Both the forgiving and relentless nature of the body is a surprise to most of us. It can be a truly humbling moment to meet the body we have ignored, dismissed, and trivialized, and be welcomed home like prodigal daughters. It is also humbling to recognize how we view the body as lesser, weak, or insignificant as compared to spirit— because we are using the metrics of spirit to judge our worth. We can’t see that the body manages the household, often with incredibly limited resources, while being called greedy and selfish for asking for the bare minimum it needs to feed us power, to tend to our dreams, and to keep our interior world clean. We seek comfort in other places. We spend what the body needs on more glamorous, more materially promising, more spiritually exalted places; anything but here. Then we wonder where this background feeling of desperation, yearning, and insufficiency comes from.
The mind—assigned to protect and serve the body—instead uses the body to get power-drunk and abandons it to be around other minds in places considered holy and productive. There is one self-congratulatory agreement among all: “My body won’t define me! I am not my body. I just use it as a place to land. I control my body! I am the master of this household.” There are in fact people who believe our spiritual status is determined by how indifferent we can be to the body, whether or not we can starve it or inflict pain on it without wincing. This is considered holy.
Of course, there are also those who pride themselves on being willing to accept the body because they are so advanced. The favorite perspective, however, is along the lines that the body is not real. The mind stuff, the thoughts, the dimensions—that is real. The body is an illusion that will fade away.
For the most part, the body is amenable and accommodating—not out of weakness but out of love. That is, until it is so deprived of resources, or so polluted that it has to say something. Trying to tell us it is deprived, it speaks to us in pain points—depression, trauma, physical discomfort, and illness. These pain points must often reach a level of humiliating desperation before we become willing to listen and create an environment the mind can settle into and enjoy.
The tumescent mind demands that these discomforts be removed from the body and that the body should be healed before it deigns to come back, but its ideas of healing are entirely backward. The mind overlooks the potential that lies within the body and the sensations it passes judgment on and failing to realize that the fulfillment it seeks in ideas and abstractions are available as direct, mystical experience accessed through the body. Healing occurs as a by-product of entering the mystical state.
