, to starve themselves to death, to sell their souls in the hope of having a mortal body that will merely better resemble a Glorified Body for a brief time. The Glorified Body is not a casual, imaginative musing or an episodic blip on the radar screens of various cultures. It is a powerful, emergent archetype. It is one of our most ancient obsessions and one of the most explosively contemporary. It is related to the deepest sources of human suffering, an inextricable aspect of a thousand types of neurotic torment, a companion in some way to almost every form of personal hell. It is also a divine muse, one of the greatest sources of hope and inspiration we’ve ever known.
Messages about the will toward a Glorified Body are as ubiquitous in our culture as radio and television waves. Expression of this will can also be found deeply embedded in every religion and mythology, and yet it is rarely named, rarely seen as a highly defined, differentiated and absolutely integral aspect of human psychology. The will toward the Glorified Body is at the center of some of our most destructive and also some of our most creative impulses. This will is a primary urge which can inspire incredible athletic achievement, great art, and technology that blurs with magic.
The will toward the Glorified Body is what inspired Michelangelo to carve David. This same will has also inspired the technological magicians of the computer industry to provide us with “Avatars”, animated characters that will represent us in the once visually anonymous world of the Internet. Soon we will be able to boot up our virtual Glorified Bodies and revel in a digital garden of earthly delights. Our bodies will be infinitely plastic and with a mouse click we can be leaner than Kate Moss or have cybernetically enhanced muscle definition that will make Mr. Universe look like the Pilsbury Dough Boy. It’s interesting to note the term the computer industry has adopted for these new digital bodies—-Avatars. The first definition of Avatar in the abridged Oxford dictionary is: “(in Hindu mythology) the descent of a deity or released soul to earth in bodily form.”
But somewhere behind the ever more glowing computer monitor or virtual reality goggles will be a human being—– a digitally unenhanced mortal/organic version 1.0, who will very likely have bags under their eyes and a pot belly. The Wizard of Oz tells us not to look at the man behind the curtain. But we will look, and will be ever more horrified with the contrast between what we see behind the curtain and what’s up there on the screen. The primary urge will remain agonizingly unfulfilled.
However unfulfilling it may be in some ways, technology is one of the central expressions of the will toward a Glorified Body. Technology actually does allow us to extend our physical bodies through time and space. The urge to become a celebrity, for example, is an urge toward a Glorified Body that modern technology can, to some degree, create. In her films, Marilyn Monroe still lives as a youthful beauty. Since she died young there is no aging, mortal body to provide an embarrassing contrast to her Glorified Body projected on the silver screen. She remains a goddess. People in our culture perceive that someone like Marilyn Monroe has achieved a kind of technological Glorified Body and seek material, technological means to achieve immortality themselves. For example, Walt Disney was a man who devoted a life time to creating virtual Glorified Bodies in the form of cartoon characters and the “auto-amniotronic” robots of the Disney theme parks. It is well known that Disney had himself cryogenically frozen at death. But Disney didn’t stop there in his will to achieve a Glorified Body through technology. Less well known is that exactly a year after his death Disney executives were called to a very unusual meeting. They were each asked to sit in a particular spot. Suddenly the lights dimmed, a projector turned on and Disney’s face, larger than life, appeared on a screen. Disney turned to look at each executive individually and asked them about particular projects they were responsible for that were still pending at the time of his death. At the end of the session he announced that he would be back to check on them again.
Projecting the image of a Glorified Body is much more difficult, however, for human beings who don’t live on the silver screen and instead are subject to the embarrassment of having an organic mortal body visible to others in real time without airbrushing or digital enhancements. Most people don’t possess unusual physical beauty or, if they do presently, may have problems if they plan to live a normal life span. Many in our culture try to glorify their mortal bodies through dieting, cosmetic surgery and exercise regimens. But attempts to whip the mortal body into Glorified Body status can never result in a lasting feeling of success. There is always that person in the glossy magazine picture who looks better and seems to really have a Glorified Body. Projection of the Glorified Body onto the idealized other makes them light up like a god, a being impervious to the blemishes of mortality. Many people are secretly fascinated and delighted when a beautiful celebrity is revealed in a People Magazine photo to have gained weight, aged or otherwise fallen from the projected glory of Mount Olympus to the mortal gutter. When many people see a glowingly beautiful person they don’t realize they are seeing a changing mortal body in a temporary condition of beauty. The glossy, airbrushed photo is relatively unchanging, but the super model is aging and hurtling toward death with the rest of us. For many, beautiful people, particularly celebrity beauties, are members of a fundamentally different caste than mortal appearing humans. These are the “hot” people that light up in our minds with the sacred fire of deep sexual longing. Perceiving them we feel the stirrings of immortal, archetypal forces. It may seem as if there were a race of gods and a race of mortals inhabiting the same planet. Nietzche’s Zarathustra said, “If there are gods, how can I stand it to be no god!” In our culture we say, “If there are beautiful people, how can I stand it to be no beautiful person!”
One of the great causes of despair and suffering in modern society is our tendency to identify exclusively with the mortal body. The intense materialistic bias of our culture has caused many of us to forget that we also have a Glorified Body —-an energy or spirit body which religious and secular traditions from all cultures and periods have recognized. Modern science has also begun to recognize that it is a fallacy to view a human being as an object. The mortal body is not a fixed object, but a process. Twenty trillion cellular animals, each of them changing nanosecond by nanosecond, work cooperatively to create body. The mortal body has been called “spiritualized tissue” and conventional materialist science has failed utterly to explain the connection between mind and brain. Quantum mechanics, meanwhile, has exploded the materialist bias of conventional science as an irrational prejudice definitively contradicted by experimental evidence. A number of open minded physicists have confronted the replicable, empirical data which has exposed the materialist fallacy contaminating not only science, but every level of our culture. The so called paradoxes of quantum mechanics—-objects being in two places at the same time, nonlocality—the instantaneous parallelism of objects separated by any distance, the decisive need of consciousness to collapse the wave function and determine outside reality, etc—-immediately cease to be paradoxes when we give up the obsolescent notion that the universe is composed of “matter” and that mind, body, and cosmos are separated. As soon as we accept what mystics and religious visionaries from all cultures and periods have recognized—- that reality is one field composed of consciousness and that what we call matter is epiphenomenonal—–a secondary creation of consciousness—-all the paradoxes vanish.
But does the materialist bias of science really affect, for example, a teenager with a body image problem? As a teacher in an Alternative School for troubled adolescents I worked with a fifteen year old boy we’ll call Adam who was depressed, even suicidal. Adam was unhappy with his body and saw human existence as painful and futile. In talking about the source of his despair he mentioned a television program he had seen a couple of years earlier. The program was a documentary of some sort that showed brain surgery being performed on someone suffering from epilepsy. During this operation, neurosurgeons would stimulate part of the patient’s exposed brain, see what response they got, and label that portion. Adam was horrified by the television documentary. It seemed that being human was reducible to a brain that was nothing more than a circuit board. He felt that this show proved that he was nothing more than a “meat puppet”, a term he borrowed from the name of a popular rock band. Adam’s feelings about his own body, and human existence, were influenced by the briefest glimpse of the pseudoscientific position referred to as “neurological materialism”—-the belief that human consciousness is nonexistent or is reducible to an epiphenomenal by product of chemical process in the brain.
But we are not “meat puppets,” we are much more than our mortal bodies and we already possess a Glorified Body. For several hundred years the priests of science have influenced the rest of society toward the materialist fallacy. We became much more focused on objects and our attention was diverted from the realm of the spirit. Our present magic is technology which we can buy at the store. The gods and goddesses we once saw in the heavens have become technology wielding extraterrestrials who, like evil scientists, do medical tests on us inside of metal saucers. And, most significantly, we became focused on the body, our body and the body of the other, as an object. We identified with the denser, mortal aspect of our being—–our physical body. That identification became more and more exclusive, and our Glorified Body—-the energy body that exists in parallel to the physical body——-was forgotten.
Our Glorified Body became the “ghost in the machine” an elusive, suspect dimension that couldn’t be measured in grams, centimeters or amperes. Materialist science found that it was completely unable to explain mind, which is more a function of the Glorified Body than the physical body. Therefore, it literally and pervasively dismissed human consciousness as either nonexistent or, at best, as a by product of an automated neurological process. Once the patriarchy declared man made in the image of God, but more recently the patriarchal dogma went all the way to the other extreme and declared man made in the image of the machine. Consciousness and free will were disparaged as illusions, accidental subprograms of our “real” center—-the brain misinterpreted as a tangled, wet, digital computer. But to the great credit of science, there are now many scientists who have left the rather clueless paradigm of materialism behind. These scientists have begun to integrate the findings of quantum mechanics, and have stopped denying the existence of phenomena that materialist science finds impossible to explain. One of the findings of quantum mechanics is that point of view changes the physical reality of what is out there. A simple, replicable experiment illustrates this principle. A photon emitter is set up to project one photon at a time at a metal plate. If the plate has one slit in it, the photon is a particle, and goes straight through the slit like a bullet. If the plate has two slits in it, however, the photon is a wave and a wave interference pattern results. The photon somehow “knows” what it is supposed to be before it even leaves the emitter. This result was startling and agitating to the naive mind of the materialist. But almost anyone who pays open minded attention to ordinary life sees all sorts of examples of inner psychic states having acausal parallelisms to outside reality. These are the strange, meaningful coincidences that Jung termed “synchronicities.”.
The photon has been called a “wavicle” because it is either a particle or wave depending on what you expect it to be. Some physicists have suggested that human beings are like the wavicle—–if you view a human being as an object, a particle, then you experience the mortal, physical body as all there is and will tend toward the “meat puppet” view of neurological materialism. If you view a human being as a soul, then you experience the wave-like spirit body and will tend toward a mystical, religious point of view. To see the full human being you must flip back and forth between these points of view until you are able to experience that human beings are both particle-like physical bodies and wave-like energy bodies.
The dualistic point of view formalized by Descartes at the dawn of science caused mind and body to be sundered into entirely separate realms. But that naive separation is failing both in science and society. Increasingly, a regained awareness is dawning in the West that body and mind are two sides of the same coin, that spirit and body have an inherent integration captured by the famous principle of alchemy, “As above, so bellow.” The Glorified Body is an energy body that is still physical, but more difficult for our present instrumentation to measure. Classical Newtonian physics and the materialist paradigm fail to explain consciousness and other aspects of the Glorified Body. But contemporary physicists like Danah Zohar, Amit Goswami, Fred Alan Wolf and others are beginning to hypothesize quantum mechanical models of the human organism that account for both body and spirit. One problem is that a generation gap of sorts has opened up between those people doing science who are aware, and have struggled to integrate, new paradigms of reality that jive with the findings of quantum mechanics and those who profess to do science but refuse to give up the obsolescent paradigm of materialism that fails to account for quantum mechanics, consciousness, parapsychological phenomena, etc. This generation gap is even wider in society were many ordinary persons, like my fifteen year old student Adam, believe that science has proven that we are “meat puppets” and that there is no spirit or energy body, and others who know the “facts of life” recognized by almost every other culture in history that we have both physical and energetic bodies.

A large part of our suffering is caused by our tendency to mistake “reflection” for “radiance.” Our materialistic bias causes us to equate ourselves and others with reflections. Mirrors, photographs, film, video obviously present us with mere reflections of other human beings. But directly gazing at a real time human body passing us on the sidewalk can also be a case of seeing a mere reflection. What we actually see is the reflection of ambient light off the surface topography of skin, hair, and clothing. This reflection enters the simple convex lens of the cornea and emerges turned upside down. This imperfectly transmitted light must be turned right side up and otherwise interpreted by neurological processing. This doesn’t happen instantaneously, so there exists a time buffer between environmental phenomena and our perception.
What we actually see is a neurological construct of a past event. Fortunately, we don’t perceive with just the conventional five bodily senses. Other persons have radiance—the direct transmission of self that allows us to feel their presence at a distance which precludes ordinary sense perception. What we actually perceive may be more like an overlay of reflection—-a neurological construct—and radiance—-direct perception of the self of the other. A person with the looks to create a beautiful topographical reflection might have a radiance that is sickening to behold. You see reflections, you behold radiance. We would ease a great deal of suffering if we could shift the ratio between seeing and beholding when we perceive ourselves and others. If we learn to behold others as radiance, to look beyond the blemishes of their reflections, to perceive the Glorified Body already present, then we will have gone a long way toward healing transformation. To accomplish that transformation we need to name and recognize the perception of radiance we already have. We also need to shift the ratio of reflection and radiance in our perception to favor radiance.
The Sixties rebellion from the dense, naive materialism of the Fifties was in many ways a reassertion of the Glorified Body. Consciousness altering psychedelic experiences were sought as out-of-body experiences on demand. The fascination with Eastern religion, transcendental meditation, parapsychology and the occult was largely a rebellion from the patriarchal dogma of the material body as all there was. For all the narcissistic goofiness, crass commercialism and gullibility often associated with the New Age, this movement grew out of the Sixties and furthered and articulated collective dissatisfaction with the reigning creed of materialism. Body image and eating disorders are largely pernicious symptoms of this reigning materialism and its tendency to create an exclusive identification with the physical body that is both painful and highly disorienting. We need  to heal that disorientation and expand our identification with the physical body to include recognition of our inherent Glorified Body.

