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Body as spirit III. Subtle body experience, with Susan Moul The essence of the 'the spiritual,' as it is seen in many cultures, through many centuries, seems to have been a notion of spirit as some sort of nonphysical body. There are many variants of this idea. Some cultures describe souls that survive death and migrate to a realm of the gods, or move into another physical body. Some describe nonphysical guardians of individuals, groups, or locations. Some describe nonphysical beings who live apart from human beings in their own nonphysical realm. Certain magical traditions describe methods for creating a 'body of light' able to leave the practitioner's body and accomplish supernatural feats. What sort of experiences or intuitions can give rise to these beliefs in some form of 'subtle body'? Do these intuitions and experiences imply that nonphysical entities exist? In considering what exactly they may mean, we need conceptual care, common sense, good research and a strong will to stay clear and grounded. It may be that the notion of a subtle body is well-founded but somewhat misunderstood. There are actual things about the physical body that we could think of subtle. There are the body's various sorts of structured electromagnetic envelope, which may have been felt long before they were scientifically explained - maybe much that we have intuited as subtle/divine/immaterial rather than gross/human/material actually has to do with the non-visible forms of energy described by physics? There are also the body's various sorts of subtle perception and intuition, which are unrecognized in general culture, and which practices such as yoga intensify.
'Spirit' and invisibility - the invisible and unaccounted-for and what is made of it 1. Entranced by transparency Before we are born amnion is our atmosphere, after we are born air is our amnion. Both are transparent, ie we perceive by means of them but we do not perceive them. Because of these omnipresent life-mediums we are prone to imagine something invisible and beneficent surrounding us. That's to be noticed first. But then also there actually are other invisible fields, gravitational, electromagnetic, and those somehow propagating the effects we know about but don't yet have theory for. We perceive by means of these fields and intuit doing so. Are these invisible fields collectively or singly what we perceive/intuit as 'spirit'?
2. Assumptions a. Invisible realities: the physical is not limited to the visible. - What do we mean by 'physical'
b. The visible body (like every other physical body) is an electromagnetic or energy body. It is interpenetrated and surrounded by normally nonvisible fields which may extend to various distances, and which act both to protect and to communicate: perceive and broadcast. The all, the wholeness of nature, our immersion interpenetration, propagation - we're immersed, energy in a sea of energy. - Explain fields: example, acoustic fields Other examples of nonvisible physical fields: Weather fields changes of the weather, the vast electrical cliffs, slipping down in the sky, avalanches of invisible lightning. Redgrove 27 Air, breath, wind itself Perceptual media: light, sound waves The whole electromagnetic spectrum, radio waves, X-rays, infrared, ultraviolet There are more than seventy octaves of electromagnetic radiation, and the human being acknowledges the visibility of less than one octave, our sight being cramped, as it were, between the red and the violet . Mosquitos and body-lice find their way to juicy places by infra-red. The whites of roses, morning glories and apple blossoms are all different colors to the bee, bcause of the differing amounts of ultraviolet they reflect. Redgrove 20 Chemical fields, scent fields, pheromonal fields It has been shown not only that trees control their insect populations by means of pheromones which they secrete on their leaves and barks, but that they actually communicate with each othe by means of chemicals carried in the wind. Peter Redgrove 27 Guy Murchie's book biological fields "over 40,000 nerve cells (neurons) in the heart alone, indicating that the heart has its own independent nervous system electromagnetic energy field 5,000 times greater than that of the brain and this field can be measured with magnetometers up to 10 feet beyond the physical body" 'embodiment' as suspension in a field
immersed bodies and the weaving of water I have sometimes thought the sea-coast Scots invented plaids by looking at the patterns of overlaid ripples at the flanks of their little boats. I mean that I think there may be a way effectively to visualize the material/electrical bodies (of both persons and the larger cosmos) as woven and self-weaving if one keeps in mind the intricate weaving of water, whose patterns are many-dimensional, transient and dynamic, rather than two-dimensional and static like a woven fabric. The weave of water can also be understood as simultaneously patterned at many different meshes or scales (because different patterns of ocean ripples and waves coexist at different scales, at the same time in the same space), and thus aspects of the weave are simultaneously thinkable in terms of a number of identities or names. Interwoven ripple-, wave- and swell-patterns alter the energetic effects of other patterns as they overtake or cross each other, but each ripple- and wave-train also keeps its own dynamical identity as it passes through an area. So what if we said it this way: maybe at some scales of ripple/vibration/physicality, human bodies are segregated from the background of the cosmos body in which they are immersed, while still feeling the effects of patterns at other scales. Maybe more or fewer of the many simultaneous scales and patterns can take part in conscious function. Maybe 'integration' has something to do with alteration of segregated aspects of human bodies. (packet letter) 'energy' and structure What biology seems to say is that it is patternedness or formedness of energy that makes a living organism one thing rather than another. If this is so, then an organism gradually becomes itself as it is forming, and no longer exists when its form is broken up. The energy that had flowed through the form that was that being is dispersed into other beings. c. Perception of invisibles: we perceive both conciously and nonconsciously. "humans in truth participate in these marvels, but unconsciously, and what we call the unconscious mind is a living organ of perception" Redgrove xviii The body including