THE REAL BEYOND REALM
Jun 25, 2026
Writing on the move Wednesdays, inspired by the navigational approach to mind. I write each text in one sitting and hit send, then I go back and revise over the next days if I have time. I do this because the kinetics and mistakes and momentary pressure are part of the process I want to be seen and shared. This one is a snippet from my day and the philosophical questions a chance encounter raised; there are nested layers in it related to kinetics, constellatory thinking and care. My next book Holding Paradox relates the gist of the navigational approach to embodied science that I’ve been working on for nearly a decade in philosophy and neuroscience research (specifically of the hippocampus). I’ve also had conversations about these subjects for Love & Philosophy.
The Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue in NYC has clearly seen better days.
The floors are frayed. Many of the bookshelves are empty. All three levels have the feeling of a T-shirt that’s been worn too many times. This is why I like it. It is, like so much of NYC, visibly in motion, which means it is potent and barely holding together at once, because its movement is its scaffolding. Books have gathered here that could lead you anywhere, because reading is a way of wandering.
This city is structured motion. Even if you have a goal, you are bound to find unexpected paths along the way. Whether you take them depends on how much you allow yourself to wander.
Sometimes wandering is the goal and your senses open to the possibility that the city itself already knows your destination. When you feel into yourself as bodily and feel into your directed and undirected motion, you begin to realize that you are always in communication with all that is around you, and in many more ways than you think or ever bring into full awareness. And yet, you can still know them, even if you can never put words or images to them.
This is because you care. Care is the urge of you. And it is far more than any of the thinking you do that has been tagged with language. Care is in every cell of your bodies and ecologies, and we are all made of (and making) many bodies and ecologies.
For me, NYC is a place where this urge quickens, where caring and multiplicity can easily become overwhelm, and yet can also always be entrancing, if attention is protected . This is why it is essential to layer with one’s surrendering, and with one’s sculpting, as movement.
Often, while walking around, or ducking in and out of stores and subways, I feel this city as one kinetic organism dancing me even as I steer from within it. Transcendence is the sweet spot of this flowing and holding of paradox.
Sometimes I get the sense that if all this movement were to cease, the city would reveal itself as a giant used chrysalis and eventually crumble and dissipate.
It is (literally) all in motion, and that movement is cognitive. To be cognitive is to be feeling, wandering, wondering, orienting, getting lost, surrendering, sculpting, being found and finding. Cognitive movement is the movement of surprises and mistakes and footsteps and heartbeats.
Once, when I was a teenager here and had just been to one of my first off-broadway plays in the East Village, an older woman told me that the reason NYC feels so powerful is because the island is actually a giant crystal.
It’s all just transparent conduction and crystallized movement underneath.
The woman was one of the main players in the little East Village play I’d just seen and we were at a bar that I was too young to have entered. I was a bit in awe and ready to mythologize. On stage, she’d seemed possessed, like a Greek Furie, one of the Erinyes. Anything she said had to be right.
This city was built atop one long, magnetic rock, she whispered to me as my friend went to get her a drink. Her words were steady and clear, and though it was very loud in the bar, her voice took some path underneath the music and I heard her as if we were alone in a quiet house.
I was jolted by her revelation in a way that even then did not quite make sense. To imagine myself atop a giant long crystal. She also spoke of cauldrons. New York City becoming molten and pouring up into me. Her words continued long into the night, dangling between an absurdity and a secret. So much so that I still remember them twenty years later. Everywhere I go in this city, rivulets like this surface between past, present and future. The woman died over a decade ago, but when I remember this story in this city, she is still here.
But that’s only one sort of movement layered and coiled. Today, there is also a quieter stream, the movement of communication between this city and myself as bodies that do not need words, or even understand them.
The crystallization can suddenly happen anywhere after all, and right now, I sense its molten flow bubbling beneath the very threadbareness of this Barnes & Noble on 5th. To feel crystallized and molten can only be done without those words.
