Flesh
This depiction of the flesh, being angelic, is pre-gendered. It represents the generative matter of an individual with its symbiotic microbiome. The flesh is viewed on the human scale and above. For the purposes of medical care, in this method, it can be analyzed down to the level of organ systems.
To take advantage of millennia of cumulative experiential learning as handed down by allopaths, you can include in your construct of the body one level—or fourteen—that correspond to the flesh, the body’s material structure and functions. The flesh aspect of the sevenfold body includes all matter, structures, and actions comprehended by modern medicine. That is, in addition to the matter that is subject to histological and anatomical analysis by biopsy, surgery, and autopsy, it includes physiology, biochemistry, and cellular and molecular actions subject to physical examination and technological measurements. It does not include intangible derivatives of the body, which can be regarded from a spiritual or subjective standpoint as being, or from a quantitative viewpoint as like differential or integral measures of bodily actions.
When you pursue emerging self-guided care and cure, you have the option to treat flesh as one entity and to collaborate with consultants versed in clinical sciences such as anatomy, physiology, and clinical pathophysiology. This is the best course of action, as–absent detailed and extensive knowledge of the flesh in sickness and health–you will be unable to access modern methods or put them into perspective. Even seasoned clinicians, who continually incorporate new information without the leisure or means to judge its utility, can get lost in biobabble or whiz-bang gadgetry and lose grounding in the human scale and in common sense. In other words, don’t try this at home—unless you are a doctor, in which case you can use the review of systems and organ systems as a frame of reference.
Chronic illness due to ongoing exposure to poisons of the flesh or to irreversible alterations in the flesh has material consequences that are not amenable to spiritual treatments. For this reason, medical assessment is a must so that harmful exposures can be pinpointed and reversed, and organ functions recovered. In other words, material problems call for material solutions if and when such exist.
What you have as an individual that no consultant can offer is the privilege of observing your body in situ every day and at all hours of the day. While the ideal allopath or medical detective will know clinical medicine, public health, and more, none can abide with you and know your body as you can. You are therefore the best-qualified person to observe your experience, to discern the consequences of your choices and actions and environments, and to make choices and changes that enhance your survival, satisfaction, and thriving. As you do this, you can clear away the debris and baggage of the past and come into sync with place and time.
As you become more aware of your body and access ideas and methods from other parts of the world, you will recognize the exhaustion of the modern view of the body. The popular infatuation with molecular biology has imbued the acronym DNA with the aura of a magic word that promises far more than it can deliver. Likewise, obsession with lifestyle leads people to imagine that if they stop eating one or another thing, such as sugar, then they need not pay attention to what else they do eat. In contrast, consider the 1972 North Karelia Project, which positively and successfully provoked wholesale lifestyle changes across Finnish communities and country. The tendency to view daily life as hazardous, the body as faulty, and the individual as helpless leads individuals to relinquish authority and responsibility for care and cure, and so to obey systems that do as much or more harm than they do good. By the same token, to pretend that flesh does not exist or is immaterial would lead you to misread or disregard it, either of which could be hazardous to self or others.
The intangible structures of the body described in the following sections form the dynamic interface between flesh and the being and interbeing that arise from it. In the language of artificial systems, tangible structures of flesh and interbeing form the body’s hardware; intangible structures like those described below form its firmware; and the habits of thought, word, and deed that they accumulate form its software.
Energy
The energy body is depicted as the late modern aura. This depiction fits infrared and other energies well in that they decay rapidly—that is, they diminish with 1/r2, with r being the distance from the body. In this method, energy is not identical to fitness or vitality, which belong to the flesh. It is the resultant electromagnetic field produced by the entirety of the body, with the conductive tissues predominating.
Your energy is like the integral of the electromagnetic fields generated by your body. That is, each tissue of the human body generates electrical currents and electromagnetism that reflects its actions. The sum total of this, called the subtle body, is the construct of all of these. The trained mind may perceive the intangible structure of the subtle body as centers and channels. While the central channel in front of the spine parallels the spinal cord and autonomic trunks, and the centers arise near ganglia, the subtle body has no single anatomic correlate. It can, however, influence the function of the anatomical structures with electromagnetic activity.
While the aura remains elusive to objective forms of measurement, some aspects of the subtle body produce strong fields (e.g. the EKG, EEG, and EMG) that allow diagnosis of cardiac and neuromuscular diseases. For the patient who is able to subjectively detect and skillfully harness the energy body, it is a powerful aid in enhancing relief and wellbeing. You can use your awareness to focus on and explore its subtle structure, which is centered on the channel that runs up and down the front of the spine and the wheels, or centers, that dot it. With training, you can learn to focus on these structures in such a way as to strengthen, balance, and ground your energy core; you can also learn to move your center of energy down to enhance grounding and fertility or up to enhance awareness and transcendence.
