Advaita Post 10-03 - Non-duality only becomes stable,..

Year No. 10 03 (February 26, 2009)

An introduction and talk on January 17, 2007 (#7, Conclusion): Once again 'the body'

The internal experience of your body can maybe help you with the universal being-experience of non-duality. If you close your eyes, you can't really find where your bodily sphere, thus your self-sphere, ends. If you are not thinking: then where are your limits?

But the body still concerns the "I". Then you needn't be so aware of your body?

If that were true, on the physical level you're not so easily free. On different levels of subtlety you're still in a body. On the level of transpersonal insight you have an insight body. So here again: be aware of your bodily being. You can confirm that that sphere becomes less and less definable.

Then you don't mean the ananda, bliss?

Yes, that, too. Then you go even further back to the source of yourself. Then you're no longer in your insight-body, but you have a body of universal bliss.

I find that 'being in the body' confusing.

You have to let go of the image that you have learned, what you know about the body and what you physically see. You go back to your feeling sense, to your feeling of your body. So the physical form that you have of yourself in your head is only one of the forms of your body.

When you dream, what kind of body do you have then? A dream body.

If you're in the mental sphere and you try to imagine that you are here and that you are there: then you have a mental body.

When you feel that you are absorbed into a happy sphere of bliss, what kind of body do you have then? A bliss-body.

I have up until now been blessed with a strong physical body, within which there is not so much to feel ...

Still it's important to feel your body very concretely, because that's your usual being-sphere. You can most easily experience your being first of all on the physical plane. That's very specific. If that experience isn't there, you quickly begin to only think about the universal being and so on. But that's only an abstraction, a theoretical idea. No, it's about your own concrete being-sphere, the 'being' that you physically experience.

Is the 'being' then the bodily being?

Can you experience 'being' any other way? How does it feel? That 'being'? What is that 'being'? As a feeling energy! In normal everyday life you constantly experience it bodily. But you can experience it on all subtle levels. Because you experience feelings internally, do you call that bodily? The feelings have to do with your own bodily sphere. The body is nothing more than feeling energies.

That has nothing to do with the experience of being?

Now, you bet it does. How else do you experience it?

Ultimately there is naturally only one being, thus then it must be so.

Just as you made balls with your fists, you felt your hands. After a shower you can feel your whole body and your being-sphere, that you clearly feel and are, has the tendency to expand. This expansion becomes more concretely experienced then, when you are directly focused on a rarefied level. You should experience the non-duality very clearly on a rarefied level, as clearly as the way in which you experience your body and the world in everyday life. Otherwise the being-experience never becomes stable and clear. Then the dualistic reality easily returns. What do you do when you don't know what reality is? Do I dream at this moment or not? I pinch myself - oh yes, I feel that pain. This is reality, because I experience it physically. That's how it works.

But what does that have to do with being-experience?

Isn't that the experience of your own existence, that you 'are there' ? That being-experience becomes the being-experience of non-duality. If the non-dual experience is not so concrete, the reality is immediately gone the moment you reopen your eyes. You feel a small pain in your beautiful and spacious meditation and so you are once again back to your old spot in the duality. Go see exactly what has the strongest character of reality.

The rarefied levels don't have a strong reality.

So, you should experience the growing non-duality on rarefied levels more clearly than when you are in your body, looking out at things as if from a distance. If that is not so, then the dual reality is there once again when you open your eyes.

But doesn't the reality need to be a whole?

Yes of course, that's clear as you release your physical forms, those that you think of as solid. But thereby the being-experience of the freedom from forms should be very clear. Otherwise it quickly disappears once again. Even if you have a sense of non-duality, if the practical experience is not strong enough, not sufficiently aware, it hardly has an effect.

As you become clearly aware of the non-duality, that is to say, as you physically become totally open, then the world is, when it returns, not a problem any longer. The world then is not so powerful to bring you back into a body and so into a dualistic reality.

Ask yourself once again: how is it now with me?