It has long been contended, by those whose business such things are, that the gut is the seat of the human disposition. Cruelly blood- and acid-riddled, this pulsing sack of liquids and muscle-viscera is, literally, the core of the self – the centre of the body, the thing around which the whole of the individual is curled and coiled; either protective, soft, as the bud of a flower, or fierce and tight, like a spring. Prepared to seize or to release at the slightest touch. Anticipating the world around, and swaying in rhythm, these juicy viscera feel the resonance of everything as it trembles down to the base.

As such, there are some amongst us for whom the gut, with attentions appropriately attuned, substantiates a sixth sense; or, rather, a first sense, the base sense, to which all other senses refer, through which they refract, and by which they are anticipated. For the five senses constitute a web, a matrix of information that hangs about the self and that is commonly called awareness, and it is down towards the gut that this information ultimately inclines. That is to say, as the contact surface mediating between the sensitive self and the world from which it is distinguished, the gut is that which is aware.

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Human emotions, in their pressing, trans-subjective authority, represent the final, most irreducible level of truth that any of our belief systems can ultimately resort to in their own proselytization. As simultaneously physiological and psychological phenomena, emotional experiences – either products of the human machine or the ghosts that animate it – are the foundation and the content, the justificatory purpose, of both materialist and transcendentalist modes of view alike, and that which both seek to account for.

Further, encounters with emotion begin in the gut. That is to say, the inner quality of any emotional experience simply is an onset of feeling in the deepnesses of the body: somewhere just above the prostate, floating around above the bladder, in the shadowed curves of the intestine, we feel joy bubbling forth in warm rushes; grief melts down out of the chest and onto the belly, in long, heavy strokes; anger pulses up out of the knotted lower organs and into the diaphragm in flashing streams of heat… Whatever and wherever the “feeling” may be, the soft core of the bodily trunk is always the radial-vortical centre. In this way, our grandest and most high-minded schemes of cosmic order – the models we build of the sky and the soul; our instincts about the unseen universe and the influence of the individual upon it – all ultimately depend upon the qualia of gastric activity.

But there is a yet further, perhaps deeper, dimension to these experiences, with yet greater pertinence to the minute mechanisms of human being. Before, or in parallel with, becoming a full emotional event, and from there emerging into lucidity and conceptualisation, the intrinsically negative or positive inflections of our intestinal responses tacitly nudge, tweak and tease the mind of the individual into a subtle (yet uncontested, and therefore total) pre–conscious attitude of negativity or positivity. This gestalt impression then quickly solidifies into a value judgement, pertaining to whatever external (or internal) event ostensibly caused the initial gut-reaction, and it is just such quasi-spontaneous nascent judgements — of attraction or repulsion, goodness or badness — that form the intentional rudder steering our consciousness through the sensory world, via the reflexive and ameliorative actions that they demand. Beneath the complex topography of the psycho-emotional realm, itself presenting a map of our individual empirical histories — our very identities — lies this most rudimentary, perhaps even arbitrary, binary mechanism.

This is the profound reality of the action of the gut, veiled in the textures of emotional experience, and that which makes it our most important philosophical tool – because it is the gut that tells us, in its crude, nervous language, what all this that is sensed ultimately means, to and for us, before we even know it ourselves, by creating the phenomenological conditions of meaning itself. Our ability to comprehend the world around us — attach significance and value to our sensory experiences, and accordingly to act out complex intentions within the phenomenal realm in which they immerse us — is deeply dependent upon the gut’s sensitive activity. Further, it follows that the profundity of this communication (viz., the depth and quality of meaning we experience, and the clear volition with which we can therefore act) can be deepened if we can learn to engage more closely with the immediate resonance of the gut’s twitching operation, which will thus yield a more profound awareness, both of the trans-human world and of the position of one’s human self within it. Of one’s most fundamental, physiological, philosophical, emotional feelings about the world, and, inevitably, of what it must mean to feel, to be subjected to experience in the first place, be it external or internal, physical or intellectual, abstract or immediate. For all such experiences are actualised within the gut; that is, its mumbles and rumbles and protests and declarations, they are these experiences. They are the fleshy gaseous content that ignites human life, sounds its peaks and valleys, flushes it with the vital heat of fear and love and everything between and beyond, to burn in the passages of art, music, philosophy, spiritual being, all simply the illustrated matrices of mind and matter, a singing sack of nervous guts, the flesh made aware. For awareness is what makes us human; but awareness of awareness — the locating of conscious attention in the immanent mechanism of experience — may yet constitute enlightenment.

It is said that the gut’s is the voice that whispers in the chambers of being; and it throbs with the pressure of incessant opinion. Listen, then – listen to the viscera.