The Body Electric

A couple of weeks ago, I got roped into crew work for a wedding. Just a small part to manage on my own, and I would offer an extra pair of hands for any odd jobs in other parts that wanted it. The wedding would be held outdoors, with Nature, and this provided two major problems.

The first was weather. Mahadevi reported that he'd worked his mojo to keep the rain back, and I thought that would be fascinating to investigate, but, I didn't glean any more than that as to the hows and whats of weather suggestion, so too bad!

The second was that, being so far off paved paths, the supplies that we needed in order to set up came in late. I don't know if the people bringing it over made a wrong turn and got lost, or got stuck in the mud somewhere. Either way, the only thing most of us crew members could think to do in the meantime, was amble back to our respective cabins and wait for everything to come together. Some opened up their laptops, others read, and I lay back and watched my mind flicker between a nap and a meditation. Anticipating the crunch time made me too high-strung to doze, but for several months I'd just felt too differently "wired" to slip into a meditative state as easily as I used to. So, I just let a part of my mind watch as the rest of my mind wandered--

-- into a meditative state. The recent "usually..." went that my surface thoughts would just be too loud to let me dip into that state for long enough. This time, I felt the concerns fade away, and all I had was this sense of a smaller body behind my eyelids, like the erstwhile "usually."

I think that sense of awareness as a substance collecting in that area is because most of our experience-- four out of five of our known senses-- are in the head. When I become aware of my toes, for instance, it's like directing them from a watch-tower. I don't feel like I am my toes as surely as I feel like I'm my head. At that point, I try a kind of active "visualization" except instead of imagining images, I imagine feelings-- of sinking. So, instead of my awareness being in my head, I imagine that my awareness is in my throat, then in my chest, and then in the pit of my stomach and so on. I still see out my eyes and hear out my ears, but they take on a remoteness. It's those, instead, that become just parts to me.

I doubt that this is all the result of intuition telling me how important the brain is. A truly wise intuition would remind me not to live so much in my head, instead of keeping it a default. Isn't it a waste of life, not to extend one's concept of self and experiences to (at least) the whole of their body?

From a BBC documentary, Horizon: The Man Who Lost His Body, I learned about "proprioception": the sense of location in space. In a man who suffered an infection that destroyed his nervous system, and in an astronaut who's had to cope without gravity for extended periods of time, they documented a loss of proprioception. Perhaps it behaves like other senses, in the way that a person can look without seeing, or hear without listening. It can be manipulated with attention or lack of attention, and imagination. In my centering and OBE meditations, then, there seems to be a satisfactory materialistic explanation after all.

Back in the cabin, Mahadevi muttered to Sibling. "Ugh, I'm crackling... Could you tell your sister to stop projecting?"

"I'm napping," I called across to them, eyes still closed.

Mahadevi insisted, "You're projecting."