Unifying Mind/Body

Bhagavan by Nichlolas Roerich,1931. State Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia

Our body is made up of our senses and our mind is made up of our thoughts. Our senses cannot consciously be aware of anything but that we exist. Our thoughts, merely give us the consciousness of existence, but they do not give us any new information. INTUITION, however, is beyond sense and thought. It is through intuition that humanity reaches DIVINITY.

We are all becoming whole and it is the part of us that is Divine that completes us. Intuition comes from within; thought from without. Intuition gives us a face-to-face view of Reality; thought gives us an indirect view of it. Intuition sees Reality in its totality, while thought chops totality into parts. The process of knowing is different for both-one sees the whole and the other the parts. Both are necessary.

Feeling is an expression of intuition, which is the repository of all knowledge. Feeling and thought must be balanced in order to reach the right conclusions in our life. One who does not have both equally is not a fully developed person.

The REAL US is invisible, because even our physical body was first conceived in thought. Our consciousness or soul is an individualized spark of God. Our five senses and our mind and emotions are tools for our soul. These tools are meant to shape us into a Divine Being.

But first, we have to determine which part of us is the leader and which part of us is following. All ancient wisdom and world religions agree that in order to manifest Spirit in our lives, we must acknowledge Spirit as guiding our lives. Without Spirit guiding our lives or a larger Universal energy, we feel split off from the whole of our lives. Our sense of alienation and isolation from our original Source causes us to feel fragmented and incomplete. Thus our whole existence is in some way is a JOURNEY TO WHOLENESS.

Another truism that is common to all religions, is that we originated from ONE SOURCE, and therefore, this source is still a part of each and every one of us. A way to reach this divine in each of us, is through divine intuition or a direct knowing.

The story goes: In India, Intuition came first, intellectual Mind developing afterwards, and later, philosophy and science. The Vedas were written prior to Buddha in pre-history 2000 BC. These ancient texts used an "intuitive speech" which reflected our deepest experiences. The Vedas were received from above as revealed utterances. They were heard from a divine source.

Here, in the Rig Veda it explains the process of intuition and its goal of transformation, through symbols that reflect psychological processes within each of us: Ila is the goddess of revelation. She opens up the "secret messages" of things. Sarasvati is the goddess of inspiration. She opens up the deeper knowledge within us. Sarama brings to us the power of intuition. She is called the hound of heaven because she chases after the darkness and pulls out of what was once hidden into the light of day. What was once unseen is now seen. Dakshina is the goddess of discrimination. She dispels ignorance by seeking after truth. By her grace, we know right from wrong. She wakes up a certain type of intuition in us.

Some other goddesses mentioned are the daughter of the Sun, Surya, whose name is Savitty or Usha and the daughter of the dawn who brings light and spiritual illumination. She brings out knowledge that was previously hidden in a light and gentle way. There are also twins of healing and harmony who assist with receptivity and openness. They widen our minds and keep us open and flexible too new information. Now we can see why the western mind calls our gut feeling, female intuition.

This "gut feeling" or inner knowing registers either in our solar plexus or our hearts. It seems as if our body's awareness is not just in our physical brain. The concept of, heart intelligence, was scientifically studied by a company called Heart Math near Santa Cruz California.

Gregg Braden, geologist and best-selling author, discusses in his book, "Beyond Zero Point," that our hearts provide the power and the compass for our journey to wholeness. He asserts that emotions, provide the template for genetic material and switch on and off codes of DNA. Emotion provides power and thought provides direction. Combined, they become feelings. Emotions drive us forward and thought guides the forward movement. Emotions have magnetic potential and thought has electrical potential.

Interestingly enough, he says, that the heart is where thought and emotion come together. And the way to tap into our hearts is through the "science of compassion." Compassion is a tool that assists us with transcending the negative energy flow by keeping us in that point of equilibrium. He cited Jesus as a great example of the rational mind governing volatile emotions. Jesus loved without judgment, he had great feeling and compassion without being disturbed and he showed emotion without a charge.

