•
 
 

  
LIBERATION FROM OR OF THE BODY
This chapter expands on the ideas presented in the previous chapter, Eastern versus Western Consciousness. I recommend reading that chapter first for better context.
   
What is freedom? There are many concepts of what freedom is and how to realise it. However, in spiritual matters, two radically different types of freedom seems to be at play: the freedom of the body and its experiences, or freedom from the body, expressed as a liberation from the 'I' and ego.
  
Embedded in the historical DNA of spiritual traditions in both the East and West is the belief that the body and physical life are obstacles to true freedom. As a result, these traditions have predominantly sought liberation from the body, understood as dis-identification from physical existence.
 
The duality between 'spirit' and 'flesh' has, at times, been approached through more nuanced perspectives, where body and soul could harmoniously coexist. The Greek ideal of a beautiful soul in a beautiful body represents one such synthesis. To some extent, Buddha’s realization of the Middle Way—where he rejected extreme ascetic practices like near-starvation—can also be seen as a softened stance toward the body. Similarly, the Chinese portrayal of the joyful Bodai, with his rice bowl, embodies a balance of physical contentment and spiritual peace.
 
Later Christian thought, particularly during the Renaissance and post-Reformation periods, began to embrace a more positive view of the body, partly due to the revival of classical Greek ideals. Catholic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued that body and soul are united in human beings, and that the resurrection of the body is central to Christian eschatology—suggesting that the body is not inherently in opposition to the soul’s spiritual journey toward God.

LIBERATION FROM THE BODY
One fine morning in his humble Lucknow home in 1995, Papaji read a local Indian newspaper story about a newborn baby in a New York hospital who supposedly cried out at birth, "Oh no!... not again!" With tears of laughter, Papaji recounted the tale to the visitors already packed into his small living room.

In comparing Eastern and Western spirituality, India stands out for its traditions that most emphatically negate the body. Papaji's teacher, Ramana Maharshi famously went so far as to call the body a “disease within a disease.” It’s intriguing that, despite Papaji’s humor and Ramana’s more solemn outlook, both shared an alignment with the philosophy of maya, which views the material world as an illusion. Their contrasting responses reveal the varied ways enlightenment can embody this perspective. It also remind us that true spiritual insight cannot be attained by merely copying a master on a personal level.
  
Both the baby’s cry and Ramana Maharshi’s teachings encapsulate the essence of Eastern belief, where human life is fundamentally viewed as suffering, creating a deep yearning for escape. We are caught in an endless cycle of birth and death, and the ultimate goal is to break free from it. In Hinduism, this liberation is called Moksha, while in Buddhism, it is known as Nirvana. From this elevated perspective, the difficult and often painful existence of the body is seen as an illusion—much like a dreamer waking from a nightmare, realizing with relief that all the fear and torment were nothing but a figment of the mind.
 
India has fostered countless stories that illustrate this theme, such as the following: A man enters a dimly lit room and sees a snake. Terrified, he scrambles to find safety. But when the light is turned on, he realizes the snake was merely a rope hanging on the wall.
 
The grand escape from this miserable and yet illusive material wold is achieved by meditating oneself out of earthly existence. Through a process of spiritual purification, where the body's thirst for life is neutralized, the vicious cycle of rebirths is transcended. The spirit is then liberated from the confines of bodily existence.
  
Thus, the highest human ideal in these traditions is freedom from desires. A person free of desires can even surpass the gods. As stated in the Puranas:
 
"There is nothing the gods fear more than a person who desires nothing."

The paradox, however, is that the spirit can only become free from the body after it has first disciplined the body to cease following its natural instincts.
 
UNTIMELY FRACTURES BETWEEN BODY AND SPIRIT
How is it that India fostered such a deep disregard for the body and its life, while in China, Taoist sages were busy developing spiritual techniques and concocting potions aimed at prolonging life? Early European Christianity, too, was closely aligned with the Eastern view, emphasizing the need to transcend the physical. Yet, Christ was resurrected in bodily form, suggesting a different perspective on the body’s role in the divine order. These contrasting views on whether the body could have a place among the gods highlight the role of civilization itself as a key force shaping spiritual beliefs and practices.
 
