You have an energy body!
It may sound a little controversial, but, the fact is, we all have energetic bodies. Surely, if this is the case, schools should be teaching us this, and why hasn’t science proven it long ago. Especially since yogis have talked about this for thousands of years…
We are talking about the energetic body that some people have connected to through ‘out of body experiences’ (OBE’s), and near death experiences (NDE’s), often floating above, and looking down on the physical body.
In yoga they talk about ‘koshas’ or sheaths of the body, like a Russian doll we have layers of subtler and subtler bodies, but all aligned to the central axis of the chakra column.
The energy body is very similar to the dream body, we all know what it means to have vivid dreams, but many also get to explore this experience one step deeper through lucid dreams.
Whether in the dream body or in an out of body experience, we have the sensation of being in our normal physical body, we look the same, physically, we have the same mentality as during our daily lives, everything is ‘as real’ as in our ‘ordinary’ day to day lives.
Yet, in the energetic body we are not subject to the same restrictions as the physical body. We can influence and shape the environment around us, we can travel instantaneously to other locations, manifest people, fly, walk through walls, dare I say it, …walk on water, touch the moon, and many other miraculous feats that would be impossible from the physical state.
Now let’s get more grounded, and come back to the practise of meditation and the awakened life.
What is it to be fully awake?
To be fully awake we need to learn how to direct our attention, and develop a more expansive spread of awareness, balanced across all the phenomena that arise, moment to moment. Upon doing that we can become more and more aware of the ‘totality of reality…’, or better said, more aware of everything that the human mind can perceive in any one moment.
To be mindful, or to have our mind full of the spectrum of awareness.
We can practise to become more aware of the different elements that make up our perception in any one moment, awareness of my physical body, my feelings, my thoughts, my environment.
But if I also have an energetic body and I am not aware of this, will I always be missing an essential element of the reality as it is in this moment…??
What does it mean then to be aware of the energetic body?
The energetic body vibrates at a subtler vibration than the physical body, it is attuned, and in harmony with mother nature, with the planet. It is a vibration that we can feel all around us. In practises like Tai chi, people can experience this energy, in meditation, the more we become present, the more we attune to this vibration. It can be felt, heard, sensed.
A newborn baby is still very connected to this vibration, naturally, the mental filters have not been formed, yet. This is the attraction of connecting with little ones, especially little babies, vibrating at this frequency, in our arms, we can also tune ourselves up to this vibration.
We are all connecting in different, even if generally subconscious, ways to our energy bodies. When we feel good, happy, present etc., our vibration is more tuned up to the energetic body, and we are more in alignment, physically, with our energetic body.
When we feel low, the vibration and alignment get all out of kilter. In such moments, the simple effect of being in nature can help us shift our vibration to a more positive frequency.
What separates us from this vibration is all our attachments, cravings, desires. If I am thinking about this or that, my spectrum of awareness is drawn towards, narrows or focuses upon ‘my mental baggage’, and since the spectrum of awareness is limited in any one moment, if I am caught up in, or have an imbalance of awareness towards mental activity, I have less awareness directed towards all other phenomena that are taking place in this present moment.
Beliefs, opinions, pre-occupations, etc. all draw us away from being fully present, this is essentially our ‘karma’ our ‘blockages’. Even to think about the Buddha or thank God for an experience of being fully present diminishes that very experience, drawing us back towards the mental chatter, and the ego’s tendency to want to own, explain, understand each moment, even before it happens.
Without fully directing our awareness towards the present moment, it would not be possible to connect to our energetic bodies, or the energetic plane, that is all about us.
What is duality and non-dualism?
I do not want to get in the way of the more traditional interpretations here, i still accept an ‘ultimate reality’ and a ‘relative reality’, and when we are able to connect to that ultimate reality, we are able to touch that which is non-dual, one.
Spiritual traditions today direct the practitioner towards ascending ‘up’ to higher consciousness to connect to this ultimate reality, whereas, rebirthing is about bringing these two fields together.
When we are able to connect to our energetic bodies, and the environment all about us, the physical and the energetic ‘spheres’ harmonise, resonate at a similar frequency, the energetic body actually locates itself around the same central axis as the physical body, the chakra column.
I think that at the highest levels of the awakened mind this resonance is like a fusion between the physical and energetic bodies. This fusion is the unity, the oneness, the ‘yoga’ (union, yoking), and when we are not in this space of oneness we are effectively experiencing varying levels of duality.
Advaita, non-duality in Sanskrit means ‘not two’, and because we do not understand our energetic ‘reality’ we find ourselves in varying states of separation.
This separation between the physical and the energetic is the fundamental ‘sense of lack’ that we experience in our day to day lives, and we try to fill up that ‘lack’, that felt ‘gap’, with everything we are attached too, sugar, screens, football, self-harm, negative self speak, which ever collection of flavours you like, and there are many, many of them out there!
And don’t forget, the closer we get to being more present, the more and more subtle the egoic delusions become.
As far as I am aware, there may be many ways and teachings that help us to make these connections, just connecting to your energetic body will change your life perspective instantaneously, and often does for people from all walks of life who have OBE’s or NDE’s.
I first got some of this through lucid dreaming, learnt from reading Casteneda’s books, and then out of body experiences from practising the techniques taught in Robert Monroes book, ‘Journeys out of the body’.
Continuing my journey, through meditation I experienced ‘virgin rebirthing’, a teaching coded into the teaching of the 31 planes of existence and also in Jesus’s crucifixion story. A process of rebirthing our two bodies into one.
This is not a simple and light hearted process, ‘yogis’ have prepared themselves for this experience with strong pranayama techniques, asana, and deep mental concentration practices. However, virgin rebirthing is a central story within the story of today’s humanity, and for that reason I can only assume that this is a key teaching to help us to awaken, and to attain to the non-dual perspective.
In the non-dual we find ourselves aligned and in harmony with the natural world. From this perspective, the way we live on this planet today appears to be completely upside-down. If enough people could have this vision, there would be a 180º turnaround. We would stop tearing up our Garden of Eden. We would realise that this way of being comes from a humanity living from the egoic mind, trying to fill-in that void, that sense of lack, created when we no longer have the connection we once held as babies, experiencing the oneness, connected to the energetic level of being.