The Gap between the Mind and the Body

I have only ever told Amendri this, but when I was younger - I often had this strange out of body experience. It felt like my mind was pulled from my body, but I was still in my body - if that makes sense (I know it doesn’t).

It feels like you are in a dream. Your movements aren’t yours, just a mechanism of your body. You hear but don’t, sound enters your ears but not your mind. It felt like you don’t exist, because it makes no sense that you exist.

It would be seemingly random - sitting on the seesaw at the playground, riding in the car to school with Mom listening to Journey or sitting in class learning the multiplication tables. One moment I was there and another I was not.

They didn’t last long, only a few seconds at most. But it always started when I started to think - who are we? Why are we here? (The fact that I was thinking about this at 8 tells you all you need to know about me lol)

They disappeared as my wispy mustache started to grow in and my face became an angry cluster of landmines - my mind became occupied with other things.

Recently though, I have been wondering why it happened. I’ve tried and failed miserably to get the feeling to come back again. I’ve been tumbling it in my mind for a few weeks and the only thing I can really conclude is - there was a gap.

My pre puberty brain struggled to understand the abstraction of life. It couldn’t understand how people are not just 7 x 8 = 56 but instead we are 2 + 2 = 5.

It was a gap so significant, it would actually pull my mind from my body. I think what it was trying to tell me, was that we as people are more than just the mechanics of our limbs and nervous responses to senses - we have a soul.

I share this story for no other reason that, despite my lack of spirit realm experiences - the soul is still a mystery. We as people are so szechuan-numbingly complex, that that it can often be easier to just drink the milk.

Fifteen years later and I still don’t know exactly what the human soul is, how to define it or how to make sense of it. But I do know one thing - the gap is there for a reason and maybe 8 year old Max was onto something.

See you next time,
Max