Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, I maintained a blog. It was a wild, eclectic and rambling sort of affair in which everyone had pseudonyms, including me, because most of the stuff I wrote about needed that sort of Internet Witness Protection Program Anonymity feature. (No, I will not provide a link to those old writings.)

But here, you will find an entirely new blog, one written above board. It might not have some of the famously scandalous stories of my old writings — in which everyone was commonly quaffing a glass of heavy, robust pinot noir or port and talking about complex psychological issues with the slightly slurred and warped reality common enough by the time one brings out the port — but it will undoubtedly have a touch of what my pals like to call Tamarisma. It’s an unavoidable trait in my writing — and in my persona: wit and intelligence and impassioned, out-spoken, sometimes outlandish, commentary.

But I’m giving this blog the courtesy of a classier enterprise by naming it The Fourth Body Blog — and if the gods who manage one’s ability to self-edit are smiling favorably upon me, I’ll live up to that moniker.

The Fourth Body, after all, is the seat of our wisdom. In the philosophical system of Vedanta — a beautifully non-theistic, non-dogmatic philosophy that underlies numerous spiritual practices including yoga, Buddhism and Hinduism — the Fourth Body is recognized as the seat and power supply of our personal narratives and meaning-making activities. This includes everything from political and spiritual beliefs to those big frames of reference — those ideas about how the world is “supposed to be” — that we rely upon to distinguish, say, dreams from “reality.”

It’s my commitment to you, fair reader, that I will make every effort to write from the Fourth Body, to maintain as much conscious awareness as I can of the stories I’m weaving for you — and to keep those stories as healthy and adaptive as possible. You may find I will pick apart some subject rather critically — for example, whether or not the pharmaceutical industry has an interest in keeping Americans on a junk-food diet so they’ll jump from pill to pill to pill in search for a “cure” to the mental anguish often caused by a shitty* diet — but I will always attempt to bring it around to something useful, something helpful. As hopeless as some social situations may seem at times, I will take a stand here against helplessness and provide some thought about what you can do to find and sustain your health and well-being in relationship to the topics discussed.

Namaste!

*I know “shitty” is a curse word; I use those sometimes. Especially when they are accurate, and I can tell you without a second thought that the Standard American Diet  (notice how it spells the acronym SAD?) is nothing short of “shitty.” If you are offended by such terminology, you may want to seek your counseling services elsewhere.