Monday, 19 August 1996
Post No. 6 of 8
by Paulina Borsook

Humans have always craved the illusion of absolute control (this time, manifested in the Extropian fantasy of choosing/creating selves to suit the occasion/activity) as much as we crave the loss of control (drugs, sex, and rock and roll). What I resist, Max, is the notion that you can tease out any meaningful notion of self from the living fabric it is enmeshed in.

Scuffling barefoot through newly mown grass; cantering a horse along a Jamaican ridgetop; the all-five-senses roaring, true kinesthetic delight in muscle discharge, endogenous opiates cranking, in bodysurfing one August day off Del Mar. These were defining moments when I felt I was most who I am, ecstasies that stem from the ways mind and body are indissoluble.

Severing the link between my consciousness and my sensorium and the carcass I was given this time around - would make about as much sense as the Xian notion of the permanence of the soul set free from the corruption of the body. How can I divorce my tree-hugger ideas from the active sensory pleasure I derive from drinking from an as-yet uncontaminated Big Sur spring?

Join Paulina and Max for a live audio debate Friday, 23 August at 11 a.m. PDT in Wired Arena.

But for someone else (let's call him Mr. X), perhaps, who doesn't like water or horses or was born with fine hand-eye coordination and a gift for competition - X, in his mentation, might care far more for electoral politics than say, my intellectual interests in bioregionalism.

How can anyone make the cut between body and mind, self and experience (whether sensory or emotional)?

As for better living through chemistry: I have many friends who are Prozac success stories, the drug causing great and subtle good changes. But most, after a time, cease treatment after Prozac gets them out of whatever trough they were in. They feel the self-medicated is the self somehow muffled.

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