The Great Awakening Part 2/4
The Fracture Questions: Time, Mortality, Body, Relatedness
Hi everyone,
I’ve been writing about the core questions that frame our cosmology, beyond the god questions and the gratitude and the love and the lineage questions. The ones that go unexamined, but are at the core of the way we design our lives, our societies, even the future we expect or the breadth of what we might imagine. Whether we live in a sort of 1+1=2 flatness or a field of magic. People can answer “what is time” or “is earth home or obstacle” so differently that all choices that come from that split.
So let’s have a look.
Today: Part 2: Time, Mortality, Body, Relatedness.
Coming up: Part 3: Legitimacy, AI, Sacredness, Grief, The Feminine.
Part 4: Deeper Dives into the 4 Emergences
Time: Line or Spiral, Consquence or Resonance?
Many of us in the west grew up with an assumption of linear progressive time, or the idea that history moves forward toward improvement. That is no longer the default.
Consider how many conceptions of time people are actually living in: The physicists describe a block universe, past and future equally real and existing at once, the present moment no more privileged than here is privileged over there. Even Einstein called our division into past, present, and future a stubborn illusion.
Geologists live in deep time, where a single human life is a flicker and the felt unit is the eon, and they make decisions a person inside a news cycle cannot fathom.
The Greeks kept two words: chronos, the sequential time you can count, and kairos, the charged and opportune moment. A person living in kairos and a person living in chronos run different orientations. French philosopher Henri Bergson split durée — the continuous qualitative flow of time as we actually experience it — from the measured, spatialized time of clocks and physics. Durée is both the hour that vanishes and the minute that will not end.
In Hindu cosmology, you have the Yugas, the vast cycles of time. The current Kali Yuga descends, not rises, in a long cosmic darkening that makes the contemporary idea of “progress” simply a local weather pattern. Aboriginal Dreamtime, the everywhen, holds the ancestral past as also and always present.
Each represents a different relationship to sequence, cause, and meaning. In the field I practice within, classical Tantra, time (kāla) is a cloak the absolute draws over itself to forget that it is everything, to experience itself as sequential.
So the Western linear world of time runs on consequence (what follows), but a non-linear one on resonance (what fits, rhymes, comes round, restores balance). Consequence asks what follows; resonance asks what belongs.
If you have a direct experience of the resonant timeless, the present that never passes, it’s very difficult to explain it to someone for whom time is linear, and prone to run out, but here are some examples:
A linear world has compound interest; the resonance world has the Jubilee, the periodic clean slate where debts cancel and land returns.
A resonance world treats harm as a present tear in a web, not a past event earning a proportional sentence, asking “what’s out of balance and how does it come round,” rather than “what happened and who pays.”
Institutions don’t default to a belief in progress; in a cyclical or degenerative age, the work is to preserve and transmit, through things such as seed banks, monasteries and lineages designed to last through collapse.
In a resonance mindset, we heal the field instead of tracing the cause. Symptoms are treated as live present entanglements, where everything is here at once, not effects of an excavated past trauma.
A sequential time view sees things as requiring diligence, sequencing, effort. A resonance mindset sees that everything can turn in a moment of grace, unpredictably.
Mortality: Feature or Bug?
I met researcher Aubrey de Grey at TED in 2005, when he was presenting the case that aging is a disease, and death an engineering problem. He was deep in mouse tests at the time. It read to me as a denial of the most organic fact there is: that we ripen and die and return, and that death is a feature, not a bug.
Now, more than two decades on, his bet is a mainstream and well-funded ambition. Life extension has become an industry. The transhumanist project, cryonics, and the upload of the brain into the cloud are its logical endpoints.
The everyday version of death avoidance is quieter: the West moved dying out of the home and into the hospital, handed the body to licensed professionals, and arranged never to see the dead. The corpse is washed and made up and sealed away by strangers. A person can now pass through an entire life without once witnessing death up close.
I remember standing at the burning ghats of Varanasi, where the pyres burn in the open, in the middle of the living city, day and night. The family carries the body down through the streets, lights the fire, stays with it, and the ash goes into the river the same city drinks and bathes and prays in. Death there is domestic and ordinary and on full view — the visible turn of the wheel. Children grow up knowing exactly what a body does when the breath leaves it.
On the other side of the divide are people for whom conscious relationship with mortality is the central practice, an aperture opener. These two camps cannot share a civilization in the deep sense. Their relationship to every single moment differs, because one is fleeing the end and the other is including it. And I will note that every contemplative practice includes death, the pondering of one’s own, a meditation on the fleeting life. )See Dream Mullick’s work on this, her beautiful death meditations Dream Mullick.
