Our Body: a City of Sentient Cells

Cont’ from May 10 post:
India, Spring 1970

Maharishi’s dazzling cosmic metaphor for the systems within the body— gods within gods within gods— had opened a new dimension for me: a profound and poetic glimpse into the living and intelligent parts of our bodies.

Then I found another way of understanding that truth.

In a dusty musty bookstore, down an obscure alleyway in Delhi, I came across a wonderful old book titled Hatha Yoga by someone named Yogi Ramacharaka.

Who was Ramacharaka? No one really knows. Written over 120 years ago, much of his book is filled with cheerful, old-fashioned health advice: drink more water, chew your food properly, take walks in the fresh air and sunshine, beware of the frying pan…

But then I read chapters 18 (Little Lives of the Body) and chapter 19 (Control of the Involuntary Nervous System). I was astonished. Clearly, he’d had the same insight as Maharishi, only expressed in terms of physiology. The body, he wrote, is a city: a dynamic cascade of layers within layers of living, interacting systems: cells, cell groups, tissues, organs, and finally, the whole.

But unlike standard physiology, which views the body as a kind of machine, Yogi Ramacharaka saw each system--from the tiniest cell to the entire body—as a discrete, sentient intelligence. Each has its own duties, its own personality, its own connection to the whole.

A cell, then, is a tiny being. A tissue, a more complex being. A major organ like the heart—quite a sophisticated presence. And we, we lucky human beings, are the divine assembly they form.

What a wise, useful, and illuminating understanding of who we are.

(Next post: turns out, we can “speak” to and inspire our loyal subjects—the living intelligences within us—just as we can, with patience and affection, communicate with a puppy.)

~ John