The will toward a Glorified Body is a primary urge, the urge of our entire species and not just single individuals living in a particular culture. Organisms of all sorts seem to have the primary urge to reproduce, to genetically propagate. Among gendered organisms there is an insistent urge to couple with other individuals of the same species. That urging may be intense enough to be described as “going into heat.” Heat is a state of excitement and increased dynamism whether it is the material heat of fire or the metabolic heat of a living organism. The organism in heat may appear agitated, even tormented while in the grip of this urge. In the adolescent stage of development—–the stage of recently acquired reproductive potential—-there may be the particularly urgent will to achieve that first coupling. The unfulfilled urge is antecedent to the coupling event—-an event that in chaos math would be a called an attractor. (An attractor is an event in the future that is so powerful that it warps causality and phenomenon in the present.) Very likely the organism will get to fulfill this urge. But it’s not a sure thing. Some organisms may die before they fulfill the urge—but certainly some individuals of that species must get to fulfill that urge or the species will face extinction. As far as I can tell, urges in nature are always fulfilled by a species, though not necessarily by every individual of that species. Only in human beings could we even imagine the existence of an urge that seems to never be fulfilled. My contention is that the human species has “gone into heat”—-a state of heightened expectation, agitation and chaos. We are nearing the attractor, nearing the place where we can couple with the Glorified Body and fulfill a primary urge.
The intensifying will toward the Glorified Body is happening at a time of evolutionary crisis when the metabolism of the whole species is heating up. Technological changes and scientific discoveries are fundamentally altering our experiences of self and outer reality. The biosphere that allows the existence of our physical bodies has undergone a global toxification threatening the continuance of our species. To understand the body image plague we must view it in the context in which it occurs—–a crisis phase of human evolution. Many attributes of the human psyche, from sexuality and body image to spirituality and our sense of relation to the universe, are rapidly mutating. We cannot comprehend symptoms without understanding the general condition of a species that is hurtling toward an evolutionary nexus charged with images of extinction and rebirth. Our intensifying will toward the Glorified Body is more than an urge to reconnect with the inherent, human energy body recognized by all human cultures. It is also a species wide urge to make a quantum, evolutionary jump toward the Glorified Body as our embodied manifestation. We are experiencing an urge to massively redefine body, self and our relationship to physical reality.

For more on this subect, see the Glorified Body book proposal and for the large evolutionary context:

Archetypes of a New Evolution which I don’t have scanned in and reformatted yet, but will soon. Chapter V of the Capusle of Intentionality—–
White Crows Rising—Evolution, Jung, UFOs, Near Death Experiences, Virtual Reality,and the Approaching Singularity at the End of Human History puts the Glorified Body into a a larger evolutionary context as does Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom—–Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring.

There is a brief discussion of the Glorified Body and a very thorough discussion of the evolutionary context in the two DVDs I did with John Jenkins and Lost Arts Media:  Dialogs about Prophecy and the End of Time and Looking toward the Event Horizon (see products and services section of the site).

— a book proposal– © 1996 Jonathan Zap revised 11/29/05

>Glad Day
“Glad Day” by William Blake

(To find out what inspired the following, and why it remains in this form, see The Path of the Numinous, but essentially I found that when I had written the proposal I had recorded what I had to say on the subject, and had no desire to turn it into a book. I have also rewritten this book proposal as a briefer article, you will miss some important sections but there is more flow, and you won’t have the annoyance of frequently hearing about a nonexistant future book. To read the article click here)

I. OVERVIEW

Suffering associated with body image has reached such epidemic proportions in our culture that it must be counted as one of the greatest spiritual plagues ever to be visited upon mankind. Media bombards us unceasingly with images of ever more idealized youth and beauty while vast portions of our population undergo voluntary starvation, grueling exercise regimens and surgery in an effort to control their body image. Attempts to control body image often result in collapsing self esteem, intense suffering and premature death through self imposed famine.

The temptation is to view body image problems as an isolated illness, rather than a phenomenon that points right to the core of our evolutionary predicament. What from one vantage seems an illness in need of eradication, from another is an evolutionary process in need of understanding and continued transformation. The purpose of this book is to explore body image problems in their actual context—- the spiritual/biological evolution of the species. Viewed from this depth, body image disorders come to seem part of a difficult birthing process. This process involves risk and suffering, but may also result in the creation of new life. For readers actually suffering from body image problems this book will provide both the understanding and the means to transform illness into growth.

From the illness point of view, body image is a problem neither hidden nor unstudied, and especially in the last decade there has been an explosion of studies, articles and books which have attempted to understand and ameliorate this collective illness. Much of the most profound and valuable work on body image disorders has been done by feminist historians and psychologists who have done incisive studies of how the oppressive force vectors of a patriarchal society, particularly the media, have distorted womens’ expectations of their bodies. This work is entirely valid as far as it goes which, unfortunately, is not to the core of the problem. The body image epidemic is greatly exacerbated by media and patriarchal forces, but is not entirely reducible to those forces. What is perceived as the cause of the illness is actually a set of pernicious symptoms created by a deeper, more primary cause. Hiding the primary cause of the collective illness are symptoms and secondary forces that are powerful, highly visible, and capable of acting as seemingly independent prime movers. But at the true center of the epidemic and its vortex of symptoms is an absolutely primary human urge, which I have termed the will toward the Glorified Body. This primary cause, unlike the secondary forces mistaken as primary, is a force capable of creating growth and transformation. When we look to the actual core of this problem we see both the reasons and the means for creating an unexpectedly positive outcome.

To understand the will toward the Glorified Body we first need to define what I am referring to as ” the Glorified Body.” In the chapter entitled “Anatomy of a Glorified Body” this question will be explored in depth. Meanwhile, we need a working understanding of what a Glorified Body is. Many Christian writings describe the body of the resurrected Christ as being a “Glorified Body” —-a radiant body free of mortal limitations. Although I am not working from a Christian point of view, I believe that this phrase captures a powerful archetype. We see images and hear stories of the Glorified Body in most or all cultures and periods. There are all sorts of variations and numerous gradations on the Glorified Body spectrum, but the defining characteristics are fairly apparent.

Although the Glorified Body occurs in endless variations there are two very broad categories in which the term “Glorified Body” will be employed in this book. One use of Glorified Body refers to the inherent “energy body” that all human beings possess. Sometimes I will substitute “energy body” to make clear this first meaning of Glorified Body. The second, and somewhat overlapping, category of use for the term “Glorified Body” is to refer to human or nonhuman entities whose manifest bodies are closer to energy than conventional flesh and blood bodies. This type of Glorified Body hovers in the collective psyche of the human species as a highly charged image and expectation of our further evolution.

The opening chapters of the book will provide substantial evidence of the inherent, human energy body. No mystical leap of faith or willing suspension of disbelief will be required to accept the existence of this type of Glorified Body recognized by secular and religious traditions throughout human history. Empirical findings from quantum mechanics, Eastern models of the energy body from Chinese and Aruvedic medicine, scientific studies of human energy fields by psychologist and physiologist Valerie Hunt, and numerous other perspectives will illustrate the existence and nature of our energetic self. Demonstrations of the Glorified Body will take many forms ranging from interpreted scientific data to specific exercises designed to heighten the reader’s awareness of their energy body.

Although the intense materialism of our culture has caused us to lose touch with our real nature, in many other cultures and periods the existence of an energy body existing in parallel to the flesh and blood body was accepted as medical, everyday fact. Chinese medicine has for thousands of years recognized that we have a body made of “Chi”, or life energy, and that it is composed of an intricate structure of energy meridians. Acupuncture works with “virtual points” located along these energy meridians which are not in any way discernible in the dense, physical body. Western medicine has gradually come to recognize the validity of acupuncture, though it is as yet unable to explain how it works. In other Eastern traditions the Glorified Body is referred to as “Shakti” or “Kundalini.” In Western occultism it is referred to variously as the “astral body,” “subtle body,” “light body,” “dream body,” “fine matter body,” and “etheric body.” Soul, psyche, self, mind, ego and consciousness can all be considered energy bodies or aspects of the Glorified Body which materialist science has failed miserably to locate or explain in terms of the physical body.

Parapsychological phenomena are also difficult or impossible to explain in terms of a physical body. Materialist science tends to react to such phenomena with agitation and denial. But these supposedly anomalous phenomena become obvious and expected when we recognize that we have an energy body. William James once said that, “All that is necessary to disprove the notion that all crows are black is one white crow.” A single occurrence in all of human history of a person, for example, being aware of another person remote from sensory information, just one mother in all of human history being able to accurately visualize her child in trouble at a distant location, would probably be sufficient to disprove the notion that we are only physical bodies. And we’ve had whole flocks of such white crows pass over our heads. For example, very large numbers of people in different cultures and periods report out-of-body and near death experiences. OBEs and NDEs involve the experience of consciousness remote from the physical body. Increasingly, these phenomena have been subjected to serious and systematic study. NDE researchers have found that people who are revived from states of arrested bodily function describe strikingly similar, life changing experiences of departing their physical bodies and discovering their awareness existing as an energy body—-a Glorified Body which many describe as possessed with extraordinary vitality, capable of seeing and hearing with dazzling acuity and sometimes able to travel anywhere in space or time at will. Frequently, near death experiencers are able to view and remember specific details of the scene in which their body died and was revived though ordinary, anatomical eyesight was not possible at the time.

Although the Glorified Body may exist in all of us, some people are able to manifest it in different ways and degrees than others. A charismatic person, a person who seems radiant or has a powerful presence may be a person better able to manifest their Glorified Body. Later, in a chapter entitled “Reflection and Radiance” there will an extensive discussion of the shifting ratios of physical body and Glorified Body in our perception of, and projection toward, other human beings. There are apparently rare cases of human beings who have shifted their energy body into the foreground of manifestation to such an extent that, for a period of time, they appear to be closer to light than flesh and blood. Much well substantiated evidence has accumulated that certain yoga masters, saints, religious ascetics, etc. achieve incorporation of the Glorified Body in ways that conventional, materialist science fails to explain. For example, there are numerous accounts of such persons being able to live for years on little or no physical nourishment.

In mythologies, the Glorified Body appears free of some or all of the many limitations of mortality. The Glorified Body may be completely free of cosmetic blemishes, limited vitality, aging, pain, disease, and death. A Glorified Body may be able to transcend conventional limitations of space and time. For example, it may not need technology or an intermediary force of any sort to appear in any location it chooses. It may have transcendent clarity of vision and thought. Often it will transcend ordinary language and communicate through radiance or from the inside of another psyche. A being with a Glorified Body may live in a state of enlightenment and love. Or it could be evil and possess an incredibly potent array of diabolical powers. Visually, a Glorified Body may appear radiant and beautiful—–awe inspiring, numinous—–the body of an angel. But it could also choose to appear cloaked as a mundane, physical body or as a hideous apparition or demon. The most evolved Glorified Bodies are infinitely plastic—-able to take on whatever form is desired. This is the quality of the shape shifter, the changeling——like the devil that “hath the power to assume a pleasing shape” or the liquid metal terminator in the popular movie Terminator 2.

