Living Through The Body Being    To an extent, your being is determined by your seeing. The way you see yourself affects the way you act, the things you do, the people you hang around with, in short, everything about you. This process of seeing yourself cannot be of a sensory nature because we do not have eyes that turn inward. It is rather a process of self-perception that is colored less by our vision than by our attitudes and beliefs. Together, these attitudes and beliefs constitute your world view, which is the primary determinant of whom you are. This world view is not static, except in the most intransigent of individuals. In most cases, you are in a constant process of changing. The more open you are to the philosophic processes described in this book, the more likely you are to question and attempt to improve your world view. One of the influences you must contend with as you analyze and synthesize your own philosophy is the power of prevailing ideologies. These may take the form of generally accepted codes of thought and of conduct among the group of people you interact with most frequently. For example, if you were to belong to a pack of destitute children roaming the streets of Rio de Janeiro you might expect to have a widely convergent ethical code concerning theft than that adopted by society at large. Some cultural world views transcend your particular social grouping to form dominant paradigms, such as the scientific paradigm of mechanical reductionism, which includes the Cartesian mind-body split. The impact of this ideology is profound. It causes a condition that is a symptom of the age of scientism, known as ontological schizophrenia. In essence, this means that you see yourself as consisting of several mutually exclusive aspects, not as a whole being. It is a form of an internal disjunction. Walt Whitman wrote about this condition that, "he or she who sees the world as fragmented is himself or herself fragmented." Many live by this split. For example, it can be reflected in a mechanistic way of thinking about causality as a sequence of physical events in science or life. It manifests itself through disconnectedness. You may feel disengaged from others and from nature. You may even feel estranged from your own physical body. The alternative is to embrace your own somatic self, to live through your body, to become attuned to the discourse of your physical being, to make yourself at home in your own structure.
Exercise 14: Discuss the following questions to more accurately determine the nature of your being:
- can you more accurately claim that you have a body or that you are a body?
- what difference would it make to your attitudes if you were to adopt the other position?
- how does your dualist/nondualist philosophy affect the way you conduct yourself in sports?
- how would adopting the other position affect your behavior in an athletic event? Becoming    Being is the origin of your becoming. From this starting point you embark upon your life's journey. What you will become is related to your philosophic growth, the extent to which you can question your assumptions and your ability to effect change in the premises that are the basis of your attitudes and behavior. If a dualistic schism is the basis of your philosophy, you may treat your body as an object. Typically, when the body is separated from the self it becomes a problem in need of control or redesigning. It is experienced as a manipulable object that should be molded so that it can fulfill culturally defined expectations. In today's image-conscious society that often means women want to get smaller [slimmer] and men bigger [more muscular]. Seeing the body as manipulable has resulted in an epidemic of anxiety about its shape. The growing incidence of anorexia nervosa, bulemia and steroid use are a testimony to the dualistic notion that we own our bodies, that they are a resource for our use and that we can shape and mold this object to suit our needs. Through such excesses, the social problem of the body as object may be reaching crisis proportions today, but the underlying concepts are symptomatic of the industrial age. In his analysis of what he called the anatomo-politics of the body, Michel Foucault has shown how the body came to be seen as a machine in the nineteenth century which could be trained to become a useful cog in the machinery of society. Since then, society has become more narcissistically individualistic. The body has become an object of consumption for the consumer industry, which is the dominant machinery of the capitalist culture of today. One current emphasis is on the fashionable body purchased with the products of the beauty and physical fitness industries. Another focus is longevity. In its efforts to eternally sip from the fountain of youth, western culture has launched a wholesale assault on the body. One facet of the greying of America is the abandon with which many maturing citizens pump their bodies full of chemical additives, vitamin supplements and painkillers in order to better enjoy the good life. If you are being and becoming in America, you have no option but to get involved in the controversy. You will either be immersed by a dualistic philosophy of the body and mind or confront the issue and construct an alternative philosophy of self. Developing an alternative is fraught with problems. It is not easy to stand out against a crowd. All around you, people are separating themselves into segments, the thinking part which is generally highly cherished and well-hidden from public view and the physical being. This is highly visible, it can be reshaped for greater appeal, it can be used for pleasurable purposes. In conjunction with others of like philosophy, bodies can be used for mutual gratification in a user society. Developing an alternative in such a milieu takes determination. Since your body is your way of inserting yourself into your world, it is immediately apparent. Your philosophy, however, is not. Consequently, you must convince others that your convictions are different from theirs by word and deed. Unfortunately, this culture is bereft of words that you could use. Our language is steeped in dualism. It separates into polar opposites. The words we use tend to tease reality apart and project "thingness" at the expense of wholeness. We communicate, and thus understand reality, in terms of dichotomies. Mind and body, self and other, work and play female and male are examples of the way we see the world in mutually exclusive, hierarchically organized, polar opposites. The ways we speak focus and limit the ways we understand. The quality of being-at-one is essentially ineffable in our culture. Our vocabulary cannot be explicit in describing what such awkward phrases as lived-body, body-subject and embodied experience might mean. However, difficulty in communicating your philosophy to others should not prevent you from developing an internal discourse. You can develop somatic awareness through listening to yourself to become aware of the vocabulary and rhythms of your physical being without recourse to language. Similarly, you can learn to value your physical being as yourself, to read that self and even to communicate meanings, through the medium of movement when words will not suffice.
