Bryan's consciousness. Illness as fracture

The man who, more than anyone else, has embodied the contemporary utopia of biochemical longevity — the prince of biohacking, the individual who turned his own body into a permanent laboratory of measurements, protocols, supplements, infusions, restrictions, and control — has declared that he has autoimmune gastritis: a condition in which the immune system attacks the lining of the stomach, one of the fundamental sites of nourishment, assimilation, and the very sustenance of life.

But from the anthropological point of view, Johnson did not simply “discover” this illness.

He created it. Not in the banal, mechanical, or medical sense of the term. Not because an autoimmune disease can be reduced to direct individual responsibility, nor because one can establish a linear causality between a life protocol and the onset of illness. He created it in a deeper, existential, symbolic, anthropological sense.

He created it because he produced a radical fracture between himself and consciousness. He treated the body as manipulable matter, as an organism to be optimized, as the sum of organs, parameters, biomarkers, and biochemical functions. He believed that longevity could be conquered through absolute control of the physical body, as if the body were a machine to be corrected rather than a living totality to be listened to.

But the body does not obey the ego. No, the body is not merely stomach, blood, muscles, hormones, cells, and tissues. The body is an embodied mind, a field of relationships, a place of truth. It is the point at which life records what the individual does not want to see. It is the threshold through which consciousness speaks, even when the ego continues to believe it can dominate everything.

This is why Johnson’s autoimmune disease is such a symbolically powerful event. Because it strikes precisely the system of sustenance, assimilation, and nourishment. It strikes the place where the body receives, transforms, incorporates. And it is as if the body were saying: “You cannot nourish yourself on your will to control. You cannot live against consciousness and expect life to keep sustaining you.”

Longevity is not a relationship with the physical body. It is not the manipulation of organs. It is not the obsessive surveillance of biomarkers. It is not the replacement of life with its measurement. Longevity is a relationship with consciousness. It is the capacity to inhabit a higher, deeper, incorruptible dimension, in which the body is no longer reduced to a technical object, but recognized as a place of truth. From this perspective, illness is not only something one discovers. It is something that, at times, is generated when life is forced to betray its deepest direction.

Johnson did not discover autoimmune gastritis. He encountered, in the body, the fracture he had built in life. And this is exactly where we must begin.

Will is the means through which human beings attempt their own self-affirmation. We believe that everything can be dominated, corrected, achieved. We believe that life can be bent to our intentions, our ambitions, our projects. But it is the ego that believes this, and perhaps the ego is precisely the most fragile, most superficial, and least decisive part of our existence. The ego moves along the surface of life: it constructs representations, desires, identities, objectives. It believes it can direct everything, but in truth it only dialogues with the most manipulable part of reality.

The body, instead, does not obey its vanities. Indeed, the body is not the sum of muscles, organs, or voluntary acts. The body is not merely anatomy, function, performance. The body is a living totality, an embodied mind, a field of relationships. It is what Nancy Scheper-Hughes defines, moving beyond the Cartesian and reductionist vision of the body, as a body that is at once individual, social, and political. Our body is mind. Ours is a mindful body.

This corporeal mind is not fully controllable, because it is connected to a deeper dimension of reality: consciousness.

Consciousness does not belong to us. We cannot corrupt it with our wills, nor contaminate it with our representations. There are no systems of mediation capable of bending it to the needs of the ego. It is not a product of personal identity, nor an accessory function of the rational mind. Rather, it is an original, non-negotiable dimension, in which the truth of the whole continues to act even when the individual is unaware of it.

The body dialogues with this consciousness. It dialogues with it even when the ego does not know, does not see, does not understand. This is why the body knows before we do. It records fractures, incoherences, the gaps between what we live and what we are called to recognize.

Consciousness is a threshold to which few human beings truly gain access, because the tribute to be paid is immense: one must accept that it exists. One must recognize that not everything is will, control, project, personal narrative. One must accept that there is a truth that cannot be reduced to human desire.

We might imagine consciousness as a quantum place: a space in which everything is interconnected and in which the only real element is the truth of the whole. Outside this consciousness, by contrast, extends a virtual world, manipulable, shaped by the ego and its wills. It is the world of human superstructures: science, religion, economics, medicine, institutions. All are systems that produce meaning, but also conflict, because they are not absolute dimensions but historical, relative constructions, traversed by power and human interests, as Foucault taught us.

But what does all this have to do with illness?

Illness is perhaps the most powerful signal of a fracture. It is the language through which the body manifests an incoherence between our human way of living and the deeper direction indicated by consciousness. We become ill when we move away from this dimension, when life separates from its own truth, when existence is bent for too long to the demands of the ego, of role, of performance, of adaptation.

The body, understood in its totality, forgets nothing. Nothing escapes it. It records what consciousness knows and what the individual often represses. This is why certain illnesses seem to exceed purely organic explanation. This is why certain pathological forms, which Western medicine tends to define as psychosomatic or autoimmune, require a broader vision.

Autoimmune diseases, in particular, express a profound paradox: the body attacking itself, the system no longer recognizing what it should protect, defense becoming aggression. Medicine describes the phenomenon, measures its effects, classifies its manifestations, but often struggles to question the more radical meaning of this fracture.

Western medicine, still tied to a predominantly phenomenological and functional reading of the body, has not fully understood the relationship between body, consciousness, and existential incoherence. It often limits itself to naming what it cannot integrate: psychosomatic, autoimmune, idiopathic. But to name is not to understand.

Science moves in another direction. It defines its own standards of validation and then recognizes as true only what falls within those parameters. In doing so, however, it risks confirming itself more than opening itself to the complexity of the living. This is why, perhaps, it will never truly resolve what it claims to explain.

The paths are elsewhere, and they pass through the body, through consciousness, through the profound relationship between what we are, what we live, and what we can no longer afford to ignore.