In contemporary mythology the Glorified Body appears in a spectrum of permutations ranging from an idealized human material body to a state of omnipotent, omniscient godhood. In our materialistic culture we have Superman, “the Man of Steel”, who has a more industrialized version of the Glorified Body. (the “the man of steel” seems the perfect Iron Age emblem of the Glorified Body—to put this in the perspective of the cycle of ages see The Mutant versus the Machine—the End of the Iron Age and the Galactic Alignment of 2012) Superman doesn’t have special radiance, telepathy or most other divine attributes, but leaps tall buildings in a single bound, outruns locomotives, and most helpful in our culture, is bullet proof. At the other end of our cultural spectrum the Glorified Body turns up as the shape-shifting UFO phenomenon perceived by human observers in endlessly varying forms.

An interesting mythological place to observe an evolving spectrum of Glorified Bodies in contemporary culture is in the rich fantasy world of Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. These novels also have much to say about the intensity of the modern will toward the Glorified Body. As Rice develops her vision, particular vampires grow more powerful and their bodies become more glorified. Fledgling vampires don’t age, are stronger than mortals, more energetic, have superior mental clarity and memory, are superb mimics and have a number of telepathic abilities. But they are also dependent on living blood and can be destroyed by fire, sunlight and older, more powerful vampires. Vampire bodies go through a kind of reverse aging—-they become stronger, more impervious, and they develop an array of powers that seems to be evolving toward omnipotence. Significantly, the most advanced vampires are no longer fully dependent on drinking blood and become less and less constrained by the organic world. In Rice’s mythology the first vampire was created when a spirit, driven by jealous discontent at not having a body, is able to enter a human being and merge as a kind of symbiont with body and psyche. In the fourth book of the Chronicles, The Body Thief , the Vampire Lestat is tempted to trade his glorified vampire body for a mortal one by the “Body Thief”—-a man of dark psychic gifts who has learned how to transfer his psyche into the body of a vulnerable human being. Lestat agrees to a three day exchange of his vampire body for the body of an exceptionally handsome, vital young man. As soon as the exchange is made Lestat is horrified by the clumsiness of the mortal body, its vulnerability, slowness, tendency toward fatigue, poor vision and lack of telepathic abilities. He feels the most extreme revulsion when he has to suffer through eating, indigestion, bowel movements and illness. It takes a desperate struggle for him to regain his Glorified Body from the duplicitous Body Thief and he is never again tempted by mortality. In the Chronicles you can feel the deep urge in Rice to have a Glorified Body herself, a body not limited by predetermined gender, unwanted body fat, limited beauty and power. Through her characters Rice displays the gifts of a talented body thief in the imaginal realm as she projects her awareness into one Glorified Body after another. And of course there is her cult following—-those folks who write her all the time begging to be made vampires so they can escape their mortal bodies.

The human will toward the Glorified Body is not a subtle urge. It is an iron fist pounding on both sides of the doors of perception. It is an urging of such terrible power that it will prompt some to go under the surgeon’s knife, to starve themselves to death, to sell their souls in the hope of having a mortal body that will merely better resemble a Glorified Body for a brief time. The Glorified Body is not a casual, imaginative musing or an episodic blip on the radar screens of various cultures. It is a powerful, emergent archetype. It is one of our most ancient obsessions and one of the most explosively contemporary. It is related to the deepest sources of human suffering, an inextricable aspect of a thousand types of neurotic torment, a companion in some way to almost every form of personal hell. It is also a divine muse, one of the greatest sources of hope and inspiration we’ve ever known.

Messages about the will toward a Glorified Body are as ubiquitous in our culture as radio and television waves. Expression of this will can also be found deeply embedded in every religion and mythology, and yet it is rarely named, rarely seen as a highly defined, differentiated and absolutely integral aspect of human psychology. The will toward the Glorified Body is at the center of some of our most destructive and also some of our most creative impulses. This will is a primary urge which can inspire incredible athletic achievement, great art, and technology that blurs with magic.

The will toward the Glorified Body is what inspired Michelangelo to carve David. This same will has also inspired the technological magicians of the computer industry to provide us with “Avatars”, animated characters that will represent us in the once visually anonymous world of the Internet. Soon we will be able to boot up our virtual Glorified Bodies and revel in a digital garden of earthly delights. Our bodies will be infinitely plastic and with a mouse click we can be leaner than Kate Moss or have cybernetically enhanced muscle definition that will make Mr. Universe look like the Pilsbury Dough Boy. It’s interesting to note the term the computer industry has adopted for these new digital bodies—-Avatars. The first definition of Avatar in the abridged Oxford dictionary is: “(in Hindu mythology) the descent of a deity or released soul to earth in bodily form.”

But somewhere behind the ever more glowing computer monitor or virtual reality goggles will be a human being—– a digitally unenhanced mortal/organic version 1.0, who will very likely have bags under their eyes and a pot belly. The Wizard of Oz tells us not to look at the man behind the curtain. But we will look, and will be ever more horrified with the contrast between what we see behind the curtain and what’s up there on the screen. The primary urge will remain agonizingly unfulfilled.

However unfulfilling it may be in some ways, technology is one of the central expressions of the will toward a Glorified Body. Technology actually does allow us to extend our physical bodies through time and space. The urge to become a celebrity, for example, is an urge toward a Glorified Body that modern technology can, to some degree, create. In her films, Marilyn Monroe still lives as a youthful beauty. Since she died young there is no aging, mortal body to provide an embarrassing contrast to her Glorified Body projected on the silver screen. She remains a goddess. People in our culture perceive that someone like Marilyn Monroe has achieved a kind of technological Glorified Body and seek material, technological means to achieve immortality themselves. For example, Walt Disney was a man who devoted a life time to creating virtual Glorified Bodies in the form of cartoon characters and the “auto-amniotronic” robots of the Disney theme parks. It is well known that Disney had himself cryogenically frozen at death. But Disney didn’t stop there in his will to achieve a Glorified Body through technology. Less well known is that exactly a year after his death Disney executives were called to a very unusual meeting. They were each asked to sit in a particular spot. Suddenly the lights dimmed, a projector turned on and Disney’s face, larger than life, appeared on a screen. Disney turned to look at each executive individually and asked them about particular projects they were responsible for that were still pending at the time of his death. At the end of the session he announced that he would be back to check on them again.

Projecting the image of a Glorified Body is much more difficult, however, for human beings who don’t live on the silver screen and instead are subject to the embarrassment of having an organic mortal body visible to others in real time without airbrushing or digital enhancements. Most people don’t possess unusual physical beauty or, if they do presently, may have problems if they plan to live a normal life span. Many in our culture try to glorify their mortal bodies through dieting, cosmetic surgery and exercise regimens. But attempts to whip the mortal body into Glorified Body status can never result in a lasting feeling of success. There is always that person in the glossy magazine picture who looks better and seems to really have a Glorified Body. Projection of the Glorified Body onto the idealized other makes them light up like a god, a being impervious to the blemishes of mortality. Many people are secretly fascinated and delighted when a beautiful celebrity is revealed in a tabloid photo to have gained weight, aged or otherwise fallen from the projected glory of Mount Olympus to the mortal gutter. When many people see a glowingly beautiful person they don’t realize they are seeing a changing mortal body in a temporary condition of beauty. The glossy, airbrushed photo is relatively unchanging, but the super model is aging and hurtling toward death with the rest of us. For many, beautiful people, particularly celebrity beauties, are members of a fundamentally different caste than mortal appearing humans. These are the “hot” (see Stop the Hottie!) people that light up in our minds with the sacred fire of deep sexual longing. Perceiving them we feel the stirrings of immortal, archetypal forces. It may seem as if there were a race of gods and a race of mortals inhabiting the same planet. Nietzche’s Zarathustra said, “If there are gods, how can I stand it to be no god!” In our culture we say, “If there are beautiful people, how can I stand it to be no beautiful person!”

One of the great causes of despair and suffering in modern society is our tendency to identify exclusively with the mortal body. The intense materialistic bias of our culture has caused many of us to forget that we also have a Glorified Body —-an energy or spirit body which religious and secular traditions from all cultures and periods have recognized. Modern science has also begun to recognize that it is a fallacy to view a human being as an object. The mortal body is not a fixed object, but a process. Several trillion cellular animals, each of them changing nanosecond by nanosecond, work cooperatively to create body. The mortal body has been called “spiritualized tissue” and conventional materialist science has failed utterly to explain the connection between mind and brain. Quantum mechanics, meanwhile, has exploded the materialist bias of conventional science as an irrational prejudice definitively contradicted by experimental evidence. A number of open minded physicists have confronted the replicable, empirical data which has exposed the materialist fallacy contaminating not only science, but every level of our culture. The so called paradoxes of quantum mechanics—-objects being in two places at the same time, nonlocality—the instantaneous parallelism of objects separated by any distance, the decisive need of consciousness to collapse the wave function and determine outside reality, etc—-immediately cease to be paradoxes when we give up the obsolescent notion that the universe is composed of “matter” and that mind, body, and cosmos are separated. As soon as we accept what mystics and religious visionaries from all cultures and periods have recognized—- that reality is one field composed of consciousness and that what we call matter is epiphenomenonal—–a secondary creation of consciousness—-all the paradoxes vanish.

But does the materialist bias of science really affect, for example, a teenager with a body image problem? As a teacher in an Alternative School for troubled adolescents I worked with a fifteen year old boy we’ll call Adam who was depressed, even suicidal. Adam was unhappy with his body and saw human existence as painful and futile. In talking about the source of his despair he mentioned a television program he had seen a couple of years earlier. The program was a documentary of some sort that showed brain surgery being performed on someone suffering from epilepsy. During this operation, neurosurgeons would stimulate part of the patient’s exposed brain, see what response they got, and label that portion. Adam was horrified by the television documentary. It seemed that being human was reducible to a brain that was nothing more than a circuit board. He felt that this show proved that he was nothing more than a “meat puppet”, a term he borrowed from the name of a popular rock band. Adam’s feelings about his own body, and human existence, were influenced by the briefest glimpse of the pseudoscientific position referred to as “neurological materialism”—-the belief that human consciousness is nonexistent or is reducible to an epiphenomenal by product of chemical process in the brain.

A central purpose of this book is to demonstrate that we are not “meat puppets,” that we are much more than our mortal bodies and that we already possess a Glorified Body. For several hundred years the priests of science have influenced the rest of society toward the materialist fallacy. We became much more focused on objects and away from the realm of the spirit. Our present magic is technology which we can buy at the store. The gods and goddesses we once saw in the heavens have become technology wielding extraterrestrials who, like evil scientists, do medical tests on us inside of metal saucers. And, most significantly, we became focused on the body, our body and the body of the other, as an object. We identified with the denser, mortal aspect of our being—–our physical body. That identification became more and more exclusive, and our Glorified Body—-the energy body that exists in parallel to the physical body——-was forgotten.

Our Glorified Body became the “ghost in the machine” an elusive, suspect dimension that couldn’t be measured in grams, centimeters or amperes. Materialist science found that it was completely unable to explain mind, which is more a function of the Glorified Body than the physical body. Therefore, it literally and pervasively dismissed human consciousness as either nonexistent or, at best, as a by product of an automated neurological process. Once the patriarchy declared man made in the image of God, but more recently the patriarchal dogma went all the way to the other extreme and declared man made in the image of the machine. Consciousness and free will were disparaged as illusions, accidental subprograms of our “real” center—-the brain misinterpreted as a tangled, wet, digital computer. But to the great credit of science, there are now many scientists who have left the rather clueless paradigm of materialism behind. These scientists have begun to integrate the findings of quantum mechanics, and have stopped denying the existence of phenomena that materialist science finds impossible to explain.

One of the findings of quantum mechanics is that point of view changes the physical reality of what is out there. A simple, replicable experiment illustrates this principle. A photon emitter is set up to project one photon at a time at a metal plate. If the plate has one slit in it, the photon is a particle, and goes straight through the slit like a bullet. If the plate has two slits in it, however, the photon is a wave and a wave interference pattern results. The photon somehow “knows” what it is supposed to be before it even leaves the emitter. This result was startling and agitating to the naive mind of the materialist. But almost anyone who pays open minded attention to ordinary life sees all sorts of examples of inner psychic states having acausal parallelisms to outside reality. These are the strange, meaningful coincidences that Jung termed “synchronicities.” Later we will have much more to say about the principle of synchronicity and its relationship to the Glorified Body.

