The Practice of Imagination 05 Embodiment & Inquiry

how to meditate on a battle field

The fifth step down.

This series turns out to be a descent. A conscious visit of my underworld, a lowlander’s dreamlands. Why did I assume this would be easy? A backyard stroll?

My physical move from rural France to the densest part of Holland was the end of a long detour, the reluctant return of a wandering soul. I am back home, but home is yet to be found. I didn’t return with an answer. Still, this owner of a lonely heart hasn’t found what he’s looking for. Maybe that is why I began looking for base camp, for a new starting point to climbing the inverse mountain in me. To reach the deepest summit of my core. The mold of me. The underworld of my being. The thick soup of this metamorphing being.

For the ones that come along; there might be some explicit nakedness ahead. Some uncomfortable passages. But I am done convincing. This is my truth. As whole as my words allow.

My perspective (like yours) is valid because it is honest and mine. Not because I am right. Any authentic voice adds to the wealth of the world. But at this point: the better you match the world’s demand the less you matter. Success and high scores have become tools of alignment. Of how much you fall in line with what is.

I don’t think we visit this planet to conform. I also do not believe we are here to fight others. So what does an embodied life in ‘nature’ look like? How to live in a place as mad as this one?

My eldest daughter, when she was three or four, claimed to have come from the stars.

To live an embodied life? That phrase is similar to: going for a walk in nature. Both are strange claims. I get what they mean, but do not share the perspective. From conception we are body and nature. No matter how hard we try to ignore both.

And try we do. There are days I feel like the world is conspiring to pull me away from where I wish to be.

And maybe it is.

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The art supply store I once owned (a chunk of twenty years) was named after a Dutch painter. Brueghel. A medieval visual master at the roots of modernity. Where Jeroen Bosch made visible the inner world of dreams and demons, full of horrors and dark fantasies, this man saw metaphor in daily life. In weddings, children’s games, politics. Both visualized the unseen, in different registers. Pieter Brueghel is famous for his mesmerizing depictions of the tower of Babel.

That tower-myth speaks to the imagination, because it is about imagination. The deep kind. The underlying driver of our world. Recently the meaning of that old myth shifted for me.

I always understood the Babylon myth as a tale of warning. God punishes the tower building people for their attempt to reach heaven by fucking up their language. Part of that story always bugged me: did that skilled, smart culture actually think heaven was in the clouds? Building a tower that high was kinda stupid, wasn’t it? Stupid in a Dubai sense, in a mars-going-reusable-rocket kind of way? All of the resources and engineers, and wealth pumped into the idea of heaven up there.

Something big is happening to language and images. That’s an understatement. Our means of representation are being taken from us by a system that is no longer on the side of people, of you and me. Pick a word and you’ll discover it has shifted meaning recently. It’s been uprooted, repackaged. Even coming from your own mouth you can no longer be sure what it says. That is not a small shift we are in. Let’s not go into why, that’s not important for this post.

Imagery too has lost all substance recently. You can no longer be sure what a picture shows. Anything printed, projected, recorded, when it is on a screen it is fake by default first. Even the real and the raw have lost their weight, their solidity. Visual trust has fallen victim. We cannot believe our eyes.

And I think data is on death-row too. Numbers, facts, dates, statistics, music, archives. Soon anything digital is marginal. All virtuosity is now suspicious. All communication is infected by the sheen of illness.

Let’s look at that old myth about communication.

Babel. What if it wasn’t punishment from above? What if YHWH acted from love? Because what the builders tried wouldn’t lead to anything good. What if it was a teaching on the way of the world? A good old blessing mistaken for a curse. A gift in stead of a disciplining.

A story about language and imagination that holds a treasure.

The reason language is losing its meaning is because we think it is possible to have one language for all the earth. And we want that one language because it will make things better, easier. We need it to build bigger cities and rule bigger nations, construct higher towers. Divine tech to give us divine powers.

One world, one tongue, one voice. One goal. It all starts with communication. We want to speak and be understood by every soul. Clear communication needs standardizing. Spelling, metrics, protocols, valuta, methods, goods, culture, clothing, traffic. The project of unification is like a tower-build. Like an enormous pyramid for a world monarch, a god-king. For the ideal arrival of the perfect one.

