Many people think of the stages of Awakening only as a process of development of Consciousness, often overlooking the role of our bodies.
As the stages of Awakening unfold, there are plateaus along the way where we might feel that we have risen above or beyond our physical body. We may even feel like our body doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. We may feel disembodied. But this is part of the process of discovering who we are and what our body actually is.
The stages of Awakening are simultaneously stages of discovering our body more profoundly. We naturally come to embody the stages of Awakening, naturally discovering with greater clarity what our body is at each stage.
What is our body? We usually refer to our physical body, the flesh and bone, our brain and nervous system, and the organs of our senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. As Pure Conscious Being, awakens more and more, we discover that our body is not limited to what we previously thought it was. Our physical body is just one “layer” of a multi-dimensional reality of what our greater body truly is.
In a sense, our bodies continue to exist in each dimension, but the wholeness, the greater sense of our bodies, is unveiled, and we recognize the greater depth and range of what our bodies encompass.
Many of us on the spiritual journey have had the experience of feeling as though our bodies expanded, felt bigger or spacious, or just seemed less constrained to a container of skin. These experiences may be characterized by feelings of peace, bliss, greater fluidity and light.
These experiences give us a glimpse that there is more to the body than just the physical form we identify with. But there is much more. Feelings of expansion or spaciousness are just a beginning to the discovery of what our bodies are.
In Self-Realization (Cosmic Consciousness), when Pure Conscious Being awakens out of identification with our personal self and body-mind, we can begin to know our body is aligned with the unbounded field that circumscribes Existence. Our physical body is then known in a different context as a feature within this field.
As our Awakening develops further and matures into Unity Consciousness (“oneness”), we come to know that Pure Conscious Being as the field and all its content, all of Existence within our perception, is our body too.
And with further spiritual unfoldment, we discover the clarity that Pure Conscious Being is the body of Pure Consciousness. Pure Conscious Being is circumscribed like a “bubble” in which Being, Consciousness, and Existence exist. And the significance of this is that we can begin to recognize that there is an even greater body — a great unmanifest formless form. The Body of the Divine.
Until the discovery of The Body of the Divine, the shifts in what our bodies are sort of make sense. Right? But a Body of the Divine? Did you ever think that was possible? I didn’t. The idea of a formless form seemed counter intuitive.
And yet Divine Grace showed me this Body of the Divine. And not only that, this formless form, this great Body of the Divine, has qualities. Awareness. Intelligence. Love. Light. Power. Joy. Intention. How is that possible? Shouldn’t the Divine be entirely absolute and unchanging, having no qualities at all? Because if it had qualities it must be of a relative nature. Right? But here I discovered that there are absolute non-relative qualities.
And then I asked myself — well why not? Who says the omnipresent, omnipotent, transcendental Divine cannot have form or qualities? And who says that the Body of the Divine cannot contain the whole of Pure Conscious Being?
But getting back to the point. So. What is our body? It is what it is now, and what we discover it is.
And as we come to discover what our body is at each level of Awakening, the greater sense of our body comes to own the other layers, not as a descent into these other layers, but as the recognition that the other layers are themselves the greater sense of our body at more expressed levels in the appearance of Existence. And we may come to recognize, not just in Consciousness, but on the level of our body, the reality of our Divine origin.
And this process is what I would call embodiment.
— Joel
The above is an edited transcript of the video:“The Bodies”
which you can find HERE.