Our bodies obviously suffer: they get injured and sick, they age and die. Life as a body is just plain painful. Lots of spiritual philosophies and practices are ways we respond to our suffering bodies. These responses often involve dissociation. Dissociation is a way of separating your consciousness from its awareness of the painful condition of your body. When you use dissociative techniques, your awareness becomes split off from the awareness of your painful body. When you dissociate, you go into a kind of trance state in which negative sensations or emotions become distanced and separate.
Dissociative practices are common in religions. Many types of prayer techniques induce dissociation. Many kinds of meditation are dissociative. Transcendental meditation and Buddhist breath mediation are both dissociative. Dissociation is a kind of detachment, and detachment is common in Buddhism. Buddha said attachment is the root of suffering. So, if you want to stop suffering, become detached. Lots of Stoic spiritual practices aim to induce detachment and dissociation. Many sorts of drugs, like psychedelics and cannabis, induce dissociative states. There’s little doubt that dissociative techniques can be useful and valuable. But they can also be pathological and delusional.
These techniques of dissociation often assume a theoretical separation of the mind from the body. For the Buddhists, separation occurs through the purification of consciousness. The pure Buddha-mind is untroubled by external events. For the Stoics, detachment means realizing that your essential self (your ego) is not your body. It’s a point of inner stillness and purity, which cannot be injured or harmed by external causes. The Stoics didn’t quite refer to this essential self as the soul, but it’s pretty close to the Christian idea of the soul as an immaterial entity separate from the body. For the Neoplatonists, the soul is often portrayed as utterly separate from the body. So this theoretical mind-body dualism goes hand in hand with techniques of detachment.
Bodies are transitory and vulnerable. They will fall apart and die. They will get sick and injured. They are guaranteed to be sources of pain. So detachment from your body, or the bodies of your loved ones, means disvaluing those bodies and their fragility. According to mind-body dualism, the really valuable or essential part of yourself is your pure mind or soul. Not your corruptible body. Spiritual traditions that value dissociation or detachment end up splitting you in half. Detachment means realizing that the world of perception and contingency is mere illusion rather than reality. It’s becoming, not being. Or it’s a narrow, ego-centric perspective. Overcome that perspective, and you overcome suffering.
Since pain hurts, an old tradition says that pain is bad or evil. This probably started with the Epicureans, but it flourishes with contemporary utilitarians. They say that happiness, meaning positive feelings and pleasures, is good. But pain is evil. I’m happy to say that pain is to be avoided and dispreferred, but not that it’s evil or that it has negative value. Conversely, I don’t think pleasure is good or valuable. It’s to be desired and preferred, but that doesn’t make it good. Goodness comes from something else.
I say this in part because I suffer from many chronic illnesses (migraines, depression, severe arthritis, acid reflux, and allergies). These chronic conditions often make my life pretty miserable. If I though pain was bad, then I’d have to think my body is bad, or defective, or that my genes are defective, or that evolution and the earth are bad. I’d be forced to find evil in the very nature of my being. But my being is not evil. A painful, miserable life is not a worse life than a happier more pleasurable life. A life with chronic sickness is not less worth living. In many ways, it may be a life more worth living. It requires you to engage with contingency, with finitude, with non-being. And it’s no contradiction to say that I’d prefer to be cured of my illnesses (and I actively seek cures). I don’t value the impairments of my body. They are merely facts.
As a naturalist, I think I am identical with my body. I am not an immaterial soul, nor am I any sort of pure consciousness. Even though perception is limited and often superficial, the physical world is not illusory. And I’m perfectly happy with the notion that my soul is a pattern of physical activity that produces my body. It’s a dynamical structure, like a computer program. Rather than think of the soul as imprisoned in the body, or entombed in the body, I think of the soul as producing the body, like a plant produces a flower, or like a program creates a video game. The soul does not fall or descend into the body. On the contrary, the soul ascends into the body, it surpasses itself to become body. Without body, soul is just an abstract algorithm that is powerless, useless, and valueless.
It’s interesting that Christianity (in its New Testament form) has a suffering body at its very core: the suffering body of Jesus on the cross. And Christianity doesn’t promise that your soul will leave your body and go to heaven (that’s Plato, by the way). It promises that your corruptible body (soma psychikon) will become an incorruptible body (soma pneumatikon). Your earthly body will be resurrected as a divine body. The trouble here is that Christianity also says that only an omnipotent God can perform this resurrection. It’s a miracle, something utterly supernatural and alien to the earth. The body and the earth remain fallen and defective. So that’s not a useful path for a naturalist.
As a naturalist, I’m skeptical of the value of dissociative techniques. I don’t want to detach from my suffering body, even when it hurts. I’d like, instead, to find a way to shine like a bright light in the middle of that physiological darkness. There are people who engage spiritually with pain. They seek it out for the sake of illumination. Some people cultivate athletic activities which require suffering. Others participate in ordeals, like BDSM practices, in which pain is sought out and lived through in ways that are transformative. Since these ordeals often get sensationalized in the media, it’s essential to stress that they often have very little or nothing to do with sex. Still, I’m too squeamish for those kinds of practices. The Dance of Souls is not for me. And these ordeals might also induce a kind of dissociation, a detachment from the pain. So I’m skeptical of their value.
I seek spiritual techniques that don’t renounce the body or the earth, but that dive into the suffering body in ways that produce new kinds of value. Perhaps aesthetic value, that is, beauty, is relevant here. Beauty is often painful in a cognitive way. There are deep links between the experience of pain and the experience of beauty. It must be stressed that pain is not something to be sought out; on the contrary, it is to be avoided. But it will occur, we will suffer, and then we need spiritual assistance. So far, most religious and spiritual advice is to deny the body, to hate its weakness, to value some non-bodily soul or some anti-earthly heaven or pure land. The traditional religious or spiritual response to pain is to deny the body, deny the earth, deny the universe. We need better responses. Naturalists don’t yet have good responses here, and much naturalism falls into the old patterns of dissociation and detachment. We need to do better.
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