The photon has been called a “wavicle” because it is either a particle or wave depending on what you expect it to be. Some physicists have suggested that human beings are like the wavicle—–if you view a human being as an object, a particle, then you experience the mortal, physical body as all there is and will tend toward the “meat puppet” view of neurological materialism. If you view a human being as a soul, then you experience the wave-like spirit body and will tend toward a mystical, religious point of view. To see the full human being you must flip back and forth between these points of view until you are able to experience that human beings are both particle-like physical bodies and wave-like energy bodies.

The dualistic point of view formalized by Descartes at the dawn of science caused mind and body to be sundered into entirely separate realms. But that naive separation is failing both in science and society. Increasingly, a regained awareness is dawning in the West that body and mind are two sides of the same coin, that spirit and body have an inherent integration captured by the famous alchemical motto, “As above, so bellow.” The Glorified Body is an energy body that is still physical, but more difficult for our present instrumentation to measure. Classical Newtonian physics and the materialist paradigm fail to explain consciousness and other aspects of the Glorified Body. But contemporary physicists like Danah Zohar, Amit Goswami, Fred Alan Wolf and others are beginning to hypothesize quantum mechanical models of the human organism that account for both body and spirit. One problem is that a generation gap of sorts has opened up between those people doing science who are aware, and have struggled to integrate, new paradigms of reality that jive with the findings of quantum mechanics and those who profess to do science but refuse to give up the obsolescent paradigm of materialism that fails to account for quantum mechanics, consciousness, parapsychological phenomena, etc. This generation gap is even wider in society were many ordinary persons, like my fifteen year old student Adam, believe that science has proven that we are “meat puppets” and that there is no spirit or energy body, and others who know the “facts of life” recognized by almost every other culture in history that we have both physical and energetic bodies.

The Sixties rebellion from the dense, naive materialism of the Fifties was in many ways a reassertion of the Glorified Body. Consciousness altering psychedelic experiences were sought as out-of-body experiences on demand. The fascination with Eastern religion, transcendental meditation, parapsychology and the occult was largely a rebellion from the patriarchal dogma of the material body as all there was. For all the narcissistic goofiness, crass commercialism and gullibility often associated with the New Age, this movement grew out of the Sixties and furthered and articulated collective dissatisfaction with the reigning creed of materialism. Body image and eating disorders are largely pernicious symptoms of this reigning materialism and its tendency to create an exclusive identification with the physical body that is both painful and highly disorienting. A major purpose of this book is to heal that disorientation and expand our identification with the physical body to include recognition of our inherent Glorified Body. This help will partly take the form of conceptual shifts, but will also be grounded by specific exercises, practices and traditional resources to help those suffering from exclusive identification with the physical body.

The intensifying will toward the Glorified Body is happening at a time of evolutionary crisis when the metabolism of the whole species is heating up. The twentieth century has seen an incredible acceleration of the historical process and now we approach a new millennium. Technological changes and scientific discoveries are fundamentally altering our experiences of self and outer reality. The biosphere that allows the existence of our physical bodies has undergone a global toxification threatening the continuance of our species. To understand the body image plague we must view it in the context in which it occurs—–a crisis phase of human evolution. Many attributes of the human psyche, from sexuality and body image to spirituality and our sense of relation to the universe, are rapidly mutating. We cannot comprehend symptoms without understanding the general condition of a species that is hurtling toward an evolutionary nexus charged with images of extinction and rebirth. Our intensifying will toward the Glorified Body is more than an urge to reconnect with the inherent, human energy body recognized by all human cultures. It is also a species wide urge to make a quantum, evolutionary jump toward the Glorified Body as our embodied manifestation. We are experiencing an urge to massively redefine body, self and our relationship to physical reality.

This book is a journey toward understanding our body image problems as a spiritual plague occurring in a volatile evolutionary context. It will provide healing practices, specific exercises and resources for those suffering from body image problems during the era of intense and precarious transitions we are currently experiencing. This book will provide the understanding and means to transform illness into growth. Finally, it will provide an in depth look at what the body image plague reveals about the transformative evolutionary context in which it occurs.

(Chapter one will be an expanded version of the preceding overview. The essential ideas of other chapters—–presented in a very tentative order—-will be indicated by a combination of summaries, outlines and sample passages. In order to keep this book proposal to a manageable size a high density of ideas must be presented in a short space. The finished text, however, will be far more readable and accessible, vividly illustrated with examples from popular culture and personal experience.)

II. REFLECTION AND RADIANCE

Sample Passage:

A large part of our suffering is caused by our tendency to mistake reflection for radiance. Our materialistic bias causes us to equate ourselves and others with reflections. Mirrors, photographs, film, video obviously present us with mere reflections of other human beings. But directly gazing at a real time human body passing us on the sidewalk can also be a case of seeing a mere reflection. What we actually see is the reflection of ambient light off the surface topography of skin, hair, clothing. This reflection enters the simple convex lens of the cornea and emerges turned upside down. This imperfectly transmitted light must be turned right side up and otherwise interpreted by neurological processing. This doesn’t happen instantaneously, so there exists a time buffer between environmental phenomena and our perception.

What we actually see is a neurological construct of a past event. Fortunately, we don’t perceive with just the conventional five bodily senses. Other persons have radiance—the direct transmission of self that allows us to feel their presence at a distance which precludes ordinary sense perception. What we actually perceive may be more like an overlay of reflection—-a neurological construct—and radiance—-direct perception of the self of the other. A person with the looks to create a beautiful topographical reflection might have a radiance that is sickening to behold. You see reflections, you behold radiance. We would ease a great deal of suffering if we could shift the ratio between seeing and beholding when we perceive ourselves and others. If we learn to behold others as radiance, to look beyond the blemishes of their reflections, to perceive the Glorified Body already present, then we will have gone a long way toward healing transformation. To accomplish that transformation we need to name and recognize the perception of radiance we already have. We also need to shift the ratio of reflection and radiance in our perception to favor radiance.

III. WE ALREADY HAVE A GLORIFIED BODY

Sample Passage:

We are in the situation of a sleeper struggling to awaken from a long, and in many ways unpleasant dream—–what some would call the realm of Maya, a place of mistaking material appearence for underlying reality. One wake up call was quantum mechanics which completely disrupted the bachelor party of science and its intoxicated reveling in the supposed certainties of Newtonian physics. At the end of the nineteenth century British physicist A.A. Michelson remarked at a scientific conference that physics was now a finished project and mostly a question of “adding a few decimal places to results already obtained.” But quantum mechanics, like the trickster aspect of the UFO phenomenon, exposed the formidable patriarchs of science as entranced suckers for Maya—–the tendency to view projection as fundamental reality. To the great credit of science, however, some physicists have been able to get off of the embarrassing whoopee cushion of materialism and realize that one can posit consciousness as the essential nature of the universe and still do science.

When we recognize the universe as a field of consciousness, we realize that mortality is a projection—- albeit a very convincing projection. We are eternally the “individual” occurrences of unified consciousness. The Glorified Body—-and its spectrum of gradations from an improved material body to unlimited potential —-is a path of developing recognition of what we really are. Out-of-body and near death experiences are revelations of the Glorified Body, episodic interruptions of the delusion that we are occurrences of solid matter in space. My personal, spontaneous out-of-body experiences, for example, caused my fear of death to vanish. The direct experience of awareness not only being able to continue apart from the “material”, but actually being energized and vitalized in a joyous way by the break in identification, was like brilliant sunlight falling on the image of a bogey man projected on a movie screen. People who have NDEs frequently report a complete loss of the fear of death.

IV. THE NATURE OF A PRIMARY URGE

Sample Passage:

The will toward a Glorified Body is a primary urge, the urge of our entire species and not just single individuals living in a particular culture.. But a species is a meta-phenomenon that can be an unwieldy object of contemplation to say the least. Before we further contemplate evolutionary urges in the human species let’s consider urges on a more accessible scale.

Organisms of all sorts seem to have the primary urge to reproduce, to genetically propagate. Among gendered organisms there is an insistent urge to couple with other individuals of the same species. That urging may be intense enough to be described as “going into heat.” Heat is a state of excitement and increased dynamism whether it is the material heat of fire or the metabolic heat of a living organism. The organism in heat may appear agitated, even tormented while in the grip of this urge. In the adolescent stage of development—–the stage of recently acquired reproductive potential—-there may be the particularly urgent will to achieve that first coupling. The unfulfilled urge is antecedent to the coupling event—-an event that in chaos math would be a called an attractor. (An attractor is an event in the future that is so powerful that it warps causality and phenomenon in the present.) Very likely the organism will get to fulfill this urge. But it’s not a sure thing. Some organisms may die before they fulfill the urge—but certainly some individuals of that species must get to fulfill that urge or the species will face extinction. As far as I can tell, urges in nature are always fulfilled by a species, though not necessarily by every individual of that species. Only in human beings could we even imagine the existence of an urge that seems to never be fulfilled. My contention is that the human species has “gone into heat”—-a state of heightened expectation, agitation and chaos. We are nearing the attractor, nearing the place where we can couple with the Glorified Body and fulfill a primary urge.

V. ANATOMY OF A GLORIFIED BODY

Although the outline may sound technical, this chapter will provide an accessible, vividly illustrated discourse on what a Glorified Body is.

Outline:

a. Anatomy of the Glorified Body in various traditions——

The Glorified Body has been called Shakti, Kundalini, Mercury and Chi. In Western occultism it is variously referred to as the “etheric body”, the “subtle body”, the “fine-matter body” and the “light body.”

b. Anatomical similarities and differences between these different models of the Glorified Body

c. The “Dreambody” in Castendea and Mindell

d. The Glorified Body and time, space, dimension

e. A Quantum Mechanical View of the Glorified Body

f. Danah Zohar and The Quantum Self —-a physicist’s model of the Glorified Body

g. The Glorified Body as a “field” experience——-

(The idea of the dreambody as high intensity in space and time corresponds to one of Jung’s intuitions about the nature of the soul. In his words,

“It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not as a body moving with time. One might assume the psyche gradually rising from minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body.”)

We will also consider the work of physiologist researcher Valerie Hunt to measure and understand the human energy field.

h. The Glorified Body, the archetypes and the collective unconscious

i. The Glorified Body and Ruppert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields.

j. Corona Anatomy—-The Glorified Body, radiance and aura

k. Comparative Anatomy—-the Glorified Body and the mortal body—- How they relate, the flow of causation and synchronicity, how they perceive each other

l. Technologies for integrated anatomy ——How various esoteric traditions employ practices to achieve integration of Glorified Body and mortal body.

m. Anatomical case studies—-Analysis of the sorts of bodies achieved by yoga masters, saints, religious ascetics, etc.

n. The mercurial anatomical spectrum of the Glorified Body

VI. EXPERIENCING AND INTEGRATING THE GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

This chapter will provide specific techniques allowing the reader to recognize and experience the Glorified Body. There will also be an overview of the different technologies of mortal/Glorified Body integration provided by different esoteric traditions.

VII. PROJECTION OF THE GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

We tend to project the Glorified Body onto those we perceive as especially graced with physical beauty. Some will project their fear and horror of mortality onto the over weight, disabled or cosmetically blemished. These projective mechanisms can cause great suffering in both the projecting psyche and the human objects of these projections. This chapter will examine the personality dynamics of the projector, and the personality warping effects of being the object of such projections. There will be a discussion of projection, envy (one of the most extreme characteristics of our age) , and antisocial behavior such as stalking. We will discuss the synergy and antagonism of Glorified Body projection merged with anima/animus projection.

VIII. BEAUTY AND THE EXTENDED SELF

Summary:

The physical beauty of reflection, and the spiritual beauty of radiance are both examples of what I have termed the extended self. Various talents—-musical, social, skill with words, etc. allow us to extend the self, to be better able to enter the perceptual field of the other as a welcome presence. Physical beauty is a profound example of the extended self and by no means a trivial gift. A beautiful person is welcomed into the perceptual field of the other often with deep sexual and emotional stirrings. There will be a discussion of the paradoxical relationship between projection and extension.

IX. PHYSICAL BEAUTY AND THE SOUL

Summary:

One of the great unexamined presumptions in our culture is the notion that physical beauty is an accident of nature, “the luck of the draw”, an attribute with a completely random distribution. In Vedic texts there are four essential variables that karma determines at birth: the place one is born in the social hierarchy, intelligence, physical strength and beauty.

