A Physical Sojourn

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately.

Wait, it’s more accurate to say that I’ve been feeling a lot about physical death, more than usual. Of course, it’s expected that someone with a terminal disease would, but since I haven’t yet died from ALS after 16 years, one would expect the fascination with death to lessen over time. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. As time proceeds and carries me silently to my inevitable end, my perception of its shadow is constant and inescapable. Is it age, my physical infirmity, my character or a result of what I learn? It doesn’t matter though, does it? Death is coming for all of us, despite our distracted willingness to deny it.

So, what does feeling about death feel like?

On a physical level, I feel my body’s weight and coarseness. It’s heavy, cumbersome, uncomfortable and annoyingly needy! Oh my God, it’s needy! It’s hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, itchy, painful, lethargic, anxious and stressed, sleepy, smelly, hairy, hormonal, dirty and requiring constant maintenance and upkeep.

Seriously, have you ever paid attention to how much attention your body requires? Most of what you do to appease the body is automatic, so you don’t notice it. But if you’re paralysed and can’t use your hands, you’ll soon see how much work it needs by requiring someone around 24/7 to help you.

However, in gratitude to the paralysing experience of ALS, I no longer feel that the body is me. My body feels like an evolving possession rather than a personal manifestation. Even using the possessive “my body” in a sentence illustrates the similarity with “my car” or “my clothes.” That is, “my” body feels like an object but not really me. The only thing that feels like “me” is the consciousness that perceives or experiences this body.

I look at my withered forearm, and I don’t recognise it. I look at my face in a mirror, and I may as well be looking at someone that I’ve known for a long time besides “me.” I’m looking at a reflected face that I’ve learned via repetition to identify as “me”. But while it may reflect the face of this body, does it reflect “me”? It doesn’t feel like it. The more I look at that reflection, the more I realise that we can’t see our own faces without a reflective surface. Without a reflective surface to reflect our face back to us, we’d never know what we’d look like, and consequently, judge and measure ourselves by.

I was daydreaming once that I lived in a world without reflective surfaces. Finally, after 50 years, someone took a photo of my face without my knowledge and showed it to me without telling me who it was. When I looked at the picture, I didn’t know who it was, and when the photographer began to explain that it was me, I would laugh and deny it altogether. After all, who is this stranger etched on a piece of paper? It certainly couldn’t be me; I don’t recognise that stranger at all!

There’s a gap between the object of my body and the subject of my consciousness that’s held together by frayed strands of visual representation. It isn’t that I don’t recognise myself, but I have a recognition that my body and face aren’t the essential me.

I just realised that if I didn’t have photos of myself as a kid, I would not remember what I had looked like at 5, 10, 15 or 20 years old. Isn’t that freakish? For example, I can vaguely remember looking in mirrors and seeing my reflection, but I cannot remember what that reflection looks like! When I try and remember, I think I create a rough composite memory from all the photos I have. But if I didn’t have those pictures to remind me of my younger self, I wouldn’t have a clue as to what I looked like.

To go even further, I think it would be the same with most memories of others. Over time and without visual reminders through photographs, drawings or others’ descriptions, we’d forget past people’s faces the more time passed. We’d have a vague impression of what they looked like, and we may recognise them as soon as we saw them (if they haven’t changed too much), but otherwise, their facial memory would be a blur. This explains why people’s most prized possessions to save from destruction are photographs; people don’t want to forget those they love in the past.

My body truly feels like an object I inhabit. It’s a tool I use, a vehicle I manoeuvre, a costume I wear to interact with the reality I perceive around me. On analysing this body, I realise I have very little control over its clockwork functioning. This body is held together through the cooperation of trillions of individual, autonomous cells. They divide, reproduce, eat and excrete and die in endless repetitions of which I have no awareness or control. Each cell is forming a bound community that exists as an independent organ fulfilling another specialised function I have no control over. My intestinal tract digests, the heart pumps, the kidneys filter. I drive this body, but its moving parts are combined, assembled, maintained and working without my input.

