I. Sacred Sensuality
A molecule of dung sings with the voice of Andromeda. The holly berry ripens, humming with the moon. When the wood thrush chants, hidden in dark branches, sunlight gushes through her throat. Minerals, plants and animals are all suffused with the nectar of consciousness. Yet having no mind, they neither worry
nor doubt: they are immersed in the oceanic sensuality of the
Holy Spirit, beyond any need for thought. 1." ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Choiceless delight irradiates dust, berry and bird, in weightless awareness without an 'I.' It is for humans to worry and doubt, because only humans have invented the mind, in the no-man's-land between biosphere and angelic kingdom.
When a stream of photons bursts the bud, I say that stream is consciously blissful. Green seedlings break ground, aching like nipples for the kiss of the sun: I say they are aware. Sparrow-throated joy arises at first light, witnessing its own feathered song. The boundless subjectivity of God quivers in each molecule of a leaping salmon.
It is not terror but bliss that explodes through the muscle fibers of a doe as the cougar sinks its teeth into her fibrillating artery. Blood-mist sprays in noble delight through her nostrils, Spirit surfeits form in mid-leap, and the body falls, re-cycling fuel to the living planet.
Awareness infuses all organic matter with super-essential joy. We humans know this ground-state of joyful energy in morning stillness just as we awaken, right before our first thought....
But as soon as the mind of yesterday returns, we remember what it was we were supposed to worry about, and we drag that non-existence past into this now of creation. Happiness is instantaneous and only lasts a moment: it must be re-discovered ten thousand times per hour.
When we cling to yesterday, we begin another drab loop of conditioned thought, each thought a reaction to a past thought. We dwell in abstractions about life instead of living life itself. Insofar as we inhabit concepts instead of life energy, we forfeit our birthright of primordial joy. Humans are the only sentient beings to have lost their song of animal ecstasy, the bliss that pulses in each particle of matter.
Might bliss sing again in our marrow? People seek ecstasy by forcing themselves to the edge of experience: in extreme sports, violence, drugs, mind-shattering noise, sexual license. They desperately look for bliss in extremes, when in fact bliss vibrates right within each atom of this body, while simply sitting, gracefully standing, calmly walking, or lying in repose.
How did we ever lose what cannot be lost?
We rejected the Tree of Life, preferring the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We invented thinking. The Tree of Knowledge is the thought-realm of opposites. The seed of this tree is the division of subject and object. To separate matter and spirit, subject and object, is our "original sin." The only sin is to abstract ourselves from creation's pulsating joy.
Through abstract thinking, we become exiles from the Earth, expelled from the garden of Now. We invent the future and the past which, after all, only exist as thoughts, detached from the atomic substance of our bodily presence. Then we dwell in the ghostly parallel world called "mind," existing as approximations that ever approach but never touch the asymptote of the sensible world.
"In nature there's no blemish but the mind." (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, III.4)
2.
The
invention of the abstract mind allowed us to develop science and
technology. No doubt science had a purpose in human evolution. But the
laboratory method of science only succeeds because thought kills
matter, and lays it on a dissecting table, embalming the world in
"objectivity." Thought triumphantly imagines its superiority over the
inanimate earth, and takes dominion over her. Yet science, by this very
method, kills the soul of the planet. The science-lab is by definition an artificial world. It is bleached white, sterilized, and haunted by a sense of exile. To save the planet, we must now learn to subsume and sublimate science under the deeper matrix of intuition, where subject and object re-unite in the primal unity of organic self-awareness.
Therefor the next step in our spiritual practice is not detachment from the material world, but consecration of the material world through enlightened sensuality. This means, quite simply, that our senses embrace the object of perception without losing awareness of the subject. Just as a flame immolates the wick, so awareness immolates the object. In this way, we transmute Matter into Spirit.
3.
The function of awareness is to bless the object of perception, whether it is a flower, the face of a homeless child, or a loaf of bread. The material form is the host which is trans-substantiated by our senses into the body of the Goddess.
Before the object is consecrated by our attention, it is merely matter. But when infused with awareness, we see the object as Mater, holy Mother. Consciousness is an energy that irradiates the earth, and the channel through which consciousness spills into creation is our eye, our ear, our tongue, our skin.
In this dawning age, we understand that Spirit does not flow down from above, but outward through the senses, until we see divinity glow from each material object of perception. When we witness Christ born in the womb of the neutrino, it will be the Second Coming. Our consecrated sensuality is the vessel through which God becomes incarnate again in the womb of Mater.
4.
