A Reflection

from beyond

A Reflection on Disembodiment

Honestly, I don’t miss my body. It was always weighing me down, it having had mass and everything (technically, it still has it, I guess). I don’t miss it at all. I don’t miss the way it experienced pain, like when I tried to stab open a plastic container with a pocket knife only to have the knife shut on/into my pinky. I don’t miss the way it had to go through doorways and was basically contained by walls except for that time it tried to climb over another person in a hallway and ended up going through the wall instead. I don’t miss the way it required maintenance checks, haircuts, nail trims, regular bathing, doctor check ups, feedings, etc. etc. I don’t miss the way it would smell things I didn’t want to smell. I do miss smell, as a general sense (actually, I generally miss all my senses), but I certainly do not miss certain smells; gas station smell, for example. I have found gas stations to be much more pleasant ever since losing my ability to smell. Of course, without eyes, it’s hard to tell if I’m actually at a gas station. I have to trust this sort of intuitive instinct that I’m in the presence of gas station vibes. Like, I sense that there are warm bodies around me doing something they believe is necessary but they are also sort of irritated that they have to do it. Actually, it may not be a gas station. It may be at a place of employment. Which I also do not miss. No one hires disembodied essences. We don’t have social security numbers, so we can’t pay taxes. We also don’t have any capacity to receive pay, nor do we have any bodily needs, which is nice. I guess you could say that I’ve finally beat capitalism. So, that’s a win. You may have noticed that I threw in a “we” a couple sentences ago. Yeah, I’m not the only one. There’s actually quite a thriving community of disembodied essences, in that we sort of recognize the presence of one another in that intuitive gas station sort of way. Some of us even haunt pickleball games. It’s sort of a joke for us. We can’t do much, in so far as our ability to influence the physical world, but if you ever have a pickleball shot that simply doesn’t do what you thought it should physically do… Well, you can blame one of us. A pickleball (or wiffle ball or ping-pong ball) is basically the easiest thing for a disembodied essence to alter. The second easiest thing is a cat. We can’t really do anything to cats. Cat’s just sort of know we’re around in a way that other creatures don’t. We are the reason why your cat might spontaneously wake up, scramble around the living room and pull down the window curtains without any obvious provocation. They know we’re around and, for some reason, it makes them freak out. We don’t even need to engage them. I try to interact with random dogs all the time–they don’t seem to notice. The third thing we can do is make a rocking chair rock in an otherwise still room. It’s a pointless activity, it’s really hard for us to do, and it makes bodied people really uncomfortable, but some of us are jerks, apparently. Every once in a while one of us thinks we can make sounds, but we can’t. Sound requires vibration, and we have nothing to vibrate. It makes us super stealthy. If you are ever in the woods alone and it feels like you’re being watched, but there’s nobody around, you are probably near a disembodied essence who is intuitively trying to figure out where they are. That’s really how we spend most of our existence–trying to figure out where we are. We are reasoning, this bodied person seems alone, seems scared, seems panicked… is this a closet? Meanwhile, you are looking over your shoulder, running through overgrowth, blowing on your rescue whistle, and hoping that another bodied somebody will find you before you become ironically disembodied. Ironic disembodied essences are the worst. I bet they’re the ones who rock rocking chairs. It seems that there’s a body nearby right now staring at a screen. They seem to be mildly confused and/or disappointed and/or entertained. It’s hard to tell–those are all bodyist understandings of experience. I think I am going to linger with this body for a little while, maybe this body knows a cat, or, better yet, plays pickleball. Or even better, plays pickleball against cats. I intuitively understand this as a possibility, so I’ll hang around you for a day or decade or two.

happy haunting,

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