Suffering and the Physical Body

Consciousness

Jan 6

Each day for every person is a battle of sorts for each has barriers with which to contend. It would seem that the metaphysical and the physical are constantly opposing one another, as the labor of the battling gods, as Aurobindo calls it, wages on.

For centuries the physical, the human body has been seen as the element of the human being that has to be purified, prepared, and readied for judgment day, for the second coming, or whatever you call the great test. The human body has commonly been viewed as having to be put to the test, disciplined, scared, tattooed, starved, to prove the person is up to the challenge.

The mind frequently wages war with the body, takes its revenge, its self-loathing, its mental pain out on the physical body, punishing the body for the sins of the mind so to speak.

Of course, there is no such thing as sin but there is error, there is mistake.

Many religions condemn the pleasures of the physical as somehow being contrary to the expectations of God and of course, this is nonsense. The sensory realms of sexual pleasure are wonderful and joyous experiences but they are lower experiences when compared to the higher realms of the spiritual existence.

Religions all over the world condemn any sexual practice that is not heterosexuality and see those sexual preferences as deviant. I would suggest that if an individual wishes to condemn alternative sexual preferences, let us examine your sexual practices and see if you pass the test as being “normal.” Of course, “normal” doesn’t exist.

There is simply preference and consequence.

The endurance of the physical body has historically been viewed as a valid test of religious truth. Of course, this is insane but it hasn’t kept humanity from beheading, burning, imprisoning, isolating and subjugating those who have other preferences to prejudice and ridicule. What you are really seeking in terms of understanding your body or the physical world itself is the essence of that which is physical.

In a certain sense and I want to be careful in saying this, matter is not real and what I mean is that it’s not real in that the truth that you see, that you have been taught about the physical, is not real. The truth that you experience about the physical matter is simply a response your mind is having to the sound waves, light waves, and pressure waves it’s picking up on…which by the way, according to one study in neural physics is estimated to be about 40 billion of those waves per… are you ready… per second. That’s a lot of waves. So, the physical is not actually doing what you think it is doing. There is no greater example than death, which doesn’t exist, but it looks like it does, when in fact, it’s a transition. I didn’t say it was not unbearable to experience a loved one dying. I didn’t say that you would not be heartbroken and grieve. I said death doesn’t exist.

Physical matter is energy. The physical body is energy. The physical is a lower form of the metaphysical and this will be if not already known by many as a universal truth. You will experience in one lifetime that your physical life is a by-product of the level of consciousness that produces it.

You can want and pray all you want to but nothing is going to change until the consciousness does. Of course, consciousness can govern climate and disease. And of course, your mind is not going to accept that. When you learn that physical matter is spirit in disguise, you’ll start experiencing a lot more joy and peace in your life and this is a fundamental, universal truth that matter is the physical appearance of metaphysical consciousness. And that includes you!

If you think that the world exists only as an illusion in your mind, then that is clearly nothing more than a mental construction and does not represent truth.

Your illusion is an illusion.

But can you imagine the numberless illusions that such illusion parents and births? If you believe the physical world is an illusion, then that perception will also see your physical body as an illusion. And that’s going to create some problems.

Certainly, any individual would have to admit that the physical world existed before human life existed. You know this to be a fact because the physical world existed before you got here.

Man is capable of destroying man but he is not capable of destroying the planet for the planet has been around for billions of years and will go on existing should mankind vanish.

At the micro-level, if the individual, you, decide you don’t want to be here anymore and you leave, the earth will still be here if you change your mind and decide you want to come back.

Truth-consciousness shows you that your physical body is a by-product of consciousness but what remains a mystery is where did truth-consciousness come from? Does God have a boss?

While these questions are so important to consider, I think it’s more valuable to stick with those questions and answers that you can clearly ask and learn about that directly influences your quality of life, your own individual level of consciousness, and the well-being of others.

So, perhaps the beginning is the fact, that your body is only a form of spirit. And so is theirs. Now, if consciousness is one, that means that your body and the bodies of others are connected. This would suggest that what you do to your own body, when you self-loathe, condemn, guilt, shame, your own body, the you self-loath, guilt, shame all others. But there’s the inverse. In condemning the sexual practices of others, you condemn your own, for everything is one and all is connected. This is tough stuff to work your way through.

