You Are Not the Body

Akbar & Jeff? No!
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

At present you wrongly identify yourself as the body.
Body is given a certain name; that is ‘you’; you consider it to be like that…
I have been very open, very explicit. I’ve been telling you that
you are not the body…
Nisargadatta

Part One:
There seems (broadly speaking) to be two kinds of people in life when a camera is pulled out: those that eagerly jump before the lens and those who flee in terror.

I am a self confessed jumper. I love to have my picture taken. And I am always eager to see the results.
Do I look good? Do I look weird? I am fascinated to find out.
Why?
Well, of course it’s great to have a flattering photo.
But, I’ve come to realize there’s something subtler going on here: I can’t believe I look like that.
“Like that!”

Last year in something of an epiphany I was suddenly struck by, “The camera doesn’t lie.”
Be it good or bad photo – that is how my body looks from that angle, in that light, after that much sleep, and in that wind and those clothes.
Good or weird doesn’t matter.
I look like… That!

What a wonderful discovery. The world is trying to get me to swallow the line that I can actually look like that.
And somewhere deep inside I know so clearly: “I” do not look like “That.”

What do you really look like? Compare the image to how you really feel.
You can try this as a bit of self inquiry:

Surely, I don’t have those squinty eyes? Not like that.
Geeze, I don’t have a head that long and strangely oblong.
I am not like that.
I am more like … what… ?
Nothing at all like That.
Nothing!

Part Two:


This is over nine minutes long, but worth it, I think.
Dean Radin describes experiments testing the relationship between mind and matter. He begins with “intention” experiments and then goes on to “attention” experiments. In these experiments, random number generators are used to test whether collective human attention corresponds to a change in the physical environment. …. It does. Checkout the GlobalOness Project here. It is inspiring.

Silence, Part 1: A Body from the Absolute

the genius
Originally uploaded by yves.harnois

In my last post, I mentioned the discomfort I was wrestling with. I described it as “shredding the Silence.” I’d like to try to explain that experience more closely, for it bears upon how it is we live in Silence.

Since 1975, Silence has descended upon me, sprung up around me, washed over in a splashing wave, or simply tickled my spine. Silence is the most direct approach I have to the transcendent Absolute. And lately, it has presented itself with such intensity there’s simply no way my body can absorb it, relax into it, or simply “adjust.”

It’s like trying to sit still and relax into a sustained jolt of electricity – except its utter Silence. My reaction is immediate and totally reflexive. I shut down tight and the whole jolt passes in a few seconds.

The curious thing about last week’s “shredding of the Silence” was that it seemed to be an opportunity for Silence to come into me without being immediately rejected.
More precisely - the Silence merged into one side of me.
There it met the resistance of my own body, a body formed from “Ether” rather than the usual flesh and bone or even molecules or energy and light.
Ether is the best label I can give it.
I see it as crystal clear, without even molecular or vaporous content.
It’s like heat waves rising mirage-like above the highway. Except this Ether is not hot, nor are there any waves.
But, it was there, taking up space, forming my body, and abutting with the Silence right along the midline of my physical body.
The Silence was something distinctly different from Ether. Lacking the crystal clarity of the latter, Silence was an unbounded, immaterial presence.
It was also not my body. But, it was ready to move in.
My insistence upon moving, upon thinking, upon doing anything of much consequence caused a shredding of the Ether spreading out from where it abutted with the Silence.
It was a most physical lesson on Wholeness breaking into individuality.
Wholeness became separated, even as it permeated.

It was a hard and curious lesson.
It’s a lesson that I’m kind of left to figure for myself.
The only text I can refer to are these words from Maharishi, notes I took the winter of 1974, from a video tape shown at a TM teacher retreat.
(Maharishi was actually discussing the possibility of physical immortality, but I’ve edited it for an emphasis towards my own situation.)
Where Maharishi speaks of Absolute, you can just as easily substitute the word Silence.

What ages? Certainly not consciousness. One thing that is ever the same is the field of consciousness. What ages is a product of consciousness – energy or matter, that which is the home of consciousness…that which is not changing is only the Absolute and from this it’s apparent [that] if there is a body made of Absolute, then it couldn’t change. If we can mould a form of that, then we’ll have a body structured out of that which knows no change. Whether it’s possible to have such a body – the real answer is if… we can locate a body made from the finest Relative, then we can conceive of a formless form…

Prior to transcendental experience is matter of [the] finest state of [the] physical. Physical values of life are found in finer and finer values, we know from experience. Physics say[s] “ground state”… These theories are structured through direct experience through instruments. And at each of these levels it’s possible to structure a body. If there is that matter existing, then the bodies can be molded out of that…

[The] time value of gross [level of Creation] is different from the time value of the subtle. But, we’re so habituated to feel the passage of time we feel some factor of time when we transcend. We may feel five minutes has past while meditating and we come out and thirty minutes are gone. So, the quality of life is different when bodies are structured in finer matter. On the finest level we have a word for it – celestial - where bodies are glowing with light, bodies made of light…

Biological immortality will be on the same level as the abstract immortality of consciousness. Only consciousness is non-changing. Unless one can understand that there is a material that is non-material, so concrete yet so abstract, a man cannot comprehend that until he has the experience…

Bodies made of light. Light is finer than sound. Sound is finer than waves. Consciousness is finer [than everything]. So there is that level of substance that is so refined. And as that experience becomes more and more clear, then we can conceive of a body made of the Absolute.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, LaAntilla, Spain, 1973.

