Subtle Differences: A Genealogy of the Soul

Radical Somatic Mutability

I have decided to return to my series Between Xanadu and Shambhala, my exploration into occult geographies. In truth, this statement is not entirely accurate. I did not decide anything, I had no real intention of returning to the series any time soon. But a book was placed in my hands, a book that ignited as nitroglycerin within my soul. A missing piece, a golden string tying together countless loose ends dangling from my imagination. I did not “decide” to return to this series, I was seized into it.

If you recall from the Xanadu series, as we progressed in our investigation we found a common theme lurking in the background of inner earth myths and tales of hidden lands—an inexplicable sympathy between occult geographies and occult anatomies. Esoteric topographies were in some way linked to mystical physiognomies, inner Earth was bound to inner man. From the Tantric context to the alchemical, there exists this subtle rhyme, this visceral riddle. The unseen organs of man seem to be his vehicle to the unseen organs of the cosmos.

Miguel Serrano wrote: “As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.”

A few days ago, such a book manifested before me. A book that seemed to be my library angel’s answer to a flux of questions and concepts that have been churning in my mind. The Subtle Body: A Genealogy, by Simon Cox. With the lucidity of a scholar and the spirit of a mystic, the author managed a spectacular feat, he traced an academic genealogy of the Subtle Body as a phenomenon and then adorned it with the brilliance of his own assessment. The word genius is thrown around too frequently these days. But in this case, I believe it is fully merited. The book began as a Doctoral dissertation, but it reads as the culmination of a life of dedicated study and passion. The author admits as such.

Instead of attempting to introduce the subject in my own words, I will insert sections of the book’s introduction, written by Profesor Kripal, the author’s thesis advisor. From this alone, you should understand my excitement.

How To Compare Esoteric Anatomy’s

As one of Simon’s doctoral mentors, perhaps it is appropriate to say that none of the brilliance of this dissertation-become-book surprised me in the least, but that it still surprised me. Moreover, and here is the potentially narcissistic piece, I clearly recognize something of my younger self in his emerging thought and theorization of the subtle body.

But Simon really did it. When I was his age, I just saw the situation, felt hopelessly muddled, and threw up my metaphorical hands. I was in graduate school, and someone asked me to review Lilian Silburn’s recently published Kundalini: Energy of the Depths (1988). It is a perfectly fine book, a study of Kundalini Yoga in the nondual Kashmiri sources. Somewhere in it was a casual and innocent comment about how the Christian experiences of the Holy Spirit might in fact be related to the yogic phenomena tracked and described with such care by the South Asian Hindu and Buddhist traditions. My own mind goes to some of the very strange mystical-physical phenomena of Teresa of Avila, the great sixteenth-century Spanish saint and doctor of the Church, phenomena which included things like (embarrassing and public) physical levitation, locutions (distinct voices without any human presence), and angelic-erotic thrusts into her “entrails” accompanied by exquisite suffering, literal moanings, and union with God.

I happen to think Lilian Silburn was correct (and it is no accident at all that she herself has led what her biographer calls un vie mystique and was the disciple of an Indian Sufi master).1 The physio-spiritual phenomena clearly are related. But how?

Something in me responded. It was not a criticism of Lilian Silburn or of the book. It was a criticism of the reigning comparative imaginations of the time. It was the late 1980s, and what we might call the New Age hermeneutic of a single “subtle body” or what Kurt Leland calls the “Western chakra system” was still in place, although this California countercultural imagination had in turn deeper historical and experiential roots, particularly in the life and work of the British judge Sir John Woodroffe in the first decades of the twentieth century, whose work was itself likely driven by his own subtle energetic experiences (evidence suggests that he received initiation from a Tantric saint before whom he reported a powerful spiritual-electric “shock” [shakti-pat] on the night of Kali-puja in 1906).2