If you could see your energy, it would look like an intangible armature of dynamic wires that give rise to spherical or cylindrical fields, which themselves diminish outwards in proportion to the square of the radius. Your energy would thus appear as a dynamic halo that is dense at your core and attenuates with distance. Your focus would appear like a beacon of light that you can intensify and move at will and so use to enliven caring and curing. Your deficits of and obstacles to caring and curing would appear as dark areas that correspond to all forms of pain and suffering; these include imprints of unpleasant experiences we have yet to put to rest, conflicts we have not yet reconciled, and problems we have yet to solve. The energy around these dark areas forms boundaries that impede flow and waste precious resources of energy and vitality. With patience, gentle persistence, and craft, you can use time and awareness to return light to these areas.
Modern medicine cannot support you in learning to care for the body from the inside, and is thus very limited in its ability to engage your energy body in self-guided care or collaborative cure. While modern medical science has developed tests such as the electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, and electromyelogram, and procedures such as cardiac ablation and cochlear implants, it is up to you to engage your energy body in creating state of being and strengthening processes of becoming that facilitate self-guided healing and cure.
The stronger and more resilient your energy body, the more resistant you will be to harmful energies that originate outside your body, such as others who do not know how to create heavenly states and who sustain hellish states that they may unintentionally share with you. It is easier to remain open and healing while in close contact with others when you are strong and resilient and able to share your heavenly states through your interbeing and interbecoming. You can draw on your sensations for this, which as you learn to sustain heavenly healing states will enable you to read your energy body and to enhance your state from your core.
Because your awareness and energy can together penetrate and enliven all aspects of the body, they are of great value in self-guided care. When your states of heavenly healing are strong enough, you can allow them to spill over into interbeing, and through interbeing into others who are suffering. When you learn to focus your energy so as to read your flesh and energy bodies, you will become able to discover the deficits and obstacles that remain and to resolve them. The emerging paradigm practices described in this book can prepare you to explore the undiscovered landscape of your body and to engage the intangible as well as tangible aspects of your body in care and cure.
Sensations
Sensations and sensory skills are represented by the ancient symbols called hamsas that depict the sensitivity of the palms of the hands.
From shortly after your moment of conception and continuously until your death, your sensory systems are collecting data on your body and its surroundings in the way that your body has been evolving since life on earth began. The material mediator of these data comprises the neural pathways that you formed in response to your experience. These pathways change as your experience—and your interpretation of it—changes. In other words, your sensory systems—like your energy—interface with all other aspects of body and being. These mediate your living ability to create your subjective existence.
Sensations are essential to care and cure. They allow you to develop the ability to read your body and its responses to phenomena in real time, and so represent the best and most important means for discerning the state of your body, measuring your relief and wellbeing, and transforming obstacles into opportunities and problems into solutions. Reading the body is an art that is vague and subtle, an art that is the work of a lifetime. This is why moderns who aimed for speed, predictability, and uniformity came to mistrust the personal and subjective, and thus to abide as aliens in their flesh. Through the emerging model, the body can hone sensations and sensory awareness; you develop the ability to read the body in the moment.
The senses include the five often emphasized: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. They also include others that are often ignored, such as the skin’s response to pain, cold, heat, and pressure; that of the inner ear to position and acceleration; that of the joints to proprioception; and that of the pineal gland to light and darkness. They include ineffable senses that are mediated by energy and cannot be objectively measured, as when you feel someone staring at you or sense “butterflies” in the “stomach.” These sensations can be honed with time, as when you cultivate perfect pitch, a gourmet palate, or recognition of optical illusions. Pleasure—like the appreciation of music, art, cuisine, and happiness—is a skill.
Sensations can assess and alter states of being, as when you recognize, enter into, sustain, and abide in states such as joy, delight, wellbeing, and pleasure. This means that you can use this intangible aspect of your living body to mitigate pain and suffering and in their place create relief and wellbeing. Over time, you can also develop habits of kinesthetic experiential learning by which you become able to read your context and body, transform your felt experience, and harness your body to the meaning and strength of purpose that enable survival and catalyze thriving.
Because your sensations are personal, unique, and responsive to your being and interbeing, you will have the pleasure of trying different means of relief and wellbeing and discovering those that specifically support your care and cure. For example, a hot or cold bath may ease aching muscles or stiff joints, and a natural fragrance, soft pillow, or healing touch may turn your state from contracted to expansive. As you advance in self-care, you can use sensations to discern problems, alter your state for the better, align your care with your context, and facilitate prevention and cure.
Clergy continue to construct historically recognized means of constructing sensations that you can share with others as part of care, such as the eyes of the palms, the hamsas, depicted here, as well as the eye of the heart, that is the horus, that was important to Jews in the time of Jesus as per the Gospel of Mary.