Both, mindfulness and desire are the keys to the Inner Paradise. This is the Alchemy of the Heart. Love and Will, Will and Desire. The key to motivating our consciousness is in our underlying will- the will of our mind, which is our motive or intent, and the will of our heart, which is our desire. We must balance these two wills as we walk The Middle Way. This then, is a question of BALANCE. Our health is defined as a state of balance.

We need to heal the split between mind and heart. We must learn to become whole, by accepting all parts of ourselves. In the book, "The Inward Arc," Healing and Wholeness in Psychotherapy and Spirituality, Dr. Frances Vaughn clarifies the relationship between inner and outer growth. In it she says, "Health is defined as a state of balance."

She describes how we must have authenticity and personal integrity in order to feel congruent with ourselves, as well as, the world around us. This entails consistency between our inner and outer expressions and congruency between our beliefs and our behavior. When our thoughts, feelings, words and actions are congruent, one develops a sense of integrity and inner consistency that is essential to well-being.

If one thinks one thing and feels another or says one thing and acts another, we experience stress and disharmony or DIS-EASE. When our inner experience has been neglected, and only our ego is functioning, we experience spiritual despair. If our spiritual concerns are integrated with our work in the world, we may discover the inner resources for guidance, inspiration and deep satisfaction that transcends the boundaries of the isolated individual. Truth is recognized and not learned. Learning to pay attention to inner experience, developing authenticity, and honoring our inner truth, are all essential aspects of wholeness.

Dr. Brown, a professor of Cosmology at the Philosophical Research Society, lays out our four bodies in forms of color:

When all four of the bodies are integrated, we get the color purple.From this purple domain is where we have balance. He used an analogy of a tent, when lifted it provides a center, (which is the purple area), at the top point and the four bodies provide the base.

One of the main precepts in Buddhism is the question of BALANCE-What is true balance anyway? It is an inner condition or spiritual perception of not over-grasping and not disengaging in life. Here we must detach and un-cling to the false notions of ourselves. We must reserve for ourselves a part of our energy for the observation of our self and not totally identify with all of our parts. Integration then, means NOT to identify too closely with moments that just arise and pass anyway. By doing this, we discover that the environment we experience does not truly exist "out there." We are actually, perceiving life from the inside out. We do not experience anything purely objectively. Everything exists upon our own conceptual previous notions-this could be called, "memories, dreams and reflections."

According to the Buddhists, these memories, dreams and reflections are all we take with us lifetime after lifetime. They posit that we carry with us specific imprints from past conditioning that colors our view of Reality. Therefore we are never experiencing Reality in the moment, as it purely is. We are mere effects of our former thoughts, actions and feelings. We are actually an effect of a cause we ourselves set into motion at a previous time. (Since no energy can get destroyed, this is how we get repackaged.) Unless we learn to live purely, moment to moment, we are like old newspapers. In her book, "Being Nobody Going Nowhere," Ayya Khema describes karma as a moment-to-moment experience:

The Buddha said, "Karma, O monks, I declare is intention." It is not just any action but the intention behind it. Intention is not only what we do, but what we think and speak." What we intend brings results and our actions are caused by what we think about them first. We must get to know our thinking process. Each mind moment has to be watched. Total attention to every moment is necessary. The past is like a dream and the future is not yet come. The only thing of interest is now, everything else is a dream-world, never being totally awake-there is no joy in that! We can only be alive now. We must be totally awake and aware of our intentions.

We must be fully engaged in the Eternal Moment of Co-Creation. We need to experience ourselves while our life is occurring. The question then is, how do we co-create, moment-to-moment with the universe?

In the book, "The Body and Its Mind", by Nina Bull, 1962, by Las Americas Publishing Company, she states that attitude always is prior to and leads to action. Attitude causes us to register a feeling in the brain.

Alfred Binet, a researcher at the time, was asked what is an emotion? "The whole secret to the solution, he said, is one word, attitude." Soviet psychologist, Professor S.L. Rubenstein, said, "Human feelings is a persons attitude to the world"; and again, "Emotions express the state of the individual and his attitude toward the object." Here he suggests that consciousness emerges genetically within the body and is conditioned upon it. Internalized thought is the most subtle form of "readiness in action."

