Polarity - Reconciling the Subject - Object Riddle
Q: Would you speak further about the unification or mergence of the intuitive and rational aspects of human cognitive capacity? What are the correlations of this mergence in the subtle brain and subtle body in general? Thank you for the intuitive wisdom.
In response to this, I just want us to remind ourselves of what is really driving this process. Perhaps it would be helpful to understand this in terms of how the polarity itself is set in motion, and why there is this polarity. It is all intimately connected with that subject and object relationship.
The subject and object relationship requires the very anatomy — the anatomical structure as this anatomical structure — which will be operating on the very principles of polarity. All of the existing yogas at some point have recognized that it is due to this polarity, that there is a possibility of experiencing anything. Of course there are different takes on what to do with it, how to bridge it — and bridging is the very aim of yoga — to reconcile that polarity; literally reconcile the very subject-object riddle, or that rupture between subject and object, which in turn is supported by the very structure of this anatomy: left versus right, solar versus lunar, and everything that goes with that. As soon as we say left and right, and solar and lunar — that is the whole physiologic structure and how we function; the modalities of feeling, thinking, acting and interacting. For that reason, in yogic literature there is this line, “When the sun and the moon set in the same place.” It literally means that vital flow in the lunar and in the solar channels go and set in the median channel of the sushumna. Literally, “the sun and the moon set in the same place,” is where the polarity itself begins to be bridged, and is eager to go through that process of unification.
How does that mergence happen on the level of cognitive capacity? This is the very magic of the process; this is the very magic of that process itself, because what happens at first is this polarity can actually be increased at some point; we may experience flares of unity, we may experience certain visions of unity. When I say certain visions, it is a paradoxical maybe contradictory example, but we had that glimpse of unity; we felt one with everything, we felt our being one with absolutely everything...and yet, being thrown back to the very, very polarized structure of this physiology again.
Speak to anyone, any experience — you had the wildest spiritual awakening, and yet you were forced to go back and deal with the very structure — and it is that very structure that supports that process. Why? Because that is the way that the nervous system functions. After all, for whom is this realization? This realization is not for that which is formless, which is beyond name and form, but it is for that which is formed — in other words, embodied — and this is where the magic of the process begins. So everything is accompanied by that greater integral reconstruction, rekindling; at every stage, there is greater mergence, there is greater integration, until everything is integrated into the very fabric of our own Consciousness.
At some point, that which has been perceived prior as distinctively different — becomes less so. Just as I said earlier, that logic and intuition no longer walk apart and perform their separate duty; they start to hold hands, and at some point, maybe even become indistinguishable. This is a very interesting process. You can also view it from different yogic processes as well; I could speak of it in terms of the fusion of the koshas, of the five bodies — the five layers with which Awareness or Consciousness is layered to navigate Itself as the body. We can speak about this process from that perspective, the fusion between the koshas — that is what leads to that. Above all else, that manomaya kosha, the one that rules the mind, and the one that conducts affairs of the discriminative intellect — they merge, and they merge with bliss. So everything becomes infused with that, and that becomes very hard to then separate; it is very hard to then speak about them separately in a different language, in a different mode of expression. It is as if feeling and thought also become much closer — feeling and thought.
I remember at some point I was giving this expression, “It is as if we think with the heart and feel with the mind” — literally — because they become fused, one with the other. The mind becomes infused with the much higher frequency of the heart here; when I say the heart, it is not just the heart as an organ — it is our awareness — the most refined faculty of our awareness, the seat of Consciousness Itself. This is a very interesting process; this is when the integration begins. However, on the way to it, this process could be polarized even greater at some point, and that is what the witnessing state of consciousness is often characterized by and accompanied by; accompanied now by the subtle separation of the subject and the object.
The only difference is that the subject now is not the subject as so-and-so, as opposed to an object in the world; the subject here is now our Self, the witness — and the object is what we have been witnessing. It is very healthy to understand this is just a phase; a phase which ought to enter another integral stage — another integral process. As soon as a plateau is gained, Consciousness can expand further, and rest on that.
~ Igor Kufayev, Online Darshan transcribed Q&A Costa Rica, August 23, 2014
.
Sushumna Nadi is the powerful vibrational channel for the flow of that life force energy, the prana, which runs along the center of the spinal cord through the seven chakras of the subtle body.