Consciousness is united and whole and complete. Physical matter is a form of the oneness, but comes into existence divided and separated from that oneness, a divided mind, a divided body, and divided emotions. Whatever way you may practice division whether mental, physical, or emotional, and, by the way, everyone does, your division or confusion or instability doesn’t affect or lessen the unity of God or consciousness. But it does affect your physical body and the physical world in which you live.

Your mind and body implement this seeming mandate of consciousness to practice division and separation as a tool of its self-expression and self-realization in the physical world, in matter itself.

But this physical creation, this physical representation, you, your body, is a lower level of the expression of consciousness itself, but a necessary one. But, of course, the mind doesn’t know this. Separated, divided, disconnected, it seeks in the physical world solutions to its separation that is not physical but spiritual but it doesn’t know that. So, sex, food, cravings, addictions, desires, comfort become the source of satisfaction to the mind that is stuck in the physical world not knowing much of anything about its spiritual origins.

This is imprisonment.

This is the unconsciousness, the division that does so much harm.

This is the suffering of the individual and the suffering of mankind.

This is the suffering that your physical body endures.

So, the great aim of consciousness, the great yearning that resides in every human being is the urge to end this division and unify with its source. And suffering is a tool of consciousness to cause the hidden manna, the secret journey of the physical to the metaphysical to come about.

You see physical matter as a source of nourishment and satisfaction when in fact, everyone knows that that this very consumption is not only temporary but often comes loaded with problems. So, the psychological, physical, and emotional pursuits that make up the journey of your physical being continue as you seek to satisfy the ailments that came about from the seeking in the wrong place in the first place.

It is not the sensual desires of the body that need to be addressed but the confusions, illusions, and false self-identity of the mind, that under the direction of a divided mind can only seek and find further division…this is the problem. This is the suffering,

So, try to think of the world, try to think of life as a unified duality, as a differentiated oneness, and not the endless battle of the dark and light forces which is what it seems to be sometimes. Without using the outer world as a reference point, you have only to look at your own life and your own physical body.

What are your own mind, body, and emotions telling you when you are in pain, in suffering? The signal they are giving off is that something’s not right, that life is not supposed to be about pain and suffering. It knows that something is wrong and that’s why it hurts so much, that’s why it reacts so quickly.

Life is supposed to be about joy and a fulfilled existence and you know this to be true, so, you can see that the inner drive contains a reconciliation of and a solution to those dual forces that unifies all fields of experience, whether joyful or painful and is able to see them as being the same thing but going about the objective is a differentiated manner.

It’s no wonder that individuals give up, get high, isolate, even commit suicide for the mind and body and emotions know that life is not supposed to be like this! And it is in the absence of the physical and into the metaphysical that the human being will, at last, be at rest and peace. From this particular point of view, the individual is justified. But this particular point of view is not founded upon a unified understanding of the dark and the light but an almost total focus on the pain which offers no solution except through escape.

You shudder when faced with strife and difficulty and your body is among your first lines of defense, a punching bag if you will, to shield your heart from hurt.

The problem is that you have forgotten and lost yourself, become disconnected from yourself, submerged within the physical world. The connection to the metaphysical has to be found again to ascend to that knowledge in order to return and transform the separation into unification.

But to be able to pull that off, to move from being separated from your true self to being connected to your true self, you would have to change your understanding of existence and understand that the hurdle you face is your own ignorance and stupidity. The emotional pain you experience in your body is not about the world but is about you. And the true source of that pain is being unable to see and understand why what is happening is happening.

I’m not saying that you will not be sad or in grief. I’m saying you and your physical body will move much more gracefully through the sadness and the grief because you are able to understand through a unified perception of the process of life.

You are absolutely aware that there have been moments when you made yourself sick. Grinding, obsessing, raging, your body became the reservoir for your mind’s inability to see. But you are also absolutely aware that there have been moments when you healed yourself.

All life seeks to expand and extend itself, to know itself beyond all definition.

And the mind can be trained to be a substantial ally in that pursuit, to become the truth of who it is, to know the truth and purpose of its existence.