Sample Passage:

Our culture lives in a painful paradox of infatuation, obsession and worship of physical beauty, and a set of devaluing presumptions that it is in some way a trivial attribute, an accident of genetics unrelated to character, karma, or psyche. Beauty, like intelligence, appears to have an amoral distribution curve—– possessing beauty, intelligence and many other talents does not have a consistent association with a person’s worthiness or morality. But it is a terribly unexamined presumption to assume that this is never the case. Physical beauty is an incredibly potent attribute of someone’s incarnate givens—-the hand they seem to have been dealt. How can we possibly presume that a particular psyche’s level of physical beauty has no connection to their incarnated spiritual essence? To suggest that beauty or its lack may be karmically intended does not presume that beauty is the outward sign of a “superior” soul. Having beauty can mean deeper entrapment in Maya, and exposure to corrupting temptations. But physical beauty may sometimes be the appropriate radiance of a soul that is beautiful. Once in a while a hero may really have a “noble brow” or imposing stature and that correspondence might be karmic intention. The relative lack of beauty may also be an essential karmic challenge to a beautiful soul. My intuition is that the beauty variable is karmic but fantastically varied, paradoxical, subtle ways. The beauty card in the context of a particular psyche may have a meaning fantastically different than the beauty card in the context of another psyche. Despite our worship and infatuation with physical beauty—- sanctioned and encouraged by our society in a billion ways—-it is politically incorrect to suggest that physical beauty might sometimes have a meaningful association with a beautiful soul. But for some reason it is less incorrect to suggest that a precociously intelligent person might be an “old soul” that has somehow earned cognitive abilities in previous lifetimes. It seems intuitively likely to me that if any of the cards in the incarnation hand we are dealt—–intellectual capacity, our parents, the wealth or poverty we are born into, etc. are subject to karmic influence than all of them are—-including looks.

We should also take careful note that the radiant beauty of a good looking loving person, and the topographical beauty of a hateful good looking person are quite different. To those unhypnotized by reflection and projection these are readily apparent as very different types. Similarly, the intelligence of a loving personality is a very different intelligence in kind than the intelligence of a hateful personality. A liquid metal Terminator would never fool a psyche that was gifted at perceiving radiance. It could only fool those who see only reflection.

X. NARCISSISM AND THE GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

This chapter will discuss the many layered relationship of the will toward a Glorified Body and narcissism. Narcissism can be viewed as the tension of a Glorified Body perceiving itself in a mortal envelope. The narcissist’s desperate longing for attention is largely the urge to explode the delusion of isolation caused by over identification with the mortal body. The narcissist wants physical beauty and other attributes to extend the self into the perceptual field of the other. We will take another look at the myth of Narcissus and consider the work on narcissism by Nathan Schwartz and others.

XI. THE GLORIFIED BODY IN RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY

Summary:

This chapter will provide a brief survey of some of the ways the Glorified Body appears in religion and mythology. It will examine certain differences between Western and Eastern religion in their views of the mortal body and the Glorified Body. For example, in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism the mortal body is seen as a tool to attain salvation. The goal is to transform the body in order to transcend its limitations and to achieve liberation. For example, Buddha, according to legend, was brought up in a palace where he was purposelfully kept away from the sight of mortality—-aging, disease and death. At his first glimpse of the outside world he recoils in horror at all the signs of mortal body corruption. He begins his spiritual quest to find an answer to the body problem and tries, masters, and ultimately rejects fasting and extreme bodily privation. When he reaches enlightenment, the nature of his physical body changes and becomes more glorified. In Christianity, however, the emphasis seems to be on separating from the mortal body at death and attaining a Glorified Body in the afterlife. There is also an expected future event, the Rapture, where there will be a collective deliverance into Glorified Bodies.

There will also be an analysis of the many forms of Glorified Body revealed in religious and mythological art. The varying forms of Krishna in Vedic text and art will be considered. Krishna means “the all attractive” and he appears in a multiplicity of forms. To attract baser souls he appears in his “opulent” form, depicted in Vedic art as a bejeweled, youth with a coquettish, seductive look. In his highest form he is supposed to be a humble cow shepherd boy. Krishna chose to stop growing at the age of sixteen so he remains an androgynous youth. There will be a parallel analysis of how the physical form of Jesus is portrayed in Christian art.

XII. THE GLORIFIED BODY IN POPULAR CULTURE

Summary:

This chapter will analyze the appearance of the Glorified Body in forms as diverse as rock star worship and the visionary Sacred Mirrors paintings of Alex Gray. We will examine the technological Glorified Body as it appears in characters out of contemporary mythology such as Darth Vader, RoboCop, The Terminator, Edward Scissorhands and the Lawnmower Man. We will consider the fascination with Christopher Reeve—-a man who was the subject of Glorified Body projection and chosen to personify Superman, revealed suddenly to have a quadriplegic mortal body. We will examine a spectrum of Glorified Bodies in three great fantasy works—-Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, Frank Herbert’s Dune books and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy.

These examples will elucidate the complex, contemporary mythology we have developed around the Glorified Body archetype. This interpreted mythology will reveal much about our current attitudes toward the mortal body and our expectations of human evolution.

XIII. THE BIOLOGY OF BEAUTY

Summary:

This chapter will provide a very brief overview of recent research that has tried to identify a genetic basis for standards of beauty. There will also be a brief discussion of how possible biological determinants of the human urge toward beauty increase the will to achieve a Glorified Body.

Sample Passage:

We have all been brought up to believe that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” that it is an entirely subjective perception and influenced by all sorts of shifting cultual influences and contexts. There is some truth to this, especially when we compare what is considered an ideal body type for women today as compared to earlier times. Even as recently as the Fifties—- if Marilyn Monroe were trying to get work today as a model or actress she would be considered to have a “weight problem”. Sun tans and “pale” being a pejorative for caucasians is fairly recent, not very long ago caucasian women were desired to be as pale as possible “Who’s the fairest of them all?” Scientific studies, however, have shown that beauty is not so subjective or culturally dependent, that it is actually based on easy to define universal criteria such as facial symmetry and simple mathematical ratios. When people from various cultures were shown photographs of people (also from various cultures) and asked to rank them according to looks, the agreement in rankings was almost astounding.

XIV. WILHELM REICH, BIOENERGETICS, THE ORGASM AND THE GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

This chapter will consider the relationship of the Glorified Body and the field of Bio-Energetics including the work of Wilhelm Reich and the neo-Reichians Alexander Lowen, Stanley Keleman and John Pierrakos. Particularly, I will make a case that the orgasm is an eruption of the Glorified Body into mortal perception and is a point of contact between the bodies. I will compare the views of orgasm in Bio-Energetics and Tantra.

XV. SEXUALITY AND THE GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

Sexuality and the urge toward the Glorified Body are deeply entwined. Many sexual goals have more to do with an urge to couple with the Glorified Body than with reproduction or having a relationship with an actual human being. Among the many topics considered in this chapter will be the tendency in a materialistic, visual culture to unhappily identify with the mortal body and project the numinous Glorified Body archetype onto the other. When the Glorified Body is projected onto the other there are typically power struggles and strongly sado-masochistic obsessions and behaviors. If a person does not perceive their own Glorified Body and has only a dis-eased identification with the mortal body they will tend toward flipping back and forth between the urge to dominate, control, possess, demean and punish the beautiful other or the converse tendency to worship, submit, be enslaved, possessed, demeaned and punished by the object of Glorified Body projection. (like the lyrics of the Eurthymic’s best known song: “Some of them went to abuse you. Some of them want to be abused.”)In other cases, materialistic, dis-eased identification with the mortal body results in interpersonal sexuality being overwhelmed by the will to obtain a Glorified Body through doomed attempts to perfect the mortal body via dieting, surgery, etc. The Glorified Body is a key player in many of the sexual paradoxes, problems and phenomena of our time. As Jung once said, “Everyone who has ever come to me with a religious problem actually had a sexual problem. And everyone who has ever come to me with a sexual problem actually had a religious problem.” The body image problem strongly overlaps religion (or spirituality) and sexuality.

XVI. THE GLORIFIED BODY AND THE WILL TO POWER

Summary:

In the psychology of Alfred Adler the will to power is the most primary human urge. But the will to power, the will to achieve the Glorified Body and the will to obtain many sexual goals are inextricably entwined. Shakespeare’s Richard the III, for example, fuses all three. He hates the body he’s been incarnated in, “…sent into this breathing world scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionably that dogs bark at me as I halt by them.” His absolute hatred of his mortal incarnation electrifies a will to power that is strongly sexual and sadistic. Richard makes a sexual conquest of the beautiful widow of a man he has assassinated, for example. He admits to killing her husband but tells her, “Twas your beauty that provoked me.” She falls for Richard’s seduction and soon after he has her killed.

In our society we see sex increasingly appearing as a metaphor for power. An alienated man living in the margins of society becomes obsessed with a beautiful young actress he sees on television. She glows with an unreal beauty that seems utterly removed from the squalor of his own mortal incarnation. He stalks her and eventually murders her. In fictional fantasies that amplify our fascination with serial killers we see a fusion of these three drives. Tom Harris’s novels Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs provide very accessible illustrations. The Red Dragon killer worships Blake’s vision of a red dragon and feels that by taking life he internalizes his victim’s spirit energy and will transform into a glowing, transcendent, immortal being. Buffalo Bill, the serial killer being hunted in Silence of the Lambs, is loosely based on an actual serial killer, Ed Gein, who wore body suits made out of the skins of his female victims in an effort to transform his body into another gender. And then there is our cultural fascination with vampires, who in a highly sexual way take the life blood of mortal bodies to maintain an immortal Glorified Body.

XVII. THE GLORIFIED BODY AND ADOLESCENCE

Sample Passage:

The biological condition of adolescence has many parallels to the feverishly excited and unstable state of the species as it experiences an inflamed, frustrated desire to couple with the Glorified Body. Adult culture increasingly resembles the worst excesses of adolescents. People Magazine, for example, with its sexual gossip, and rankings of “who’s hot, and who’s not!” is essentially a nightmare amplification of high school popularity games on an international, adult stage.

Actual adolescents suffer both as objects of Glorified Body projection, and also as subjects who feel the most intense dissatisfaction with the mortal body at a time when it glows the most brightly. (a BBC documentary called, I think, Faces, a plastic surgeon who was involved in some of the cross cultural studies of beauty —see biology of beauty section—makes the statement that, based on objective criteria, human beauty is usually at it its peak between 14 and 24)

The androgynous adolescent is often used to personify the Glorified Body. Krishna, for example, is said to have chosen to stop growing at age sixteen. Peter Pan seems to be an androgynous early adolescent who has a Glorified Body and invites children, not weighed down with heavy adult corporeality, and aided by a little angel dust, to fly away to Never Never Land. Some middle aged rock stars, especially Michael Jackson, seem desperately determined to hold on to the form of the androgynous adolescent. Jackson admits to a life long obsession with Peter Pan, his estate is named after Never Never Land and he is apparently willing to use surgery and (apparently) inappropriate relationships to hold on to the youthful Glorified Body.

XVIII. ANDROGYNY AND THE GLORIFIED BODY

Sample Passage:

The Sixties were, in many ways, an explosion of mutating adolescent culture fascinated with experiencing the Glorified Body. There was a rebellion from repressive patriarchal injunctions about physical beauty, sexuality, and gender roles. Psychedelic art and music combined with powerful hallucinogens to provide out-of-body experiences on demand. There was a fascination with parapsychology, flying saucers, science fiction and weirdness generally, the occult, and Eastern religions which seemed to promise states of bodily transformation and transcendence. There was an urge to break down the isolation of the separated mortal body through communal orgiastic experience that involved boundary dissolving ingredients like sexual freedom, hallucinogens, psychedelic lights, colors and music. There was a surreal aesthetic in dress, music, art, language and thinking. Androgynous rock stars like Mick Jagger seemed liked prophets or gods. Gender roles blurred and men and women came to resemble each other more.

