Sophia and Human Embodiment

Robert Sardello

Let me begin, let me step beyond the sphere of the familiar and into unknown regions of the body with a small, powerful, quote from the modern mystic Simone Weil. She said: “Let the soul of man take the whole universe for its body.” Simone Weil is not engaging in speculation here. She is presenting a real, an actual option. The nature of this option needs clarification. By option, I do not mean that through some sort of extraordinary circumstance, such as becoming a mystic, it is possible to, as it were, extend the individual body out to the furthest reaches of the cosmos. We could never do that. Rather, the individual body is already the body of the whole universe. Our only option lies in realizing this in actual experience by making every determination to be in connection with our living body.

Simone Weil’s statement is an explicitly Sophianic statement, and I want to bring that out. I do not think that it is a misunderstanding to hear “Let the soul of man take the whole universe for its body” to be saying: “ Our individual body is Her Body, for She, Sophia, is the whole, the totality of the Universe.” Many Sophiologists have proclaimed Sophia as the totality of the universe. For example:The Russian Sophiologist, Pavel Florensksi says:

"This sublime, royal and feminine nature, who is not God or the eternal Son, nor an Angels or one of the saints… is she not the true synthesis of all humanity, the higher and more complete form of the world, the living soul of nature and the universe? Our forefathers, the devout builders of the Sophia churches and painters of the Sophia icons deeply sensed her existence.”

Another example: the great visionary Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), speaks of Sophia in three ways: as the Soul of the entire cosmos, as the Soul of the starry heavens, and as the Soul of the World. Further, these three soul levels of Sophia correspond to three regions upon which they work. The body of the Soul of the cosmos is the entire universe; the body of the Soul of the starry heavens is the sun, the planets the stars; and the body of the Soul of the World are the elements out of which all creatures and things come into existence. It is within this deep and wide understanding of Sophia that I want to re-imagine human embodiment.

I am going to begin by describing how to step over the abyss straight into the wild body that we are. The process consists of a continual self-wounding of our ego brought about by taking a radically different approach to the spontaneous images, fantasies, feelings, desires, emotions, moods that are occurring all of the time. Instead of taking these phenomena as manifestations of the psyche, which is the typical way they are interpreted, imagine them instead as spit off parts of the living body we are. This psychic material, if left to bubble up from those unknown regions of the un-conscious, the not-conscious, and disappear, leave us with an experience of the body that is only a thing. The wild, primordial, activity of body escapes.

The precedent for the peculiar view I am putting forward, which is the view of the congruence of psyche and matter, can be found with the alchemists. For the alchemists, psyche and matter were not two separate dimensions as they are for us, but a single whole existing simultaneously in two dimensions. For us, the body as material processes has become dissociated from the soul as imaginal processes. A dire result follows. Our modern, civilized, scientised bodies do not have the capability of going through the transformations necessary to develop toward a valid meeting with the spiritual realms. The force of transformation is allowed to escape, like steam from a kettle. Our existence before death and what exists after death thus remain completely separate and discrete realms because the intermediary realm of the soul-body is effectively bypassed.

The way to begin working away from the discrete universe where a sharp line divides life from what lies on the other side of death toward the continuous universe of a constantly changing sense of what constitutes life, is through ensouling the body and embodying the soul. In alchemy this process is first imaged through the form of the alchemical vessel in which the various processes were carried out. The vessel for alchemical work is described as a hermetic vessel. This glass vessel, of which there are numerous shapes, is at one and the same time sealed and open and is a perfect analogue of the human body. The hermetic vessel in alchemy is not merely a piece of equipment but is identified with the alchemical work in a primary way. For example, the circulation within the hermetic vessel known as the Pelican is described in the following manner in the anonymous alchemical text “Tractatus aureus Hermetis”:

…the outside to the inside,, the inside to the outside, likewise the lower and the upper; and when they meet together in one circle, you could no longer recognize what was outside or inside or lower or upper; but all would be one thing in the circle or vessel. For this vessel is the true philosophical Pelican, and there is no other to be sought for in all the world. (quoted in Jung, 1944, pr. 167)

The vessel being described here is in the image of the Pelican piercing its own breast to feed its young, an act of self-sacrifice and as well, a self-wounding. In the alchemical vessel, a substance is heated. Steam rises, which then, through the circular nature of the vessel returns to the belly of the container. The analogy to making connection with the soul-body is clear; when fantasies or any other sort of psychic material rise up into consciousness or semi-consciousness, this material is to be returned to the body-vessel. Making this circulatio process a conscious practice is primary for coming into connection with the wild body.

