Borborygmus, I'm told, is the name for a visceral gurgle. The profoundest gurgle of all the gurgles of mankind. We are, when all's said and done, little more than glorified earthworms: our ecological niche is turning and composting the soil. Biota of every kind go in at our leading, gnawing, swallowing edge... finest fertiliser exits at the rump. Limbs, senses and reproductive glands are auxiliary adaptations.
The worst alienation of all is alienation from the belly: the gut: the second brain... second brain from the top, that is, but the older by a billion years. There are more neurons in the tract between the stomach and the anal sphincter than in all the whorls of the cranium. Those who meditate come to know this, intimately. Insight lives in the intestine: the hara - the tan t'ien - the immortal spiritual foetus forever striving to be born. Deep diaphragmatic belly breaths burn off aeons of karma like the pushing of some perfective protoplasmic piston.
I sat once breathing silent breaths on a wooden platform inside a walled garden. The gardener raked the gravel of a path. I experienced all of this in my belly, being precisely for that moment both the gravel and the rake. What a marvelous taste of worm-mind!
For the worm there is no duality of outside-inside. Its hidden name is earth-glide-through-glide-through-earth. It is the soft mud's conscious tongue tasting itself. For a worm, far is as good as near. It is wholly self-same: it is maximally sensate: if it were any more adapted, it would be indistinguishable from its environment: its skin tastes mud, its gut tastes of glorious mud.
My ego stampedes towards intellect and fancy: fearing that one day I will be food for worms: believing that it can kill me and survive: that it can outrun the composting process which is all of life. The ego hounds us pell-mell up and down property ladders, onto treadmills of boom and bust. We charge for the safety of porno and reality tv: 7 billion constipated commuters taking a holiday from self.
Ego, I heard it said, is the sum total of our insults and wounds: it calcifies around the soft peristalsis of our life process. Look at us! All you can see is the scar tissue. Awkward gaits, twisted minds, rigid moralities, shallow breaths, bacchanalias enforced at gunpoint, the apotheosis of every perversion.
All that of course you already know: eat, drink, be merry, they say, for tomorrow we die. We killed the planet, now anything goes. It is suicide to run against the herd... Why die now when you can die very slightly later?
Anything you might say in protest against the race to the bottom is just more text, of which there is no right reading - every voice is a voice in the wilderness.
But, if you stop for just a while, in a still garden - while there are still gardens - and listen to the silence of your breath, you may hear the voice of utter confidence ringing out from your abdomen. Borborygmus, borborygmus, all is one (not even one), all is well. On that fixed point, you might just turn over the earth!
The worst alienation of all is alienation from the belly: the gut: the second brain... second brain from the top, that is, but the older by a billion years. There are more neurons in the tract between the stomach and the anal sphincter than in all the whorls of the cranium. Those who meditate come to know this, intimately. Insight lives in the intestine: the hara - the tan t'ien - the immortal spiritual foetus forever striving to be born. Deep diaphragmatic belly breaths burn off aeons of karma like the pushing of some perfective protoplasmic piston.
I sat once breathing silent breaths on a wooden platform inside a walled garden. The gardener raked the gravel of a path. I experienced all of this in my belly, being precisely for that moment both the gravel and the rake. What a marvelous taste of worm-mind!
For the worm there is no duality of outside-inside. Its hidden name is earth-glide-through-glide-through-earth. It is the soft mud's conscious tongue tasting itself. For a worm, far is as good as near. It is wholly self-same: it is maximally sensate: if it were any more adapted, it would be indistinguishable from its environment: its skin tastes mud, its gut tastes of glorious mud.
My ego stampedes towards intellect and fancy: fearing that one day I will be food for worms: believing that it can kill me and survive: that it can outrun the composting process which is all of life. The ego hounds us pell-mell up and down property ladders, onto treadmills of boom and bust. We charge for the safety of porno and reality tv: 7 billion constipated commuters taking a holiday from self.
Ego, I heard it said, is the sum total of our insults and wounds: it calcifies around the soft peristalsis of our life process. Look at us! All you can see is the scar tissue. Awkward gaits, twisted minds, rigid moralities, shallow breaths, bacchanalias enforced at gunpoint, the apotheosis of every perversion.
All that of course you already know: eat, drink, be merry, they say, for tomorrow we die. We killed the planet, now anything goes. It is suicide to run against the herd... Why die now when you can die very slightly later?
Anything you might say in protest against the race to the bottom is just more text, of which there is no right reading - every voice is a voice in the wilderness.
But, if you stop for just a while, in a still garden - while there are still gardens - and listen to the silence of your breath, you may hear the voice of utter confidence ringing out from your abdomen. Borborygmus, borborygmus, all is one (not even one), all is well. On that fixed point, you might just turn over the earth!
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