Satsang Worldwide

Visitor: “What do you mean with ‘Spherical feeling and experience’?”

R: “A human being has different modalities or ways of functioning. In English, we summarize this with the word ‘mind’. In a way, you could attribute the modalities of your mind to different ‘layers’ or ‘bodies’.

Divided into density, a human has a physical body, a subtle body, a causal body and a supra-causal body.

Of course everyone knows what we mean by the ‘physical body’. Under the ‘subtle body’ we count the dynamic energy management, the imagination, the mind and the intelligence. Typical human abilities and skills arise through this subtle body. We can refer, project, imagine, think, organize, order, classify, prefer, manage, systematize, label… Through these capacities one can create distance from his activities and behavior. He is able to come to an understanding of how he interacts with his environment. He comes across ‘himself’ and ‘his affect on something' and he can consider, judge and adjust them in all kinds of ways.

When the subtle body is still a bit undeveloped, you see in people that these abilities and skills can get out of hand and can run of with them. We call this "the dark side of the moon".

When an ability takes hold of you, it becomes your inability!

Through the ability of ‘taking distance’, fantasy and the creation of self-images; one can create an illusory (id)entity and can lead quite a life of its own. You can then find yourself in a fully classified, labeled and self-constructed world. As Goethe's sorcerer's apprentice, he doesn't realize what he's setting in motion. Before he knows it, he creates a distance from everything, labels everything, classifies everything, prefers everything unilaterally, attributes reality to it ... and thus creates a split, isolation, dominance, one-sidedness, condemnation, denial, avoidance ... Most people are alienated from ‘who and what they are, their surroundings, their entire living environment and their place in the cosmos’. All human and interpersonal problems here on Earth are based on this.

Well, in order to allow you to awaken and expand again from this, spherical feeling and experiencing helps you to see and experience beyond your own mind-constructions. In ‘Spherical feeling and experiencing’, we call the first thing we come across the ‘label machine’. Once the subtle body has learned to get into a trading mode ...

Imagine that I want to sell you this ‘juicy, red-yellow-pink, sticky, sweet-tasting and ripe-scented fruit'. This goes a lot faster via the label or word ‘mango’. Immediately you know what I mean by the label and I don't have to explain my merchandise in all colors and scents every time. Language is therefore more of a quick ‘exchange’ mode, not an experience mode. Before fully experiencing something, it is okay to first have a superficial idea of what something is. From an evolutionary survival mode, an ancient human scanned his environment quickly and superficially. When during his wanderings he entered a new valley and saw something vague or unfamiliar moving in it; he quickly scanned whether 'the vague or unknown object’ was not a saber-toothed tiger or something else threatening. Once classified as ‘not dangerous’, he did not need to sound the alarm and then no longer needed to know what the object was for survival.

Once again, when ‘what is an ability first’ takes hold of you, it becomes your inability!

When a labeling and conceptualizing mind dominates, everything you experience eventually becomes dull, familiar, modal, gray, halfhearted, superficial, distant, empty, numb ... It is typical for an undeveloped subtle mind to get stuck in a fully labeled and conceptualized trade-world. Jesus referred to this as ‘the living dead.’ Intense love, happiness, pure peace, exuberant freedom ... have been brought back to a monotonous, semi-dark twilight existence ... Through an over-conditioned mind, an ever-creating, constant distance-taking and on and on conceptualization, you feel separate and lifeless. You only approach everything through their names, their ‘value’ and their superficial meaning. Kahlil Gibran referred to this so beautifully in his poem on Love as ‘into the seasonless world, where you will laugh, but not your full smile, and weep, but not all your tears ...’. I'll just give you the most important part of the poem.

In order to return to pure experience, I first teach you to transcend the label mode. In my tradition this is called going beyond ‘namarupa’. ‘Nama-rupa’ stands for name-and-form. Via ‘Spherical feeling and experience’, first the ‘name’ disappears and then the ‘form’ disappears. One experiences something again in its pure essential energy quality and energy working. When you start to experience everything again in its pure essential formless energy quality, you enter the path of the Avadhuta. In the East we say: ‘The Avadhuta is the One who passed away from name and form (namarupa)’.

Visitor: “I just looked up the term 'namarupa' in Wikipedia. Wikipedia says: ‘Nama rupa’ is an Indian concept that existed before Buddhism. It is composed of the terms nama and rupa. Rupa means ‘visible or tangible form or body, the concrete existence’. Nama has different meanings, including language, thinking ability and organization. It denotes the totality of mental factors plus consciousness. So Nama stands for the thinking-and-organizing-mind, giving meaning to our experiences...."

R: Yes, beautiful. So ‘Nama’ stands for the world that arises through all the abilities of the subtle body and at the same time ‘nama’ stands for all your inabilities; when the subtle body takes over you. When you have gone beyond name-and-form you arrived in the Nondual. You are in the capacity we call Jnanamayakosha or just Jnana. Hence we call the precursor of this ‘vi-jnana’. The word ‘vi’ stands for duality. The ‘V’ shows that ‘two’ meet in the valley; the point where they meet. When the ‘V’ is pointed downwards, it represents the division into two and represents the belief in opposites. Your belief and preference in opposites creates a split. In the East we therefore speak of ‘split-mind’ instead of ‘Whole-mind’ or ‘One-mind’. You can find the prefix ‘vi’ in words such as viveka (discernment), vikshepa (dissemination), vichara (self-inquiry), vikalpa (divergence, projection) and thus also in vijnana (intelligence)...

When you transcend name-and-form through ‘Spherical feeling and experiencing’, you enter the Nonduality of Jnana and you have definitely and truly entered the Path of Realization!