I passed by the bookshop on my way to the reading room at the New York Public Library earlier today, and I knew I would have to come back. It was just a nudge—there’s something here I am meant to find, some book hidden someplace, some sentence I must read and think about. Something to unlock another rhythms in me, join the music of past, present and future in a new vibration, turning up what had been the faintest melody. It was a quick communication, but I listened.
As someone who had worked in many independent bookshops in this same city, I feel a little guilty shopping at a chain store, a place I was once taught was the enemy. These days, however, I want all and every bookshop with rows of real books in it to be blessed and flourish, including every cavernous Barnes & Noble.
I walk in and let the crystal lead, ride the lava escalator, and soon stumble upon two books I had not known existed but was definitely destined to read for reasons it would take too long to go into now. Suffice to say, art has come alive for me again lately (it goes in odd waves) and I end up with two books on art criticism, one by Maggie Nelson and another by Megan O’Grady. More on those some other time. For now, I want to dwell on a sentence I read in one of them. Or rather, on a phrase: reduced to the body. It is my feeling that we are narrowing ourselves when we worry about spirit or the real inner life that we experiences being “reduced to the body”. Here is the sentence from the book that stayed with me:
“Ford was doing the thankless work that so many did during #MeToo; telling the story of what it meant to be reduced to a body.” 1
Reduced to the body is the phrase that gets stuck to me. I understand what is meant and it is an important point, but what bothers me is that our bodily being is the precious part that is being hurt. Perhaps this is why the phrase “reduced to the body” comes with me and cannot be swatted away, even after I pay, even after I walk back to 50th street, even after I read the pages and get the point and am glad she made it. Still, it is a hammer to the crystal, a lid over the molten lava I want to feel everyone flow , and I fight to stop the hammer, remove the lid. I then realize it is what I will sit here now and write to you about. Here is the question I want to ask you, or some version of it:
Can we reconsider bodily being as entrancing, as more than a shell or vehicle but rather the very gift itself?
In this quote above, the phrase “reduced to the body” is about a very serious subject and I respect that. It was meant to show how someone’s soul was made to shrink because they were ‘only’ seen as a body.
This is a common way of speaking and was meant with that sort of everydayness. The phrase “reduced to the body” is only one version of many similar such phrases that assume spirits and bodies to be separable. What I am trying to communicate is that our science shows the this spirt and mind is bodily movement and the sacredness is not able to be reduced to the body because it is that body, though not in the way we currently view what a body is. Bodies are so much more than we currently mean when we use that term.
We discuss ecologies and environments this way, too. We say “she’s just a product of her environment” and if this is some settled thing, when it is truly ongoing and much more than such a statement even hints at as happening. All of these are lids on the lava, shatterings of the crystal, because when we use them, we assume bodies and ecologies are known things, mysteries solved, as if whatever it is we are, it cannot have anything to do with this visceral living stuff that is us as bodily.
Such phrases often come in the context of one group trying to downplay the thoughts and actions of another. The general idea is that we are more than our bodies and meant to show that a person is not just how they look, not just whatever human traits they might have. And of course, I agree with all that. But bodies and ecologies are not just those things. Not even close. They are the mystery and the richness of all that ever moves us and all that we ever move. They are constant thresholds, constantly re-potentiating, and we hardly even notice that we are them.
This is why it upsets me, to see us and to read us wasting these gifts. We are doing ourselves (as awarenesses within bodies and ecologies) a great injustice when we talk about not reducing others to them.
The body is a world (and worlds of worlds!) we have hardly even sensed, an entirely mysterious and powerful endlessness of being (and more than being! we don’t even have a name for it). A body is not just a vehicle or a shell or a form that contains ‘the real us’. The process we gesture towards when we use the word ‘body’ is the rough estimate we are making of a portal into what is beyond all that might end or begin. The body is like a living, moving city held together by motions that are living ontological knowings far beyond what can ever be put into words or images or in any other such way represented.