For many there was also a revulsion for unliberated adults, not just for their values, but also for the heavy corporeality of their very gender defined bodies which seemed liked personifications of enslaved mortality and mediocrity. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” (was it Jerry Rubin who coined this commandment that became famous in the Sixties?) is a statement that presumes an eternally youthful Glorified Body as birthright. Much in our popular culture is devoted to the rage and disbelief many Sixties baby boomers feel about discovering themselves to be middle aged.

Twiggy (the most famous model of the Sixties), with her ethereal body and huge eyes was almost prophetic of the stereotyped form of the androgynous, big-eyed alien. She seemed halfway between corporeal and cartoon, far closer to the large eyed, androgynous characters in Japanese animation than to the form of a mature woman’s body.

As the transcendent (but also narcissistic) surrealism of the Sixties congealed and descended into the dense materialism of the ensuing decades, the fascination with androgyny became more concrete, literal and corporeal. The Twiggy fad became a reigning, patriarchal standard co-opted by industry. Young women had to starve themselves into submission to it. But the origin of this androgynous ideal had far more to do with the will to achieve a Glorified Body than any patriarchal motive.

XIX. WOMEN, THE PATRIARCHAL CULTURE AND THE GLORIFIED BODY

XX. DIETING, EXERCISE REGIMENS AND THE MYTHS OF SISYPHUS AND TANTALUS

XXI. DIETING AND EXERCISE REGIMENS AS A NEW RELIGION

XXII. ANOTHER LOOK AT ANOREXIA AND BULIMIA

Summary:

These chapters will largely incorporate an eighty page document entitled, The New Religion—Body Image and Eating Disorders. This was a small, not-for-publication book that I wrote in the late Eighties to sum up years of research into body image and eating disorder psychology. It was intended for my teaching colleagues and some of the troubled adolescents I was working with at a Long Island alternative school. During this period of research I was pleased to discover that most of my independent insights and realizations had already been anticipated by feminist historians and psychologists. Supported by their work, I created a theory that the world view of a person afflicted by a body image/ eating disorder could best be understood as a secular and highly materialistic religion involving guilt, sin, ritual, fasting, asceticism, trials, images of salvation in the form of a glorified, slim, androgynous mortal body, and a descent into the corrupted flesh and despair of the damned. Feminist historians pioneered the connection between patriarchal, puritanical Christianity and its abhorrence of the body as a “temple of corruption” and the fanatical, secular abhorrence of body fat. In the feminist paradigm, when women in the Sixties tried to “get bigger” by liberating themselves from patriarchal domination, there was a compensatory effort to make them smaller by wasting their life energy on Sisyphus-like efforts to retain a down-sized pubescent body. The pioneering feminist work continues to have great value, but needs to include a missing dimension—-the innate human will to achieve a Glorified Body.

In these chapters anorexia, bulimia, low bodily self esteem, body image and eating disorders of all sorts will be reevaluated as symptoms of a will to achieve a Glorified Body. This will is both internal and innate, but also externally created and exacerbated by patriarchal forces and media. The fatality rate in these disorders reveals that this urge can be stronger than the urge to obtain needed nourishment, the urge to survive. Many of the control issues involved in eating disorders, the will to control other people, and especially the will to control the mortal body, also need to be reevaluated as refractions of the will to achieve a Glorified Body.

XXIII. THE SUFFERING OF OUR WILL TO A GLORIFIED BODY AND THE CREATION OF SELF-REFLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

Sample Passage:

The painful dichotomy of identification with the mortal body and tantalizing, fleeting perceptions of a Glorified Body may be the essential irritant that awakens self reflective consciousness. Arnold Mindell in his book, Dreambody, writes: “We can say with the ancient Chinese shamans and physicians that ‘life itself is the beginning of illness,’ that consciousness develops from pain, discomfort, joy and extreme sensations. The ego awakens when the body is disturbed, since the disturbance means consciousness of a foreign element.”

When Adam and Eve follow the serpent’s advice and eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they depart the unconscious paradise of Eden where they have immortal Glorified Bodies free of blemish to incarnate as flawed mortals. Human incarnation begins with shame at their naked bodies. Bodily self consciousness is the end of animal consciousness and the beginning of self reference. In our culture we use the phrase “self conscious” pejoratively to mean that someone is caught in feedback loops of a neurotic/narcissistic painful self awareness that is probably making them socially and bodily awkward. But consider the phrase self conscious apart from the cultural bias. Being conscious of the self is a paragon virtue. Socrates said, ” Know thyself.” When Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge they became self conscious in both senses. A body image problem, understood in its full depth, can become a path to self knowledge.

XXIV. TRANSFORMING HATRED OF THE MORTAL BODY

Summary:

This chapter will review the evidence of our profound hatred of the mortal body. A magazine ad for Porcelana, an anti-aging cream, reads, “They call them aging spots. I call them ugly.” (Ram Dass, who pointed out this ad slogan in a talk on aging as an example of manufactured suffering, reveresed the statement and said, “They call them ugly, I call them aging spots.” The depth of self hatred and hatred of the other for having a mortal body will be confronted. The desire to escape hated corporeality by the urge to mate with a glorified looking other will be compared to the myth of Tantalus who was punished by the gods for feeding them corporeal flesh. Tantalus was doomed to be forever hungry and thirsty. There was always beautiful fruit just above his head, but when he would reach for it, it was always pulled away. Finally, there will be discussion and exercises that will encourage acceptance of the temporary mortal body and recognition of the Glorified Body that exists now and that awaits us in the future.

Sample Passage:

For many people, corporeality is a crucifixion. They are nailed on the horizontal axis of the mortal body which intersects the vertical axis of the Glorified Body. Jung felt that the crucifixion was the central metaphor of the human condition. Before Christ could be resurrected and incarnated in a Glorified Body he had to accept the crucifixion fate.

Accepting the suffering, the crucifixion of mortality, with its bleeding stigmata of cosmetic blemish, disease, aging and death may be a crucial phase of our spiritual development. We may despise, even feel wrathful, homicidal rage when we see that our bodies don’t appear in the bathroom mirror as Glorified Bodies. “That body needs to be starved to death!” is the unconscious cry of the anorexic. Perhaps it is sensed unconsciously that death is, in fact, the only cure for mortality. Perhaps death really does hold the potential for transition from corporeality to the Glorified Body, so that a death wish is a true unconscious intention of a psyche seeking transformation.

When we view the body of the other we may be equally hateful. If the other does not appear to have a beautiful body then they receive no projection of the Glorified Body archetype. Instead we may project our own shadow on to them. They become projection screens for our own anxiety about corporeality, our fears of becoming fat, old, diseased or disabled. One sees the sad, anxious mirror of ones own mortality. The sacred fire of sexuality grows cold in their presence. The unglorified other carries the odor of death, and mating with them compared to the beautiful other may seem a choice between coupling with a corpse or a god.

But if one couples with a glorified, beautiful other to escape the imperfections of corporeality then one spins about in a vortex of Maya and arrives back at the same point. The idol starts to age and develop feet of clay. It turns out to be a trick and the god or goddess is revealed to be a flawed mortal. One reaches for the fruit of paradise, but like Tantalus, punished for feeding the gods the mortal flesh of his own son, it is always pulled away.

XXV. HEALING/TRANSFORMING THE MORTAL BODY

Summary:

This chapter will discuss flaws in the Western medicine paradigm. It will suggest paradigm shifts necessary to understand and work with the ailing body. It will examine the presumption that illness is always a bad thing that needs to be cured and suggest other possibilities. We will understand possibilities and cases of shifting the physical body into a more energetic, glorified state. Finally this extensive chapter will provide alternative attitudes, practices and resources for bodily healing and transformation.

Sample Passage:

Indian, Chinese and Tibetan medicine all employ out-of-body states to promote healing. They attempt to create a state of health which approaches the Glorified Body. Certain very rare individuals—yoga masters, saints, religious ascetics —–have reportedly achieved states where they required little or no physical nourishment to live for long periods of time.

Our attitude toward healing tends to be very bipolar. Death and disease are not aspects of a process, but enemies to be fought at all costs. We take our doctors and other “experts” very seriously. Almost every other commercial on TV is a remedy for the headaches, stomach aches, indigestion, heart burn, constipation, etc. that are typically caused by eating a toxic diet (also sold on TV) and living in a toxic culture (also brought to you on TV). A typical commercial of this time involves a worried older man who describes symptoms that sound like they might very well be stomach cancer. But then he goes to his television doctor and a few seconds later in the final deliverance scene his face is beaming and he proclaims, “My doctor says just take Mylanta!” As health insurance becomes too expensive, these helpful companies offer people free medical diagnoses and prescriptions. Buy their product and everything will be just fine. And why pay so much to see a real doctor when the television doctor already knows the answer? If you’re masochistic enough to sit through a couple of hours of American commercial television you’ll be amazed at the chorus of voices repeating the mantra, “My doctor says.. My doctor says… My doctor says….” followed by injunctions to take various over the counter potions. The television doctor never says anything about changing your diet or exercising. There’s always a delightfully simpler and easier solution that involves a helpful purchase and in no time you’ll be up and about keeping the treadmills of industry spinning merrily along.

Very recently,11/16/05, I wrote a very brief blog that has some relevance here:

Feeling Unhappy?

That’s just your body’s way of saying you have a Prozac deficency.

I keep hearing a really offensively stupid ad on the radio where an announcer asks menopausal women, “Are you getting hot flashes, mood swings, etc.?” A list of symptoms are recited that probably apply to almost any menopausal/premenopausal woman—“Well that’s just your bodies way of saying it’s time for _________”(insert name of pharmaceutical which I can’t recall).

So this is a pretty interesting concept that never occurred to me before. Specific bodily sensations we might have are actually our bodies way of notifying us that it is time to buy specific pharmaceuticals or other products. This principle can help us to redefine many of the physical sensations that sometimes puzzle us. In the ignorant past you might wonder why you were having a headache, but now you know that headaches are just your body’s way of saying that you have a defficency of Extra-Strength Excedrin. Bodily sensations now start to make a lot more sense. For example, let’s say someone punches me as hard as they can in the face and it hurts. Well, this is probably just my body’s way of saying I need Comcast High Speed Digital Cable, because if I were home alone watching cable I wouldn’t be having dangerous human interactions that could result in punches. Sore feet are just my body’s way of saying that I need to purchase Nikes. If I feel tired, that’s just my body’s way of saying I have a latte deficiency and need to report to the nearest Starbucks.

This is the helpful role that society has always played for us, it takes our internal perceptions and explains them to us eliminating our confusion. Feel an excitement in your lower charka? Well that’s just your body’s way of saying you need a hottie. Feel unhappy? That’s just your soul’s way of saying you need a Fundamentalist Religion. Got Fundamentalist Religion and still unhappy? Well that’s just your souls way of saying it needs the 72 virgins waiting for it in paradise and its time to put on the exploding overcoat. Uncertain about where the world is going? That’s just your mind’s way of saying it’s time to vote for a helpful cowboy as President. You are President but still don’t feel important enough? That’s just God’s way of saying that you need to be a War Time President and it’s time to preemptively invade another country. Got a splinter in your mind you can’t get out? That’s just the matrix’s way of saying that the world hasn’t been pulled over your eyes tightly enough and you need to buy something, some imaginary steak perhaps, so that you’ll stop worrying your pretty little head and let parasitic entities keep sucking you dry while you sleep away your incarnation. (end of blog entry)

But my real doctor says don’t listen to the television doctors, listen to him. And what does my real doctor say? Quite often he’ll say that everything will be better if I purchase some prescription pills that a helpful multinational pharmaceutical company has brewed up for my healing. Perhaps some nice antibiotics that will kill the bad disease. That good looking, dynamic man on television doesn’t sit around trying to figure out why he has so many headaches like some introspective sissy, no he’s going to “Bang it back with Excedrin!” And we all know that real doctor pills have an even stronger bang. My doctor says…

But here’s something the doctor doesn’t say very much about. For approximately eighteen hundred years Western medicine was under the spell of a Greek medical philosopher by the name of Galen. Galen believed that the body was governed by certain fluids, called humors, such as “phlegm”, “cholera”, etc. When Shakespeare’s characters are sometimes described as “phlegmatic” or “choleric” we must remember that these were not merely personality adjectives but were also actual medical diagnoses in Elizabethan time. Galen’s philosophy had an authoritative and impressive sound to it, but it also had the disadvantage of being utterly and completely wrong, and the treatments derived from Galen, particularly blood-letting were harmful, sometimes fatal. But for eighteen hundred years or so, the impressive patriarchs of medicine, the graduates of the most distinguished medical schools in Europe, treated most illness by letting blood—applying hot glasses or leeches to people’s skin. This was such a common and universal practice that doctors were called in the vernacular “leeches.” For eighteen hundred years, “My doctor said just apply blood sucking leeches!” Many of the most famous historical figures, and lots more regular folks died because they listened to “My doctor says…” during this eighteen hundred year interlude of insanity. For example, a man whose face appears on our dollar bill above the motto “In God We Trust”, by the name of George Washington believed in “My doctor says…” A hail and hearty man of sixty-eight, he went out for a winter horse back ride and came back with a common cold. Over the next two days his doctor proceeded to relieve him of six pints of blood. George Washington’s last words were spoken to his doctor, “Pray, take no more trouble about me, just let me go.” Finally, in the 1860s a young, not especially distinguished young British doctor working in a public hospital decided to do an experiment. It may have been the first double blind study. He took a randomized list of patients and divided it into two groups. The first group was treated with the techniques he learned in medical school—mostly blood letting. The second group was treated with just soup and bed rest. The second group did significantly better and gradually the medical establishment came to realize that they had been killing people for a mere eighteen hundred years.

