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S2E29 TRANSCRIPT:

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body

Yucca: Welcome back to the wonder science-based paganism. I'm one of your hosts Yucca. 

Mark: And I'm the other one, Mark.

Yucca: And today we are talking about the body, our bodies, what bodies are our relationship to them and how that ties into our. 

Mark: Right. One of the things that is often used as a, a distinction between paganism and many of the other larger religions is that we are an embodied religion. We are about the, the, the materiality of earth and ourselves and the, the biotic kingdom, all of which is physical. It's all, it's all made up of material stuff.

Yucca: Yep. And most of us aren't trying to ascend to a higher plane or any of that kind of stuff. 

Mark: Well, there are a lot of people in the pagan community who, for example believe in a soul or a spirit. And they, they believe that that may carry on through a reincarnation process or something like that as non theists, pagans, we, and science-based pagans. We don't really buy that. We don't see any evidence.

What we see evidence for is that there is no distinction between the body and the self or the mind we are thinking meat. And it's the meat that does the thinking. So our bodies are ourselves. And in order to, to fully live in the experience of being human in this world, we have to embrace the physicality of ourselves and not think of that as distinct or separate from the real self that the over culture tells us is like some ghost in the machine.

Yucca: Yeah.

and, and this can be tricky because we were just, before hitting the record, we were talking about how so much of our language is shaped by the cultures that we are around and the religions that influence the larger culture. And so we'll often end up using. Words and expressions that don't reflect what we really believe like, oh, well this is the body I'm in, Right,

That expression would implies that the eye is separate from this body. And that I'm just in it. Like you were saying, the ghost in the machine that of just driving this body around rather than seeing wait, this body is. Me, my mind is 

Mark: Yeah. 

Yucca: an expression it's created from it's it's emergent from this body 

Mark: Right, 

Yucca: and it's not a different thing.

It's part of it. 

Mark: right.

Right, There are, there are technical terms for those two different worldviews and they are dualism and monism and dualism was advanced as a model. I mean, it's been believed for many, many centuries. It philosophically, it was advanced as a model by Rene cart with his famous, I think therefore I am he was willing to extend that the fact that he was thinking meant that he had existence, but he wasn't willing to go quite so far as to say that his body was a part of that thinking process which we have since learned it is.

It is indeed to the degree that we now are able to identify particular little synopsis that encode particular meanings for us particular words. 

Yucca: Mm. 

Mark: It's not a precise process by any means, but there has been enough research to demonstrate that the thinking is, as you said, an emergent property of the brain and of the nervous system.

And what that means is that we are our bodies. The sum total of everything we are is our bodies. 

Yucca: Mm. 

Mark: That, that is a view called monism, which as opposed to dualism, which is the idea that the body and the mind, or spirit or soul or something are separate and that one could exist without the other. And as you say, we use so much language even to say my body.

Makes no sense because really what we should be saying is I, I do this, you know, I, I kicked my legs. I I don't respond well to a bell peppers. I need insulin whatever, whatever it is. It's not my body needs this. It's I need this because there's no difference between the self and the body. And this is important.

It's not just important from the philosophical standp