With freedom of expression running rampant, in large part due to the Internet, I wonder about evolution and devolution of consciousness.

A person at home in their own skin seems a rarity these days. The body is used and seen as more of a commodity than an organism of consciousness. Many will think it strange to even refer to the body as an organ of consciousness. We hear the phrase body-mind quite a bit, but that is still further out on the onion than the actual state of affairs.

Most of us are quite attached to the body, but treat it with less regard than our favorite old t-shirt. Even with all of the sexual permission, exploitation and “freedom” of the past 50 years, many still suffer from the plague of “body sin.”

I thought I was the quickest mind alive and the quickest with words but words cannot catch up with these changes, these changes are beyond words, beyond words, beyond words. While I repeated these words I felt the waves of pleasure like those of the most acute pleasure of lovemaking . . . I felt the impossibility to tell the secret of life because the secret of life was metamorphosis, transmutation, and it happened too quickly, too subtly. – Anais Nin

Electric flesh-arrows . . . traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm. – Anais Nin

The physical body is the visible manifestation of the so-called Subconscious Mind. The body is the fingerprint of the soul, a Rorschach of the Self. Nothing can be hidden. The body communicates it all. These last two sentences may be the motto of David Cronenberg’s work; the unconscious is never as un-conscious as we like to think. – Antero Alli

What do you think the body is?

Image by Peter Sharpe