Question: It’s funny how the feeling of aliveness is so deeply buried in this body. Even when I get out a level or a few [and come to higher states] and see my life beyond time, as part of a complete super-I, I am still oscillating and undulating back into a deep place within this body. My body always seems to want to cloud out the timeless and complete view.  Any guesses as to why?

The view that chimes with my experience is nicely laid out by Ramana Maharshi. The Sanskrit term “samskara” or “vasana” can be regarded as an outward-going ego-tendency. The story Ramana tells goes something like this: suppose that one is like an untrained cow whose tendency is to leave the stall in which one resides in order to search for grass out yonder. Suppose that there’s a trainer who slowly lures you, the cow, back into the stall with the promise of sweet grass. Little by little, you learn to stay quietly in the stall and to find contentment (here, the consumption of sweet grass) there.

Similarly, the I-am-the-body identity is “sticky” inasmuch as there’s an outward-going tendency (a samskara or vasana). Herein lies the difference between Christian mystics and Indian jnanis. The former “come into and out of” the body-identity while the latter are established as jivanmuktas. Put differently, there’s a difference between samadhi and sahaja samadhi: in the former case, the body-identity has completed dropped, only to stickily return anon (due to vasanas) whereas in the latter case one is established as pure Being (which, of course, undulates in, through, and as the physical form).

As jivanmuktas, jnanis have no truck with the gross body or with the subtle body or with the deep sleep state or with any state or station. They see all bodies, states, and stations as nothing but undulations of the boundless Self that they are. It’s for this reason that they experientially know that what they are, that what we essentially are, that what essentially is is Love.

Ramana Maharshi expresses this point very well in one of his “Forty Verses on Reality”:

To those who have not realized the Self, as well as to those who have, the word “I” refers to the body, but with this difference, that for those who have not realized, the ‘I’ is confined [exclusively] to the body whereas for those who have realized the Self within [but not only within] the body the “I” shines as the limitless Self.