Because modern therapeutic depth psychology takes psychic material of any sort as separate from the body and as material to be interpreted, the opportunity of this discipline, my discipline of depth psychology, spiritual psychology, to serve the transformation of the body unto and into death is short-circuited. Returning images, fantasies, and emotions to the body does not mean interpretation. When, for example, an image comes up, the alchemical way of working would be to quite deliberately and quite consciously picture the image as moving from the region of the head upward and then in an arc back downward and into the region of the heart. If you do this practice even for a little while you immediately find that it is not at all easy. Your body begins to feel alive, and not in a particularly happy way. Indeed, you may feel as if you will burst open. What is happening through such a practice is a radical change in the sense of the body. The categorical demarcation of psychological and physical spheres of human experience can gradually be overcome.

A strong word of caution needs to be interjected at this point. We must take every aspect of the hermetic vessel of alchemy into account in taking it as an analogue of the separation and re-uniting of psyche with body. The hermetic vessel is made of glass. If we take it as only glass, we are seeing the vessel just as a laboratory instrument and not as a living symbol of the process we need to engage in. That the hermetic vessel is glass, a purification of substance, symbolizes that the separation and re-uniting of psyche with body is a purification process. As we engage in the practice of returning psychic material to the body, it is necessary at the same time to be able to observe the process carefully, to see through what we are doing, to engage in the process with an attending intelligence. That is the symbolic meaning of the glass container. The hermetic vessel is at one and the same time body and intelligence. To simply return images, fantasies, feelings, emotions, and moods to the body, without the act of seeing through would result in becoming quickly overwhelmed with compulsion, despair, rage, panic, anxiety, and feelings of abandonment.

The bodily result of even working to a small degree with this alchemical process is quite striking. The body becomes experienced as the center of one’s being and is felt as neither personal or impersonal, neither ‘mine’ nor ‘not mine.’ We have entered the mystery of incarnation. The entrance, is, of course, disorienting. Further, it is not as if we go through the entrance, get through the chaos and everything settles down. We enter a new way of knowing, the way of not-knowing.

When we work for a time with the meditation above, our sense of our living body changes. At any given moment, it is not possible for us to tell whether our body is a thing or a pure activity. I call this living ambiguity of incarnation the Uncertainty Principle of Embodiment. A simple example:

Out on a walk, near our home, I come to an open field and pause. My attention is drawn to a large pine tree. This tree becomes the central focus of my attention. This tree, though, is placed within a background of which I am peripherally aware - the sloping, grassy hill upon which the tree grows, the blue sky mottled with clouds. My own body may make an appearance within the visual panorama. Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of my foot, my elbow jutting out as I raise my arm to wipe my brow. However, I find that there are large portions of my body that I cannot see. I cannot remedy this deficiency by simply shifting position to get a better view. Wherever I go to gaze at my body, it comes with me as itself the source of the gaze. The place from which the world opens up for me, in a large measure remains itself invisible. I can go around other objects and get a view of them from all sides. My body, however, remains an absolute “here” around which all “theres ” are arrayed. My body, however, cannot ever be completely one of those “theres”.

Reflecting on this experience, we can say: the condition under which it is possible for us to be present to the world around us is that the body must partially disappear. Nonetheless, the body is indispensable for the world appearing for us; it is through the body that the world appears. The world opens up for us through our body, but only under the condition that the point of view of bodily activity itself disappears. For example, we are present to the world through seeing, but we cannot see the seeing. Or, we touch an object in front of us, but we cannot touch the touching; and so on with all the senses. The body as activity remains invisible, while the body as thing takes its place in the world of things.