Every physical particle has a spiritual core. It is time for humanity to locate the seat of divinity in the heart of the atom. This new mode of sacramental sensation reveals God in our bodies. We now transcend the age-old dualism of soul and flesh. Our goal is not to be liberated from the body, but to glorify it. For this body is an ever-dissolving stream of photons, and each photon is a virtual particle made of bliss, bubbling up and vanishing instantaneously in the boundless ocean of awareness. Our body is the field of our bliss.
The only difference between a Human and a Christ is that the Christ is fully aware of what the Human is. In the 2nd century, St. Athanasius declared: "God is humanity wholly alive." We are not designed for out-of-body experience. Nor are we designed for blind absorption in sensuality. Let us transcend these neurotic mood-swings between the metaphysical and the addictive. Rather, let us unite heaven and earth in celestial sensuality.
Jesus prayed, "Thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven." This is an earth prayer, a body prayer, a prayer for the glorification of matter through sacramental delight in the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and skin.
II. Practice for the Consecration of Matter
1. Observe the next thought arising... This simple practice will subvert the power of forming images and words in your mind. Then you can rest as awareness unformed into thoughts. Do this not by suppressing thought, but observing the thought-stream without resistance or concentration. Simply refrain from grasping any particular concept in the moment of its arising.
The instant a mental image begins to form, let it dissolve back into the electricity of the brain. This does not require effort, only attention. And no energy is expended. In fact, energy is gained; for instead of capturing energy in mental image-making, thought dissolves into pure energy and becomes available to the nervous system as bliss.
2. Now experience this living electricity in your nerves as a one continuum of sensation. Experience the body as a host for a much wider field of energy that envelopes and pervades your form, scintillating beyond your body's edges. Experience that you, in fact, have no edges.
3. Enter a single random sub-nuclear particle. Observe the most minute particular impulse, such as a tingling in the brain. After dissolving thought into the sensation-field, let your attention sink into the finest particles of the field. No sensation is insignificant.
4. Observe the subtlest thread of this sensation vibrating in and out of the field of pure silence. Use this very sensation as the suture (sutra) which weaves your awareness on the ever-dissolving edge of the present moment. Do not form a mental image or intellectual concept of this experience. Simply return to the finest particle of sensation arising from empty space.
5. As this sensation-thread dissolves, let empty space recognize itself as pure awareness.
Do these sub-nuclear particles, threads, vibrations in you body, cause you to be aware? Or does vast empty awareness vibrate into particles? Is there any difference between subject and object, consciousness and matter?
6. Now, thought and sensation have evaporated into silent emptiness. You are aware of this silence within and between every atom of your body. It is also the space around you, enveloping your body. You have expanded into boundless space through the tiniest point in matter.
You entered an instant photon of light and became the all-pervading eternity. You discovered the womb of the great Mother in the heart of one particle. Give thanks with this breath.
III. Conclusion
Jewish mystical tradition calls this experience the Ain-Soph-Or: "Emptiness in a point of light." The Buddhist Heart Sutra defines this phenomena precisely in its first verse: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form."
Jesus ecstatically shared this awareness when he said, "I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last." He also applied this principle in his social ethic: "He who would be greatest among you must become the least, the servant." His teaching echoed the ancient Indian Upanishadic text: Ano Raniyan Mahato Mahiyan: "one atom of the smallest is greater than the greatest."
Or in the words of founding quantum physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, "when the electron vibrates, the whole universe shakes."
Growing familiar with this sacrament of sensation, you can employ the practice any time, anywhere, at a bus stop or in a waiting room, to energize and re-create yourself. Be easy and natural with the practice. Don't regard it as a formal discipline. This practice is simply the humble awareness of your own body, in its finest particles, as the miraculous gift of Mater. Through this simple sacrament of sensation, you will know your own flesh as the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Make the entire journey - mind to body, body to energy, particular energy to cosmic silence - in less than a minute, or even in the duration of a breath.
In this dawning age, we will discover in our very own flesh, that our real substance is not dense "matter" separate from "mind." Our true stuff is Radiance: neither matter nor spirit, but a new, more integrated and gracious experience of energy.
Our mind-body Radiance is downy as cotton, glittering with threads of ananda. Consciousness in itself is peace. Consciousness in the body is bliss.
Through our Radiance, rays of pure awareness dance into particles, shining and spilling as light from darkness, creation ex nihilo. The entire field of body, senses, and the world we behold, is the grace of a dazzling sun, that shines from the womb of unfathomable divine silence within us.... On earth as it is in heaven.
Jai Guru Dev
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