Thread by @wordpaley

thesis: life evolved/created to be progressively better at keeping time. the human body is the most advanced chronological device, with a resolution of 330 billion time units/day (# of cell divisions). it has cyclical (skin, menses, sleep) and linear (brain, telomeres) clocks.

Using Jewish thought’s 4 categories of the natural world:

🪨inanimate: stays the same forever
🌱plant: grows fast when young, then stays largely the same for a very long time
🐒animal: similar lifecycle to humans but no semiotic memory or free will, so limited ability to change

This can also be measured by the relative difficulty of determining age:

🪨: nearly impossible to determine age
🌱: once mature, very difficult except if you kill it to count tree rings
🐒: difficult to determine except in early and late life
👥: extremely easy—just ask for bday

The body is a good clock on an object level. It knows when it’s time to eat, sleep, go outside. It knows when its inhabitant’s time in the world is up.

but it’s also subjectively good. it records human memory, and allows easy access to it. like an old calendar or dated diary.

What further separates humans is that they can *consciously* speed up, slow down, or reset their clocks, either by making changes to their physical lives or reinventing their self-conceptions. This is why major life changes are often felt in the body and may feel like a new birth

These changes, in turn, affect the functioning of the largest of these clocks—the lifelong body clock, the one that stops when it breaks. think of interconnected gears or cogs, like in a real clock. the big one will turn too fast or too slow, if the smaller gears do that.

It’s all about the synchronicity of the body, a finite clock, with the soul, an infinite energy source. If the body can’t figure out a way to use the energy efficiently, it will short-circuit and fry out. it won’t break, but it will find other, less efficient ways to use energy.

Dumb example: Bob is an artist at heart stuck in a 9-to-5. He’s stressed from work and hates his job. But he ignores his creative urges and comes home and binges Netflix. All that bottled-up energy needs to go somewhere: self-loathing, workaholism, a blowup at work.

Bob’s body clocks are not synchronized with the powerful energy source of his soul, so they’re forced to deal with outbursts at opportune times. this wears them down. if he goes on like this all his life, the big body clock wears down too. we know that long-term stress does this.

Of course he can make small changes to his diet or sleep or whatever. But so long as he doesn’t allow his soul to truly express itself, and adjust his body accordingly, the gears will keep grinding against each other. the stress will return. it could morph into worse things.

This is why the 10 generations after Adam and Eve lived so long. Their bodies were so synchronized with their souls such that they were immediately responsive to their souls’ needs, instead of letting the energy bottle up. it’s a far more energy-efficient way to live.

Does that mean their moments of inspiration were less powerful? Perhaps, but they felt G!d *in their bodies* more powerfully than we ever could, because their constant body-soul synchronicity allowed the impact of the soul on the body to be cumulative, not intermittent like ours.