The example above concerns perception. The same uncertainty principle holds also for action. A simple example; the act of taking a bite out of an apple. The act of biting is realized only in the thing bitten. Within the field of things-to-be-bitten, there is one thing I cannot bite; my own teeth. Similarly, my mouth cannot swallow itself, my foot cannot kick itself, my hand cannot grasp itself. In order for the body to be the means through which we act, the body itself has to, as it were, disappear. Both our perceiving and our acting are outer-directed concerns which require that the body efface itself in order for the world to be present. In fact, for our body to function in a healthy way at all requires, demands, that we not be present to it. We cannot, for example, initiate walking from here to there by sending out certain nerve signals from the cerebral cortex. We would not know how to begin to do such a thing. To extend our image even further, it is not only perception and action that take place through the body only insofar as the body is not experienced, this same uncertainty principle hold for emotions and other corporeal states such as hunger, thirst, sexual craving.

Our body as living, the wild body, is first and foremost not a located thing, but a path, an access for the opening-up of the world to reveal itself to us. The body conceals itself in the act of revealing the world. However, it is only through this ongoing act of concealment that our body feels it own presence as a whole. In presencing the world, the body is never completely effaced. Its presence, given through the revelation of the world, however, is not that of an organ or groups of organs, but is given as the experience of life. This whole being that is our body is not experienced as a material thing, but as life itself; not some-thing that has the additional property called life, but rather, what we call life is none other than embodiment experienced. The living body, then, is to be imaged as the intertwining of corporeality with the world. The two -- corporeality and world -- cannot be separated. For each of us, corporeality and world form a single field. If you can for a moment come home enough to your body to feel the priority of this interactive field, it is an experience of the intimacy of our soul-body with the Soul of the World.

The body as thus far considered only has to do with what we might term the surface body. The internal body organs have not been considered in the image presented. We have to also turn our attention to our corporeal depths. The functions that unfold in these bodily depths are crucial for sustaining life. It is very clear that the actions of the depths of our body are also not available to awareness. However, a different kind of disappearance of the body is involved with the activity of the inner organs than with the surface of the body. The disappearance of the body surface reveals the world, and the revelation of the world is felt as the life of the body. The disappearance of the interior body reveals, though in an indirect way, the intelligence that is the body. In order to understand what is meant by the intelligence that is the body, take this observation by Lewis Thomas:

“If I were informed tomorrow that I was in direct communication with my liver, and could now take over, I would become deeply depressed. I’d sooner be told, forty thousand feet over Denver, that the 747 jet in which I had a coach seat was now mine to operate as I pleased; at least I would have the hope of bailing out, if I could find a parachute and discover quickly how to open a door. Nothing would save me and my liver, if I were in charge. For I am, to face the facts squarely, considerably less intelligent than my liver. I am, moreover, constitutionally unable to make hepatic decisions, and I prefer not be obliged to, ever. I would not be able to think of the first thing to do.”

This picture of the intelligence of the liver holds true for all of the internal organs of the body and for the interior, visceral life of the body as well. We are not aware of the depths of the body, we could say, because we could never be up to the intelligence that is our body. It is only through our not-knowing what is going on within our body that the body functions with great wisdom. A kind of mysterious reticence occurs on the part of the visceral body, such that our organs do not come into thematic awareness except in times of illness.

The body we live can thus be characterized as living in concealment. The great mystery of incarnation centers around the continual disappearance of the body in order that the world and others may exist for us. The mystery of incarnation also centers around the activity of wisdom that makes possible an ongoing seemingly seamless flow with the world, without having to think about how to go about this business of embodiment. But, because thinking about the wild body is so slippery, I have to emphasize that the living body is not a thing that then effaces itself in giving us the world. The living body is no-thing; incarnation is the act accomplishing a linking, a bonding, a uniting, the coming together of ourselves with the world and with others.

