Aquarius Writings #3 - The Body is Your Kingdom; What kind of Ruler are You?

Perspectives employed:
1 Metaphor
2 Science
3 Yoga
4 Esotericism
5 Alchemy




Subject: The Body is Your Kingdom!


1 Metaphor

Except I'm being literal. Actually it's much, MUCH larger than any historical kingdom. Just stop looking at the human-scale sizes, and look to the cell-scale sizes. A simple shift of perception. Is that too much to ask? It is just as real, just as crucial a part of creation, and every bit as much action is going on down there as is going on in the world of human civiliazations! And yes, you can pull the strings all over and through your entire body, seemingly without doing a thing, just like a King or Queen! (And how fair a ruler are you?)

Organs are galaxies. Tissues are star systems. Cells are planets, nations, peoples. Sound like a far-fetched comparison? Why should it be? Are you thinking of the size relationships yet? What is a man's size compared to a galaxy? What is a single ribosome's size compared to a man? Cells form groups just like people and nations do. They "do work" in great chemical organizations, just like civilizations do with people. And just like human relationships, they can be healthy or unhealthy, and you have a choice in what happens, should you choose to accept it.

In every instant you are alive, your body is a bustling, inter-connected and inter-dependent community of almost incomprehensible size, organization, and coherence. Metabolism. Air is flowing into your lungs. Your lungs capture the air and transport oxygen into your blood flow. Your blood keeps flowing. Around and around inside you like a vast interstate, complete with white blood cell coppers and various hormone tractor trailors. Even officially-sanctioned "bandits" are let loose on this transport system when you have a puff of a pipe. This interstate branches off into many different smaller roads. On to the brain. Those hormone tractor trailors are docking and delivering their shipments to their reciprocal brain stimulation sites. Ahh, there is so much going on I could write whole books! And the best part is, minus the comparisons to objects of the mundane world, it's not fiction! The whole system is ALIVE, and it is NOT AT ALL wholly understood!

Please, take your bodies. You could devote a lifetime to trying to understand them, and pretending they aren't interesting or important is a severe loss! It is too typical of humanity to ignore the obvious miracles literally in their faces, to obsess over trivial matters instead!

2 Science

Have you heard of the "placebo effect"? The one discovered and repeatedly verified all within the past 100 years?

The phenomenon of an inert substance resulting in a patient's medical improvement is called the placebo effect. The phenomenon is related to the perception and expectation which the patient has; if the substance is viewed as helpful, it can heal, but if it is viewed as harmful, it can cause negative effects, which is known as the nocebo effect.

en.wikipedia.org...


Even the best sheep's most reliable shepherd, Skepdic, must admit the existence of this widely-documented phenomenon, and elephant in the room:

The placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or invasive treatment that has been administered.

A placebo (Latin for "I shall please") is a pharmacologically inert substance (such as saline solution or a starch tablet) that produces an effect similar to what would be expected of a pharmacologically active substance (such as an antibiotic).

www.skepdic.com...


But the Skepdic, like all who are material-minded when it comes to life and the body, is apparently puzzled over this "placebo effect" because they can give no explanation for its practical mechanism. How can the mind "tell" the body to be healthy through belief and expectation only? They can only note that it seems more than just psychological, though there is an obvious psychological aspect to it, and they say further research is needed. Of course further research is always welcome in every field. But this particular idea of mind-body connection is not at all new to the world, only new to modern science. For those who only turn to modern science for knowledge, it's "new" (within a century), but the extent to which mind and body are connected may be studied for thousands of years more and still we will not have come to a complete understanding.

The phenomenon of "placebo effect" suddenly becomes uncomfortable to many when we raise the question, "Is prayer or meditation that invokes a genuine change in psychological/biochemical state a practical means of medical treatment?" According to how we understand the "placebo effect," it is just as possible to properly believe you are being treated with a sugar pill as it is with prayer, since neither a sugar pill nor the prayer itself are actually being attributed with the improvement in healing. And perhaps most disturbing of all is the idea that "belief" should have anything at all to do with the cold, hard, mechanical world of science!

3 Yoga

Yoga means "union."

When Yoga is being practiced, no matter what kind, a union between two things is being practiced. They are being integrated so as to behave as a singularity. An important kind of union in Yoga is the union between mind and body.

When the union between mind and body is sufficiently realized, it will be seen that the mind and body literally are/have become one and the same thing. This may seem obvious to the materially-minded given that all functions of the mind itself are perceived to arise from the chunk of meat that is the brain, and this may be true. But experiencing the connection consciously brings profound insight to how the flesh of the body might be instructed by the mind, just as any other intelligent organization could be instructed by a mind with the proper means of communication.

