Mind, Body, Spirit

I will start the discussion by stating the obvious. There is countless hours of instruction on guided meditations, deep breathings, and healing sounds. These are all intermediaries. They act to distract the mind long enough to feel the spirit’s movement in the body.
Due to their very nature as an intermediaries, they are ineffective. If you wish to know your body, a video or an instruction is not needed. It’s like asking to take a breath. Do you follow an instruction manual for a casual breath?

As I write these words, I feel called to do a deep dive into the subject matter. I wish to leave no stone unturned. As you sit here listening, you may ask, why does the man writing this discussion express concern for intermediaries? Afterall doesn’t a child use a tricycle to learn to balance before riding a bicycle?
On my journey, I realized that the intermediaries were the longest roads to nowhere. The mind has a tendency to latch on to the intermediary. It makes the intermediary the new goal. If the journey started on a path to finding peace, at some point, meditation, yoga poses, charkras, become the new goal. Peace was replaced with the goal to become a meditation master.

Direct examination, direct pursuit, direct truth is the fastest and most effective path to becoming aware of what’s real. I stand before you as a traveler who has wasted most of his life on the path to nowhere. I stand before you a man who once tasted the directness of the path and understood there was no other way. 
The soul or spirit is an un-intangible yet ubiquitous consciousness we all have. It’s the feeling that lives within us, deep in our bones. It’s the intuition that we routinely squash and then come back around and say, “ah, we should have listened to our gut.”
For most, the awareness of spirit is limited to a fleeting intuition. In fact, this is the tip of the iceberg. Very rarely is the entirety of the ice glacier explored.

The spirit is the ultimate guide. It has the ability to turn off the mind. It naturally knows how to control our body to accomplish its mission. The spirit is unlimited. It knows no bounds. Its potential is vast. It does not need to be told what to do or what to say or how to dress. It simply has the knowledge to take the steps that will help it accomplish its task.

The body is a natural extension of the spirit. After all, it’s the physical home for the spirit. Just like the soul, the awareness of our body occurs with direct examination.

An intermediary is not required. Awareness of one’s breath, the pace of it, the depth of it, whether it’s from the thoracic diaphragm or the pelvic floor, is all an intention. It’s a knowledge.
This knowledge is a natural knowing once you’re aware of it. It’s like the position of your elbow. You know if it’s straight or if it’s bent. You can have awareness in every part of your body, in every aspect of your body, simply through direct awareness. All that is needed is a desire to become aware of it. Wherever your awareness is now, from a beginner to a tantra spirit master, all that is required to reach new heights is direct awareness. What stands between you and direct awareness of the intricacies of the spirit and the nuances of the body? The barrier is the mind.
The mind is the car that keeps driving around the block when you don’t need it. It’s the dog that never stops barking. The thoughts are like an artillery barrage that flood your consciousness. The lies that protect your ego. The fragile ego that’s not based on fact or reality. The desire to feel good, to imagine and dream what others say or think about you. The story you tell yourself about yourself. The story of others that’s constantly changing and being filtered based on the audience. The need for something to be good or bad, right or wrong. The need to take a stance. The need to have an opinion. The need to feel an artificial connection to others who subscribe to the same stance. Mental models and constructs and emotions. All of these are distractions of the Mind. They’re not based on reality. Turning off the mind, turns off the voice in the head.
When the continuous stream of thoughts is turned off, you can pull your head out of the sand. The fog clears. You can now see what’s in front of you. You can understand the thing right before your eyes. For the first time, you can see the world for what it truly is.

The Mind cannot be turned off by any intermediary. Mind-altering substances are rampant in society. You can buy them at the grocery store or a food cart. They’re even sold on airplanes. Any intermediary to turn off or alter the mind is deeply impractical. Are there mind-altering substances that can reset your mind and its thought patterns? Sure. Those are temporary, akin to placing a little bandage on a traumatically amputated limb. The mind will do anything to stay alive. It will fight, crawl, grind, attack back. It’s like putting a Dementor back in the box. A Dementor who became accustomed to being king. 

Direct truth.

You can listen and observe the mind’s thoughts without acting on them. You can become aware of the separation between yourself and the mind. You can see the foreign nature of the voice in your head. As you realize its futility and its evil undertones, you can decrease its volume. The mind stops becoming the impetus to act. It instead becomes background entertainment. As a foreign substance, it can be studied like a zoo creature and then it can be turned off. You may notice it turning off when you’re in the zone. When you’re all in on something you love, there may be no voice. You will feel peace without the voice. Your vision will become crisp and you will feel the ridges of the object in front of you. After experiencing moments of no mind and the peace that lives on that side, you will want to turn the mind off altogether.
During this time, the mind will fight and crawl and entertain. For the one on this journey, there will be a knowing that whatever the mind can provide is a shallow and temporary dopamine filled blip.

A natural step will be turning off the mind altogether. You can live your life without mind.
You can experience whatever you wish to its truest extent. You can see in high definition forever. This is samsara, moksha, samadhi, funa, baka, haqiqa, and all the highest levels of any spiritual construct. This is Buddha’s enlightenment, liberation, bliss, peace. No temples, no gurus, no chakras, mantras, divine texts, or pilgrimage needed.

Direct pursuit, direct truth.

Awareness of the spirit is a natural step when the mind is off. The intention of the spirit is pure. Its action is sincere. Its words are intended to resonate, not to convince or instruct. It comes complete without desire.
All the levels of the spirit are still unknown to me.

The first level I can attest to, firsthand, is a deep intuition. The spirit can see and feel many things I cannot describe. My intuition will reveal truths that I cannot describe, but I can take action on. The spirit can access knowledge from the universe. Even as I write this, the universe flows through my fingertips. It writes what it’s meant to be written. It pauses. It ebbs. It flows just as it was meant to be. The writing happens with my eyes closed. This is not me. I have an intention to share my story. But when the universe wants, it can express it as it wills. There is no rough draft, research, or creative method. I sit on the ground with a pen and paper, close my eyes, and allow the spirit in the universe to write through me. When the spirit is instructed by the universe to act, I stand witness to what it will do. 

Awareness of body is effortless when the mind is off. You can feel the spirit fill every corner of your body. You can consciously choose to engage certain muscles. You can observe your breath and how it changes with your observation. One aspect of the body that is not talked about is that it naturally evolves to the intention of the spirit. But it can be responsive to the mind. The mind can cause the body to stress or to feel happy. This is a temporary response. For most who live in mind, the string of temporary responses triggered by the constant mind causes a longer lasting change. When the mind is off, the body instantaneously evolves to align with the spirit. It’s a natural phenomenon. The body will eat when it needs to eat, as much as it needs to eat, when it needs to eat, in conjunction with the goal of the spirit. This effect can be fine-tuned via objective tracking, but should be just limited to that. Objective tracking can easily become the should or the target. Its benefit is in passive observation. The spirit with this knowledge will naturally fine-tune the body. Wherever your spirit wants to go, your body will organically follow.

On the axis of the mind body spirit connection, overcoming the mind opens the door to feeling the spirit and body.