We all know, of course, there is another side to embodiment. It is the side with which we are much more familiar, the body as a complex, material thing. I certainly do not deny this body. This body is our body as a corpse. In life, its main function is that it makes the body visible. The material aspect of embodiment means that the body is also an object that can be sensed by others as any other material object. The material aspect of embodiment locates us in space and time. However, we are mistaken if we take this visible body, in itself to be the living body, the ensouled body. The ever-present presence of the corpse that is also us - all of those chemical processes going on, the continual ongoing decay, the body as harbinger of thousands of bacteria, of viruses, the vulnerability brought about by being a physical thing, subject to gravity, the play of the elements that can bake, freeze, soak us to the bone - must indeed be the source of an ongoing horror of death. The body described previously as the wild body knows nothing of this horror. To the extent we rid ourselves of strictly materialistic attitudes toward our body, the horror of death, while still present, diminishes greatly in intensity. Why? Because, through experiencing the wild body we free ourselves from the overshadowing presence of death. Thus, we are compelled to say that the body is simultaneously soul/spirit activity and a visible presence in the world. As soul/spirit, then, there is an incorruptible aspect to the body. As material corpse, there is at the same time, a corruptible aspect to the body.

We might think of this rather difficult, contradictory concept in this way: it is quite possible to imagine that the corruptible body does indeed pass away, and that passing away is what we typically think of as death. However, passing out of the extensity of the corruptible body, we can now begin to see, is at the same time passing into the intensity of the incorruptible body. In ordinary life, we typically lean more toward the extensity of the corruptible body - unless we work to develop the capacity to be present to the incorruptible, wild body. The alchemists, in particular, developed procedures for moving from the corruptible to the incorruptible body.

We have to understand that the work of the alchemists, from one point of view, was merely to take what is already happening and to hasten the process. We do not have to become practicing alchemists, in the sense of doing the practices that they did, in order to, throughout our lives, develop an ability to gradually be more and more present to the incorruptible body. To begin, think of it this way: What we today call psyche is actually the intensity of the body, and what we call body is the extensity of the soul. There is no dualism of soul and body. We are not so able to realize this twofoldness of the soul-body because of the presence of the corruptible body. The presence of the corruptible aspect of the body makes us think there must be two quite separated things - the body and the soul. When the body dies, perhaps the soul continues on. This way of looking at the matter, however, is fraught with very serious difficulties. The most serious difficulty is that this simplistic view does not pay sufficient attention to the actualities of experience. And, following from such inattention, the body is completely degraded because it is identified wholly with only one aspect of the body - the corruptible body.

I want to give a picture, now, an image of the unity of the corruptible and incorruptible body and what happens at the moment of death. This image, admittedly, is a bit crude, but I think you will nonetheless find it rather helpful. The image is in the form of a dream. This dream is of a woman who was quite devoted to the work of C. G. Jung. She did not know Jung, but the night after his death, she had this dream:

“She was at a garden party where many people were standing around on a lawn. Jung was among them. He was wearing a strange outfit: in front his jacket and trousers were bright green, in the back they were black. Then she saw a black wall which had a hole cut out of it in exactly the same shape as Jung’s stature. Jung suddenly stepped into this hole, and now all that one could see was a complete black surface, although everyone knew that he was still there. Then the dreamer looked at herself and discovered that she, too, was wearing such clothes, green in front and black behind.” ( Marie-Louise Von Franz, On Dreams and Death, pg. 155)

An absolutely marvelous dream! Everything I have been struggling to say is here given in picture form. It is a dream of Jung’s death. In this dream we see that the visible body is at the same time the invisible body; the corruptible body is also the incorruptible body. At death, the visible body disappears and what remains is the invisible body. The dreamer then realizes in the dream that she too is exactly this kind of body, an image that says we all are, and also that the twofold nature of the body exists, not just at the moment of death, but is the very nature of embodiment. But, perhaps the most striking part of the dream is that while the corruptible body passes away, disappears, returns to the earthly elements of nature, the incorruptible body remains here. The dead are with us, all around us, all of the time. We should not consider them to be off in the heavens or hells somewhere. The other dimensions are right here, though they operate according to different laws than the visible world.