But instead, the mind seeks to fulfill its own impulses because of its submersion in the physical world and its inability to see anything beyond the physical which you can call ignorance. Any substantial effort you make will be met with opposition from some direction for opposition, setback, failure, and obstruction are the companions along the journey of awakening and there’s no need to be naïve about this. That is the path. And all great leaders have the scars to prove it.

But when the effort is consciously made to make the ascent, to come to understand the why, the how, the origins, the who that you really are, it’s as if another law seems to enter the landscape and the physical barriers have no choice but to yield to the ascent. Without a doubt, consciousness is the great mitigator of all difficulty. Consciousness is the greatest asset you have in healing your mind and body.

In the 1987 experience when I left my body, and thought I had died, and experienced the wonder of God, when I realized that I was coming back, I begged not to come back, I didn’t want to come back and said over and over, “Please don’t make me go back, it’s too damn hard.”

I am sharing with you that the quality of your existence, the quality of your life is all about speed, all about vibration.

The inertia in which you find yourself facing and mastering the tasks of daily living, the horizontal, is daunting and prevents you from ever truly mastering the dynamics that are shaping your life. Being busy and overwhelmed with your horizontal life is a central characteristic of that inertia…just doing stuff…and the body is the receptacle of that inertia.

The mind moves about the day attempting to consume what it considers to be the source of its eventual well-being if it can just consume enough…love, money, ego, sex, God…and it’s not going to happen for you were never incomplete in the first place.

This the mind has to accept as a lie of existence, of surviving, of consuming. Compulsions, habits, conformity to the laws of ignorance, addictions, and desires become the very mental, physical, and emotional substance against which you have to rebel and revolt.

But this is the beginning!

Acknowledge the closed-tape-loop that has encircled and imprisoned your life and then…
Acknowledge that you do not have the knowledge you need to have to become happy, fulfilled, blissful.

You see, if this other you, the enlightened you, the awakened you did not exist, then you would never experience any dissatisfaction at all! But the other you does exist and is real and that is why you grind and agitate and argue. This merging of your horizontal with your vertical is the only way out of the mess.

So, in the meantime, your finite, horizontal, closed-tape-loop mind does remain unhappy because it does know that there’s something else.

TruthSpring is about helping you organize, know and experience what that other is and that other is called consciousness.

You can observe as you move through these cycles of life that you constantly passing through phases of creation, preservation, and destruction, and yet, all human beings seek mental, physical, emotional, and economic stability, all seek the absence of war and the establishment of unity, the absence of fear and the presence of absolute certainty about themselves and the world in which they live.

Beyond your mental constructions that are only reactions and responses to the content of your life which contain no truth about yourself or the life you lead, there is another world and there are the steps to awakening that are fully known and are available to you when you are ready. It is an absolute certainty that the future of this world will not end in destruction or death but a transfigured life through the awakening of each individual. Your life and the difficulties you face are not futile for they are the play of the greater consciousness that seeks to descend into the horizontal and you are the instrument for that change. The secret, hidden you must in one lifetime arise.

I would like to end with this quote from Aurobindo’s Savitri to remind you of who you are.

“O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
Around your little self and petty things?

But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
Not for vain repetition were you built;
Out of the Immortal’s substance you were made;

Your actions can be swift revealing steps,
Your life a changeful mold for growing gods.

A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,
The immaculate Grandeur broods upon your days,
Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.

A greater destiny waits you in your front:
This transient earthly being if he wills
Can fit his acts to a transcendent scheme.

He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyes
Hardly from the Inconscient’s night aroused,
That look at images and not at Truth,
Can fill those orbs with an immortal’s sight.

Yet shall the godhead grow within your hearts,
You shall awake into the spirit’s air

And feel the breaking walls of mortal mind
And hear the message which left life’s heart dumb
And look through Nature with sun-gazing lids
And blow your conch-shells at the Eternal’s gate.

Authors of earth’s high change, to you it is given
To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul
And touch the mighty Mother stark awake
And meet the Omnipotent in this house of flesh
And make of life the million-bodied One.

The earth you tread is a border screened from heaven;
The life you lead conceals the light you are.”