The Body Is NOT a Machine. . .
. . .and if I hear that goddamn analogy one more time, I swear I’m going to scream!

My cousin from back East came to visit me in Eugene last month and we had a little disagreement. He’s a good guy. Compassionate, intelligent, a competent professional guy who gives far more generously of his time to the poor than I, but he’s yet another one of those people our culture has molded to enable the status quo to continue without missing a step.
“The body is like a machine” he said, “a very complex machine,” he argued.

I don’t even know how we got started on the subject. I held back that scream I mentioned before and let him continue. I was raised to be polite. It’s something I’m trying to loosen up a bit. He had an impressive line up of reasonable examples of all that science knows about: brain function, genetics, chemical interactions in the body, etc. Of course I, being a good anarchist, ecofeminist Eugenean raised by New Age parents respectfully disagreed. Unfortunately, I did not have very convincing statements to offer up off the top of my head. I’m the kind of person that likes to mull things over before I speak. Writing it out first is even better. What follows is my answer.

My dear cousin, the body is very much UNLIKE a machine. It is, in fact, not at all helpful to think of it as a machine and rather unhealthy to even think of us as a body, separate from mind and soul.

Machines are dead—we are alive. Electricity animates machines. As for the human body, it is still—after many generations of contemplation and inquiry—a mystery how our bodies are animated. Machines have no soul, we do. Machines are very stupid, we are sometimes smart and, at our best, even wise. Even the greatest computer in the world only truly understands ones and zeros. Nor is there any sign on the horizon that computers will ever be able to think as humans do. The body is, like all living beings, sacred. Machine: profane. Machines cannot love, create poetry, compose music, sculpt, nor think for itself. Human body: 6 more “can do’s” for us.
Our bodies are self-regulating and self-healing with its own wisdom and self-awareness. Machines: not even close.

It’s an exercise in self-oppression if we think our bodies are machines. When machines breakdown we kick them (when we can get away with it) and swear at them. It makes it far too easy to do the same to our bodies when we view them as machines. Instead, we should be asking (lovingly) of ourselves, ‘what am I doing wrong and how can I improve how I live to feel right again?’ And if pollution or the stress of modern life impinges—against our will—on our body’s health, we should be asking, ‘how can I agitate with my neighbors to end the assault?’ If we think our bodies are machines, it makes it easier to hand it over to “experts” who (somehow) know better. Like handing over our cars to the local mechanic. We were never meant to hand over responsibility for our bodies to ANYONE. Instead, we have always lived to ask for loving assistance in healing. It is a moral cop-out to hand over the responsibility and, in so doing, we make it far too easy for doctors and hospitals to squeeze profit from what should be everyone’s right: good health.

If our bodies were very complex machines it wouldn’t feel so awful for an ironworker to go pour molten metal all day or a line worker in a factory to stamp out widgets eight hours a day. Instead we would get a feeling of: ‘ahhh, communion at last!’

The comparison between body and machine is so far off it even asks the wrong question or assumes the wrong assumption. The body, by itself—without the mysterious spark of life---is simply dead: flesh and bone, blood and sinew for only a brief time after that spark is gone. To try and hold the thought in our minds that we are body alone—just to consider what that means—is to imagine death and therefore, no body, nor mind, nor soul.To see ourselves accurately we must begin to think of ourselves as body, mind and soul. That is: BODYMINDSOUL. Period. No spaces, no separation. To look at ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘I have an ugly body’ or ‘I have a beautiful body’ belies the truth of who stands before the mirror. Yet, most of us have practiced this form of self-illusion. We are ALIVE and that’s all that need be said.

Look, bottom line: we have to start questioning how we think, how the society wants us to think, if we’re ever going to really change how things operate in the future. It’s no small feat. Mao says power comes from the barrel of a gun, but I say, power comes from the well of your soul. To understand this is the beginning of our climb up into freedom. The way things are in modern Western cultures, nobody’s even lifting a finger to change things if they think everything’s fine the way it is.