In India, the harshness of existence—marked by cycles of drought, famine, and disease—may have reinforced a desire to escape the physical realm, leading to a spiritual focus on moksha, or liberation from the body’s limitations. I have in detail described this aspect of meditation as a survival response to famine and catastrophy here.

Yet, there seems also to be other civilisatoric modulators in the game.
 
Both in the East and the West, there have long been ongoing conflicts between our biological "animal" nature and the remarkable ability of the mind to imagine new possibilities. The fluid mind, capable of instantly grasping and creating utopian visions of how we might interact and understand ourselves, often moves far faster than the body. The body, like an old elf in wooden clogs, struggles to keep pace, weighed down by ancient instinctual hardware and outdated cultural software. It resists the disruptive changes brought about by the soaring, ambitious Icarus-mind.
 
From my historical perspective, these conflict seem to follow a distinct pattern. We become "civilized" in waves. The transition from a hunter-gatherer existence to an agricultural life demanded a radical intensification of self-control. Similarly, the shift from agrarian life to imperial living in larger cities required further retraining of our behavior. This pattern continues through history, marked by various transformative examples.
  
These tensions are especially pronounced at the fractures between old and new social orders, especially when the new order manifest in a disruptive way what it often seems to do.
 
As civilization advances—becoming more complex and affluent—the primitive and instinctual body is often left behind, reprimanded by the new demands of society. The more sophisticated the social order becomes, the more the body, with its ancient impulses, struggles to keep up.
 
To keep it simple, we all know how easy it is to adapt new ideas on a mental level and how difficult it is at the same time really to change behaviour according to our new ideals.

The older our biological "operating systems," the harder they are to adapt during times of change. These older systems are largely unconscious, and without consciousness, change becomes even more difficult. Moreover, the archaic parts of our biology were shaped over vast aeons, far removed from the rapid cultural changes of the last 2,000 years.
 
In disruptive transitional phases, the willing and visionary spirit and the instinct-ridden, lustful, fearful, aggressive and first of all habit-driven body have stood against each other like dog and cat. Only with the application of large doses of both carrot and stick have the archaic instinct-programmed systems within us "understood" and sluggishly learned the new behavioral demands dictated by societal consciousness. After a few generations, it seems that the new cultural behavior becomes habitually embedded as a norm, resulting in a temporary truce between spirit and body.
 
THE WESTERN ADAPTION OF 'MAYA'
The Contemporary War between Body and Spirit
I think we can all agree that we once again are living in disruptive times of such magnitude that our old world order is shaking from top to bottom. At first glance, we may not see body-renouncing ascetics walking the streets with beggar bowls, but the dualism between reality and ideality has grown far more pronounced over the last 20 years. This dualism has assumed new forms, which, while they don’t resemble the old manifestations, still produce soldiers in the ongoing war between body and spirit. This conflict creates suffering, which in turn reinforces the polarization that the spirit attempts to overcome through its own imaginative realms.
 
Let me give some examples of this conflict zone. A growing number of young people are increasingly dissatisfied with the body they received in the genetic lottery. For some, it takes the form of young men striving obsessively to develop Adonis-like bodies. For women, this dissatisfaction might be surgically compensated with new noses, lips, or breasts.  And in a more extreme manifestation, with the aid of new technologies, the spirit now claims that gender itself is merely a matter of choice.
 
I can’t help but see this as a recurrence of the age-old war against the body, with the same catch-22 that religious renunciates of the past faced: the spirit can only become free from its hatred of the body after it has first disciplined the body to cease following its natural biology.
 
We are now in high-tech times where the cultural and technological shifts enable people to "reinvent" their physical selves in ways previously unimaginable. Here I see the rise of body modification, extreme fitness culture, and debates around gender identity as manifestations of this ongoing conflict.
 
When did this resent body-negation start?
 
Hippie Freedom and Self-restraint
My guess is that the youth rebellion and the hippie movement in the 60'ties initiated this new wave. It birthed a mind who would throw the same culture from its sensual and spiritual hedonism into a disciplinary anti-thesis. In my view, it is no coincidence that Steve Jobs was both a free wheeling Indian loving psychedelic hippie and a control freak. Only such an anachronism was able to create the abyss we all gaze into today: the smartphone.
 
