day I was at a meeting where the teacher was talking about how you are greater than the body. Many of the students were deep in meditation in the dimly lit room, surrounded by pictures of various saints, illuminated by candle light. The smell of incense wafted through the air and there was a feeling of deep peace. Right in the middle of his talk on the body I looked down and noticed that I was pressing on my wrist and doing the Aikido stretches.
Before I had a chance to get embarrassed, I thought, “If I am truly greater than the body, then even now, in the middle of these wrist exercises, I must be greater than this body.” So without stopping the wrist stretches, I closed my eyes and asked, “Do I feel like a body.” To my surprise I discovered that which was free of physical limitations. It also turned out to be very blissful. In the middle of my wrist stretches I had the best meditation that I had ever had up to that time.
So here’s a chance for you to experiment a little and see for yourself. Everybody knows that when you sit down and close your eyes, the world and the body are there but you don’t see them, right? But why don’t you verify this. When you try this simple experiment of closing your eyes, what do you actually experience? Is it what you are supposed to experience?
When you are not looking is there actually a body and a world in your experience? You may feel a sore back, a pain in the shoulder, or your heart beating. But does that add up to a body? Is your experience that the body is there but you don’t see it? Maybe you don’t really experience a body at all. Find out for yourself, don’t rely on my word, and be ready for some surprises.
If you can even get a little sense for this, you will begin to discover what the greatest sages of all time like Christ and Buddha knew. Your actual experience is a lot richer than it is cracked up to be. Just because you assume limitation, doesn’t mean that you are really limited.
Imagine that when these great sages talked about, “The kingdom of heaven within you,” or “Freedom from old age, disease, and death,” they were actually talking about what you experience even now.
When you start to look at your experience from this new and fresh perspective, you will know how this is true. Furthermore, your life will change and expand in ways that you never could have imagined.
So in the same way that you see your friend and therefore know that you are not your friend, you see your body. You are the seer and your body is an object in your awareness. What that proves is that you are more than a body. The limitations of the body such as old age, disease, and death, are not your limitations. This points to how free you really are.
Now let’s get back to examining the limitations that you see, so that you can step beyond them, and into the limitless Awareness that is your natural state. If you are not limited to a body, are you limited to the forces that enliven the body such as breath? In the next chapter, “The Forces that Enliven the Body,” we will find out.
The Forces that Enliven the Body
Now lets look a little deeper. What about the subtle powers that enliven the body such as the breath, the digestion, the elimination, and the procreation? The ancient Indian masters saw that these were the functions that moved in waves, and called them the pranas. Even thought waves are considered to be part of the pranas.
You know whether you are breathing freely or if you have asthma. You know whether your digestion and elimination are working well or if they are all clogged up. In the same way that you are greater than the body — because you are aware of it (you see it) — in that very same way, you are greater than the pranas because you are aware of them.
One advantage of this path of Knowledge is that it doesn’t depend on the condition of your body or breathing. Whatever their condition, you just notice that you are the subject, free from their condition. On your deathbed your body and breath will probably not be in good condition, but you will still be able to meditate right from the source, unaffected by their condition. This is the advantage of a meditation where you meditate as the source, a position that is unaffected by the condition of the body or the pranas.
On the other hand, if you use your breath to calm your mind or keep it under control, then if the breath starts to malfunction, what will you do? If meditation depended on the breath, then a person with asthma or even a bad cold would be in trouble. So here we meditate from our innate freedom and not from the limitations that we see.
When we talk about the pranas it is also a good idea to talk about desire, especially what I call biological desires. These are the desire for food, sleep, and the desire to reproduce, for sex. These are very powerful desires and if you don’t believe me, try refraining from one of these for a long enough time and see what happens.
In general these biological desires are not a problem. You are hungry and there is food. You cook it in an appetizing way and then eat until you are full. Then you get up from the table and go on with the rest of your life.
Or if you are sleepy, you make your bed in a nice way and then sleep until you are rested. This seems like a natural way of handling natural desires, and I imagine it is the way that God intended it. So what’s the problem?
In certain meditation techniques they started to repress these desires. So here’s what happens. Michael was a relatively normal person who started to get interested in meditation. He had little success and so he sought a master.
When he found his master, the master told him that he should only eat until he was half full. Being a good student, Michael started just eating until he was half full. This went fine until about three days later in his morning meditation. Michael started dreaming about chocolate cake with chocolate icing, chocolate ice cream, and whipped cream.
Now being a good student Michael knew that he shouldn’t be thinking like this. So he spent the whole morning meditation fighting with his mind, trying with desperation to stop thinking about food. And the more he fought, the more he spent his precious mediation thinking about food.
And then as the days rolled on, he still kept up the image of being a good meditation student by only eating half as much as he needed at his meals. But when midnight came, he would sneak down to the refrigerator and stuff himself full of food.
So what was happening to Michael? These biological desires are like a pendulum that wants to come to balance. The more you swing it to one side, repression, the more it wants to swing to the other side, indulgence. That is until you let it come to a natural balance again.
What a tragedy — here Michael had the opportunity to discover the very substance of the universe, and to find the source of happiness itself. And here he was spending his meditations, fighting with his thoughts of food.
Unfortunately, the Catholic priests are another good example of what I am talking about here. Lately, the Catholic church is getting sued because of allegations that the priests were molesting the children.
The official explanation is that there were a few “bad apples” in the Priesthood. I disagree. I think that these are normal men caught in an abnormal situation. They pushed the pendulum of repression so far to one side that their sexual desires are coming out sidewise. I think that this whole scandal is a sign from God that the priests should be allowed to get married, so that they can meditate on God and not on sex.
Finally, as a meditator you should know that the source of happiness wells up from deep inside of you. It is the place where you actually experience happiness. There is nothing strong enough to destroy the happiness that you are. Not a slice of pizza, a dip of ice cream, or a boy or girl friend.
Our aim here is to use our life to get to the source of wisdom and bliss, not to waste it fighting with our desires. So if you find yourself fighting with your desires, just remember the old Zen saying, “When you are tired sleep when you are hungry eat.”
When I first wrote this book I didn’t go into the topic of desire with this much detail. But since then I had lots questions concerning these biological desires. Thus to keep spiritual aspirants from getting caught in the clutches of repression and indulgence, I wrote a little more about them.
So I think that you can see that the