Ideas without attitudes, feelings or motoric tendencies, do not exist. The activated attitude responsible for feeling in emotion is always involuntary and instinctive. (So it is just below our threshold of awareness.) The emotion of JOY was studied and determined to be wholly of the moment, without a future or past. It was like a reaction of a child. Unlike TRIUMPH, which had a sense of continuity-past, present and future-and a sense of something overcome and something still to do.

Pavlov's concept of "reflex of purpose" was to him, the most important factor of life. This brought about a whole new concept of human potential. One of goal-orientation, it was as if the body had a mind of its own and had a goal or purpose in mind. If this purpose was thrawted, people got depressed.

Purposeful behavior is a conscious striving for some desirable objective, more or less distant and not too easily attainable. This can be called a goal if it is positively valued and serves a personal and/or greater need. A goal-orientation behavior is essentially a unified approach, with one objective or aim. Frustration however, starts with a divided mind/body. On a frustrated situation, the obstacle appears to be nearer than the goal. In order to correct this, the obstacle must be seen as a mere hurdle and not a threat. If the obstacle is seen as a danger, fear instincts are aroused, and the alignment of obstacle and goal is impossible to achieve.

A SENSE OF DIRECTION IS THE KEY TO THE ORDER OF THE MIND. The problem of unhappiness is when too many of man's objectives are obstacles or a means of escape and not true goals.

Another system that relates to goal-orientation is the psychology of engagement with everyday life. In his book, "Finding Flow," the author of "Flow" and "Creativity," Mihaly Csikszetmihalyi, states that the key to our health, is to challenge ourselves with tasks requiring a high degree of skill and commitment. He teaches us to learn the joy of complete engagement and to approach things with complete abandon, so that we don't have room for thoughts, just pure experience that transcends thought.

It appears then that the universe was designed to give each and everyone of us a "hidden, but directive purpose." So, it would be our aim to uncover this unique purpose and then to align all of our actions towards achieving it. But, since our senses can be unruly at times, we need to guide the senses with our reasoning mind in order to achieve success of our one-pointed aim. Once off-track, we must gain wisdom from the higher reasoning faculty of our soul, in order to know what too take right action on.

According to the Ancient Greeks, our physical world is made up of elements that are living matter and have perpetual motion. This motion comes directly from the Kosmos and has the power to "steer all things." Then ideas and thoughts from this ONE MIND or Kosmos, and is mediated through the soul in order to create matter and physical things. So, thought is the "unseen" that arises before the effects of the "seen."

Most of our minds operate in the unconscious or subconscious. This is where all creation begins. Just like the black sky of the night, which fills up most of the sky, so too are we immersed in this night of consciousness, even though we are not aware of it. From this place we tie into patterns that existed long before we did.

According to Amit Goswami, a quantum physicist and professor at Oregon State University, when we find meaning in something, we are tapping into this vacuum or infinite energy, which automatically organizes our experiences and gives us form. He believes that we live in a "Self-Aware Universe."

Quantum physicists believe that although the universe appears as chaos at first, it has an internal organizing principle that keeps the cosmos integrated and on course.

In the "Emerging Mind," by Karen Nesbitt Shanor, PhD, Deepak Chopra writes, 'I would like to define consciousness by calling it awareness that has three components: attention, intention and memory….these are also energy an information. Therefore, consciousness and information and energy are identical. The essential ground of nature is non-material. These energy and information fields express themselves in human physiology and the human nervous system as thought and memory, intention and attention-all those things we experience subjectively in every moment of our existence.' This seems to be the new paradigm and its consistent with the paradigm that existed in the Vedic tradition.

The concept of eternality of being behind constant changes in time and space is a major theme in the Upanishads. The One or principle of Unity is present in all things. We are all parts of the whole, in fact, the parts contain the whole. "I am one with that which is all."

The key here is that there is spirit in matter and matter in spirit, they cannot be separated. In fact matter was created for the delight of the creator. The creator is the masculine or father principle and matter is the feminine or mother principle. So, man's goal is to unify all things within himself by developing a conscious relationship with the divine and by discovering his TRUE NATURE and taking RIGHT ACTION. (We will cover this later in the paper.)

