Body as a Gateway to Awakening

I'm going to speak about something that is a direct experience that we all share at this very moment.

Seems not so special.

And not so extraordinary.

And still in the traditions and teachings of awakening and enlightenment,

Surely in satsang,

Is mostly disregarded.

But it is a gate to awakening if only we knew how to look into it,

How to get in touch with it.

So what is this something that is completely not special,

That we all share as a direct experience?

Seems completely non-spiritual.

And yet it is a gate to awakening.

It sounds like in those legends where there is a dwarf that is standing on a bridge.

You have to answer a certain question,

A certain riddle to pass through.

To get the wake.

Yes.

So the answer is the body.

Why am I saying that this is considered not spiritual?

Not spiritual because in most teachings of awakening and enlightenment,

We are taught to practice that we are not the body.

To practice detachment from the physical experience,

Moving to a state of non-attached consciousness.

Leaving behind the earthly bondage.

Shifting all our sense of identity.

But today I am going not just to defend the body,

But to awaken in us a new consciousness of the body.

Hopefully we will realize by the end of this meeting that to a great extent the body is consciousness.

We only need to know how to look into it so deeply,

Be one with it so deeply.

That then surprisingly becomes a portal to the cosmos,

To limitlessness,

To space and to reality.

And as we are sitting here,

Let's first of all just become aware how much to a certain degree we are already practicing pretty wonderfully the enlightened teachings to detach from the body.

We are actually already doing it.

Basically if we met a great yogi and he would say,

Detach from the body,

Then you could honestly say I am already perfectly detached,

What do you want from me?

And this is because we are experiencing ourselves not as the body,

Really.

I am not the body in any way.

Our state,

Because we are not the body.

We are even not the mind.

To say that we are the mind would be an insult to the mind.

You see,

Because the mind is a tremendous thing.

The mind is the cosmos.

It is infinite awareness.

It is attention,

It is listening,

It is intelligence.

So basically our location ordinarily is just in some kind of one tiny island within the mind where we stand,

Can hardly move and we put our flag of identity,

Say here I am.

And this tiny island is just an island of thought.

Memories,

Wishes,

The very little story we have weaved around a sort of me.

Through which we look at everything from a very separate and isolated angle.

This is most certainly not the body.

If anything we are not meant to become free from the body.

But the body is meant to become free from us.

From this tyranny of thought and concept and isolation that is imposed on it by thinking.

So basically there are three ways to regard the body.

One is to say I have a body.

We all have this sense,

Right?

But we are somehow connected to a certain physical unit that is our possession.

Something we need to defend,

Something that we need to nourish with pleasure.

And it is truly the vehicle to which we fulfill our desires,

Our wishes.

Still there is a detachment.

You can like your body,

You can hate your body.

You can wish that your body would have been different.

Then the second option is I am not the body.

As I said,

We have already fulfilled this to a certain degree because I have a body is not I am,

Right?

It's not an identity.

I am not the body.

We just need to take one more step and to detach completely to realize that we are spirit.

We move from body consciousness to spirit consciousness.

In a way we begin to hover over the body.

But there is a third one,

A third possibility.

When this third possibility is fulfilled,

It is a very different experience.

This third possibility says I am the body.

It's a state of unity of consciousness,

Of awareness and the body.

And this simply happens when this thinking machine is dropped or you detach from it.

Because you realize that the body has never been the problem.

What is the problem with this innocent,

Sweet guy?

You see?

Definitely I am the problem with my attachments and fears and anxieties.

I am like a charioteer,

Like a driver in a car that takes the car and pushes it to the abyss.

Of course if you misuse,

Then who is the problem?

The driver or the car?

The real problem is never the body.

There is nothing to detach from.

The only problem is the self.

This mental and emotional entity that wants and desires and is anxious and so on.

That what it does to the body is that it basically isolates it from the entire universe.

But really,

Not only that the body is innocent,

But the body is already united.

The body is fully connected to the entire universe.

The body has never developed some kind of a separate consciousness.

Not only that,

But the body has in it the direct memory of where it came from.

It is not like this foreign entity that again of course also came from only one origin,

But has the capacity to imagine that it came from elsewhere.

With thought you can imagine,

You can fantasize.

Which is nice when you fantasize,

I don't know,

Ways about ways to heal diseases,

When you fantasize about all kinds of visions and possibilities and creative endeavors.

This is nice.

But with thought you can also fantasize a me.

Imagine,

Enter a sort of a hallucination in which suddenly you are here and the universe is there.

Suddenly the universe is an object.

Just like we do all the time when we say life.

You know how we say it?

Except life.

What is life?

You see?

What does that mean?

Are we some kind of a thing that is outside life?

That accepts life?

Think of it,

It's hilarious,

Or we say the cosmos.

And then immediately with our thought we get a certain object that there is a cosmos.

Now,

Are you something that,

I don't know,

You are watching from somewhere else?

The cosmos?

Can it be that you are not the cosmos when you say the cosmos?

Is it possible?

Of course not.

You are life.

You are cosmos.

But we are imagining,

There I am,

Here I am.

And this is where all the trouble begins.

And then we impose this on the body.

Suddenly the body which is a very natural cosmic flow.

Physicists say that this is stardust,

Even deeper than that.

The body has a living memory of,

Let's say,

15 billion years and before that.

It was there in the Big Bang.

It doesn't need even mentioning,

Reminding.

It is ancient,

Wise and connected.

Not connected,

Unified.

But then our this thinking program,

This fantasy imposes on it separation.

Then it becomes a body of me.

It is mine and begins to become agitated.

That's why also it becomes,

Well,

A lot,

Very often,

Sick.

