on leaving our bodies

the body is a vehicle for the soul, for awareness, for “me” yet it is also a cage, a room, a  house that holds in the spirit. without the body we cannot seem to experience and see things and travel, yet due to the body we cannot move faster and we have to compromise and take care of aches and pains. no wonder our relationships to our bodies seem forever paradoxical, loving and strained, punitive and rewarding, all at the same time.

our bodies have limitations, they hurt, they age, they become infected, they stop working… in a spiritual sense perhaps birth and death are coming into and leaving from the body.

consciousness and awareness seems to be ahead of the body, it is not separate, yet it seems to be able to transcend the body. we can imagine running even when we’re not, we can fantasize about intimacy even when there is none physically, we can invent scenarios and react to them.

yet we suffer when our mind is where our body cannot be or our body is where our mind doesn’t want to be. suffering happens when we are in a place we don’t want to be.

so it makes sense that when we get caught in suffering, we want to abandon our bodies. we want to abandon “reality”- the solid material-ness or is-ness of things that cannot seem to change as easily as our souls can dream. perhaps that is what suicide is.

yet it is this act of  wanting to leave parts of ourselves, of fighting with out inner selves, of abandoning either our souls or our bodies, seem to create even more suffering. after all a civil war always depletes the country and leaves it weaker, or split into multiple parts. integration, with all parts intact, is what jung would call individuation. embodying our bodies and materializing our souls seems to be the spiritual quest.

From world weary woman,  

 

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birth and death

babies make sense of their bodies as they grow. they don’t know where their bodies are, and initially they don’t recognize themselves in a mirror. the awareness that is partially housed in the body starts getting acquainted, like getting familiar with a new neighborhood, it starts exploring and knowing its way around. but perhaps, as it starts getting familiar and settled into the form of the body, it forgets that there is a world outside of the neighborhood, or that this body or neighborhood was once (and is) part of the bigger world or awareness.

in the book Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder writes: a magician does a trick… “a white rabbit is pulled out of a top hat. all mortals were born at the very tip of the rabbit’s fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. but as they grow older they work themselves deeper and deeper into the fur. and there they stay. they become so comfortable that they never risk crawling back up the hair again. only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. some of them fall off and others cling desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness stuffing themselves with food and drink: “ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space!” but none of the people down there care.”

the Buddhists talk about the one mind. other metaphors also include the idea that death is returning to oneness. that the awareness or spirit that is housed in our body for the duration of our life escapes. when i think about it, my statement about life escaping is akin to how we talk about the sun rising and setting although in fact, it is the earth that is rotating, the sun is not “rising” or “setting.” from our perspective, the spirit gets liberated but in reality, may be, the construct of the body drops away while the spirit/soul/awareness was always already united.

is a room made of the walls or is the room the space inside the walls… when we remove the walls does the room still exist?

you are my consciousness,
awareness and freedom.
i am the deep waters
of your unconscious.

you are my light
and i am your shadow.
you are my expansiveness
and i am your depth.

you open yourself to me
and i to you…
as bodies transient, suffer
illusions of separation,
spirits unwavering, dance in our breasts
ecstatic, boundless and infinite.

you are the man in me
and i am the woman in you.
you are me
and i am you.

© The Paradox of Being. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of written material, ideas, and images without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. Links to the original content on this blog may be provided.