The habitual, unconscious, hegemonic, “hammer” approach of the dissociated bodymind is reinforced in at least two ways: through fearful repression and through socialization. First, let’s look at how sensual alienation is rooted in the individual’s tendencies to repress and deny certain experiences.
Although fulfilling peak experiences are the fruit of the integrated bodymind, they are not the only variety. Intense experiences of the lived-body can often be of intense fear, hurt, and other “bad stuff.” Human beings, equipped as we are with our fine-tuned conceptual capacities, will understandably draw on those capacities in response to pain or fear that is experienced as threatening or overwhelming in some way. When a fully embodied life gets too frightening, or hurts too much, a person can put some safe distance between themselves and their experience by centering awareness on conceptual processes. In this way, the basic I-it stance of sensual alienation rests partly on a habituated repressive response to pain and fear. It’s interesting to note that, ultimately, bodymind dissociation may be rooted in that most pervasive of fears — the fear of death.
In other words, to fundamentally identify with the body is to confront one’s own mortality. Whereas the biological world of the lived body is one of continual flux and flow, of continual birth, death, decay and renewal, the world of thought gives the illusion of persistence and permanence. The concept “me,” for instance, is persistent and basically stable over time. “Me” today is the same “me” as I was ten years ago, and will presumably be the same “me” ten years from now. Yet the actual me-in-the-flesh is born, continually changes throughout life on all levels, and eventually dies. Thoroughly wrapped up in and identified with the stable self-concept “me,” I can bask in the illusion that I’ve stepped off the train of continual change, the train ride that will eventually reduce “my” body to something along the lines of fertilizer or worm-food. Thus, it’s the sheer gravity of imminent death that may, at least partly, underly people’s tendency to dissociate from the world of the lived body.
Psychologically, a threat to any value that an individual holds essential to his or her existence as a self — be it a threat to physical life, the love of a cherished person, economic status, athletic prowess — can trigger a repressive response. If one identifies with being an active caretaker, for instance, then having kids “leave the nest” can feel overwhelmingly threatening to one’s sense of self. Repression in this scenario might range from an out-right denial that one’s kids are growing up, to an unyielding stance of treating one’s adult children as if they were still little kids. The main point is that human beings, when we feel that our fundamental sense of self is threatened in some way, can turn our attention away from whatever aspects of our immediate situation elicit fear or anxiety. Although the initial response of repression can often be a creative use of one’s capacities to get through the rough times of life, the habitual tendency toward dissociation and self-alienation leaves our bodymind in a continual state of contraction across situations, creating a condition of perpetual distress. We have noted how this distress is rooted in the individual’s own repressive capacities; now we can move to a discussion of how the tendency to be habitually dissociated is reinforced by the processes of socialization.
Although on an individual level, a person may tend to distance oneself from sensual levels of experience in response to a directly perceived threat of some kind, one typically moves toward a habituated stance of sensual alienation in response to a cultural situation that continually encourages and demands dissociation. From the time of Plato right up through the Cartesian foundations of modern science, the notion that the human being is fundamentally divided into mind and body, spirit and flesh, has been so basic to the Western worldview that, like water to a fish, it is largely taken for granted. Of course, few intelligent and sensitive people are likely to profess explicit views and philosophies that support a strict separation of mental and bodily-felt realms of experience. In fact, many are perhaps inclined to claim that their lives are unaffected by such “metaphysical” concerns — “I feel like I’m plenty embodied, thank you very much.” Nonetheless, the doctrine of mind-body dualism shapes people’s experience because it is inexorably tied to our social institutions, which were indeed founded on views of reality that did, explicitly or implicitly, embrace the separation of objective thinking from subjective feeling. Cultural institutions are usually slow to change, so regardless of the current shift in outlook, most Westerners continue to be born into and bred on a world of sharp dualisms. These dualisms can insidiously convince us of the unreliability of our own perceptions, encouraging a dependency on the judgments of publicly designated “experts.” The result is a belief system that encourages conformity and is designed to maintain the status quo. These doctrines are anchored into people’s living bodies via a myriad of implicit teachings — a nonverbal system of indoctrination that trains people to instinctively look outside their directly felt experience for direction. A teacher of mine, Don Hanlon Johnson, calls this entire project — i.e. the many ways in which we learn to integrate these beliefs and techniques of dissociation into our lives — the “technology of alienation.”
In the next installment I’ll explore this “technology of alienation” in more detail, and then point to ways that we can move away from this alienation toward levels of greater conscious connection and deeper self awareness.