Paramahansa Yogananda, writes in "Man's Eternal Quest," that life itself is totally independent of the body, but life has become identified with the limited conditions of the body. On pg. 342, he states, "If you analyze the body and mind, you will find there is no connection between them, except what you give." He continues, " Being made in the image of God, man can live in the body completely separate from physical sensations. But instead he adopts the conditions of the body as if they were his very own. To be free of sensations, one has to separate himself mentally from the body. Therefore the saints teach mental detachment from both pleasure and pain. To understand and experience mental aboveness, one must practice it.

In the spirit of the Bhagavad-Gita, he continues, " Catering to sensations is the cause of all suffering and misery. God didn't intend for us to suffer; he created sensory perceptions to guide and entertain us in the form of mental pictures. He meant for us to use the body instrument wisely, not become so identified with it that it makes us miserable." His bottom line is—Mind must acquire greater control of the body!

Kuthumi, who was a Mahatma for the Theosophical Society, in the late 1800's states, "Man thinks of himself as solid. But he actually lives in an envelope of flesh and blood that is penetrated by his consciousness. Consciousness, must be regarded as man's connection with his source. In effect, man's literally a broadcasting station for God's energy and His cosmic rays. Those who are sensitive can attune with these waves and may perceive their nature and their origin.

The will and the desire of God is the energy that beats your hearts. Christ said, "I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness." When we speak of the light of the world, we speak of the light of the aura, and we are talking about a tangible manifestation.

During the same time period, Gustav Theodore Fechner, describes how consciousness comes into us….'Life and consciousness never arose, but are original activities of the universe; they are two expressions of the same thing…from without all is manifold, from within, all is unity, and both together constitutes all there is. The soul is not punctual, but pervasive throughout the body. '

Kuthumi continues, "The idea of pure spirit as a Being is absurdity…'Why is it more impossible that matter should produce spirit and thought, than spirit or thought of god should produce and create matter? …We believe in matter and matter alone…she is the great whole out of which nothing else exists."

The major question in the Bhagavad Gita, is how can we harmonize our spiritual life with our day-to-day life?

It starts with action. Arjuna, a warrior in the field of battle, (both an inner and an outer battle), is a man of action not just a man of knowledge. His problem is his "inner-bankruptcy" of his whole conscious being- his thoughts, heart and desires were dharma-less and he can't find the "law of action" in his life. He asks Krishna, who is his supreme guide, who knows all things-beginning, middle and end- "Give me that which I have lost…a path which I can confidently walk…a true and clear rule of action." He asks for dharma, not the secret of life, but his rightful place and his map for action towards that end.

Krishna, (who is really Spirit or Arjuna's rational mind), instructs him to assign to everything its supernal and real nature rather than its present and apparent value. "Find the hidden links and connections. Consciously direct all life and act to the true object and govern it by the light and power of the godhead within."

"See the divine origin of all things. Immortality is the home, which the soul travels. Self-knowledge is the means of knowing our svadharma-OUR INNER LAW OF BEING- the law of His Life. This world, the manifestation of life in the material universe is not only a cycle of inner development, but a field which external circumstances of life have to be accepted as an environment and an occasion for that development."

There is a specific action that is required of Arjuna. His dharma is not one of self-pleasing domestic happiness and a life of comfort and peaceful joy with friends and relatives. His name means one who "cleaves to the truth." He is of the warrior caste and his true object of life is to battle for the right during a time of great up-heaval and world change. If he does not take his place in the battle of life, or fulfill his reason for being, the society of which he is fighting for, would not "hold-together,' just as if God did not perform His works, the world would not "hold together."

Symbolically, Arjuna represents us-the striving man, Krishna represents our higher Self, the four horses are our unbridled senses or four lower bodies, the reigns are the mind and the chariot is the soul.

The Native Americans have a motto that "everything in life has a purpose and every person has a mission." It is up to man to listen to the "still voice within himself" in order to discover for himself his true nature. In addition, he then must trust that nature and follow its dictates through guided action.