The Body: Corrected or Consecrated?
The body splits run between ideas who treat the body as an object the self possesses and works on, and people who have had at least one experience of the body as the site of sovereign truth and intelligence.
The object side has many flavors. Body as tool, to be used. Body as problem, to be fixed. Body as project, to be optimized forever because it is never finished. Body as machine, the Cartesian body of pumps and levers, explicable by its parts and therefore, in principle, repairable and upgradable, which is the assumption sitting under both modern medicine and de Grey’s dream of aging as an engineering problem. Body as enemy, the ascetic flesh to be subdued, the obstacle between a person and spirit. The body as a noun you have, the thing acted upon. The body that can be sold, rented, and harvested.
The other side of this: the body as temple, consecrated rather than corrected, the dwelling of the divine. Body as archive, holding memory and ancestry in tissue, below the reach of language. Body as the lived ground, the medium through which there is any world at all. We do not perceive with the body. We perceive as it.
My mother’s tongue, German, keeps the divide in two words. Leib, the lived body felt from inside, the body you are, kin to Leben, to life. Körper, borrowed later from the Latin corpus (the same root that gives us corpse) the body as object seen from outside, the one on the examination table. The etymology already holds the split: one word grows from life, the other from the corpse. Most of medicine and optimization and every exit project assumes you are a Körper. The somatic and tantric work assumes you are a Leib. These two attitudes, if unintegrated, will build incompatible worlds, and the knowing side stays partly incomprehensible to the other no matter how well it is explained, because the only proof is the no in the gut that arrives before the mind has agreed to anything.
The two build opposite institutions wherever they touch ground. Körper medicine trusts the chart and tells a patient with a clean scan that the pain is not real; Leib medicine treats “something is wrong” as data the instruments missed. A managed birth is a monitored extraction on the clock; the other kind assumes the body knows how and the mind should step out of the way. At the end of life, one model counts success in days added, the other in presence. The executive who trusts the model overrides the gut as bias to be corrected; the one who trusts the body walks out of a deal that pencils out perfectly because something in the room said no. Talk therapy reasons you out through the mind; somatic work discharges what the nervous system is still bracing against, which insight alone never reaches.
Tantra holds the deepest version. The microcosmic body of tantra seats every world and every deity within it, the energy centers (cakras) and channels (nāḍīs) a map of the whole, the body the field where Śiva and Śakti play and therefore the actual site of liberation. The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra never sends you out of the body to find the absolute. It sends you further in: into the breath, into the gap between two thoughts where the body shudders awake. The body is where the absolute is hiding.
Relatedness: Bounded or Porous?
This one is really a question about identity: what a self even is. At least three answers compete, and people rarely notice they have chosen one.
The first makes you a thing. A bounded unit, a sovereign individual, an atom of a self that exists complete and then chooses to enter relationships as a secondary move. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called this the buffered self. The term comes from his 2007 book A Secular Age, where he contrasts it with the older porous self — the buffered self is bounded, sealed at the edge of the mind, master of the meanings it assigns to a disenchanted world; the porous self was open and permeable to forces, spirits, and meanings outside it. It is the self late capitalism requires. The consumer, the brand, the resume, the soul held as private property. Hyperindividualism is this self taken to its logical end.
The second makes you a crowd. A collection of organisms run by a controlling mind, or minds. The body that is more microbial cells than human ones, the psyche a parliament of parts with no one finally in the chair, in which the “I” becomes a story the committee tells about itself. This view dissolves the fortress, which is a relief. It can also deflate into pure mechanism, and at that edge it circles back and thingifies you again, only now as a colony of survival units rather than a single one.
The third makes you a relationship. The self as porous, co-arising, never finally bounded, constituted through others before it is anything on its own. Ubuntu, the communitarian ethic carried in the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa, says it plainly — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons, I am because we are. The Bodhisattva vow lives here. So does worlding, the indigenous understanding of humans and land and species in constitutive relationship rather than contractual arrangement. So does polyvagal theory’s discovery that the nervous system is a social organ, regulated by other nervous systems, never private. This view sees the bounded self as a functional fiction.
Anyone who has chanted in a full room knows the moment the single voice stops being findable, when the I drops into the we and the boundary you guard all day simply is not there — and nothing was lost in its going. I write about this dissolve at length in my 2026 book, Mantra, Tantra, and Ayahuasca. That is the felt proof on the relational side. To a self that knows itself as a unit, it registers as a nice feeling and nothing more. These two are living in different selves, and each self builds the politics, the economics, the families, and the spiritual paths it requires.
(Continues in Part 3)
