The subject of yesterday's 'Thought for the Day' was 'I Am Not This Body,' and I received some responses to this idea. A few were celebratory of this fact, of not having to be at the mercy of this faulty, dying package the body can sometimes be. At least one was very clear in pointing out to me what the reader saw as the 'mis-take' of my thesis:
We are individual personal units of conscious spirit emanating from the one eternal personality. We are expanded eternally for the joy of the absolute person. We are real, our body is real, but temporary. Jagadish Yes, absolutely. Our body is real. The Veda would not dispute this at all. As I wrote to Jagadish, Totality is exactly that: totality. It must contain both the Absolute unboundedness that underlies all things, and it must contain this relative world, of which my body is a part. As students of the Veda, of life, of spirit, of consciousness, we may at times swing back and forth from one to the other. We may spend years identified solely with the relative, which is why so much of Vedic writing insists on recognizing the Absolute. And of course the opposite may be true, and if we sit in our cave, be it literal or figurative, and do nothing but meditate and try to find the experience of transcendence, we will be missing out on the life being lived on the relative plane. Our teacher, Guru Deva, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, was known for his ability to state truth concisely, succinctly. One of the stories told about him illustrative of this bears on the subject at hand: People by the hundreds, when they heard Guru Deva was going to speak, would gather in anticipation, sometimes waiting for hours before he would appear. On one such occasion, Guru Deva appeared before a large gathering and spoke the following as the entirety of his presentation: "NIVAR TATWAM" "Go where you are not." If you are too much in the relative world, sit in meditation and experience the transcendent field. If you are too much in the Absolute, put yourself into movement, take the show on the road, step into the relative world and use some of the adaptation energy you've been gathering in meditation. Go where you are not. There always will be another level of expansion to be had, another degree of union to embrace. Always. We'll know we're finished when we no longer have this body to work with. Today I will ask what part of the equation I might be missing, and I will look for the way to add it in.  Salt Flat, near Death Valley, CA
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Kober
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