The Transcendental Concept of the Subtle Body

Wednesday, January 15th, 2014

Jung said that psychic healing occurs through numinious archetypal experience – by working with symbols and images. Similar to Jung’s use of symbols, Andean shamans – or paqos – use ceremony and rituals to create vessels that contain archetypal energy, and provide a means of differentiating from the experience in order to make meaning. Rituals also create psychic space to move around in that serve as a bridge or gateway between the conscious and the collective unconscious. In shamanism, the intention is to move beyond symbolism to the energetic level of preverbal experience. In the deeper realms of shamanic nonverbal experience, the image is no longer relevant and drops away.

Growing up in this culture, we tend to see nature and the world around us through our lens of ordinary perception. However, by shifting our conscious awareness and paying attention energetically, it is possible to experience the earth as alive – as an energetic body with its own consciousness. In Journey to Ixtlan (Castaneda, 1972), Don Juan described the experience of seeing the world around us energetically as “feeling with your eyes.”

An example of this practice occurs in the epic film Star Wars. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan tells Luke repeatedly to “feel the force,” and instructs Luke Sky Walker to use “the force” to develop as a Jedi warrior. In our collective culture, the idea that it is necessary to use “the force” to become a Jedi warrior is accepted as true (hence the success of the movie), but the actual practice and experience of becoming a Jedi warrior is far more rare. The act of knowing moves beyond the description of belief into a state of experiencing by being in it.

In his identity transition from anthropologist to sorcerer, Castaneda wrote (1998),

“I felt that I was truthfully cut in two: some part of me was not shocked at all and could accept any of Don Juan or Don Genaro’s acts at face value. However, there was another part of me that flatly refused; it was my strongest part. My conscious assessment was that I had accepted Don Juan’s sorcery description of the world merely on an intellectual basis, while my body as a whole entity refused it, thus my dilemma. But then, over the course of the years my association with Don Juan and Don Genaro I had experienced extraordinary phenomena and those had been bodily experiences, not intellectual ones (p.45).”

Both Obi-Wan and Don Juan are describing the process Jung called shifting into awareness through the somatic unconscious or the subtle body. Jung described the subtle body as, “(being) beyond time and space, beyond our grasp, per definition; the subtle body is a transcendental concept, which cannot be expressed in terms of our language or our philosophical views, because they are all inside time and space. Moving deeper into this in-between space or field is an aspect the veil in which concepts of images and symbols cease to be applicable.

According to Jung, the dialogue that takes place in this realm occurs in the form of images, rather than words – by understanding the archetype through working with symbols. I would add that although the images may be the means of expressing and communicating the experience of the subtle body, the actual experience of the subtle body occurs energetically within the body at a level deeper than the symbolic level. To understand something symbolically is a cognitive operation of the mind – and to understand something with the mind requires separating from the experience. To understand something fully with the body entails one to be with it. Being with something energetically involves entering a state of fluidity, while having an awareness through the formation of a symbol necessitates being outside the experience. To see something symbolically and describe it requires being outside of it.

 

 

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