Please don’t mistake the meaning here. I’ll go to a doctor and even take antibiotics, which have saved countless lives, if I’m absolutely convinced its necessary. Western medicine has uncovered an amazing wealth of valuable information and effective treatments. But I consider myself to be the person responsible for my body, not my doctor or the friendly pharmaceutical company. I’ve also learned, many of us have, that dis-eases are not to be looked at with the naive, literal materialism of Western medicine. Often they are the metaphors or physicalized expressions of spiritual process.

Arnold Mindell speculates presciently about what collective compensatory mechanisms might do in response to false healing, “Will Death create diseases that cannot be healed?” This was written about three years before the discovery of AIDS. Mindell, a Jungian analyst, describes medical dreams observed in various patients that point toward the urgent need to free our understanding of bodily process from the constricting illusions of materialism. Mindell writes,

“Frequently the dream physician is unable to cope with the nature of the disease. In a dream of a cancer patient, a surgeon-physician—who in reality is a manly, powerful person—-appeared as an insane man asking the dreamer for help. A leukemia patient dreamed that her physician said jokingly that he was a holistic doctor; but beings from another world associated to the leukemia said that they too were holistic. Still another cancer patient dreamed that the last healer who could help her was called a mandala doctor. Another person, after receiving a diagnosis of cancer, dreamed that the healing medicine consisted of a spiraling rocket. In many dreams of ill persons the physician himself is responsible for propagation of the disease.”

XXVI. HEALING THE SUFFERING OF OUR WILL TO A GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

This chapter will provide an array of practices and techniques for healing some of the suffering associated with our will to a Glorified Body. Already existent healing methodologies and resources such as Feldenkrais method, Bioenergetics and Eastern disciplines of transforming human energy like Chi Kung and Tai Chi will be discussed. Some of the major goals of these practices and resources will be:

a. Shifting exclusive materialist identification with the mortal body by gaining awareness of the Glorified Body.

b. Shifting the perceptual ratio of reflection and radiance in favor of radiance.

c. Recognizing the illusory projection of the Glorified Body archetype onto good looking mortals and reclaiming some of this projection.

d. Recognizing that over weight, aging and average looking folks also have Glorified Bodies.

e. Learning to recognize, interrupt and still the thousand tongued demon of bodily self hate when it speaks in the mind.

f. Providing help for those who are particularly good looking to resist the pressures and distortions of being Glorified Body projection screens.

g. Exploring techniques that encourage movement toward open hearted acceptance of suffering that may be unavoidable in a mortal body incarnation

h. Providing new approaches to compulsive eating disorder thinking and behavior

i. Suggesting life affirming approaches to healthful eating and body weight

XXVII. DREAMS, LUCID DREAMING AND THE GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

This chapter will discuss the reality of dreams as the other side of incarnation. It will demonstrate that dreams, particularly lucid dreams, are opportunities for us to experience the shape-shifting Glorified Body free from the constraints of conventional space-time perception. Quantum mechanical models of dreaming created by Fred Alan Wolf and other physicists will be discussed. Dreams will also be considered as voices and visual, emotional expressions of processes of disease, healing and transformation in the mortal body and Glorified Body.

XXVIII. OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE, NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE, DEATH AND THE GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

This chapter will provide a brief over view of the wealth of valuable research done on OBEs and NDEs. Particular attention will be paid to the work of Dr. Kenneth Ring, a remarkably open-minded university scientist who has been studying NDEs for decades. There will be a discussion of what these phenomena indicate about the Glorified Body and quantum mechanical models of consciousness.

Paradigm shifts in our perception of death will be offered. The relationship of death to the mortal and Glorified bodies will be discussed and once again we will consider the point of view of quantum mechanics. Use of death as an ally, teacher and rejuvenator in the Casteneda books, Mindell’s somatic therapy and Eastern traditions will be discussed. Alternatives to our society’s dis-ease with death will be offered. A paradigm of mortality and death as developmental catalyst will be presented.

XXIX. TECHNOLOGY, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE WILL TOWARD A GLORIFIED BODY

Summary:

This chapter will begin a widening of focus and shift in emphasis as we move toward the conclusion of the book. The plague of body problems was introduced in the context of a larger evolutionary struggle which will be given more thorough consideration in the final chapters.

Topics covered in this particular chapter will include the development of technology as an extension and augmentation of the human body. The film Edward Scissorhands and other examples of popular culture will be used to illustrate the prodigious benefits and problems involved in our emergence as a technological animal.

A major section of this chapter will be a consideration of the technology of virtual reality and its relationship to the Glorified Body and the further evolution of man.

XXX. THE GLORIFIED BODY IN UFO AND ABDUCTION PHENOMENA

Summary:

This chapter will discuss possible relationships between UFO and abduction phenomena, the Glorified Body, and human evolution. An overview will be presented of the work of Carl Jung, Jacque Valle, Kieth Thompson and others who have studied these phenomena with open minds and psychological depth. The inadequacy of both denial and conventionalized extraterrestrial explanations will be discussed.

Sample Passage:

People who have abduction or encouter experiences, like people who have OBEs or NDEs often articulate a changed sense of bodily reality. A woman describing her own encounter to Whitley Streiber relates, “My realization was that I was a spiritual being solidified into physical form. I really got, emotionally, that physical and spiritual are not separated whatsoever.”

XXXI. HUMAN EVOLUTION AT THE BRINK OF QUANTUM CHANGE

Summary:

This final chapter will incorporate material from two earlier works: Archetypes of a New Evolution and The Capsule of Intentionality. Archetypes of a New Evolution, written when I was an undergraduate in the late Seventies uses the analytical tools of Jungian psychology to reveal an evolving mythology just beneath the surface of popular culture. The Capsule of Intentionality provides an expanded view of these emergent archetypes which provides us with information about the evolutionary nexus we are approaching.

Archetypes of a New Evolution I don’t have scanned in and reformatted yet, but will soon. Chapter V of the Capusle of Intentionality—–
White Crows Rising—Evolution, Jung, UFOs, Near Death Experiences, Virtual Reality,and the Approaching Singularity at the End of Human History puts the Glorified Body into a a larger evolutionary context as does Casting Precious Into the Cracks of Doom—–Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring.

There is a brief discussion of the Glorified Body and a very thorough discussion of the evolutionary context in the two DVDs I did with John Jenkins and Lost Arts Media: Dialogs about Prophecy and the End of Time and Looking toward the Event Horizon (see products and services section of the site).

© 2007, Jonathan Zap, age 49     Revised 2008   Edited by Austin Iredale

“You’re only as old as you feel!” The problem is that expression got old by the twentieth time I heard it, back in 1973.  And now, after hearing it an additional twenty times a week in the ensuing thirty-five years, I have come to find this particular cliché to be very, very old.  In fact, if this cliché were as old as my feelings about it, it would probably be able to remember a time when the Big Bang was a mere twinkle in God’s eye.  And that’s just another way of saying that, based on how I feel, “You’re only as old as you feel!” has become an infinitely old cliché.

Being infinitely old must be a pretty depressing phase in the life cycle of a cliché, whose mind consists of a single, unchanging thought form.  Especially since this single thought form fearfully cringes from age and seeks to diminish the horror of oldness through the viral propagation of an old mental trick, an arthritic sleight-of-hand, pulling the old switcheroo gimmick of substituting one word for another, in this case “feel” for “old.”  Winston Smith, of George Orwell’s 1984 , was very familiar with the old word-swap trick because every time he showed up for work at the monolithic, windowless Ministry of Truth building he saw, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”  Only now the Ministry of Truth would have to add, “Old is Feel.”

For the age phobic, this is a very convenient little switcheroo because, unlike age, feelings are famously variable and infinitely subjective.  So once you can reduce a feared quality into the quivering jello mold of that which is famously variable and infinitely subjective you can then claim the quality to be anything you like.  Unlike the one to three digits of your age, if age equals feel, well, who’s to say what you are feeling; you can claim you feel like anything.  With a bit of word-swap legerdemain, the mortality-denying, self-tricking ego can pretend it has gained variable control, through cliché technology, of the annoying and relentlessly increasing variable known as age.

So now that it is politically incorrect for my age to be a number, now that it is a feeling, what my age is gets a lot more confusing.  Apparently my age is based on how I feel, but how I feel is always changing.  It has been said that the average adult has a major mood change every ninety minutes, and for the average adolescent it’s about every twenty minutes.

Like most people, my feelings are extremely variable. Feed me a triple espresso and a shiny, new digital gadget and for the first fifteen minutes I might feel like a fourteen year old on an ultra sour candy sugar rush.  But check back a couple hours later when the espresso has worn off and I have to call tech support in India, and you’ll find that my feeling-based age is about 91. Or as I should say, “ninety-one years young.”  But if I hang up on tech support and smoke some crack, then, for the next five to ten minutes, I’ll be a high blood sugar fourteen year old again. Five minutes later, however,  the crack starts to fizzle out and my feeling-based age increases by about a decade a minute for the next ten minutes. I could temporarily reverse that trend by smoking more crack, and so forth. The point is that during a typical day like that I have to constantly keep recalculating my age. This means that with every vicissitude of my feelings I have new math homework just to know how old I am, and rather than face an eternity of new math homework, I’d rather just accept my age, an easy to remember two digit number that remains constant for an entire year.

So let’s take off the beer goggles of you-create-your-own-reality, New Age wish-fulfillment thinking.  You are as old as you are, and if you are reading this, if you know how to read, then you are almost certainly old. Based on my calculations, people are already old, or at least middle-aged, by the time they are eighteen.  Eighteen is the age when people go to college and add “the freshman fifteen.” And what people really mean by aging, as we’ll see later, is something far more serious and tragic than age, what they really mean is:

The diminishment of hotness .

Let’s face it, by eighteen you are already over the hill in many important areas.  By the age of eighteen your chances of becoming the cute but bratty child star of a TV sitcom start to diminish by about forty-five percent a year.  But even if you can accept never being the child star of a sitcom, and are willing to settle for being, say, a world-class gymnast, then you are still forced to realize that unless you already have at least six years of gymnast training under your belt, you are totally past it.

The truth is we are all old.  Even if you are a fourteen year old gymnast you are still a mortal/corporeal Version 1.0, and I think for most of us the whole gravity-bound, aging, illness and accident-prone corporeal lifestyle is getting pretty old.  And that’s why people are lying to themselves when they say they want to be young, because they actually want some thing much more than that.

Let’s say, for example, a man is lamenting, “Oh, I wish I was young again,” when a genie happens to be walking by.  The genie immediately grants his wish and puts him into the body of a random fifteen-year-old.  The problem is that around 87% of the fifteen-year-olds in our society are morbidly obese, and only when the wisher finds that they are locked into the body of an obese and pimply fifteen-year-old does he realize the deeper truth: what he really wanted was not merely youth; what he really wanted was to look hot.

Case in point, Galadriel, the elf queen of Lothlorien in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Those of us who have read the books, particularly the Simarillion, know that Galadriel is thousands of years old.  But you don’t catch Galadriel having to say defensive things like, “I’m six thousand years young.”  The reason should be obvious: Her hotness is not in question, therefore her age doesn’t matter.