Steve Jobs' favorite spiritual book was Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. He was deeply inspired by it and reportedly re-read it many times throughout his life. Autobiography of a Yogi also made a significant impression on Mark Zuckerberg. In 2015, during a trip to India, he shared that Steve Jobs recommended the book to him when he was going through a challenging period at Facebook. Jobs suggested it would help him reconnect with a sense of purpose and the "bigger picture" of his work and life.
 
In this context, it is interesting that several influential people, including Elon Musk, with scientific evidence behind them, are convinced that the reality we live in is a simulation. It is, in fact, not real.
 
Musk’s philosophical influences tend to focus on existential questions around technology, humanity’s future, and survival, rather than spiritual or mystical perspectives. However, Musk does share a similar drive for purpose and impact, a theme that resonates with the spiritual journeys described in works like Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi.
 
One of the central themes of this chapter is that the technology-derived digital realm itself embodies a more spiritual than material existence, one where we are free to invent avatars as replacements for the identities once shaped by biology and society. This shift draws us into a fundamentally body-negating universe.
 
Identity and body are deeply intertwined. In a world with diminishing ties to a physical body, we can become whatever entity we choose—or that chooses us. This is precisely what children growing up with computer games learn: we pick our character before the game begins. With a few clicks, we can transform into heroes, villains, men, women, or even mythological creatures. This early shift away from traditional, inherited identities contributes to a parallel rise in anxiety, which paradoxically makes us cling even more tightly to “identities.” Whether these identities are based on gender, race, or politics, they often become, in the absence of a grounded connection to physical reality, abstract constructs searching for concrete form. Identity, once shaped by the body, family, and culture, is now increasingly a matter of active choice—much like selecting characters in a digital world.
 
Much like in The Matrix, physical embodiment is no longer essential for engaging in digital reality.
 
In this way, the mind-dominated digital world echoes ancient Indian philosophies suggesting the physical world may be an illusion. Today, however, “simulation” and “hologram” have become the preferred terms. This insight places us within a polarized space, balancing between hedonism and extreme self-control, as we navigate digital experiences that liberate yet distance us from the physical self.
 
Consider social media personas as an example of this tension. On platforms like Instagram or TikTok, people curate idealized versions of themselves, choosing avatars, filters, and content that align with aspirational identities rather than their everyday realities. This can offer liberation from physical and social limitations, enabling individuals to embody new aesthetics, values, or personas.

Yet, the pursuit of digital approval often fosters obsessive self-monitoring and an endless need to uphold an “ideal” online presence, introducing a hyper-discipline that results in real physical consequences—such as feelings of inadequacy, body dissatisfaction, or anxiety. Much like traditional hedonistic pursuits that promise pleasure but foster self-doubt, there is also a tendency to shape and discipline the body to resemble its digital avatar.
  
Ancient people had every reason to flee from the body. Freedom from the self, from bodily existence, made perfect sense, for only a few lived beyond the age of 40, and no one could be sure what tomorrow would bring in terms of war, catastrophe, hunger, or disease. The risk of a violent death was extremely high. Viewing the world as an illusion was, therefore, an appropriate survival strategy, especially in India, which, due to frequent monsoon failures and an overly caste-divided society, could never figure out how to face challenges collectively. Indians thus developed meditation as an anti-body survival solution in an inherently over-fragmented, dysfunctional society. The logic of "What is lost externally must be gained internally" drove this Indian meditation practice, leading to a form of spiritual liberation through alienation from the life of the body. Now the question is how we in the contemporary West can harwest from these experiences.
   
MY STORY: HOW DID I DIGEST THE ILLUSIVE ILLUSION?
It was—and still is—quite common in my spiritual circles to hear people claim that the world is an illusion. Statements like, "Nothing truly exists," are often repeated, especially in New Age communities influenced by Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy. The same concept also bleeds into the various mordern trends that view our existence as a simulation. In these circles, the philosophy of illusion goes beyond a mere critique of our superficial, influencer-driven, reality-TV-saturated world. Here, the concept of illusion expands to include all the moving parts of time and space.
 