the brain is responding more comprehensively, differentiatively and subtly than we can know purely on the basis of experienced perception. We don't 'collect data,' we respond differentiatively. Some of our differentiative response happens on a scale that is sub-threshold, or too swift, or unsynchronized, or whatever it may be that keeps that response from being part of the sentience network. Such response may nonetheless serve to organize behavior, and so can be called perception. perceptual fields An acoustic field, the propagation of sound waves in the elastic medium of for instance air. A perceiver immersed in this field. Perturbations propagated from sources to the perceiver are convolved within the field so that where it contacts the perceiver's body, values of the acoustic field are complex effects of many events and presences. This complexity is resolved/differentiated as responses to separate sources by perceiver's body. Differentiation is itself complex response to many sources, facts, logical levels, at once, these differentiative response structures both distributed and connected, so that they are in principle separable while at the same time part of a whole. complex perception two sets of local signals from your skin. One is concerned with the object's shape and texture; the other is concerned with the places on the body being activated by contact with the object and by the arm and hand movement. subsequent body reaction, relative to its emotional value, the somatosensory system is again engaged, shortly after that reaction. Because we perceive by means of a body, any perceptual system, not only the skin, may also be used to perceive that one is perceiving, and sometimes qualities of that perceiving. Exteroceptive perception and then also: interoceptive/somatosensory perception of motor acts of perception, of emotional evaluation in perception, of sensory surfaces being contacted, etc. Much. 'imagining' as perceiving What you call 'inward' seeing and I call simulation or imagining, can nonetheless, I think, be a form of actual perception, which is what you want to say it is. Suppose a clairvoyant 'sees' an event happening at a distance, some event the visual system cannot be picking up. Can't it be that she is responding to field structure of some other kind and that other-kind of response structure is connecting through to seeing-structure to inform correctly while nonetheless only seeming to see? This can be called a visualization or perceptualization, because it is using the vision system's marvelous capabilities to know something in itself and in principle nonvisible. subtle senses use of less-explored fine tunings smell I began to practise yoga and yoga-breathing assiduously. Soon there were differences. I found that if I allowed the atmosphere of people to play on me, including the breath, I could often detect the fact that their smell changed according to what they were saying, especially if they were excited. It was more a natural perfume than a 'smell', and I noticed a strange communication or feeling gap when people were obviously using artificial deodorants. Redgrove xv electric sense in the late 1950s a wholly unsuspected sensory modality was discovered which, like the magnetic sense, has the profoundest implications for the arguments of this book: the electric sense. It was shown that the electric ray and the electric eel perceive by electrifying their envronment. They create, by means of electric batteries in their musculature, a tremendous electric field which (as in echolocation) is distorted by the objects around . This class of fish swims through the water electrifying it by rapid pulses from their living battery. All objects which are better conductors than water draw the lines of force of the field together and all poor conductors force them apart, so a picture is formed much in the way the field of electromagnetic radiation we call visible light conveys by reflection andd diffraction the visible world to us. The charge, however, is so strong that it can stun prey, and fishermen as well. Redgrove 18 electromagnetic sensing, felt energy flow somatosensory intuition/perception without names Another sort of feelable hidden field: the brain's entire field, structures of the uncon not only next to but also under, entangled within, pervasive of the con network. Sen Campbell at the colour conference told a story about moving to Brazil when he was seven. They told him everything would be different. He assumed he would be different. But when they got there he was still himself. A kind of human being he is Teillard de Chardin when he was seventeen. He thinks the being who is being me is the same being who is being him, that consciousness joins us in a substrate. One of the reasons he thinks this is that when he was a child he looked at the stars and said to his father, What is behind them? His father said he didn't have to worry about what was behind them because they are so far away. Steven said to himself, No, there is something behind them and it is the same thing as what I am. It was a moment that marked him, he said. What I thought was that he was feeling his brain feeling the stars. [journal 1996] d. Aspects of such perception have been defended against/ suppressed/dissociated. Present as ghosts The Romantics were right to affirm that their feeling-perceptions led to an actual communion with nature and a vision of its unity, and were correct in their high estimation of the imagination, which was to Coleridge 'the organ of the supersensuous', the vehicle of understanding of such perceptions, detected by the neglected, repressed, unconscious, non-visual, carnal or dark senses and it was this vision that was violently and short-temperedly struck down Redgrove xxx e. And nonvisible aspects of physicality can be correctly felt but falsely explained. Example: invasion: demons as disease agents History of subtle body beliefs GRS Mead wrote a booklet around the turn of the century titled, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in the Western Tradition. Material quoted is almost exclusively Gnostic-Christian in origin. Plato and soul, neo-Platonics
practices are designed to create and mature a body of subtle "astral and etheric energy" The idea of the 'simulacrum' thought to be
"militant purification" Suggested reading
Mead, G.R.S. Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition: An Outline of What the Philosophers Thought and the Christians Taught on the Subject. Kessinger, ISBN1-56459-312-6.
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