Great plan. Except for the fact that language does not work that way. Even stronger: nothing in nature adheres to pyramid hierarchies.

There is only one actual one. The One. Whoever that is, whatever their name. And going up doesn’t bring us any closer than a walk in nature brings us closer to nature. Words are local. Human scale local. If you walk for an hour their meaning has shifted. If you travel for a day the same sound will point at something entirely different. That’s not a mistake. That is how nature works. French apples struggle in Siberia. Tropical fish do not take the oceanic subway to the Thames. Potatoes carry a thousand names because there are a thousand kinds of tuberous swells.

The bureaucrat that decided they were all potatoes made a mistake. That same pencil-licker wondered why we need so many kinds of apples anyway? Five is enough for the supermarket isle.

I don’t think it is. We need ten-thousand.

Same with earth-apples.

And corn.

And penises.

That Babel-tale is about monoculture. About teaching humans that diversity is not a mistake. Confounding their language was an evolutionary gift.

It rooted words to place, to context, to occasion, to voice. Like trees, and clouds, and people. And they abandoned the tower-plan.

Locality

What I will try is to hold you. These are deep waters. I am asking you to come with to where it is dark. Reading this is closing your eyes and sinking through the surface to layers not often visited. These steps lead down into the dense earth. A journey to the most local.

It is the body that knows. Yes, present tense. Here and now is the body. That may sound abstract but is a physical truth.

It also is a mystical truth. We live in matter. Somehow we occupy this bundle of cells among the cold stars. We walk the thin crust of a hurdling ball of molten iron.

I think the Babylon myth tells us an old truth. We aren’t born from nothing to escape the valley of death. It reminds us we are eternal and incarnated to be here, in the body. To be local. Like all matter. The kingdom is here.

Because the strive for unity ignores that everything is local.

This subtle difference can help us overcome our towering tendencies. The future is local. We will abandon the world project when we discover that truth. I don’t need to be a prophet to foresee that.

The body is all of your cells and all of your bodily functions. This includes the brain, genitals, pimples, pain, stress, aging. And while we have lots in common many things differ wildly. Skullshapes, length, labia, strength, smell, how we walk and talk, how we think, process and learn. Diversity is crucial. As is continuity.

Life is disrupted continuity. From parent to child there is a very tight bottleneck. Only sperm and egg meet in the birth-canal. That is not a set-back, not a faulty forgetful set-up, that is the smart balance of potential and heritage. The wise rhythm of forgetting and remembering. That is the intergenerational exchange. The same contraction and widening happens in the water cycle. In the energy path of magnetic fields. The torus shape of trees and plants and worlds. Cultures expand and dissolve.

We’re not here to hold on to one phase, one form. We must surrender to the seeding, make way for the next. But whatever comes next is best served by maximizing this version. Tomorrow depends on a well-lived today. What matters is getting to know who you are by exploring the place. By curiosity. By using the available means.

We learn to walk through curiosity. By getting to know the effect of gravity. It’s nice to read about rain, but nothing beats getting drenched by a summer cloud. We do not learn the reasons to not spill food from a dad yelling at us. We learn by the carpet hairs in our mouth spoiling the apple-sauce. From day one we build a relationship with the here and now. With body and place and time.

But somehow we have started replacing experience with the representations of it. We have come to believe that what we have learned is in the books, in the words. That the child inherits what the father gathered. That wisdom and wealth is best kept in vaults. That value is expressed in large numbers. That nothing we imagine is out of reach.

Survival of the most fitting

Here’s an alternate take: all knowledge is local.

If true that means there is a trade-off between depth of knowledge and wider accuracy. As if too much detail or overstretching definition leads to a sort of encapsulating, an isolation from the larger unknowable reality. A sort of limit to knowing. To know more you’d need to go wider, but going wider looses grounding, or essential in-place-ness. Making knowing just a practical means of navigation, a disposable short term advantage. Not general advancement or progress. The actual knowing is either in the being, in the matter or, if not, must be metaphysical and therefore unknowable to matter.

Knowledge as local fitness, not global truth

Knowledge as situated navigation. In biology and ecology, knowledge is indistinguishable from fit-to-environment. An organism “knows” insofar as it survives locally.