Liberation Through Alienation
For many years of my younger life, I fled inward every time I faced problems in my outer life. When I had trouble with a girlfriend, I fled into the "I am not the body" meditation.
 
Was it a good idea? Hardly... The problems didn’t disappear because I practiced ostrich meditation. On the contrary, many precious years passed, during which I could have learned to navigate life’s tricky whirlpools as a more down to earth human being. Instead, I chose, during difficult periods, to depersonalize myself into pure spirit.

Throughout my life, I’ve seen this survival strategy used countless times by sensitive vulnarable modern, Western-conditioned people. For people with mental anguish and struggles in daily life, it is all too tempting to reuse or perhaps misuse ancient Eastern spiritual DNA to liberate themselves through alienation.
 
The 'Spiritual Bypass'
A Japanese Zen monk once gave a lecture on meditation on the top floor of a skyscraper in Tokyo. Suddenly, a small earthquake caused the building to sway dangerously. People panicked and rushed out of the building. Only the Zen master remained seated. When the earthquake was over, the audience returned to the lecture hall, where the Zen master sat, unmoving, in serene calm, eyes closed. When people asked why he didn’t flee, he replied:

“While you fled out, I fled in.”
 
In meditation, you let the world be the world and adapt yourself instead.
The colossal freedom potential in this 'flight' is dizzying and awe-inspiring and yet at the same time problematic.

I came to understand the dangers of spiritual intro-escapism through personal experience and later through my encounter with a new wave of spirituality led by Bhagwan Rajneesh. Unlike many spiritual leaders, Rajneesh took the traumas and struggles of ordinary life seriously, blending modern therapy with meditation. At the time, this felt like a fresh breeze, a revitalizing shift in spiritual practice.
 
Later, I realized Rajneesh wasn’t alone in the insight that meditation, unless purposefully directed to support personal growth, could easily become a survival technique akin to an ostrich burying its head in the sand—an escape from reality. Psychologist John Welwood had already coined the insightful term "spiritual bypass" in the early 1980s to describe this phenomenon, referring to the tendency to use spiritual practices as a way to avoid confronting unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, or unfinished personal development.
 
Welwood observed that spiritual bypassing happens when spirituality is used as a means to evade painful feelings, unresolved traumas, or relational challenges, rather than engaging with them in a healthy and grounded way. Interestingly, Rajneesh and Welwood were aligned in their thinking, demonstrating how related insights often emerge concurrently. Even Transcendental Meditation, popularized by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1970s, showed a shift toward valuing the material world alongside the spiritual. Maharishi promised a "200 percent life," with both 100% material fulfillment and 100% spiritual life, suggesting a newfound respect for the body's role in personal growth.

What strikes me now as particularly strange is how, like many around me, I found myself navigating two parallel paths that rarely intersected. On one hand, I practiced radical body negation; on the other, I pursued therapeutic practices focused on healing bodily traumas and improving my material circumstances. This dichotomy recalls Gurdjieff’s observation that each of us harbors more than a hundred different personalities, many of which remain unaware of each other. Fascinatingly, this split mirrors the recurring paradox of body negation versus body discipline—a theme that weaves through historical and cultural conflicts between body and spirit.

Ultimately, everything comes down to ensuring that one hand knows what the other is doing. Today, I view this dual approach as emblematic of my generation of spiritual seekers, encapsulating both our drive to transcend and our need to heal.
  
New Age – Illusion or Ferrari?
New Age organizations today continue to grow, drawing on the religious DNA of the East in the sense that most modern meditation traditions still carry within them Buddhism’s or Hinduism’s ancient longing to escape the troublesome existence of being human. At the same time, the dreams of bodily happiness are marketed in such a way that it’s hard to tell whether the project is about wellness or the negation of earthly life. A variety of reinterpretations are trying to find their way in a landscape where, at one moment, you are supposed to rise above the illusory body and not take the ego seriously, and in the next, you are doing everything possible to make the body feel extra comfortable with therapy, massage, personal development, tantra, mindfulness, and fine dining. Add to that the American dream, which promotes the idea that mindfulness and positive thinking are the way to the Ferrari you’ve always dreamed of.
 
