Edward’s Diary Entry 115: Awareness and the 5 Yogic Bodies?

5 bodies and S-A: Now the difficult thing to understand about S-A is the following: Our Self-Awareness is not really ours. It is not something we have. It seems to be something we are in. In other words, it has us. We don’t have it. Loosely, we can say “I am aware of X…”, but really it is “Awareness is present in me to perceive X…”  

This is because Awareness is not a quality of and by itself. We know not from where it comes. But it’s there. It’s Life. Life has it. The plants have it, the insects have it, the trees have it, anything living has it and maybe even inert things have it in a different way. Living cells have it. But it is filtered through each of their life-patterns. The Awareness of a cell is the life of the cell, but the dosage is different from my Awareness. The dog has it, but a dog’s awareness is not like mine. What would the Awareness of the whole Planet Earth be like?

Our human Awareness can focus on our body, awareness can focus on the mind, with its thoughts, emotions and sensations. The “I” in me can direct awareness to certain processes. Going back to “Edward’s Diary Entry 109: The 5 “bodies”, according to the yogis”, in a calm, contemplative state, we can be “aware” of things happening in the Food Body, the annamaya kosha. We have the sensation of hunger, thirst, pain, pleasure, flexibility or stiffness in limbs. We place our attention on the breath and perhaps hear our hearts beating and some blood pumping. Only the gurgling of our guts tells us that the body is busy digesting, transporting roughage, taking in nutrients, etc. Most of the bodily actions simply occur without any attention from our normal Awareness. The intelligence of the body is enough to take care of absolutely everything that goes on below our level of consciousness. And good thing, too, or things would get even more messed up than what they are due to social conditioning as regards the intake of food and drink and stimulants…

When it comes to the Mental Body, the manomaya kosha, we can be aware of things going on all the time: the so-called misnamed “stream of consciousness” (more like flow of unconsciousness at times!) is a procession of thoughts that are a-thinking in me, triggering internal or external actions, reactions, emotions, feelings, sensations, and generally running along known pathways, nerve channels, due to past experiences, memory. In short, data accumulation that tends to run along in grooves. When we sit down to focus attention or Awareness on these processes, things keep rolling along merrily, and the infinite combination of past and present and future thoughts can spark of imagination, even what we call creativity, but it is all a reaction to past input, and the juggling of the known with the known. It can go on indefinitely, the combinations are so great. This ensures a certain pattern of behaviour, but it hardly gives us anything new. The rumblings of machinery don’t produce the goods – the right products have to be designed, made, packaged and marketed to make people happy.

As we said before, Awareness of the pranamaya kosha, or Energy Body, is reserved for rigorous, long-time practitioners of yoga, for the few, for the elite. We cannot say much about this because it is outside our normal Awareness. What is outside our Awareness does not exist for us. It’s like asking the ant to consider a human being. What can an ant know of a human? Ants are maybe aware of all their co-workers and queen, and their many sources of food and forest pathways, but their field of Awareness is too small to comprehend a whole human being. Just like the underdeveloped human being is too puny and small-minded to comprehend the entire World. And that is why we are all divided into little, supposedly “manageable”, sections, sects, divisions and groups, often at odds with one another.

But as from a few Entries ago, I bit off more than I could chew when I wondered how to connect Awareness with the 5 Yogic Bodies. On this blog we have always seen the relationship between Awareness and the body and the mind, but anything above this is outside our present experience. But there is nothing wrong with that. It is as it should be, because Awareness pervades everything, and yet is nothing of and by itself. The body and mind have qualities of their own. The 5 yogic bodies or sheaths have qualities of their own. Awareness, as the quality-less factor, stands apart from all subdivisions and units and underlies the very structure of everything, like food for bodies, air for lungs, light for darkness, space for sky and nothingness for something-ness.

So let’s dedicate our attention now to cultivating Awareness, on a more practical level…