Spirituality Vs. the Body

The traditional cultural view of the West is that there is something wrong, even evil, about the body. The body of course is the handicap the ego faces for it depends on it to present and enact itself while the body seems to go about its business with activities in need to be hidden. In the end the body wins, not only with the death which ends the whole thing, but with little deaths so to speak in the form of such things as bowel movements and the infinitely complicated intricacies of our erotic business in which the dignity of the self is in jeopardy, not to speak of the cancers and heart attacks and what not it creates with no consideration for our struggling ego. However, this same body can serve to enhance the status of the self when it embodies those ideas constitutive of this self and of course is so shaped as to be an object of admiration, at least for some time. But even under such positive circumstances, the body is viewed as merely a servant, a tool even if we are admittedly stuck with it and its unpredictability.

Many years ago when I was on the faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Georgia, one fine afternoon, I went to the movies. I was the only person there sitting perhaps one third of the way down in a central seat, with the exception of couple seated many rows down. Taking advantage of the rising noise from the sound system, I let out what I expected to be a little fart. But not only did it turn out to be resounding, there was simultaneously a sudden silence in the picture. The couple turned around to see what had happened, and I too turned around to look behind me, but there was no one there. I was suddenly stuck in the glow of this fart, presenting myself to that couple as the culprit as one who had allowed his body to show itself in its most undignified manner.

But all true meditation is a return of our attention and consciousness to its source in the presence that is enshrined in the body. From this silent presence rise all the thoughts which define our ego and its props. And this presence is the one presence of all that is said to exist so that there, in the silence of this body’s bodiness we recover the Knowledge of the immensity of Being, what the Chinese call the Tao.

Spirituality has been identified in those theological and theoretic aspects of religion with the doings of the intellect so that it is something that pure abstraction and has no existence other than the one the intellect gives it. In the process, the body is reduced to an instrument with which to present our ego to others, sexuality even defined as the original sin.

The great spirit, the Tao is the aliveness from which among other things rises the intellect; but that great spirit is silent. It is the pervasive vibration of conscious energy from which all that is appears, what the Shaivist call spanda.

So long as we fail to tune in to this primordial vibration which produces our existence, there is in the core of our being a lack, a void which may appear to some dreadfully threatening and from which we all too easily run to the social game in order to gain from the game we play with others a confirmation of the substantiality of our ego. Only when we exist this body fully are we on the path to the spiritual resolution of this dreaded lack, a lack seen as evil because it undermines along the course of our life the supremacy of this ego, this person we pretend to be.