An arsenal of pop-smart livelihood gurus preach and talk, but it makes little difference. The foundation, which is rarely questioned, is old and shaky, especially if it is meant to support a dream of material success. Let me emphasize that there’s nothing inherently wrong with desiring a Ferrari. The issue is the inconsistency in the cultural software of meditation.
 
In this Western interpretation of Vedanta, life itself is viewed as illusory.
 
I, too, have made similar statements and 'believed' the world to be an illusion. But now, I find myself asking:
 
Why did I say that in the first place?
 
In my 47 years of meditating, I've observed how the invisible aspects of the ideology that accompanies meditation subtly shape our perception of reality. The small, almost imperceptible things we repeat over the years contribute to creating the map that guides us through life and defines where we belong. From the micro to the macro, everything flows as information that shapes us—whether we are conscious of it or not.
   
However, even the slightest misalignment between this ideological map and our 'core personality' will eventually create obstacles on our spiritual path. Without harmony between the smallest and largest aspects of ourselves and what we absorb, we will gradually experience stagnation.
   
Life in the New Age scene has taught me that I often built my life on 'truths' from external sources, which slipped into my system without proper scrutiny. In my blind rebellion against the authority of my own culture, I plunged into reverence for exotic authority. Uncritically, I adopted foreign religious and cultural beliefs, only to later realize that I was filled with undigested ideas that were neither truly my own nor beneficial to me.
 
Let me offer a small example: I rejected Christianity as pure hypocrisy, only to find myself singing devotional bhajans to the elephant god Ganesh or the monkey god Hanuman. I didn’t grow up around elephants or monkeys, yet here I was, praising them. Worse still, my rejection of Western authority led to an uncritical submission to father-figure substitutes in the form of misguided gurus.
  
My goal now is to bring these external ideas into the light for closer inspection. Like using tweezers, I must dissect my meditation practice down to its smallest details. Only those pieces of information that pass the critical test of both the intellect and intitution in honesty will be allowed to integrate into my new spiritual DNA.
 
So I repeat the question:
 
What does it really mean to say that the world is an illusion?
 
Is it even appropriate to view what’s right in front of our noses as illusory?
 
Based on my own inner experiences, I can confirm that there is a galactic perspective where 'one' is, so to speak, led out of the protective walls of the ego and the body, rising above roofs, cities, countries, and further inside-out, so far that the planet we call Earth, then the solar system, and finally the galaxies seem no larger than a molecule in a speck of dust. I could also call it a location-less location of consciousness, devoid of anything other that the swirling of that into that.
 
From in-out here-there, our little, ever-changing lives seem utterly insignificant and, in that sense, an illusion.
 
However, less will also suffice. Many will surely recognize moments in meditation, so still and deep, where many desires, tasks, or problems that once seemed significant now seem non-existent.
  
However, it should be clear by now that I am no longer certain about the absolute truth of seeing and especially living the world as an illusion.
  
Have we really been given a body and a world just to abandon them in favor of a depersonalized spiritual perspective?
  
As far as I can see, a self-reinforcing loop of conclusions forms in the relationship between illusion and detachment: We leave the world because it is an illusion. When we leave the world, it becomes an illusion.
    
The spiritual eagerness to label our bodily life as an illusion or a simulation, therefore, makes me suspicious. What is the motive behind this devaluation of body-time in space?
     
The Indian philosophical argument is that everything that changes is illusory. Today you are young healthy. Tomorrow you are old and seriously ill. Today your wife loves you. Tomorrow she has left you. Don’t attach yourself to life, for it is samsara, ever-changing, and change creates suffering. Therefore, attach yourself to the unchanging in the form of eternity, God, the Self, Spirit, Nirvana, the Ground of Being, or Consciousness. For only the unchanging can be considered real.
  
Now my question is: Does the Indian conclusion hold, that 'something' does not exist because 'it' changes?
 
Could this argument actually be hiding an unwillingness to face life’s hardships?
 
Why is suffering considered so terrible? Why not see it instead as an integral part of a changing but wonderful life of sunshine and storms?
  
I, therefore, allow myself to view the illusionary perspective as a potential expression of escapism.
   
Why have we been given a body if the whole point of the game is simply to leave it?
  
