from the "Oracular Organs" series (2021)

 

I found this ancient, unfinished piece here in storage at my father's place. I started it in 2002. I decided to fix it up, and finished it. I hadn't the slightest clue what prompted this thing in the first place, but I now believe it depicts a "dissociative soul" or "visceral pupa". 

This gets to the heart of this series' themes--that the body is a "host of sensations". By this I mean to infer that the self is somatic--the body generates a sense & sensation of self out of a communicative collective of cellular processes. 

     Our identification with this self, as distinct from the body, is false and dissociative, a dream within a dream.

We tend to believe that this self is the "I" that astral travels or even transmigrates from body to body over lifetimes, but I suspect this is our ego's desire to persist--a pernicious, armored response in confrontation with its inherently illusory nature, and ultimately its dissolution. 

     I think we feel most like ourselves when we lose ourselves in sensation and sensual delight--this is when the cellular collective of the soul comes alive and a knowing beyond our grasp takes the wheel-within-a-wheel. Especially when we lose ourselves in sensation with one another.

     "What of all the sensations we became?

     We'll recollect them by someone else's name.

     You may suspect them

     to be One and the same."  

     I suspect that no sense of soul or self is ever experienced without a body and its perceptual organs. Even an NDE may draw near death, but is not all the way untethered from the body. So long as the brain is alive (and able to dilate time) all experience is mediated.

I discuss this with Anthony Peake in an upcoming SPAOP episode, in relation to his research and his Cheating the Ferryman hypothesis. 

Don’t mistake these speculations for materialist reductionism. There is something far stranger at play here.