It’s nice to find such passages.
It helps me trust my own experience.
(And I apologize how my editing and Maharishi’s spontaneous speech make it read a bit jumpily.)
I don’t feel nuts. But, I do feel a bit outlandish.
However, there is some very interesting biology here.
And Silence is important too…

As is comic relief.
Maharishi went on to speak of Tapas – purification of the body to refine its elements into the celestial.
During this past week, I have spontaneously become the simplest of vegetarians. No more meat for now. So, it seems some Tapas begins solely intuitively.
However, I fine it difficult to believe that my blend of decafe and regular coffee, beta blockers and calcium channel agonists is really the stuff of traditional regimens.
Which brings us back to the interesting biology of all this.

What does it take to physiologically support enlightenment?
Take a look at this video of Ramana Maharishi before you answer.

Waking Up each Morning

early incarnation
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
Adrienne Rich, Power

Or to put this in another way and on another level:
It is necessary that the Current be attuned to the resources of the body and particularly the nervous system. While in the Current, I feel exaltation and a sense of well being that reaches well down into the outer organism, yet this does not change the fact that the Current is a powerful energy and does tax certain powers of endurance… The physical body is clearly the weakest link…

if the body is thought of as something like a ten ampere fuse, while from the transformer, just beyond, there is being delivered a current on the order of one hundred amperes at high potential. One is constantly under a pressure to use more than ten amperes and thus strain the fuse close to the point of burning out.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy.

And in yet a third manner, this from Eckhart Tolle:
Chi is the inner energy field of your body. It is the bridge between the outer you and the Source. It lies halfway between the manifested, the world of form, and the Unmanifested. Chi can be likened to a river or an energy stream. If you take the focus of your consciousness deeply into the inner body, you are tracing the course of this river back to its Source…

You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains for a while when you return to the manifested, the world of separate forms. This energy is much more vital than food….

…use your inner body as a portal through which you enter the Unmanifested, and keep that portal open so that you stay connected with the Source at all times. It makes no difference, as far as the inner body is concerned, whether your outer physical body is old or young, frail or strong. The inner body is timeless…
The Power of Now.

Most mornings, lately, I wake up with something of an elevator ride.
It begins from the ground floor of “Existence”- I guess.
No object. No thought. No dream. Still, there seems to be something to the Nothing, when I look back in time. A bit of light, something even though there’s nothing, it is certainly not empty.

A swoosh as if some elevator is rising, pulls “me” out of That pure being, into a tingling field of energy as simultaneously I regain the ability for thought and to notice what is going on.
The tingling energy of rather dingy light (I want to call it “golden” – but that’s too clean and clear) this electric tingling of dirty dish-water energy swells up and floods my physical body. Instantly, my physical body is racked by inner trembling and nausea, where previously body was just fine and resting quietly.

Now, I can notice that it’s morning and the bedroom is surrounding me.
The elevator ride is over, even as awareness of my inner body remains.
I lie there for a moment hoping things will settle, become less intense, before I venture reaching out a hand to Bennie.

He is such a happy fellow. By contrast, I am feeling fairly trashed.
The ride up into "awareness of..." is such an uncontrolled process and where I am deposited is so very disappointing.
It all ends up in an “Ugh” and nausea.

Becky and I used to laugh about a picture of me as a baby in my buggy, ca.1952.
We entitled it, “Patty, trapped in her body.”
We joked about the shock of incarnating and how I’d been blessed with one solid chunk of body. (“Ninety-fifth percentile in every grade school class and all of it was muscle, dense.”)

Waking up these days seems to be a small scale recapitulation of that incarnating.
Leave the Light, take on inhabitation of this dross, dross body.
I find it tedious.
I also think of Maharishi saying whenever we’d complain, “Something good is happening.”

But, I think Tolle has put it somewhat inaccurately.
It does make a difference what shape your body is in.
(Why else do people become vegetarians, especially while on spiritual retreat?)

Each morning's re-awakening leads me to all sorts of questions.
Why is my inner light so dingy? What inner alchemy is this?
Does the physical body pollute the inner? Or, does the subtle stir-up the gross?
I bet both sides can be to blame. So, which direction, out-to-in or in-to-out, is causing my particular malaise?
Is this dross of physical or psychological origin? What did I eat yesterday? What can I change today? Is this toxicity from this life? A past life?
…so many questions… I will stop here.

… Or, perhaps, I’d do well to rethink the fact I’m sleeping with a dog.
Oh! That is simply far too sad.

Bennie stays.

PostScript:
And now I see. The physical body is the fuel. The inner body is the flame.
The inner body doesn’t care what the physical is like: strong, weak, pure, impure.
It’s all fuel for the fire and It will burn the dross until all the fuel is gone.
Nothing gross (including Bennie) can pollute this fire.
But, you can sure generate a lot of smoke, shakes, nausea, and more.

As with tending any fire, you want a clean and controlled burn.
And tending to the fire is a skill we each must master for our selves.

As for The Poet, Merrell-Wolff, and Tolle, they are right on – each in their own way.

You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone ...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down
the upbreathing air.

Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” The Dream of a Common Language.