Bodies and ecologies entrance, and are our entrances into what we already are and what we are already within.
To think there is a body and then ‘a real person’ inside that body is to confirm a limitation that does not actually exist. Whatever movement that real person is, the body is that and much more. We confuse our inability to really see and sense what we are for one another (and what we are all within and co-creating) with the small part of bodies we can handle, with the sketches and terms (like the word ‘body’ itself) or with the idea that there is a right or beautiful way to be a body. In fact, all bodies are right and beautiful and the differences in them, especially those that might seem out of the norm, are like thresholds of new potential and knowledge just waiting for us to be able to more fully sense and discover more of them (of us, of what self is only the growing tip of).
As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, our bodies are not things, they are situations.2
Bodies are also ecologies. Ecologies within ecologies, like books within bookshops or bookshops within NYC; like NYC within New York State. We can make distinctions but we cannot take one out of the other one. When we see another body, we are seeing another part of our own shared world and what we see before us is the chance to open the lid and let a little more of the lava pour into us, to feel the power of the crystal that is our shared bedrock. We cannot ‘reduce’ people to bodies anymore than we can reduce the books in Barnes & Noble to Barnes & Noble itself. Bodies are millions of books waiting to be read and written and found; they are musical rivulets ready to lead us into their flow, to give us notes that will open us to new melodies as part of a shared ecological motion and evermore layered song.
How can we better handle this? How can we help one another better handle this? That is the real work at the heart of addressing any of the concerns we mean when we talk about “being reduced to the body” or “being a product of our environment”.
Every body is a kaleidoscope of kinetic cognitions—of oriented feelings, habits and experiences— that offer an endless array of new potential readings and new potential sensory openings and new portals into whole other ways to be. We cannot reduce a body. We cannot reduce any body (within or without or in any direction you choose) because a body has no beginning or end and is inseparable from our own.
Bodies and ecologies are so potent that we limit our own senses, reducing our ways of seeing and being to scripts that limit us into seeing bodily and ecological movement as if it were static or flawed or limited, as if the small part of which we can handle and of which we are aware can be reduced to it. All we show when we hurt bodies or when we treat them as if they were anything other than precious is our own limitation, the edge over which we are not yet able to sense. Nothing can be reduced to bodies because they already contain and produce whatever the experience is that one wants not to be reduced. Bodies as ecologies and ecologies as bodies are mysterious beings, us and all, here to open unique movements in us as us. No body is only one body after all.
Once we understand minds as navigational movements of living beings that co-create one another and the ecologies they also birth, nurture and evolve, we can no longer speak of ‘reducing’ mental, emotional, or spiritual life to the body because all we have ever meant by such words are themselves experiential rivulets of the potentials of animacy that we do our best to sense with words like ‘body’ and ‘ecology’ and ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘us’.
To treat another body in a way that is less than sacred is to misunderstand the situation of being alive.
So why is it we do it so often? Why is it so hard for us to live at that vibration?
It may have to do with the assumption that there is any ultimate beginning or end, any body that is not also ecological, any ecology that is not also bodily, and any of what these words inadequately point to that could ever be containable in its kinetics. What evidence do we have of that? All this way-making may just be uncontainable, precarious and powerful precisely because we have no idea how to handle what is beyond limits. It is precisely the movement that words and images and representations can never say or show or name.
In other words…
Whatever we might be coming to better know as spirituality, as God, as psyche, as love, as sun and moon, as meaning and ecstasy and earth, and as any form of mysticism we might mistake, consider or conjure, it is only a taste of what it means to be able to experience bodies and ecologies beyond words, beyond these representations with which we try and notice ourselves as part of shared movement, of all that we feel that will not fit into any ‘where’ because it is never only of ‘one’ realm.
page 122, Megan O’Grady, How it Feels To Be Alive (a book I recommend and that later writes very beautifully about the body; this was just the phrase I happened to read at the shop that stayed with me, as it is a phrase I’ve encountered often)