Evanescence

The Exile of Body and Soul

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Listen Here- Podcast Style

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Photo by Joe Dudeck on Unsplash

Evanescence

The bare flesh of the Earth
Reveals a little more sometimes
Playfully lingering just a little longer
To rub up against me
at the edge of essence
Where the skin of matter
reaches out for a deeper embrace
with the spirit of consciousness
Sacralizing a desire for a reunion
to create god
to meet in the waves as one
Begging the angel
to write us as a poem
before logic arrives
to change her mind

© Jamie Millard

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“We find the soul not by turning away from the body, but by embracing it in a way that spiritualizes the body; and we find the sacred not by turning away from the world, but by embracing it, in a move that sanctifies matter. The soul is both in and transcends the body, as a poem is in and yet transcends mere language.”

Iain McGilchrist

The human experience!
A carnal quest for meaning in a search for that nature of being before the division and separation of paradise lost. That space before the mind was given executive power to exile the body, and evaporate the soul. Sometimes the cosmos comes knocking to find us if only to offer us but a brief glimpse. As a poem we meet her as one traversing and crossing the gap between realms to enter into a union with the metaphor as love. Mere language cannot cross over. Logic cannot cross the gap and will rail against it. Comparison, guilt, labels, and judgement arrive on the scene to dam the river and close the door to the garden.

Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar wrote an incredible book I am traversing right now called, The Matter With Things. It builds on his first book The Master and his Emissary. The Matter With Things is about the nature of reality. It’s about how we are equipped by our brain and how we try to understand it. He feels we have been misled to depend on that aspect of our brain that is most adept at manipulating our world for the betterment of our own purpose.

According to McGilchrist, our brain has two unsymmetrical halves known as hemispheres which both pay different types of attention to the world. The left brain hemisphere places its attention on the world to manipulate. The right hemisphere puts its attention on the world to understand and to bond. Both create different experiences with different qualities. Both give different sidelights on two distinct, entirely coherent versions of the world.

These two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival. We need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to deal with the necessities of life, and to build the foundations of a civilization. But to live in it, we also need to belong to the world and to understand the complexity of what it is we are dealing with. This division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. Both hemispheres work well together not because they have the same role, but precisely because they have different ones. However, it is a barrier and in fact, it is a catastrophe when we use only one.

We have been misled to depend on the left. Coercing the world is not the same as understanding.

As awareness tries to ensnare you in the net of understanding, Meaning remains the bird that eludes the realm of speech.

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib

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Metaphor might just be the only way of understanding anything. More to come on this next week ❤️

The full podcast style audio version can be found under the main title at the top of the article.

Thank You for Being Here,

Lots of Love,
Jamie