Why, I asked, do we feel it appropriate or helpful to explain Christian mystical phenomena in Hindu or Buddhist yogic terms? Why not explain Hindu or Buddhist yogic experiences in Christian terms? Not the Holy Spirit as unconscious kundalini, then, but kundalini as unconscious Holy Spirit. That kind of thing. The latter Christian theological reduction would have felt especially forced, to me and my graduate peers of the time anyway. So why the attractions of the former? Why not refuse both reductions, and yet still rec- ognize that, yes, something is there, something is indeed happening in both historical and cultural contexts that is very different and yet somehow the same? Sir John Woodroffe, and ten thousand other New Age seekers, have been “shocked,” literally, spiritually, and physiologically. So was Teresa of Avila. By what?

What I was asking for, in some unformed way, was what Simon delivers here to such stunning effect—a new comparative imagination that refuses any easy reduction to a particular cultural, historical, or religious frame, and, precisely as a result of this refusal, concludes with a most surprising and most constructive theory of the subtle body and its energies. That theory comes down to what he calls “radical somatic mutability” or “multinatural somatic pluralism, where these many bodies can be seen as gateways into alternate realities.” Or, to put it differently but similarly, “different cultural conditions give rise to different embodied beings.”

Whoooaaaa.

I got excited. I got excited because this finally makes good sense of our historical sources and their phenomenological descriptions in both their obvious similarities and their obvious differences. I also got excited because it implies that the powers of the human mind and imagination (we need a new word) and its symbolic, ritual, and visionary forms are awesome. As I have put it elsewhere, we really become in Simon’s thought “authors of the impossible,” co-creating new mental-material realities in which we and future others can live and dream.

There is no permanent separation between subjectivity and objectivity here. The human mind somehow shapes the behavior of matter. And the material world, on a “subtle” or, what the New Age hermeneutic calls an “energetic” level, responds accordingly (since it, too, is somehow “mental”). We are close to what Henry Corbin called the imaginal realm, where spirit becomes body and body becomes spirit.

But this is not quite that, either. For one thing, Simon’s multinatural so- matic pluralism is a much broader comparative theorization that can be applied anywhere, and not just to medieval Persia. It can embrace Corbin’s Persian sources, for sure, but it can also embrace Silburn’s Indian Sanskrit sources, or Tibetan or Japanese Buddhist ones, or Chinese Daoist ones, or Christian European ones.

And to skip to the end…

I would also not count out just yet the usefulness and interpretive power of the Neoplatonic ochema or “vehicle” of the soul. The ochema, after all, is often described as spherical. Ioan Culianu once described it as the “space shuttle” of the soul. Or, I would add, a humanoid UFO. It is probably no accident at all that one of the twentieth century’s greatest researchers of the UFO and alien abduction phenomena, the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, had a Sikh guru and therapist who was also a kundalini teacher, Gurucharan Singh Khalsa. Nor is it an accident that it was the Esalen Institute and the human potential movement in the figure of the psychiatrist and holotropic breathwork teacher Stanislav Grof who, in the late 1980s, first set Mack on his life-changing path and later passionate interest around the UFO topic.5 As Mack himself put it with respect to the Grofs, “They put a hole in my psyche and the UFOs flew in.” Sounds about right to me.

By the end of the book, I was left as astonished as Kripal.

Cox’s theory of the subtle body and the inexplicable variance across esoteric traditions, expressed my own still-gestating insights and intuitions in a lucid and erudite way. I was stunned. This elucidation seemed to be the missing piece, the keystone connecting several interlocking arcs of interest, everything from myths of inner earth to UFOs, from Hans Gunther to medieval alchemy. For the foundation that Cox has laid can be taken much further than he ever imagined. This may be the single most important article series to date for contextualizing the rest of my work. And once this stone has been set, we can finish all the other article series in development.

In this first article, I will briefly summarize Cox’s genealogy of the subtle body and his conclusions, before expanding upon it with my own thoughts. It will be fairly quotation-heavy, and I do recommend reading the book yourself. In the second part, I will truly bring this boat into forbidden waters.