    Try the following experiments to better understand dualism and its alternative:
Exercise 15: In an evening of television viewing, notice the following: which kinds of bodies are glorified, whether the body is represented as a person or as a thing and how many examples of dualistic language you can discover. [Don't forget the commercials]
Exercise 16: Try to discuss a recent athletic event with a friend without using any dualistic concepts or terminology.
Exercise 17: Spend some quiet time alone getting to know yourself better. Start by focusing on your steady rhythmic breathing and then develop an internal discourse.
Exercise 18: Express yourself as clearly as you can without using words. Moving    Actions speak louder than words, as they say. Through your actions you express your feelings, your inner meanings and your philosophy. You also display degrees of dualism. Human action is a means of personal expression, or it can be acting, a form of role-playing. Sartre used the term authentic to describe a state in which you act as you are and "bad faith" to describe actions that do not emanate from your core, which are not genuine and that do not resonate with the essential you. If you suffer from "ontological schizophrenia" you may be acting in bad faith. You are roleplaying if you view your body as one step removed from your essence, for then you have a separation between intent and action. In that case, "you" view your body as something to be manipulated, "you" decide how it will be used in a particular endeavor. Lets take sport for example.
Exercise 19: Respond to the following questions. Why do you choose to play a sport? Is it the opportunity to express yourself, to seek pleasure in the joy of the moment and to be one with your surroundings that draws you to the playing field? Or is your motivation extrinsic to the activity itself? Perhaps you are a varsity athlete on scholarship, so you feel obliged to be at practice. Perhaps you want to create the sculpted physique that is bound to enhance your social life. Do you do it to find friends, to get fit, for the thrill of it, to avoid boredom . . . ? If you are an elite athlete, you are probably motivated by the quest for that elusive record performance. Paradoxically, it is at this pinnacle of movement perfection that participants tend to be most dualistic. Top athletes often view their bodies as machines. Like any finely-tuned machine, it must be managed, maintained, conditioned and fueled. In some cases, a drop or two of special additive is mixed with the fuel to squeeze a little more performance from the body-machine. Like any machine, the body is subject to an occasional breakdown. Unlike the bob sledder, the athlete cannot jump into another vehicle for the next run. Sometimes a pit stop is inevitable, but with the help of medical technicians, the athlete is returned to the race as quickly as possible. Millions of research dollars are spent on speeding up the treatment and recovery phases of athletic injuries so that battered and bruised bodies may reenter the fray without a moment's delay. In such cases, bodies are often divorced from their owners, even though they may be willing to "put their bodies on the line" for the chance of winning the big game or breaking a record performance. The mind/body schism is certainly found in competitive sport, but it affects all realms of movement. In social settings, dualists may try to use their bodies to gain an advantage or may be oblivious to their physical functioning. Because they are not at one with their bodies, they are unaware of internal dialogue and unable to decipher even the loudest cries for help. Lifestyle diseases abound in a society of individuals who have lost touch with their physical being, who don't understand that every movement contains a message and that, in a very real sense, they are their bodies. The alternative is to embrace the experience of the embodied self. This entails regaining control of your movement agenda and determining when, where and under what circumstances you will participate in sport. During the activity, listen carefully to what your body is telling you and respond in a timely fashion to its cues. In all spheres of movement, try to become more physically literate. Learn to decipher somatic messages and to express your deepest insights and passions in an authentic way through your physical being. To illustrate how your philosophy of dualism influences how you live through the moving body, try this experiment:
Exercise 20: Participate in the same sporting event in two quite different ways. In one case, separate yourself [philosophy speaking] from your own body. Treat it as a machine. Talk of it and think of it as though it were an object. In the other case, be your body. Be less concerned with your strategy and execution than your inner rhythm. For example, if you decide to play tennis, play one set with a sole focus on technique. Analyze in excruciating detail how you are gripping the racket, the angle and velocity of your swing and the positioning of your feet. In other words, think about what you must do with your body in order to win. In the second set, concentrate on your inner game. Focus on your breathing. Let the game flow from deep within you. Don't force it, just let it happen.