Perfection Of Body Research Articles

Does the Body Keep the Score After the Game Is Over? Personal Identity and Perfection in the Resurrected Body

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk gives language to what has become a cross-disciplinary consensus—that our bodies and minds are profoundly, often surprisingly, involved with one another, and that traumatic events often mark people for life. In this article, I ask after the implications of this contemporary consensus for the resurrected body, in light of traditional claims about the body's perfection and persistence of identity in the resurrection. I widen the focus to include various ways in which the body might keep the score. In addition to trauma, I consider martyrdom, disfigurement, and disability. Whatever else it may mean, bodily resurrection must entail the completion of one's earthly life. In light of this, while there will be no debilitating signs of sin and death, it seems reasonable to suppose there may be salutary and doxologically oriented reminders of sin and death in the resurrected body.

The Fountain

All things flow from her. We know her tears create the stinging sea, and when she sighs the ferries founder and the porpoises and whales can't focus on their own discourse for the disturbance. These are the waters of life, the bitter fluids fleeing her body's perfection with such speed that when her piss drills a road to the earth's center, all wars suddenly cease and enemies tumble in. Her flowings are the means by which we mourn the dead, the living, and those never born, for mystery is in her menstruation– like manna her ministrations trickle into wine I drink from a crystal bowl.

The Taoist body

The ancient system of thought known as Taoism remains today the least well known of the world's great religions and one of the most inaccessible aspects of Chinese culture. This is in large part because Western thought clings to the notion of the separation of matter and spirit, body and soul. Taoism refuses this dualism and considers the body's perfection as essential as the soul's redemption is to Christianity. Kristofer Schipper's elegant and lucid introduction to the traditions of Taoism and the masters who transmit them will reward all those interested in China and in religions. The result of over twenty-five years of research, including eight years of fieldwork in China, Schipper's book retraces, step by step, the way that leads from Chinese shamanism and traditional village life to the physical Tending Life techniques, which in turn lead to the mysticism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Schipper shows the fundamental unity underlying all aspects of Taoism as Taoism considers itself to be. The social body - the community, the village, the land - corresponds in all aspects to the physical body in Taoism. In both of them the survival of humanity is decided here and now. 'My destiny is within me, not in Heaven!'