The subconscious acts as the intermediary relaying conscious thought and intention to the physical body, automatically translating the conscious thought into electrical activity, chemical reactions, and the released chemicals then go out to the body through the blood stream and cell metabolism. You do not need to worry about all the things that have to happen between the thought, and the body, for the body to receive the "instructions." You may only need to presently feel in your body the change you want to occur, for example, the same way actors are trained to make themselves feel anger, depression, etc. It is the exact same mental process as when an actor or actress does this, and in fact the actor/actress is causing all of the same damage to their body when they get into a depressed or angry character as a genuinely depressed or angry person would. This is the first step to controlling the mind and body, and we are not limited to making our bodies only feel angry or depressed.




4 Esotericism

In esoteric work, body awareness is associated with subtle systems of energy within the body, and stimulating them either from the top-down (using mental visualization techniques) or from the bottom-up (stimulating the physical body's senses and easily "feelable" energies first). One school of body awareness and subtle energy exercises I particularly recommend is Robert Bruce's, known best as "New Energy Ways" or "NEW" for short.








The simplest way of stimulating the energies in your body so that you can FEEL them move around your body, is to lightly massage or tickle areas of your body until they become very sensitive. When they become sensitive, this is a perfect oppurtunity for your mind to focus on these areas and familiarize itself with the way they "feel," which is the way that part of your body actually interfaces with your mind. Acquaint yourself very intimately with the way every part of your external body "feels" when stimulated, then start recreating the sensitive feeling without touching, and simply by focusing the mind of the same body part. This comes very easy with a little practice. Then you can begin moving the sensitive awareness of your body around from leg to leg, to arm, to head, to torso, as easily as your attention shifts, so does the very sensitive and present feeling inside your body. This is a form of SUBTLE ENERGY that you are now moving around your body!! So simple, yet this is just the beginning.

With that hopefully one can begin to get a picture of what is slowly and carefully cultivated with this technique for increasing body awareness. Robert Bruce himself provides most/all the rest of his techniques online for free, for anyone willing to follow up on him.

5 Alchemy

The last thing I will mention to you now about the kingdom of your body, relates to the other technique for raising consciousness and increasing body awareness I mentioned above, the "top-down" technique using creative visualization and starting with mental energies rather than physical sensations.

The idea of the body as a castle or kingdom may have been popularized by esoteric Alchemy. The practice was to visualize an elaborate castle with many rooms and halls, as a conscious metaphor for the body, to be integrated with the physical body by the subconscious. The following comes from a review of the book "The Tower of Alchemy":

In Western mystical teachings, the analogy of the soul as a castle or palace with myriad chambers has long antecedents. St. Teresa de Avila drew upon this comparison when writing her classic The Interior Castle, and the early mystics of the Kabbalah wrote of journeying in the series of “Heilkhalot” or palaces of the upper worlds. Likewise, in the Western alchemical tradition, there are allusions to towers and castles, which contain important symbolic information about spiritual work. ...

The key to this form of alchemy is that one does not work directly on the physical body, but instead projects the etheric or subtle body in the form of a castle or tower and works within the edifice’s many rooms and grounds by means of visualization. These rooms correlate to the different sephirot or energy centers on the kabbalistic glyph of the Tree of Life, which in turn correspond to the chakras. After each practice, the subtle body is drawn back into the physical. Goddard notes: “[W]e use an indirect route to make the necessary changes within the astro-etheric body, so that the subconscious will proceed to implement those alterations . . .as it continually builds and maintains the physical body.” The author notes that “no work is done directly upon the physical body—except for relaxation, posture (asana), and breath (pranayama)—because direct concentration on the organs . . . of the body can easily lead to an imbalance of the fine electrical and chemical functions and result in disease.” Working with kundalini energy to transform the body (or arousing the dragon, to use Western terminology) is safely done within this mode. ...

According to the author, “The principal alchemical operation is thus to transmute a transient, mortal and gross body into a deathless, physical body of pure Enlightenment.”

www.abovetopsecret.com...


This level of existence is of ideas and archetypes. The patterns you lay down in the "mental realm" all eventually manifest physically as the effect your brain has on the rest of your body trickles down through the reactions. So it is healthy to maintain a strong and compassionate "inner abobe" to radiate outwards into your body and the rest of creation. If you habitually harbor negative thoughts and feelings, you will be like an apple with a rotten core. Eventually the whole thing will be rotten. Dig down deep and clean everything out of your closet, it's part of the healing and remembering process, too!



May the compassion of the Mother embrace this enlightened community, and may the divine Light of the Father illuminate it.