Simon Cox is a scholar and practitioner whose work traces the history of the subtle body across Taoist, Tibetan, medical, alchemical, and Western esoteric traditions.
He studied history at Oxford, spent six years training in a Taoist context at Wudang Mountain, and later wrote his dissertation at Rice on the genealogy of the subtle body. In this conversation, we talk about internal maps of the body, Taoist and Tibetan somatic cartographies, the challenges of translating contemplative practice across cultures, and how different ways of inhabiting the body may open into different experiences of reality. Toward the end, we touch on the ontology of pain, cultural differences in interoception, and embodied cognition.
Timestamps
00:00:00 – Intro and Background Context
00:03:50 – Development of Internal Maps
00:08:00 – The Neijing Tu and Practice-Based Internal Cartography
00:11:30 – Porting Taoist Practice to the West
00:14:00 – Qigong, Neigong, and Modern Chinese Practice Categories
00:17:20 – Taoist Diversity and Tibetan Subtle Body Maps
00:21:10 – Medical vs. Spiritual Maps
00:25:10 – Paradigms, Tibetan Medicine, and the Three Turnings
00:27:30 – Two Unsatisfying Views of the Subtle Body
00:32:20 – Novel and Inevitable Syncretisms
00:35:00 – Historicizing and Genealogies
00:38:10 – Reality, Truth, and Embodiment
00:40:00 – Awareness, Inhabiting the Body, and Taoist Theories of Mind
00:43:20 – The Mind Outside the Body
00:46:00 – Fate, Ancestors, Purpose, and Lines of Affinity
00:49:00 – Polyontology, Political vs. Policing, Frequency Resonance
00:54:20 – Esalen, Western Somatics, and Theory vs. Practice
00:56:50 – Paradigm Shift, New Materialisms, Distributed Agency/Intelligence
01:00:50 – Ontological Pluralism and Eurocentrism
01:05:30 – Mutual Vulnerable Knowing and Minds Knowing Minds
01:09:30 – How Scientists and Technologists Can Contribute, and The Ontological Turn
01:15:10 – Embodied Mathematicians
01:20:00 – Technology with Different Ontologies, Tsien Hsue-shen, Cybernetics
01:26:30 – A Genealogy of Pain
01:31:20 – Ontology of Pain, Christian Suffering vs. Buddhist Suffering
01:35:00 – Biocultural Disease and the Social Transmission of Pain
01:40:00 – Simon’s Current Projects: Esalen, Harvard, Energy, and Qi
01:43:10 – Eugene Gendlin and Therapeutic Process
Excellent interview with Simon Cox on The Integral Stage where they actually talk more about the subtle body as a term.
The Subtle Body: A Genealogy by Simon Cox
