| "I am the body"
is love by Mark Powell "When...You ALLOW Your conditional self To BE the TOTAL body-mind (Simply PERCEIVING -- and Not Seeking To Acquire Absolute conditional knowledge and Power, or Struggling To Strategically Escape From the Natural body-mind itself, or From the conditional worlds themselves), the body-mind Is Naturally (or Simply, and Whole bodily) FELT -- and human Existence Is (Thus) Simply Expressed As A Natural Radiance Of Whole bodily feeling (or Of Simple, and ordinary human, Love and Happiness)." -- Avatar Adi Da Samraj To me, these compact, diamond-like words written by my guru, Adi Da Samraj, contain a lifetime of rich study and exploration. I invite you to re-read these words slowly, mindfully, breathing fully. Participate, for a moment, in this possibility: Life lived as the body, experienced through a luminous mind, an easy fullness of presence, an expansive feeling of continuity with life. Put in more conventional language, Adi Da once simply spoke about how, " 'I' am the body is love." He means that the sense most of us have, that "I" am some sort of intangible essence WITHIN my physical body is false. I don't "have" a body. I don't "inhabit" this body, floating about somewhere behind the eyes. Rather, the entirety of my ordinary, daily persona (what, in the quote above, he calls the "conditional self") IS this body. To realize this is to realize a radiant state! Of course, ultimately, we are infinitely more than our ordinary personality or body-mind complex. We are the Sea of Conscious Light (as Adi Da once referred to the Divine Reality) in which the very universe is apparently arising. It's conventional you -- small "y" you -- that is the body. You in your True Condition -- capital "Y" You -- are pure Consciousness, which boundlessly transcends your brief speck of body and all time and space. But, according to Adi Da, Awakening to that Ultimate Identity is an immense matter, immeasurably more vast and demanding than is sometimes suggested in the consumerism of pop-spirituality. It is the supreme odyssey of the human story. But that great, spiritual journey, paradoxically, doesn't unfold based on any sort of dissociation from the body. Even though, ultimately, the process of awakening is about the transcendence of the body-mind, this transcendence is a process that must be founded in living fully as the whole body. This is because our sense of being "subjective someones" INSIDE our bodies is a neurotic adaptation -- an anxious recoil from our true interconnectedness with all of life. To heal from that schism -- me and "my" body -- and fully be the total body is, according to Adi Da, a luminous state of being. It is to fully inhabit the living texture of the present moment, released into the play of relations. Adi Da Samraj is an unprecedented divine incarnation, the avatar of this time. He has described how, ultimately, the individual body-mind cannot strategically orchestrate this shift into living as the whole body, not in its deepest realization, because all such efforts originate from the conceptual mind, the very thing that must be surrendered to the perceptual being. The fullest realization that "I am the body" is a gift of his grace, because of the unique nature of his spiritual blessing transmission. This may sound dubious, but only until you start to feel, first-hand, how Adi Da does not function as a separate entity, but as a transparent, magnifying vehicle of the Divine Love that is the reality of you and me and everything. Hence, a remarkable "physics" takes place in those who make a life of spiritual communion with the Living Light that he transmits. And even though the realization, "I am the body" is only the barest beginnings of the spiritual awakening process, it is, nevertheless, a profound shift. It is a radically different way to be and live, and, to my way of thinking, anything that even gives us even a nudge in that direction, can be powerful. As a Rolfer®, working every day in the wordless realms of human embodiment, I observe what happens when people even get a tiny taste of life as the body. My work involves melting the armor in people's soft-tissues, bringing conscious contact to the unconscious parts of our bodily selfhood, facilitating a taste of knowing ourselves as the body. Often, peace and expansiveness washes through the client. I, of course, only support this process, because the innate intelligence of your highest being (which is, ultimately, what Adi Da is) is always "wanting" to move you toward surrender into the body and life, as surely as a plant "wants" to turn toward the sun. Any supportive aids toward that healing impulse -- heart-centered yoga or bodywork, bioenergetics, conscious breathing -- can only serve the process, in all its pulsating aliveness and mystery. When The Body Is Full Of Light "Mindless embodiment Consciousness without inwardness Thus it becomes obvious, Every object is only Light, the energy of Consciousness. First transcend the mind, not the body. Inwardness is flight from Life and Love. Only the body is full of Consciousness. Therefore, be the body only, feeling into Life. Surrender the mind into Love, until the body dissolves in Light. Dare this ecstasy, and never be made thoughtful by birth, and experience and death." -- Avatar Adi Da Samraj Mark Powell is an educator in Adidam Twin Cities. Adidam Twin Cities offers classes and events about Avatar Adi Da Samraj. A free introductory presentation is offered, in the Uptown area, the last Monday of each month. Call for information or for a free CD of excerpts of talks of Adi Da Samraj at (612) 377-9099. Mark also is a certified Rolfer®, practicing in the Uptown/Kenwood area for the last seven years. Contact him at (612) 872-6055. All quotes © 2004 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed. Copyright © 2004 Mark Powell |
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Aug 2004 |
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