That the human being consists of only two parts—body and mind—is a concept so much taken for granted in the Western societal mainstream that its authenticity is hardly ever questioned.
Indeed, the body-mind concept in its modern status has been science-sacrosanct—so much so that mainstream workings can feel justified in relegating contrasting phenomena and data into the nebulosity of the unscientific.
Thus, the modern “image of man” is as body-mind. The culture-shaping influences of this image have been exceedingly strong. The image is so powerfully and redundantly prevailing in the overall societal sense that hardly anyone even knows how to begin challenging it—not even scientists themselves.
The image conceptually divides the basic perception of the human into two parts. This, of course, is a dualistic dividing, and is in keeping with the somewhat demented love affair the cultural West has conducted with the reductionism philosophy of dualism.
One importance of this dividing is that it omits, or does not permit, a logical tripartite dividing that includes human energies, human energetics, and phenomena accompanying them.
So it is perpetually difficult, for example, to account for and give authentic place to sexual energies, creative energies, mental energies, and, as well, to morphological energies that shape inanimate matter into animate formats.
In order to discuss the concept of the human as body-energy-mind, it is first somewhat profitable to review when and why the decidedly faulty dualistic concept became established.
IMAGES OF MAN
During the early decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists dug deeply into the cultural aspects of past societies.
Those studies reinforced the concept that human societies need what is referred to as an “Image of Man,” in order to have some idea of what men thought MAN (including women) to be. In the past, therefore, human societies erected different kinds of images of man, based on whatever was seen as consensus reality by those societies.
This need is an exceedingly interesting revelation overall about the “nature” of societal humans. But it has always led into problems—especially among those societies which felt that only one Image of Man was needed, and this was the one THEY had constructed. Many Images have come and gone, of course.
In this light, the modernist body-mind Image is, in the nearing future, likely to be replaced as not quite authentic and all-inclusive, largely because advancing scientific discoveries are leading toward new knowledge packages.
Many early anthropologists noted that different Images of Man were established and adopted by each given society. Each society, then, saw all other Images as useless, and sometimes as a threat to the integrity and sanctity of its own Image.
Some wonderful books were produced regarding images of man. But when investigated species-wide, the fact that there were so many images, each differing, clearly established that all Images of Man were only artifacts of societal thinking.
Further, it could be surmised that the realities upon which the Images were based might only consist of supposed realities that somehow gained mainstream support.
So in actual fact, the Images were considered authentic only by virtue of the mainstream support. And since most societal mainstreams demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, perhaps many Images were in fact empty of everything but authoritarian insistence and conditioning.
The anthropological studies further revealed that the realities upon which the Images were incorporated could consist as much of the illusory as of reality. By direct implication, then, the anthropological revelations touched upon an issue quite sensitive to the modernist mindsets.
This sensitivity specifically involved the authenticity and durability of the Image of Man that the modern sciences and philosophies were working so diligently to construct.
The most important issue along these lines was that the modern sciences were working to ELIMINATE illusory, religious, and superstitional contexts that the moderns felt had been incorporated into all earlier Images. But anthropologists more or less suggested that all earlier societies also had thought they were eliminating the same things.
Even a hint that the modern sciences, however unsuspectingly, might be replacing earlier illusions with new illusions of their own was untenable. So various brouhaha’s erupted in scientific and academic circles, all eagerly fueled by philosophical Intellectuals.
These arguments increased in pitch when anthropologists began reporting on certain conditions that were notable in earlier societies:
1. awareness of invisible energies
2. different sexual formats, often ritualized
3. connections of apparent sexualizing energies with “higher powers of mind”
4. the use of erotic methods to enhance creative and psychic capacities
THE MODERN EMERGENCE OF PHILOSOPHICAL DUALISM
The body-energy-mind concept was entirely visible and relevant during the many decades of the European Renaissance, one of the most significant reculturalizing events in human history.
Indeed, it could be said, with historical justification, that the sciences of the Renaissance were focused on cosmic, natural and biological “energetics.”
However, at some point during the post-Renaissance decades, this important trinity passed from mainstream consideration, with the result that the human was increasingly explained as body-mind only.
After the disappearance of Renaissance energetics, and until the 1930s Soviet introduction of bio-energetics, no comparable official concept really existed in the modern scientific and philosophical West. Although human energies could be talked about in popular, layman terms, there existed no official scientific or philosophical substance for them.
