Gouda Jan 17, 2007
Once again ‘the body’
It’s possible for the internal experience of your body to assist you in [recognizing] the universal being-experience of non-duality. When you close your eyes you really can’t tell where your bodily sphere, that is, the realm of your self, ends. If you don’t start thinking about it: where are your limits?
But the body appears to fall under the same rubric as the I, doesn’t it. Then you don’t have to be that aware of your body, do you?
If only that were true. On the bodily level you are not simply free. On various levels of subtlety, you are still positioned in a body. On the level of supra-personal insight you have an insight body. So here too, the same applies: just be aware of your bodily being. Then you affirm that this sphere [or realm] becomes less and less definable.
Then aren’t you referring to ananda, the bliss-being?
Yes, that too. [But] Then you withdraw even further back to the source of yourself. Then you are no longer situated in your insight body, but rather the universal bliss-body.
I find the “being in your body” confusing.
You have to let go of the image you have learned, what you know about the body and what you see materially. You retreat to your sense of feeling-awareness, to your feeling of your body. So that material form that you have in your head, as a cognitive form, is just one of the [many] forms of your body.
When you dream, what kind of body do you have then? It’s a dream body.
When you are situated in the mental realm and you are imagining that you are here and that you are there, then you have a mental body.
When you feel that you are being absorbed in a blissful sphere of ananda, what kind of body do you have? An ananda-body.
Thus far I have been blessed with a physically strong body, in which there’s not much to feel…
Still, it’s important to feel your body concretely because that’s your normal sphere of being. Initially you can experience your ‘being’ best on a physical level. Then that’s very concrete. When that experience isn’t there, very soon you’ll only be thinking about universal being and such. But then it’s only an abstraction, a theoretical realization. No, it concerns your own concrete sphere of being, the ‘being’ that you experience physically.
Is ‘being’ then bodily being?
Can you experience ‘being’ differently? What does it feel like? This “being”? What is “being”? It’s a feeling energy! In normal everyday life you always experience it physically. You can experience that on all the various subtle levels.
Because you experience the feelings internally, do you call that physicality?
The feelings have to do with your own bodily realm. The body is nothing more than some feeling energies.
Still, that doesn’t have anything to do with the experience of being, does it?
Well, count on it. How do you experience it otherwise?
Ultimately, of course, there’s just one being, so it has to be that way.
Just now you joined in with [the exercise of] clenching your fists and you felt your hands. After a shower you feel your whole body and this sphere of being of yours, that you clearly feel and are, has the tendency to expand. That expansion then is experienced more concretely than if you were to go directly to a rarefied level. You will also have to experience the non-duality very clearly on a rarefied level, just as clearly as the way you experience your body and the world in every day life. Otherwise, that being-experience will never become stable and clear. Then the dual reality returns all too easily. What do you do when you don’t know what reality is? Am I dreaming right now or not? You pinch yourself – oh yes, I really feel that. That is reality, because I experience it physically. Now, that’s how it works.
But what does that have to do with the experience of being?
Isn’t that the experience of your own existence, that you ‘are there’? That being-experience becomes the being-experience of non-duality. When that non-dual being-experience isn’t so concrete, [then] that reality is gone again as soon as you reopen your eyes. You feel a pain in your beautiful and spacious meditation and so you return once again to your little old place in duality. So, take a good look to see which has strongest reality.
The refined levels don’t have such a strong reality.
Thus, you will have to experience the reality of a growing non-duality on those subtler levels even more clearly physically than when you are situated in your body and you sit looking out towards things at a distance. If not, the dual reality will reassert itself again when you open your eyes.
But shouldn’t reality become one whole?
Yes, of course, and that is [very] clear when you let go of your bodily forms – which you think of as fixed. But when doing so, the being-experience of the freedom from forms must also be very clear. Otherwise, this lack-of-division (non-duality) just disappears again very quickly. Even when you have some sense of it, if the concrete being-experience is not strong enough, is not clearly conscious enough, it hardly has any effect.
When that non-duality becomes clearly conscious, that is, you become completely open physically, then the world, when it does return, is absolutely no problem anymore. That world then is not so strong and powerful that it brings you back into a particular body and so into a dualistic reality.
Ask yourself again and again: what about me?
thegroundlessopenness 