Despisers of the Body

I wish to speak to the despisers of the body. Let them not learn differently nor teach differently, but only bid farewell to their own bodies – and so become dumb.

“I am body and soul” – so speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children?

But the awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body.

The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman.

You say “I” and you are proud of this word. But greater than this – although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say “I” but performs “I”.

- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Needless to say, I am coming around to this viewpoint more and more, especially of late.

As one who has been at war with my body – or shall I say my body has been at war with me over what I’ve done to it – I am feeling stronger every day that I need to have a physical metanoia, a come-to-Zarathustra moment. A lot of the spiritual blockage I feel may just very well be due to the physical blockage that’s been building up over the years, a dam threatening to burst, held together by spit and dirt and a little Dutch boy’s unspoken prayers.

The last worthy effort I made to reclaim my body, the summer of 2015, changed my life more powerfully than anything since that conversion experience I had back in the spring of 1992 when I renounced hedonism and read every jot and tittle of the Good Book. (And, also like that spring of 1992, my renaissance lasted four or five months until my old evil habits – “the despisers of the body” – came in to reclaim the house.)

I’m gonna lift some weights now.