The concept of dualism is quite ancient, some of its formats dating back to Manichaeism arising in Persia about A.D. 226. Earlier formats are found in ancient Greece and among the even earlier Sanskrit-speaking people of India.
Most dictionaries usually offer three principle definitions of DUALISM:
1. a theory that considers reality to consist of two irreducible elements or modes
2. a view of man as constituted of two irreducible elements
3. a doctrine that the universe is under the dominion of two opposing principles, one of which is good and the other evil
Even though dualism does have a lengthy history, the particular concept of dualism that came to overwhelm modern thought is acknowledged as originating from the famous French philosopher and scientist, Rene Descartes (1596-1650.)
Descartes is unquestionably accepted as major among the founders of modern thought, but also among the most original philosophers and mathematicians of any age.
It is interesting to learn of an unusual element in Descartes’ early background. On the night of November 10, 1619, while in Germany, he had certain dreams which he interpreted as a divine sign that his destiny was to found a unified science of nature.
At the time of the dream it seemed that this new unity would be based on mathematics. He did not, however, immediately set about to write works of philosophy or science, but continued to travel widely.
His first substantial work was “Rules for the Direction of the Mind” written in 1628-29. Although “Rules” was never completed, what did exist was published in 1701, but probably only because Descartes had become a philosophical superstar by the time of his death in 1650.
In November 1628, Descartes was in Paris, where he distinguished himself in a famous confrontation with one Chandoux, who held that science could be founded only on probabilities (probability theory later becoming a significant issue in physics at about 1928.)
Descartes eloquently attacked Chandoux, vigorously claiming: (1) that only absolute certainty (not probability) could serve as a basis of human knowledge, and (2) that he himself had a method of establishing this basis.
Here is made visible one essential ingredient regarding the nearly absolute charisma Descartes’ thinking was to have, a charisma that is by no means dispelled even today.
Simply put, most humans prefer to deal in absolute certainties rather than in amorphous probabilities. Thus, Descartes was not only to become an exponent of certainty, but a comforting icon of it as well.
As regards Cartesian Dualism, Descartes held, in absolute certainty of course, that there are only TWO causally unrelated substances, the physical and the mental.
Accordingly, for Descartes, a human being must be some kind of union of two distinct things: a soul, or mind—and a body. The body is part of mechanical nature, the mind, a “pure thinking substance.”
Since the body is merely a physical mechanical system, the pure thinking substance must be the principle of life that energizes the mechanical system.
For Descartes, live bodies differ from dead ones as stopped watches differ from working ones. Moreover, there are many actions that the bodily machine performs on its own, without any intervention of the thinking substance (a.k.a., the soul.)
This Cartesian division of the human being into two distinct categories of body and mind apparently disposed of the “soul” which was a religious concept by renaming it “mind.” And in this sense, Cartesian dualism was seized upon by later scientific materialists as the battle between religion and science heated up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Descartes later changed his mind and became prepared to identify a close union between soul and body as a “substantial union” of MOTION. He does suggest that this union is in fact a “primitive” and thus unanalyzable union.
Nonetheless, he went to some lengths to analyze it. In fact, his increasing analysis led him to have a good deal to say about it, and he did so in his PASSIONS OF THE SOUL which he published in 1649.
As discussed in PASSIONS, the nature of the soul is quite complicated. But Descartes essentially offered a picture of the soul directly moving the pineal gland and thus affecting the “animal spirits,” which he considered to be the hydraulic transmission system of mechanical change.
One might have to struggle a little regarding this concept, but a possible clarification is that “hydraulic transmission system” is a kind of energizing principle.
Descartes’ picture also referred to what the soul was and was not conscious of, but there are certain difficulties in understanding exactly how he envisioned this consciousness.
In any event, the pineal gland theory offered in PASSIONS was not a part of the Cartesian system that garnered wide favor in the developing patterns of the material, modern sciences.
The pineal gland idea, however, found wide favor in the occult sciences—so called to distinguish those sciences as areas of knowledge rejected by the modern science.
It is somewhat ironical, even humorous, that Descartes’ ideas were seminal within both the modern materialistic sciences AND the modern occult sciences.
