Thinking the Resurrection Body

Submitted by Tim Bourke on Sat, 11/03/2007 - 6:56am.
Through PoF, we may experience that the power and potential of what manifests itself in us as thinking has no limit, it is spirit, it is divine. But what follows from this?  Is this simply a power which is totally separate from the human body, from what I inhabit from day to day, at least during my waking hours?

 

 

Through PoF, we may experience that the power and potential of what manifests itself in us as thinking has no limit, it is spirit, it is divine.

But what follows from this?  Is this simply a power which is totally separate from the human body, from what I inhabit from day to day, at least during my waking hours?

Not at all - in fact, thinking has to play a role in my coming to  understand the relationship between my body and the spiritual.  And thinking itself utilises the human body to come to manifestation.  And it is precisely coming to a real, concrete and living understanding of this relationship that poses the great challenge for me, now and into the future.

 

To take a simple example - spiritual scientific writings may lead me to see that the human head, my head, is in a very different state to the rest of my body, to what lies below my neck.  In fact, in some ways my head looks a bit similar to a planet - it is a spherical body with a hard outer crust and a liquid element below the surface.  And even more than this, there are parts like the eyes which appear to have been created in an analogous way to the way volcanoes appear through a kind of eruption - and in a similar way the physical activity taking place around them differs, there is a different state of non-equilibrium, a different flow of energy as it were.

Fanciful?  Perhaps, but consider the throat, nose and ears as well.  If we have something like a cold, there will be something like eruptions again at these points - even something like earthquakes! 

Through pondering thoughts and images like these small examples, trivial or even false though they may seem at first, following them through consistently when they occur to us through our own thinking observation and experience, examining them in our own lives, we can be led to a much truer and more all-embracing spiritual knowledge and living awareness even of the body, of its sickness and health.  This knowledge can then work for the future creation of a body that is truly healthy, that is finally freed of the sickness of sin within the bodily nature of humankind, to quote a phrase from the Christian Community's Creed.

Leading on even further from this is the thought, what is the future of the human body?  What form will human beings take in the future?  Endeavouring to fully answer this question I may be led to ask also, what forms have human beings taken in the past?  What light does this shed on the future of human beings? 

My attention can then be drawn to the lower part of my body.  For example, what is the heart?  Where has it come from?  What is the relationship between my life of feeling and the ceaseless circulation of the blood, its rising and falling?  And the humble feet that walk upon the earth, and my legs?  What do I really know of them, faithful servants that they are - I often only notice them at all when they fail or cause me pain!

And what of death, and the thought of further (and previous) lives on earth?  How does this form in one lifetime relate to previous and future forms?  What is my destiny and human destiny more generally?  What of the idea of "higher" worlds?  What is their relationship to the earthly, sense-perceptible world?

There is an element in me, active in my thinking, that is ceaselessly working at the resolution of these questions inasmuch as they are real questions for me, valid and important in my own life.  And the resolution may involve more than just head-knowledge - it may involve me also starting to become, to embody the answer to my own questions.  This is the Christ, working within and without in ways that are much more concrete, real and truly physical than I may now imagine or perceive, a divine element working ceaselessly at the creation of the resurrection body.

 

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Reincarnation, the body and the three minute warning.

 

Thanks Tim for the post. Here's my thoughts of the moment on this.

 

It surprises me that as I have less and less time in this incarnation, it becomes less important to me, not more, how I spend my time! (pain, bereavement trauma etc obvious exclusions)

Its a bit like with the old three-minute-warning question: "When the sirens go off , how are you going to fill the time?" On reflection (mature) there simply isn't anything sufficient to the situation. I seem to be at a stage now where time itself is becoming the texture of my experience, not what I put into the time flow. Think how as a young person I clawed my way from high-point to high point, all carefully staged, and then forgotten.

I feel it is the same when one becomes certain of ones past lives. The self of today's life is in a way "trumped" by a new self  that has endured, albeit in some ignoble forms, from way back. Likewise, it is the new self for all its quirks, that will be going into the future- gawd elp us! The substance of ones life is immediately altered, as if from the future. Life is no longer so private. The task of the self remains of course, but the one who is performing it is revealed a bit more.

Love

Bryn

 

Eyes as Pools

Thanks, Tim

There's so much to think about what you've written here that I'll only be able to do it a little at a time. For now, I'm entranced with your analogy of the head as a planet and the eyes as the result of volcanic eruptions! It reminds me of a lake in Oregon called Crater Lake, because it fills a gigantic crater left by a volcano. It's a very deep blue circle that has gazed unblinkingly back up at the sky all these thousands of years since. What has it seen, I wonder?