I suppose we can use a simple car analogy. While I’m in the car, I’m responsible for driving it here and there, but I didn’t build it or put it together. Neither am I consciously making all the independent parts work in unison. However, when I’m inside it and turn it on, all I control is where it goes and how fast it gets there. While I can do some basic maintenance, another intelligence designed and built it. However, the car needs a conscious driver to make it run and function. I am just the driver. I am not the car. Once I leave the car and cease to maintain it, nothing in the car runs, and it will slowly decompose and rust.

Just like the car, my body works independently of my awareness via an intelligence to which my consciousness obviously belongs. After all, just as my consciousness can drive this body or use it to manipulate matter in the surrounding objects, then so too must a higher intelligence control and direct the fundamental forms of our reality. Everything around me, from the rotation speed of the earth giving me days and nights, to plants living through photosynthesis, and the myriad of species in their various and wondrous designs inhabiting the planet, their laws and composition must be guided by a supreme intelligence. This supreme intelligence is what holds and controls every atom and molecule in the universe.

Every atom and molecule miraculously knows where to be.

This is so profound that when the thought arose in me, I wept from the wisdom in that insight. Every atom and molecule knows where to be! What do you think would keep your body’s octillion atoms in their precise locations to make your body what it is? Not only that but your atoms are continuously being replaced and rearranged in your body. The question has to be asked: how doesn’t your body fall apart or morph into another species? You’re going to say DNA, right? But what holds the atoms that form the DNA into its alphabetical and chromosomal structure? You see, you can talk of physics and chemistry all you like, but all you’ll be explaining are effects. Because if you go down and dirty and question why and how so many atoms maintain your form, you’re going to have to eventually conclude that there’s intelligence at play—a supreme, invisible intelligence directing the molecular orchestra.

If you’ve seen something die and decompose, you’ve been witness to that intelligence no longer holding that molecular structure together. That life force, the intelligence that animated a material body holding its form together, is absent. What is that intelligence? Many over the ages have called it spirit. The spirit can be thought of as the “intelligence” that holds molecular form through time. After all, the only difference between a molecular construction that is alive and one that is not is the intelligence flowing through it—its spirit. It seems, then, that when the spirit (the driver) withdraws from organic matter, its physical form (the body) dies. Physical death appears to be the process of our spirit leaving the body. While the spirit is inside and animating the body, that’s what’s commonly thought of as a soul. A soul is an incarnated spirit—a spirit in physical form.

With this concept of our spirit (driver) driving a physical body (vehicle) in mind, it should become obvious why or how we can feel disconnected from ourselves or the world around us. Our souls feel alienated in a form that’s subconsciously recognised as not us, in a nonsensical world that’s not ours. It’s a subconscious recognition, an intuitive remembrance that we don’t belong here, that this isn’t our home. We feel lonely and lost, yearning for something we can’t place. We intuitively know this life isn’t all there is. This isn’t base reality. It can’t be. If it were, we wouldn’t have developed the perception of something beyond. We wouldn’t have the notion, or the capability to reason on metaphysical and spiritual subjects. After all, materialist evolution doesn’t require it for survival. We could have remained primates and survived well enough as apes currently do. No abstract reasoning or metaphysical revelation is evolutionarily required.

No! It’s obvious to anyone with eyes to see that there’s something more, something beyond the veil. And physical death, with its superficial horrors, is the freeing of our spirit from its physical sojourn. That is what I see now; souls inhabiting and maintaining molecular forms until it’s no longer feasible or required. My forearm, so alien to me in its withered form, is being held together molecularly by the supreme intelligence coursing through the cosmos, and my spirit has temporarily taken up residence to go for a ride. Once the ride is over, my spirit disembarks and remembers itself as the veil of ignorance is lifted:

“Ah, that’s why I didn’t recognise myself; it wasn’t me!”

Tell me in the comment’s section if or how you relate to this experience. Thank you for being here, and talk to you soon.

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Also published on Medium.