Sensation of the Soul
The Art of Dying & the I of the Heart (Post-Vipassana thoughts)
Good Morning, Good Mourning!
Someone wrote in the comments section recently that “Good morning” refers to good mourning—the awareness that the night of mourning the sun’s passing has ended in the goodness of the new sunrise.
Quite a Christ-ian sentiment!
At the recent “Christ outside of Christianity” meeting, with a focus on Buddha, I remarked how it’s hard to enjoy a sunset. I meant to really appreciate it and give it the attention it seems to merit, but maybe there is more to it? Maybe we’ve got millennia of ancestral memories of the sun setting as a terrible experience, when people still didn’t know if it was ever going to come back?
Truth be told, we still don’t ever know if we will live to see morning. Maybe we are not supposed to enjoy it?
Let’s Get Non-Physical
What kind of sensations don’t belong to or come from the physical body? If there are such things as nonphysical sensations (and I believe there are), when and how do we experience them while we’re alive, while we are essentially in the body and contained by the body?
If the subtler the sensations, the deeper we are going into the body, then does this mean the closer we are getting to what we are beyond the body? That within us which continues to exist outside of the body?
If the “the art of dying” is to become practiced in being aware of the subtler sensations, is it because the subtlest sensations continue on, even as we leave the body?
This is theoretical, admittedly. I don’t remember dying the last time I did it. But by definition, if it were true, it would also be experiential. And every night it is experiential, to a degree. Those of us who have practiced or spontaneously experienced leaving the body while awake, falling asleep consciously, have all had an experience of being in “subtler bodies.”
In fact, I’m fairly sure we are sensing things that aren’t confined to the physical senses all the time, and it is only that we either fail to notice them, or misidentify them as ordinary sensations.
Prisoner of Infinity + a Ticket to Eternity
I had two dreams back to back, about ten years ago. The bad one came first. It was of dying and of not having a body, and it was sheer horror. There was nothing to contain me, and my consciousness was spreading out into infinity. It was the opposite of claustrophobia, since it was having no confinement at all, yet it was the same sort of feeling, taken to the nth power. It was absolutely nightmarish, like the worst possible thing. A prisoner of infinity!
The relief of waking up and having a body to be centered in, contained by, was immense. God grant I don’t have to die into that!
Very soon after this nightmare, maybe even the following night, I had another dream about dying. There is less to say here, as always seems to be the case with the good stuff. It is harder to even zero in on what it was, besides saying that it was a sensation. A kind of galloping sensation, the best sensation imaginable (not orgasmic though; it wasn’t that kind of sensation).
It felt like this was my frequency, the frequency most essential to my being. The sensation of the soul.
I was dying into this sensation, and the sensation was my ticket out of the body, my ticket to eternity. The conundrum of the mind is, “How can we exist forever and it not become hell?” This sensation, if it was forever, I knew it would be absolutely fine. No problem at all.
My consciousness had become this perfect sensation that was rolling on and on, forever.
Rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling.