The Unruly Body (Slight Return)

On chakras, heart attacks, and sharpening the wild mind

The end of Akira confused me, speaking of unruly bodies and wild minds, when Tetsuo lost control of both and seemed to balloon up to a giant mass of flesh and fat that, if I recall, suffocated his friend. Neo Tokyo was eventually destroyed; this, after the military failed to control Tetsuo’s supernatural abilities, thereby his wrath and telekinetic violence inaugurated the apocalypse. I am told I should read the manga if I wish to get a firm grasp on the plot; if I read anything, likely it will be Wikipedia, the true source of all things wonderful and splendid and dubious.

Furthermore, in the matter of unruly bodies, I have read quite a bit on chakras. I wish to understand the ways in which our bodies align with our minds to bring us forward to something new and immaterial, that might explain things science refuses or is ill-equipped to address. I read up on the crown chakra, the root chakra, the heart chakra, and the throat chakra; there are at least three more, but I suspect there are billions through our bodies, like little unseen galaxies connected by tunnels or networks of light beams threading points of massive amounts of energy stored within us.

I think this is grand. I cannot contain my excitement. For various reasons, I have accepted the illogic of the world. A budding mystic entranced by metaphysics and the everyday, I’d like to one day move objects with my mind and learn how to live a peaceful and joyous life as a regular human being. I have determined that eating myself into an early grave simply won’t do, though not for lack of trying.

I had a health scare in late 2016 when I thought I was having a heart attack. The power of the mind being what it is, I might as well say I had a heart attack for real. I thought it; I believed it; I experienced the fear of impending death — a tingling sensation traveled from my chest to my left shoulder, then down to the fingertips. Granted, the emergency EKG readings indicated no arrhythmic activity, as though I made it all up, as if the heart attack was all in my mind. It doesn’t matter when speaking of direct experience.