Download PDF - Stillness Speaks

imaginations; ego, filled with selfishness, fear, vanity, arrogance, and desire;and the Unconscious, a vast storeroom cluttered with the myriad seeds of pastactions. Each room appears a separate conscious entity with its own nameand form but when the mind walls are destroyed only one conscious entity,formless Awareness, remains.Failure to see that the apparently disparate parts of the Self are oneleaves another option. Spiritual practice slowly and patiently empties therooms and pulls down the walls keeping us from wholeness. For example, apure crystal resting on a blue cloth appears blue. Remove the cloth and itssparkling clear nature is known. When the Subtle Body is purified the Self isrevealed and one sees that one was never “broken and diverse” in the firstplace.“The individual’s Gross Body,the medium through whichpleasure and pain is experienced,is composed of matter.The type of body is determinedby past actions.”(12)That the body is comprised of food consumed and shaped by activity isobvious, but why such a variety of human forms? Or, how do experiencesfrom the past come to determine the characteristics of the body that will bethe medium of experience in this one?Nobody questions heredity today, yet the idea of reincarnation has yetto gain widespread acceptance, even though both attempt to explainessentially the same phenomenon - how experience passes through time toprogram the future. Heredity describes how certain physical tendencies informer generations "reincarnate," return to flesh. Microbiology hasdiscovered that these tendencies, which are the result of an ancestor'sprevious experience, are stored in a very subtle part of the cells, the DNA,and passed on to succeeding generations.Spiritual science, which describes two additional bodies, the Subtleand Causal, contends that our psychic life, like physical experience, has alsoevolved a way of surviving physical death and remanifesting. We havematerial science to thank for an increasingly detailed and accurate picture ofthe processes that make up the physical body. Psychology, a relative infantscience, is largely responsible for our rudimentary knowledge of the Subtle22