Continuing on from this post, where I’ve gone on a bit about the separation between the soul and the body and how that seems to be a primary focus of modern spirituality – not just Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, and modern Paganism as well – to somehow escape these mortal confines and move on to a Better Place, whether that be another physical place (planet, dimension, vibrational plane, etc) or an afterlife.

I mentioned in that post that it was interesting to me that I have been pondering this focus and how our more modern new age/pagan faiths must be getting this influence from Christianity (western interpretations of reincarnation/karma, starseeds, 5th dimensionality, otherkin, etc), and why we have this opposition to being incarnated beings and enjoying our earthly existence when I ran into the same concept in my Somatic Psychology reading for school. An observation about how society believes in a sparation between the mind/brain and body. That the body is some kind of machine that we must pilot, discipline and control with our true selves, the mind.

I may have forgotten to mention how somatic psychology interprets this as leading to a separation between the individual and society, and humans and nature, cascading out into multiple levels and layers of separation, creating divisions on divisions.

Anyways, so interestingly, after I posted that, the very next day, in my Decolonizing Worldviews class, it was mentioned again, in a very offhanded way, that Renee Descartes was responsible for introducing this idea in Christianity/Philosophy.

Renee Descartes was an extremely famous philosopher, commonly considered the father of modern philosophy and most famously known for “I think, therefore I am.” He apparently introduced the “mind-body dualism” – the whole idea that the mind/spirit is separate from the body.

This was back in the 1600s, so while for the time his thinking was rigorous and thorough, he was relying on his own perceptions and his own feeling of certainty for deciding what was true and real and what wasn’t.

So now we’ve arrived at the place where we started to separate the soul from the body entirely (because in the scripture, we have 15 Corinthians 42-44: “So, also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. There is a natural. body, and there is a spiritual body.”)

All just food for thought!