Seeing the world as an illusion makes it easier to escape existential responsibility for what is… here and now… right in front of us. Calling something illusory is the same as downgrading its value.
    
Suffering is easier to 'survive' when it’s just an illusion anyway.
   
I call it liberation through alienation.
 
Depersonalization as a Survival Strategy
The very idea that the world is an illusion, in the sense that it is not always what it appears to be, is in itself a wonderful philosophical and cognitive discovery. 
 
The new scientifically grounded thoughts that the world is actually a simulation are groundbreaking. I don’t see it as a coincidence that the elite of the Western world are now rediscovering the concept of illusion in the form of simulation theory. For, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the body and the spirit are once again at odds.
  
The philosophy of illusion can, as long as it merely poses critical, skeptical questions about the beer-drinking existence we automatically take for granted, have the potential to develop into a theology of freedom.
 
The problem only arises when this philosophy becomes a norm, a dogma, an unchallenged and unexamined foundational assumption upon which the rest of the narrative of existence is constructed—a narrative that often practices what Buddha would call a thirst for life.

Why?
My gadget-guru Steve Jobs kept asking people who worked in different business organizations: Why do you do what you do? No one could really answer. The only response was: We do what we’ve always done, what we’ve been told to do. Steve Jobs had enough awareness to see through the routine sleepiness in these answers, and with this insight, he was able to change work procedures so they became meaningful.

We are hopelessly stuck in habits and sleep. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a business empire, an academic institution, or a meditation organization. For that reason alone, all tradition-based meditation organizations should subject themselves to a thorough revision a la Jobs.
 
The dilemma in meditative circles—whether the body is worth investing in or whether it is an illusion to be transcended—is a very real one. The liberation of the self can often be uncomfortable. The pain, which is a fundamental condition of living in a body and interacting with other bodies and the world, is still there, even if you flee from it into the world of the spirit. It makes sense for sensitive people in a modern big-data world to reuse the old Indian depersonalization techniques, where one liberates oneself from oneself. It’s almost too easy to use meditation as a spiritual bypass of the body and everyday life. A depersonalized life without integral bodily existence, however, offers no spiritual fullness or depth. I would go so far as to call it a waste of life.
 
As mentioned, the body and spirit, after a long period from the 60s to the turn of the millennium, are once again on a collision course. The only thing I am critically concerned with here is the lack of meta-awareness in this conflict. The sleepy meditative environments need more restless but wakeful Steve Jobs archetypes to ask questions about everything between heaven and earth.
 
In a time like ours, with dizzying speeds of change in our self-perception and the interfaces through which our metamorphosing identities navigate, the body is left behind like a fossilized turtle while the hare’s soul in us hurries to put on new virtual bodies.

This separation already happens on a micro level the second you forget that your body feels anxious because you got a like on a photo of a dessert you posted on Facebook.

In this context, it is no coincidence that Steve Jobs took a meditative pilgrimage to India in his youth and remained friends with the book Autobiography of a Yogi for the rest of his life. Silicon Valley is, if anything, a postmodern Buddhist/Hindu melting pot, spiced with microdoses of LSD. Nor is it a coincidence that Indians are so good at programming. They are used to handling "nothing."


LIBERATION OF THE BODY

"God enjoys himself in all things."
– Meister Eckhart

"Real knowledge, even in this body,
is intrinsically so delightful
that the sum total of created things
is nothing to the joys of pure perception."
– Meister Eckhart

"God delights so in this likeness that
he pours out his whole nature,
his whole substance into it, in his own self.
The joy and satisfaction of it are ineffable.
It is like a horse turned loose
in a lush meadow, giving vent to his
horse-nature by galloping full-tilt about the field:
he enjoys it, and it is his nature."
– Meister Eckhart

The organic-chemical cultural mutations between digital technological expansion and the spiritual traditions of the East are already countless and unpredictable. Add to this brew the psychedelic information coming from the shamans of South America.

In this sea of possibilities, I choose—with respect for all the possible and impossible hybrids that the liberation from the body can take in a world where spirit will likely shed its old shell and inhabit cybernetic organisms—a different path.

I call it the liberation of the body as a path to liberation from the body.

