/lit/ - Literature

You are not your body! It is your most vivid and persistent experiential cognitive activity during your waking sensory hours, but in a “flying dream” you are in your subtle body of death and dreaming. Your subtle body is what you call your mind of perception and imagination, as well as your emotional states, throughout the day. The mind, the subtle body, can be energetically detached from the physical body and be developed to do extraordinary things. If you have read the books of Robert Monroe, Carlos Castaneda or Swami Muktananda, you can begin to see, at least theoretically, how this works. From the standpoint of physical sensory duality of physical world, objects and other human bodies, your selfhood is all too easily identified as a bodily subjective object, which makes the mind or subtle body, the dreamer, seem to be a relative noumenal subject transcendentally above and beyond the physical world and physical bodies of physical phenomenal subject-object consciousness as neuro-cognition.

Developing the subtle body and its extraordinary faculties, powers or siddhis is a big deal for most human beings who can do such things or who at least aspire to do such things. The human soul (whatever that might turn out to be) eventually outgrows the ignorance of naïve materialism and develops a kind of subtle supermaterialism of identifying conscious selfhood with the mind or subtle body as a subtle subjective object (the subtle or dream body) that experiences subtle subject-object phenomenal consciousness of subtle worlds, objects and other subtle bodily persons, such as ghosts of the dead or nonhuman spirits such as are called angels and demons. But the subtle “self” is not real because the even subtler causal plane or world of sheer abstractions or pure ideas, thought-structures, then becomes the relative noumenal subject in nondual consciousness of the subtle subject-object phenomenal dualistic realm. The causal seeming noumenal self sees then that the Dreamer is the Dream, the Perceiver is the Perceived, the Feeler the Felt, just as before it was the seeming subtle noumenal self or supersensory mind that could see that the physical seer is the physical seen and the physical doer the physical thing done. But the causal self is still a mere concept and not an ultimate transcendental reality, not a phenomenological transcendental ego as conceived by Edmund Husserl. It is still a third plane of duality of phenomenal abstract subjective object looking at phenomenal abstract objective objects.