- Increase depth (specialization), and you gain precision at the cost of transferability.

- Increase breadth, and you gain pattern recognition at the cost of grip.

There is no privileged scale where “truth” finally stabilizes. Only zones where things work. This makes knowledge less like a map of reality and more like a local guide.

Highly articulated knowledge systems create closed semantic loops, become internally consistent and increasingly refer to themselves. At a certain point, refinement stops revealing reality and starts insulating the knower from it. This is visible in late scholasticism, hyper-specialized academia, and of course technocratic models that lose contact with lived consequence. (Insert centerfold of technocratic model)

Precision becomes a kind of epistemic terrarium. A glass cage.

Relativity as the price of knowing

If all knowledge is local, then knowing always implies position. Position implies exclusion. Exclusion implies blindness elsewhere.

There is a real trade-off between

depth → embodiment, intimacy, fragility and

breadth → abstraction, mobility, loss of substance.

No view is innocent. The “view from nowhere” is a myth — or a power move.

Being, matter, and the limit of articulation

This echoes Taoism: The Tao that can be named is not the Tao. Heidegger: knowing as being-in-the-world, not cognition. Polanyi: tacit knowledge — we know more than we can say. Indigenous epistemologies: knowledge as relationship, not information. Cognition is a derivative phenomenon, all language is a compression algorithm, a summarizing tool. It also means metaphysical knowing is not inaccessible — just non-extractable. It cannot be carried away. Only inhabited. The gold turns to dust when brought to the surface.

Fully holding this thought destabilizes authority, expertise, progress narratives. It undermines the idea of cumulative, linear knowing leading to an arrival at the top. Seeing this is uncomfortable, and many people retreat back into certainty, hold on to identity, adhere to doctrine, or hide behind irony. Disguise the rotting framework with another layer of wordpaint.

Because living with local truth and global unknowability requires humility without collapse. It lets go of the ideal and accepts the body as it is. Yours and mine. It cannot judge. It must accept the world in full color. Not just the pretty ones.

Knowledge may not be about possessing truth at all, but about participating in a region of reality, long enough to act responsibly within it, while knowing that every articulation is provisional. Knowledge is not disposable — but perishable. Like the body.

And wisdom, perhaps, is knowing when to let it rot.

But still I am struggling with embodiment. Locality is simple and obvious. But given a few thoughts the view has far reaching consequences. The body is clearly local and anything in, or coming from, or surrounding it, all knowable through being present. But that doesn’t hold. Like we never see the full moon, nothing we encounter is revealed at once, so through time we construct, remember the other sides of things and gain an idea of completion. But that is no longer direct. This makes awareness on not knowing crucial. Like a negative knowing needing a large chunk of our perception. To not fill understanding to the brim with expertise. To keep a largely blank mind. Like having enough space on a hard drive to run complex software. And this software of being is very complex. It needs a lot of headroom to catch the transcients.

Let’s look at how we treated embodiment in pre-modernity. Before the high ideal replaced the old practices of knowing.

Shamanic initiation is not metaphorical

I feel the intensely physical side of shamanic initiations is often ignored. Those practices were literally wounding, literal pain. It is literal throwing up that brings us to a more real understanding. That more real is a widening, a stretching of the former frame. A gaining of bandwidth. More control through giving up petty control. By accepting what isn’t controllable the real agency steps forward from the shadows.

This frame —liminal state— new frame, is as old as the world but no longer part of our social fabric. It is removed from the systems and structures. While the function of physical initiation is obvious, it is so aggressively ignored, that it reads to me as an actual psychic disorder. Modernity has yet failed to be initiated in the realities of existence. We are in the first stages of a giant liminal state and there is no shaman to guide us through.

Shamanic rites of passage are about pain, vomiting, fever, disorientation, near-death, disfiguration, exhaustion. A release from what is not or no longer us. And crucially: loss of control in the most literal sense. We allow the other be the other to become more ourselves. We become more local.

Modern discourse likes to keep initiation “symbolic” because symbols can be discussed without being undergone. But historically, the body is the gate. No wound, no passage. Not as masochism but as necessary epistemology. Certain truths cannot be known without bodily disruption, because the old frame is held in the musculature, the gut, the autonomic nervous system.