Most of our illnesses are psychosomatic.

Of course,

If you consume by mistake poison,

This is most probably not psychosomatic to respond negatively.

If you consume certain chemicals,

You are out of ignorance because we don't know what we're doing.

But in itself,

With the body without the self,

Is naturally mostly not only healthy,

But very happy.

When we say that we feel tired,

It means what we actually say,

I have tired the body too much with thinking,

Wanting,

Desiring,

Pushing.

And well,

Have made it pretty miserable.

So now it is exhausted.

Remove this self,

The tiring aspect.

Shockingly,

The body again is energetic,

Happy,

Because it is like it has a plug.

It is connected to the cosmos,

To the energy of the cosmos.

It has the same vibration,

Aliveness.

The body is naturally happy.

It is happy as a dog is happy.

When you see a dog running on the grass,

Or a child running,

It is because there is not much of a separating entity controlling the body.

You see,

The body is also very quiet at the same time,

Very relaxed.

You just drop this separating entity,

And suddenly you realize that it is full of silence.

And you know what?

It is not even desirous as they accused it to be in medieval times and in all the religions that they say,

The body is a source of evil,

Full of desirous and evil thoughts,

The desire of the flesh and so on.

This is not true.

Thought is desirous.

The body is not desirous at all.

Truly,

The body needs very little.

It has its own natural rhythm.

It is not a body that thinks of sex all the time,

That has fantasies,

That abuses the sexual impulse in a completely unstable way.

It is not a body that produces sexual thoughts.

Why would it?

Is it crazy?

Why would it constantly generate a sexual urge when it is not even a natural rhythm?

It doesn't make sense.

Bodies don't do such things.

Only thoughts do.

Only thoughts begin to get hooked on something,

Some pleasure,

And turn it into an obsession.

And tell the body,

Now I will take you here and there and there and there,

Fulfill,

Fulfill,

Fulfill,

Now become fiery,

Become explosive.

Nobody also becomes addicted to sugar,

And nobody suffers from obesity.

Nobody thinks of eating too much,

Like waking up in the middle of the night saying,

Oh,

A really fancy pizza in the fridge.

It doesn't make sense.

On the contrary,

The body says,

No,

What is it doing?

I am already full.

I am telling you,

Hey,

I am full.

Can't you feel it?

Like,

Didn't you get the signal?

Whenever thought abuses the body,

It sends signals telling it,

What are you doing?

So this is where we begin to realize that the body is actually more spiritual than our conditioned mind.

The mind is farther from spirituality,

You see.

It's farther from the spirit.

It is from the stars,

From the moon,

From the rivers,

From the breeze,

From the trees.

The body knows all that.

It immediately recognizes,

Like,

Hey,

How are you doing?

It tells the moon,

It tells the sky,

The clouds.

It recognizes everyone because they are it,

You see.

Because the cosmos is a body.

And this is a branch,

This is a leaf.

How can a leaf not recognize the tree?

It feels it.

It feels the unity of the tree.

And it feels it in such a natural,

Familiar and relaxed way.

Of course,

There are some instincts in the body which are healthy,

Although we exaggerate with this thing we call instincts because instincts are when a grizzly bear is approaching you and not when we want something and it is taken away from us and then we feel that we are in a danger.

Of survival,

War or something.

When we stand in front of a crowd and we think that people are going to stone us to death because we will say the wrong word.

The body doesn't have any idea what's going on up there.

And its instincts again are overused.

In it there is no separation really.

It's not that it ends here.

And then there is another thing.

It is just a part,

An energetic part of the whole.

Sharing ecstasy.

Sharing in the cosmic body.

One of the most beautiful sentences I have ever heard from a spiritual master was this quote of Ramana Maharishi.

He said something like,

I know only two things.

The self,

He meant the true self,

Not the self.

He meant consciousness,

Reality and the body.

He said these are the only two real things.

In between them there came something that I don't know what it is.

The me,

The I.

And this is the only,

This is the unreality.

And this is a great teaching.

It says basically that between the body and consciousness there is no separation.

They both share reality.

Matter is not a problem.

You see?

It's not that by becoming spiritual we need to deny matter.

It's like denying nature.

Why would you deny nature?

And you are nature too.

So you can just as well think of the spiritual process as the process in which the body gets rid,

Becomes purified of the elements that the self has instilled in it.

Because the body is unnaturally filled with memories,

Imprints,

Resistances,

Desires.

In the spiritual process it becomes innocent again.

It returns to be cosmic.

Only now the awareness that we have cultivated in the spiritual process is sinking,

Falling into the body,

Uniting with it.

And this is where I am the body.

Because it's all vibrating with consciousness.

It's only our thinking that makes it seem like an object.

And not just object,

An object of flesh and blood and bones.

There is not a real experience of the body from within.

Have you entered it once?

Have you felt into it?

Have you entered this cosmos?

Often in meditation when we enter deeply enough what happens is that we suddenly feel that we don't have a body.

Then we say,

Ha ha,

Transcended the body,

But this is not what happened.

What happened is that the body has revealed itself as consciousness.

Suddenly there is no separation because it's from within.

There is just pure space because pure space,

Vibration,

Intelligence,

All are qualities of your body.

Your body.

We speak of chakras,

We speak of Kundalini.

But really this is deep,

Deep,

Deep in the body.

It's like in the innermost of the body.

It's not outside.

And this is because this is full of spirituality.

It's a celebration of spirituality.

It has all the forces within to get you back home,

To make you feel belong again.

So slowly feel how you are entering because the body doesn't even have a fear of death.

For it it's just disintegrating peacefully.

To take form again.