There is this eternal dichotomy pervading the reflections about being human in this body. It seems that from the beginning we understand that there is more here than meets the eye, more than flesh furiously zipping around looking for ways to produce copies of itself (this is the logic of a tumor cell). Since the origins of philosophy (which was in its infancy still very much connected to the practicality of life) there was a postulate of the soul, and the references to the same stuff consisting a human as spirit, anima, ghost in all the ancient societies. There was this notion that a body was a vessel containing a soul, like a meaty taxi for a few decades from which you’re released by the death of the body to return to a realm of spirit, eternal consciousness, the interconnected energy of all there is, heaven/hell… the accounts vary but the dualism is still present.

Once the sciences advanced and still had no success of pinpointing the soul/consciousness, the words we used in our dichotomy with the body changed -the soul become “thought” or “brain” as the seat of the thought. A thought as a free agent, not connected to your body, as a “thing in itself”. This is what the new rational thinking of enlightenment era aimed to do – to lobby for the thought as a pure thing and make sure it is not mudded by our own lower urges, emotions and instincts rooted in the body. The dichotomy is still the same and equally unresolvable, it just uses different terms. You are not a brain and a body – your whole body is that brain, and it is intelligent. Maybe not verbally intelligent so we tend to dismiss everything that cannot speak for itself but it speaks by action. The neural network is not based only in the penthouse behind your eyes but stretches out throughout the body – the body that was designed to survive. Your eyes are finely tuned to a certain part of color spectrum to be able to recognize the colors of ripe fruits and vegetables, you are very good at intuitively understanding the movement of medium sized objects to be able to hunt and use tools, your gut has just as much to say in how you feel as your brain does.

There is no dichotomy, you are all of it all the time. You were made to thrive, consume, fight, grow, learn from mistakes, invent, search. Your mission is not ot find a space where the parts of you separate but a life in which they all integrate.