by gurugeorge » Wed Apr 01, 2015 9:39 pm
I think the Liber O and 8 Lectures essays can be a bit misleading on this subject.
Here's the fact: it's possible to get to a state in which one doesn't have the normal sensation of having a body. The best description of it, and one of the few descriptions of it outside of Crowley's work is in Katsuki Sekida's Zen Training, where he calls it "body-off sensation".
IOW, it's part of the oral tradition in meditation traditions, but seldom gets mentioned as a separate topic in the way that Crowley and Sekida mentioned it. The reason for that is, that as Crowley said, getting it is a kind of "foot in the door" thing with meditation - you only get it after a certain period of sincere, dedicated meditation, and teachers would probably prefer you to bring this to them as a result.
However, it's possible to get it without any sort of struggle or "pain barrier". And the particular posture doesn't really matter all that much. The only thing that matters about posture for meditation is that one's spine should be upright and that one should be comfortable (again, Sekida gives some wonderfully detailed analysis and description). This means that either a chair (God posture) or any seated cross-legged position should be fine, but for seated cross-legged meditation, it's best to raise your bum, so that your knees are a tad below your hips. That sets the spine at the right position "bolt upright", if you also have a sense of the crown of the head being pulled up. (In actual fact, the correct position will feel as if you're ever so slightly leaning forward (from the base of the spine) at first.)
Basically, if you just do normal counting meditation, then move on to following breath, you can get "body-off" fairly quickly (a few weeks of half-hourly meditation daily should be enough). It's not really necessary to treat Asana as a separate topic if the aim is to get "body-off". However, it may be the case that for the Thelemic system, the requirement is that you go "through the mill", as Crowley might have said (i.e. the discipline and moral training is part of the system in the way that it isn't so much with some other traditional systems).
The reason for "body-off" is interesting. I think it's down to the way the brain works - mostly by generate-and-test (is it this?, or this?, or that?), and constant active scanning. It's very clear to see with the case of the eyes. If you either stare at something (anything, a pebble will do), or stare at a blank wall, for a while, you eventually get a sort of "grey out" - you actually lose the sensation of vision altogether, you literally cease to see anything. This is because your eyes have either ceased to saccade, or they're saccading over a visually featureless surface (blank wall), so edge detection is lost, so there's no generate-and-test process in the visual system, so no vision.
I think a similar thing happens with the body. The proprioceptive system probably has an equivalent of constant scanning or saccading going on, and when that ceases, or is presented with the same signal for long enough, the sense of proprioception is lost.
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"To wake up is to wake the world up" - D.E.Harding