On this path I will now give my take on what reality is:
 
What is real? It is what the heart touches. Whatever the heart chooses to love becomes real in a psychological sense. What the heart does not love becomes unreal, an illusion.

Individuation in Super-Awareness
It makes sense to view humans as a tree. The tree’s root system is our unconscious biology, which carries millions of years of accumulated biological operating systems. In the treetop exists what grows in the light of consciousness.

Most of the body’s inner biological life is hidden, not because it is repressed, but because it is wordless, and therefore unknown and incomprehensible. No historical figure, to my knowledge, has pointed more clearly to the human roots’ diverse depth and importance than the psychologist C.G. Jung:

"Man's task is to become conscious of the
contents that press upward from the unconscious."
– C.G. Jung

Jung called the process of becoming conscious of oneself "individuation." For Jung, however, individuation was inseparably connected to the world of words and understanding. For him, understanding was a central tool for the spiritual locksmith’s work of unlocking the door to the unconscious.

I, however, see a new ruler, radically different from the king of words, conquering the continent of the body!

This ruler is born at a balance point created by ouriboic super-awareness as explained in this chapter.

The Incomprehensibly Wordless Super-Awareness
Once upon a time, deep in the heart of the Russian Empire, there lived three monks on an isolated island in the middle of a large lake. They had almost no contact with the civilized world. They knew very little about Christian theology. Their only prayer was: "We are three. You are one. Lord, have mercy on us."

A bishop heard about these three hermits and decided to visit them. He rowed a long way out on the lake until he finally reached the small island. The monks greeted him with great love and humility. However, the bishop was deeply surprised by how little the three knew about Christian theology and decided to stay on the island for a few days to give them a crash course in Christianity. The hermits were deeply grateful for the bishop’s teachings and thanked him many times as they bid him farewell. The bishop rowed back toward the mainland. Halfway out, he heard the monks calling after him. He turned and saw the three running across the water. "Lord," they said, "we have forgotten your teachings. Can you repeat what you said?"

The holy simplicity of the three hermits renders theology, and in a broader sense, the very phenomenon of ‘understanding’ unnecessary in a form of incomprehensible super-conscious wisdom. To understand something is to grasp it. Who wants to grasp it? It is the ego, which eternally desires to transform things by grasping control through the proces of undertanding. The ego desires understanding. Understanding brings power. In super-conscious wisdom, however, we let go of everything we have grasped.

The super-conscious highway is therefore also the flyover that bypasses the ego’s futile attempts to spiritualize itself through self-development. This is not to say that one can do without therapy or psychological insight, which, to continue the highway metaphor, could be compared to the essential on-ramps. The overwhelming mass of texts on Meditation.dk consists of on-ramps to the super-conscious highway. This articulation knows its place as a servant and makes room for what is most important—awareness, which, when you inhale a perfume whose name you don’t know, makes you aware of the scent.

The Super-Awareness Colonization of the Body’s Wilderness
Meditation.dk is an artistic life project that, step by step, brings super-consciousness to the dark, attentive body micro-world without words. In this sense, meditation is the psychic microscope of super-awareness. It incarnates in the body as a wordless and understanding-less spatial realm of abstract clarity. The colonization of the body by super-awareness is radically different from the otherwise praiseworthy body-consciousness behind the desire to exercise and eat healthily. It pales in comparison to the consciousness that suddenly becomes aware of the deafening roar of our cells’ living wave-rush. The body’s cosmic background radiation is here—always. However, we only become aware of our foot the moment we sprain it. When it functions, we ‘forget’ it. We only hear the fridge hum when it stops. Through change, we become aware that the hum was there all along. Now the task is to become aware of THAT which never changes.

Meditation is about cultivating a consciousness that perceives the age-old timeless cellular essence within us. It involves journeying deeply into the sensory realm of the body, discovering that the path inward is also the path outward. Through this process, we liberate ourselves from the confines of the body by first freeing the body itself, creating a harmony between presence and transcendence.

It's about learning to shake hands with oneself, so that both hands—and all parts of our being—truly know knowing.

May we first understand, then free ourselves from understanding. And may we then 'innerstand' in pure simple awareness.