=1 "The Body of Joy"
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The Body of Joy
According to our ordinary way of seeing as well as our trained scientific experience, nothing that exists can cease to exist. Everything merely changes. No thinker believes that the world will ever vanish into nothingness, that there will be no space or time, that all the quanta or quarks which exist today in their thousandfold forms will some day cease to exist. We see constant change, but we never see ‘something’ turn into ‘nothing’. The question of one's personal survival thus depends entirely on the question, “Do I exist? How far do I participate in existence?”
As for the material components, the atoms of our body, there is no problem. They are indestructable.
But we are not merely body; we are also life. As an animal, a living being participating in life, we are also eternal. The cells of our body, though continuously manifesting new possibilities, are identical copies of sister cells, and follow an invariable routine laid down in the ancient seas of our planet. There is no foreseeable end to this greater life. So why worry? We have only to be this life, this continuous cell division, this resurrection.
Yet may it be that for some us us this is not enough? We want a still fuller participation in being, a soul participation perhaps?
How, you ask, can I believe in the Topic::soul if I haven't met it?
Let me ask you a question: Do you believe that you are yourself?
Yes, of course, I am myself.
Well, you are even more yourself when you are soul. You have always been soul, even before you were body you were soul. Anyway, you don't have to be introduced to yourself, and yet you believe in yourself. In the same way you don't have to be introduced to your soul because you are your soul.
It is not a being separate from yourself and other beings. It is one of your own possible ways of being.
You are not always in the same state of being. There are times, in your dreams, when you are a dream body; there are times, when you are awake, when you are your physical body; when you think and create you are your mind; and there are times when you are soul. All these are different states of awareness, of consciousness, of being, of vibration, of resonance.
We have heard more nonsense said about the soul than about any other subject under the stars, including much childish or popular superstition. Because the churches keep mum about the soul, people learn about it in occult books: ghost stories that make your hair stand on end. But in reality you have often met your soul without recognizing it.
When you feel alone or are afraid of something, and suddenly you have a feeling – not the thought but a feeling – that you are not alone, that nobody is ever alone, that you are well protected and that there is nothing to be afraid of – well, that was a contact with your soul. When there is suddenly the feeling of a warm protection around you, as when somebody on a cool evening puts a soft shawl around your shoulders – well, that was your soul being. Don't be surprised. It is something not only in you but around you, because it is a greater and vaster way of being than your physical being.
When you try to remember an episode of your childhood and you suddenly realize that you have forgotten all those little sorrows and remember only the joy – well, that is how the psychic being in you remembers. That is also how it remembers from one life to another. Everything is filtered, cleansed, till only the joy is left, because your psychic being is joy. Not the noisy joy of your vital being, but true joy. You can feel no true joy without it. The body in which you feel it, you body of joy, is the soul.
People speak of a sad or tragic soul, a suffering soul. That is like speaking of stupid intelligence or dark light, because even when your body is suffering there is always joy in your soul. There is no ‘dark night of the soul’, only a dark night of the little ego, because the soul shines of itself. It is its own light. To feel and to be the oneness, the joy – that is our soul.
When you sit at night on the shore of a quiet sea, and the moon rises shimmering across the water in front of you, and suddenly you are aware that you have seen this already a million times, though it might be the first time in this life, at that moment you have become one with your soul or psychic being. You are for a moment psychic, and take part in its very special memory.
The same thing may happen when you look into a living fire at night, a campfire or a hearth-fire – a door can open into a long past; not the memory of one or two lives, with all their ugly or petty details as we read of in books on spiritism, which is something very different, but a joyful depository of literally thousands of lives, of a greater life without beginning or possible end.
That is our soul: a subtle body with which to stretch to the utmost beyond, to the very summit of being, to the peaks of intensity, the heights of joy.