Advaita Post 10-02 - Thus at a given moment, the experience will come...

Year No. 10 02 (January 26, 2009)

An introduction and talk on January 17, 2007 (6): Bodily inside-out

I find it so odd that turning the inside-out can be felt almost physically.

It should happen on the bodily level too, otherwise you can get stuck there. That's where the hardest knot of identification is. You should experience the inside-out then in your own bodily feeling sphere. With the return to yourself, 'yourself' is first and foremost physical. You should experience that a reversal happens there: the inside out.

You say: "I am myself most in the center of my heart." So you go back to the center of your heart. There everything is turned inside out. The internal space of the heart appears to be greater than everything, absorbs everything. In your experience the area of the heart is physical. It is this bodily being-sphere that expands itself infinitely and becomes universal.

The body has cosmic dimensions. You are that body, thus there arises a universal self-being without a center. First, there was a center, but the center has opened from the inside out and reverses. So then there is a universal self-being. Because it is bodily experienced, the experience is very clear and concrete. If it is not bodily, the experience remains vague, if there is an experience at all, and nothing changes on the level of the body. Thus at a given moment, the experience will come that the hatchet will be set into your body. On the physical level it will break open. 

Not as a hatchet, but more like a balloon that opens.

OK, but still the inside out, as the balloon pops.

See that tiny space in the center of your heart, that center of self-being, and that the space becomes larger than anything else. Then you experience that your real situation is always like that, that the self-being of everyone, of every living creature, is the infinite space, that in self-being there is no multiplicity, that there really is non-duality.

As long as you are still confined to the body, you experience the endless space: Brahman, from out of your "I"-center in that body. "I", as a physical human being, am really nothing in comparison with Brahman.

Go back to the center of your heart. That breaks open and you experience the Self as identical with Brahman. 

Then the body is no longer experienced?

So long as there is something in the experience, you experience it inside-out as self-being, as long as you experience your own body as self-being.

You can look first at the everyday situation of your own body. In the internal atmosphere of your body isn't there a non-duality? Internally you feel your left hand and you feel your right hand. There is a non-duality. Why? Because that is all included in the sphere of yourself. Go look further: your left and right shoulder ... 

But you can also look with your eyes at one or the other hand

Yes, but then you go back outside the things experienced to establish a limited position and then there is duality. Now it's a matter of going very clearly internally into your own body to recognize that there is a non-duality. You don't set yourself up in the position of your right shoulder and say: "Left shoulder - buzz off; you're a competitor." If this atmosphere of non-duality becomes universal, then you find that everything in your own body is present in a non-duality. You yourself are everything! Then all competition is gone, all combat and every war.

I find it easier to experience the space in which everything is in me.

But that experience still has a bodily quality doesn't it? You should experience it as concretely as possible, otherwise it doesn't work and it remains a vague consciousness. You must experience it very concretely as you experience your own body internally. Otherwise, it just remains more or less theoretical.

I have the idea that I don't feel my body internally.

That's not good. Fortunately, it's not true. Just once feel your left foot ...

I thought we had just confirmed that naturally there is nothing.

As long as there is a body, it is reliably there. You sit in your body, so it's good to experience something from the inside-out. If you clench your left or right fist and relax it once again, then don't you feel your hands from the inside-out? Let them go again ... Now, that's what I mean.

I look from inside-out in my head.

You're positioned very strongly in your head, but isn't everything in your body in a kind of non-duality? Isn't it all your own internal atmosphere?

If you would be less centered in your head, your sense of self would be more spread throughout your whole body and therefore the experience of non-duality would be stronger.