If you could figure out how to plug your body back into the Source context, you could experience it as an infinite well that would fill your body with all the vitality that you require. Your body is, as we have been told by many traditions, made in the image of the Divine. Yet this image, what we imagine this to mean, has been denatured by millenia of Empire infecting us with the thoughtforms of domination. The divine is neither some benevolent bearded man, nor simply the esoteric body of Jesus, but Nature herself. The divine is the cosmic inhalation and exhalation of the Universe, of which you are a part, but from which you have become untethered through alienation.
The reason you have become untethered, the reason that modern people have become untethered, is because our umbilical cord of relatedness to the Living World has been severed by a deviation from our ancestral baseline in kinship with all of Life. Severing this cord of relatedness with the Living World led to severing the cord of relatedness with one another, which led to severing the cord of relatedness with ourselves.1 The purpose and purview of this book, and our work, is to restore this felt lived experience of kinship, so that we can come become what some of our Indigenous mentors call real human beings. When you experience this kinship with yourself, you take care of yourself. When you experience it with others, you treat them as you would treat yourself. When you experience it with the Living World, you treat it with the same care you would treat your own body. (A quick secret: it IS your own body. Not your body in the private, enclosed, self-centered way that we usually understand this, but your greater body in the sense that as you begin to develop real relatedness with the Living World you extend into it, through threads and then cords and then ropes of connection.)
Everything that we are connected to is part of us. Many people have told us so, including Jesus, Buddha, the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and the American Transcendentalist poet Walt Whitman, who did so in this manner:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years.2
And the thing that both quantum mechanics, and spirituality has been trying to tell you is that everything is connected to you. We are woven through the Universe. And yet there is a problem, a paradox, because most people do not experience this reality. They might hear about it, or even believe it, even accept it as conceptually, or foundationally, or definitively true: yet this is not how it feels to them.
How they feel is isolated and alone.
And the reason that this experience - isolation and loneliness - is happening for most people is that the neural architecture of connection is shut down. Most modern people spend most of their lives defended against relationship because their bodies are experiencing threat, and when we feel threatened we are not open.
What we are going to do in this book is approach kinship through the doorway of your Autonomic Nervous System. And one way to understand your autonomic nervous system, in terms of its potentials to reconnect you to a greater experience of wholeness, is that the ANS is the altar of the spirit.
The altar of the spirit.
Do you understand what that means?
If I could not use the language of spirituality, and there are times in my work when I cannot, because a lot of what I've done for the past 15 years is train mental health and medical professionals, some of whom would run screaming from the room if I used the word spirit,3 I would say that the Autonomic Nervous System is the architecture of the mindbody connection. And this is true. It is the neuro-electrical grid that unites the felt experience of the body with your sense-making and meaning-making apparatus: your storying ability.
Yet if we can open to an animistic framework, and acknowledge that life is a spark, a vitality, we see something else emerge which is so much more profound. In the Tzutuj'il Mayan language of Santiago Atitlan, in what is now Guatemala, the word for life - to be alive - is N Kasea. This word means: the ember yet burns.
Life, vitality, is this mysterious flame. The difference between us and a corpse is this animating vitality. You can call it N Kasea, or you can call it spirit, or qi, or prana, or ‘the breath of life’4. All mystical traditions share this awareness. If we think about our essence; our vitality, as this flame, this burning ember, the Autonomic Nervous System is the altar upon which it meets our experience. The neural interface between spirit and matter.
An altar.
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