You cannot reason your way out of a nervous system that has never collapsed and reassembled.

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The ideal body vs the initiated body

Modernity chases control, optimization, smoothness, youth, predictability, perfect symmetry. The initiated body is scarred, marked, changed, not at all “perfect”, and still more capable. Neurotypical normality ≈ unblemished surface. Initiation ≈ functional damage that opens capacity.

A body that has never been broken has no depth.

A psyche that has never been undone has no authority.

Vomiting as truth (and why that matters)

Throwing up as sacred ritual. That detail matters more than people realize.

Vomiting is a total failure of composure, the body rejecting meaning it can’t digest, the collapse of “I’m in charge”.

Modern culture medicalizes or aestheticizes everything except loss of dignity. But dignity is often the last defense of a false self. Real agency begins after the body has proven it does not belong to the ego.

More control through giving up petty control. Letting go of the need to reshape what is not you. And allowing the change that fits this moment, this place, this body.

Bandwidth

After initiation more sensation is tolerable, more ambiguity can be held, more contradiction can coexist, more reality fits through the aperture. This is not chaos.

It is increased resolution. More surface area.

Modern systems train for narrow-band stability: one role, one narrative, one acceptable affect range, one “functioning” mode. Initiation creates multi-channel beings. No wonder institutions can’t handle them.

The aggressive ignoring

It’s not just that modernity “forgot” initiation. It actively defends against it because initiation produces people who cannot be easily managed, breaks identification with status, weakens fear-based compliance, generates authority that is not granted from above.

From that angle the state of our world begins to resemble a collective psychic disorder: the total avoidance of necessary pain, pathological clinging to control. Denial of death while being obsessed with safety. Ritualizing comfort while producing existential fragility. A culture that cannot vomit becomes toxic. It will project pain and death outward. It will blame anything but themselves.

Modernity as an uninitiated adolescent

Initiation traditionally marks a transition from dependence → responsibility, from fantasy of control → relationship with forces, from innocence → accountability.

Modernity has power without initiation. Technology without humility. Knowledge without ordeal. That is not adulthood. That is a five year old in charge.

That is arrested development at civilizational scale. So when crises come—ecological, psychological, technological—we panic, medicate, optimize, fence, attack, lash out, throw tantrums. Cover our eyes and pretend no one can see us.

A giant liminal state with no shaman

We are in the first stages of a giant liminal state and there is no shaman to guide us through. Traditionally, liminality without guidance produces monsters, possession, scapegoating, mass psychosis, false prophets.

Which… should feel uncomfortably familiar. The role of the shaman was never to “fix” the world.

It was to enter the breakdown consciously, be wounded on purpose, return with a map drawn in scars. Modernity killed that role, and now wonders why the underworld keeps breaking through. Why the nightmares have returned.

So, why this bleak observation in a series on imagination?

The often extreme physicality of the shamanic tradition is paired with deep imagination. The shaman was the one who dared to inquire. They knew the edge by experience and discovered the imagined is the glue that holds their being, that makes consciousness possible. That is why they could travel into the real, deeper than others. Holding that kind of bandwidth is a heavy and dangerous task. It needs a deeply rooted body to see the larger reality. It needs access to the Imaginal to find the specifics that matter. Shamanism is an alignment practice. With body, with place, with past, present and future. With the potential of each part. It is a momentary reversal of channel. From digesting to vomiting. It is going through the eye of the needle. Dying and returning. Giving up, to receive life. Accepting the disease to heal.

Inquiry is all that. The willingness to be changed by what you encounter. It is not about the size of the wound, the amount of pain suffered. It is the change of direction that matters. That is conversion. To turn with.

That’s how to meditate on the battlefield.

Awareness on what I am, on who I am, on how I am. To rise from the ashes, to burn and not seize. To remember me and you into being again. To walk the field and know it from bones to skin. To have it in the heart and not reject any flower, any presence. To be invisible and unavoidable. To leave no trace, make no sound not intended. To leave the lasting mark, give the sustained voice to who love me, the roar to the unwelcome. This is my ground. Enter as friend, as lover. Stay the night to celebrate the rise of light. The given day is ours.

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