THE HUMAN AS BODY-ENERGY-MIND
One of the most common overviews of human energies, including those sexual, is that they constitute functions, “drives,” or powers of some human aspect that is not actually physical by definition, but understood as being quite close to an “instinctual” something or other.
Most dictionaries give at least two definitions for INSTINCT. The second one (most usually emphasized in science and academia), defines INSTINCT as “consisting of specific responses to environmental factors, the responses being hereditary, unalterable, and not involving reason.”
However, the term is drawn from the Latin INSTINCTUS, meaning “impulse.” Thus, the first definition in English is given as “a natural impulse, capacity, or aptitude.” So there is a “conflict” between the first and second definitions.
It is true that a “specific response” can be seen as an impulse. On the other hand, the word “specific” can bring up a number of questions if one takes time to reflect. A little further thinking can reveal that a response is not exactly the same as an impulse.
The principle reason is two-fold: while a response IS a reaction to a stimulus, an impulse, strictly speaking, is not a response or a reaction.
The center of this little difficulty is that IMPULSE is taken from the Latin IMPULSUS meaning “impel.” In English, therefore, IMPULSE is defined in ways that cannot really be equated with the definitions of RESPONSE.
IMPULSE usually has at least three definitions: (1) the act of driving onward with sudden force; (2) a wave of excitation transmitted through tissues and especially nerve fibers and muscles that results in physiological activity or inhibition; (3) a force so communicated as to produce motion suddenly.
The distinction here is that RESPONSE to stimuli obviously is the effect of some cause, while IMPULSE as to impel is clearly describing a cause that will result in effects or responses.
Additionally, “a wave of excitation transmitted” obviously refers to some kind of energy, or to some kind of energetic or energizing process.
Furthermore, whether instinct, response, or impulse, none of them can be random or just flopping about. Otherwise, life forms that have them would quickly be reduced to a pulsating mess. Thus, some kind of “organizing intelligence” is implicit, and which, by all available clues, is energetic.
Various problems arise if it is accepted that the physical body is the fundamental reality regarding what the human is—because this relegates the human as energy to a less important conceptual place, or perhaps to no real place at all. Even if “mind” is added to “body,” this dualism still omits “energy.”
In actuality, the human is some kind of a “marriage” of active energies and physical body. Indeed, people refer to “body energy” and to “mental energy.” It is thus somewhat difficult to see why the energetic components of the human are NOT included in science, or why human energetic phenomena generally fall into the unscientific category.
And if the energy aspect of the human is SUBTRACTED from the body aspect, and from the mental aspect, then the fate of the body will fall apart and back into the inorganic materials of which it is composed. The fate of the mind is much worse.
It is true that the rather recent concept of biophysical energies does exist. But it is also the case that the term “biology” came into German and French usage only in 1802, and into English usage in 1813.
Since then, the definition of BIOLOGY (or BlO) has referred to the science of physical life, the division of science that deals with “organized beings,” their morphology; physiology, origin and distribution—but does not deal with their energies.
In the narrower, and most broadly accepted sense, biology refers to physiology—”the branch of biology dealing with the processes, activities, and phenomena incidental to and characteristic of life and living matter.”
In the bio-physiological sense, then, the human is thought fundamentally to be living matter organized into a body. This concept is something of a derangement of the actual facts.
In actuality, the matter itself is NOT living, since the atoms of organic and inorganic matter are exactly the same. Indeed, all atoms incorporated into any and all physical structures, including the skeletal and electronic nervous system, are gradually but completely exchanged every seven years by new atoms.
While the concept of biophysical energies has been making a slow comeback since the 1930s, the concept of bio-energetic physicals has not.
In other words, we think FROM matter TO energies—not from ENERGIES to MATTER.
But even so, a vital question pertinent to both concepts remains: which of energy or body is the cart and which is the horse that pulls the cart? This is to ask, do the impulses of energy drive the automobile, or do the impulses of the automobile drive the energy.
Perceptive individuals can recognize that whatever the human IS, it is a complex and complicated affair, one that incorporates much more than body-mind alone.
The question can then emerge as to WHY, during modern scientific times, the most generally shared consensus REDUCES this complex affair to the simple parameters of the physical body, or to the body-mind duality.
This is a reductionistic concept via which the human as energy isn’t only set aside, but obviated into obscurity. To discover the WHY of this can be helpful, and can lead to greater insights regarding human as energy.