Does anybody say, “If only I were a fruit fly?” Fruit flies are usually only a few hours old, they are younger than almost any of us, but no one cares because of a simple reason: Fruit flies don’t look hot; therefore their youth doesn’t matter.

This is the point of plastic surgery; it is not merely to look young, but to look hot.  That’s why you hear about people paying thousands of dollars for liposuction but you never hear about people paying thousands for lipoinjection. (Actually, one easy fix for a wrinkly face would be inject it with fat, causing it to fill out and look more youthful. But that wouldn’t be hot, and so nobody will get rich from lipoinjection.)

So now we are starting to get a more authentic sense of one of the pillars of the age issue. It is not about feelings; it is not about youth versus old; it is about hot versus not hot.  Now I can formulate the First Noble Truth of my philosophy of aging,

I. For many, aging is not about feelings, not about youth, it is about hotness.

Most people are not yearning to be young in the sense of naïve and inexperienced.  They want to continue to have all the inner resources of age, but they would like to have the smooth skin and radiance of youth.  They do not want to be a sickly or unattractive youth; they want to be a perfect specimen.  And do they want that perfect specimen to go through the aging process?  Hell no . . . that was the whole point, to escape aging.  An immortal perfect body comes close to satisfying what they want, but if you think about it, immortality goes on for so long. Being in any one body, however perfect, has got to become boring after a while.  But if one were an immortal changeling, able to match the body to the occasion, now that starts to look like an interesting prospect.

That’s the kind of prospect I’m willing to settle for.  I’m not really interested in being young only to have to go through all the ages all over again —enough already. I’m ready for what I feel is my right as a citizen of this rich and abundant universe, which blossomed out of a single point ten orders of magnitude smaller than a gnat’s toenail into more galaxies than there are grains of sand on this earth. Is it so unreasonable for me to expect, as someone who has endured all the gross and petty humiliations of corporeality, to become an immortal changeling?  In the seminal computer game World of Warcraft , people can switch their embodied forms with mouse clicks. Does World of Reality have less processing power than World of Warcraft ?  Why should I expect less out of life than I do out of a mere computer game?  Isn’t it only appropriate for me to want to have a warrior body form with rippling muscles to handle conflict situations, while still being able to slip into a variety of more comfortable bodies for sensual encounters?

I’m not joking here. If you think I am it might be because you have been successfully conditioned by the Babylon Matrix to take the whole corporeality scam completely for granted.  If you put aside the fatalistic conditioning of a mortal slave, ordinary common sense tells you that being able to choose the right body for the occasion is as basic an evolutionary progression as being able to choose the right words, facial expressions or clothing for an occasion.  It is only what is appropriate. What would be grossly inappropriate for an evolving being would be to get scammed into endlessly repeated corporeal incarnations in which you become stuck in one leaky, aging body after another.

Corporeal incarnation was probably a deal you made. Drunk on nectar and ambrosia, a giddy moment between incarnations, and with the foolish overconfidence of the disincarnate, you signed on for a mortal incarnation, which at the time seemed like the intense thing to do, kind of like a Nineteenth Century adolescent who thought going to war would be an exciting adventure.

But now you know better and might like to renegotiate the deal,

“Can’t I just be any age I feel like?”

“Can’t I just create my own reality?”

Yes, you can create your own reality, BUT . . .

(You knew there was a huge BUT coming.)

BUT, to really be able to create your own reality you need to be a fully, fully empowered New Age person who has completely internalized the you create your own reality principle and does not harbor a doubt the size of an organic mustard seed. To get to that kind of state of personal empowerment it’s going to take god only knows how many workshops, past-life regressions, and other costly New Age products and services.

But once you’ve paid for all that, and gotten rid of all doubt, then you really can create your own reality.  This may finally explain the unsolved mystery of why there are no middle-aged New Age people. They have learned that they can create their own reality, and so they’ve recreated their ages and become the Indigo children who have such a precocious knowledge of New Age principles.

But if you can’t afford all those New Age products and services, or even if you can, but still harbor doubts, where does that leave you in 2012? If you think mortality is inconvenient, try mortality plus the inconvenient truth of climate warming plus apocalypse plus no ability to create your own reality!  If you are not the maître de of your own private reality by 2012, better prepare yourself for being left behind in a world composed of failed New Agers and other clueless mortals unable to self-rapture themselves into new realities.

That sounds harsh, but there is a kind of cosmic justice to it.  No one wants to live in a world of immortal changeling losers and doubters.  The loser with a thousand faces.  And it is so easy to imagine how being an immortal changeling could be abused by the unworthy—the devil that hath the power to assume a pleasing form, and all that.  Ideally, being an immortal changeling should be reserved for only the high New Age elect like myself.

Without such selectivity the New Age would be a disaster. Can you imagine the problems that would be created if you allowed people who don’t respect diversity to live in a world of immortal changelings?  Can you imagine the burka that an Islamic Fundamentalist would want you to wear if you were an immortal changeling?

So the losers and the doubters will get filtered out automatically. But you know just as well as I do that with the whole light and dark way that things work out, there are going to be immortal changelings who are evil and have a diabolical array of fell powers.  Any immortal changeling knows that an epic struggle of light and dark comes with the territory; same as on the Babylon Matrix, only the light and dark will be differently distributed.  In the epic world of immortal changelings, dark and light are concentrated into a much smaller number of entities, and this makes things considerably more dramatic and mythological.

I guess at some point it may have become unclear, even to myself, if I was dissing other people’s attitudes toward aging, spoofing my own, or pulling back the veil of a mortality obsessed matrix.  I’ve been losing control of my rants recently, and they seem to reveal more of myself and my shadow than I intended.  So let me clarify, what I am basically saying is,   (the Second Noble Truth)

II. Get over it. You are in an aging corporeal body. Take the damn two-digit number (which is not something you can feel your way out of) and get on with it.

But by “on with it” I don’t mean to a depressed acceptance of mortality. What I mean by “on with it” is (the Third Noble Truth),

III.  Recognize that you are already a shape-shifting interdimensional traveler.

Your aging mortal body is not your true identity, and although the present phase of congealing into one corporeal body is such a convincing matrix, and no doubt a huge inconvenience and hardship, remember that it is only a phase. Your age is probably a two-digit number, and chances are, based on present medical technology, you will probably never have to endure more than two digits worth of age. And if you have any sort of background in math or science, you know that two digit numbers are really small numbers.  The whole mortal number you pulled on yourself may stretch out into the scratchy last cut of a black vinyl golden oldie, but even that will probably still be only a two digit number, or at best in the very low one hundreds. Thankfully the mortality number is never a very big one, and once the reset button gets pushed you’ve got a chance to renegotiate.

Of course, if you are a fundamentalist materialist and a technological futurist, like Ray Kurzweil, then you may have some expectation of having your consciousness downloaded into a quantum computer housed in a titanium alloy exoskeleton with Zeiss Ikon optics and a shape-shifting dermal layer consisting of nanobots able to reconfigure themselves in any way that is consistent with the underlying titanium alloy exoskeleton.  In other words, your expectation is the nerdy gadget version of being an immortal changeling.  But no matter how many off-planet backups of yourself you have downloaded into quantum computers kept in super-cooled, fully hardened underground bunkers, there is always the possibility of a super wave or galaxy devouring black hole destroying all those backups.  This is what Tolkien called premature immortality: the naïve confusion of immortality with being in a single, age-resistant body.

In addition to your aging, mortal/corporeal Version 1.0 body, with its two-digit age, and all its obnoxious limitations and vulnerabilities, you have other bodies, and those other bodies are not as stuck in one matrix as is the flesh and blood body.  If death seems too long to wait for a new body then just wait a few hours until you are ready to go to sleep Once a day most people enter another matrix called the dreamtime, and while there they are in an age-variable, shape-shifting dreambody that can defy gravity and rebound from life-threatening situations with the resilience of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character.  There are also the energy bodies that people experience during near-death experiences, and out-of-body experiences (of which I have had numerous).  These energy bodies may have such enhancements as panoramic vision, orgasmic aliveness and spiritual enlightenment.

Fundamentalist materialists would have us believe that unless we have the luck to live long enough until technology gives us an ability to download ourselves into quantum computers, then we are just eternal losers, a bunch of rapidly deteriorating furless monkey with a couple of hemispheres of tangled wetware ready to crash into the velvet darkness of eternal unrecoverable data loss the moment our monkey form flatlines.  And oh so many things can make a Version 1.0 monkey form flatline: a banana peel on a staircase, another monkey driven car on the freeway…

And even if it hasn’t flatlined yet, Version 1.0 is always buggy, and there is no warranty, no tech-support. The best you can hope for (if you can afford about $700 a month) is the privilege of turning your fate over to some caring, giant HMO, and maybe the mortality mechanics that work for the HMO can patch you up for a bit, or maybe they will kill you themselves if you are one of the unlucky hundreds of thousands that each year succumb to an adverse reaction to a combo of pharmaceuticals.

So before I lose control over this rant again, let’s boil things down to a few simple truths about aging.  Stop trying to pretend that aging is sexy or that it is about personal empowerment, high performance, plus sentimental good feeling, like the fifty-five-year-old model woman with perfect bone structure playing volleyball on the beach with her grandchildren in the Celebrex ad.

Say after me the following affirmations,

“Every day in every way I’m getting older and older.”

“Today is the first day of the rest of my ever-diminishing life.”

“Mortality sucks, and then you die.”

Here now are the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Noble Truths about aging:

IV.  Mortality is developmental, and you probably signed on for it because it puts fire under your ass.     Most immortal changelings are too stuck in the immortal changeling rut to do anything with their endless lives.

V. Fear of death is about fear of unlived life.

Evaluate everything from the point of view of what you will remember well on your deathbed.  Live every day like it could be your last and stop the countdown to apocalypse dates like 2012.  The count-down-to-apocalypse game was old when Revelations was written (in the expectation that the freaky events described were going to happen to the Christians of the First Century AD).  Your personal event horizon of death could come at any time and is guaranteed, so stop projecting it toward a collective eschaton; it just binds you deeper into linear time.

VI.  Stop falling for the fundamentalist materialist longing for anti-aging medicine and its vain efforts to forever patch up a pro-aging mortal body.

You already have glorified bodies. Death, the mortal emergency, can actually be a liberating emergence of your other bodies, and a chance to more fully recover your real identity as interdimensional traveler. So stop cringing from the amazing intensity and vulnerability of your mortal incarnation, it is a once in a lifetime experience, lots of disembodied spirits envy the dynamism of mortal incarnation, and remember that however ambivalent you might be about being in a body it is for a limited time only, and then you may discover that there are other worlds than these…

For further reading:

The Glorified Body—-Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution

Read this as a book proposal:

The Glorified Body—Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution

Read as an article here:

The Glorified Body

Read the intro of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler for more on your identity as interdimensional traveler.

The longing for beauty may originate from a longing to reconnect with the glorified body, see:

Beauty in the Eye of the Phase Shifter

The longing for the beloved may reflect deeper urges that have to do with the incompleteness of being in a particular mortal body:

Stop the Hottie!

Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring

For more on projection of mortality toward a collective eschaton see:

Clocktime Metastisizing toward  2012

For more on the feeling that there is something wrong with this world and the mortal coil it rode in on:

A Splinter in your Mind

For a more surreal version of your identity as interdimensional traveler see:

Friends don’t let Friends Incarnate in the Babylon Matrix

For more dissing of shadow-denying you create your own reality New Age philosophy see,

Reality Testing is Politically Incorrect

A more serious critique of same:

Dynamic Paradoxicalism—the anti-ism ism

And for a potent life stance that is empowered by awareness of mortality and death see the several documents in the Warrior category of the writing section of zaporacle.com.

The three best books on aging I have read (also the only three) are:

The Force of Character and the Lasting Life by James Hillman  (whom I found to be extremely obnoxious the last time I met him in person)

And  Still Here—Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying by Ram Das (whom I found generous and as lucid as ever despite his massive stroke when I last met him in person)

The Virtues of Aging by Jimmy Carter (whom I never met in person and who doesn’t know shit about the Middle East)  is an ok book on aging, but nowhere as good as the above two.