Forms of vitality within embodied awareness: a phenomenology of invocation

Introduction

A person may have a most beautiful external objective body but minimally lived in. Embodiment allows us to understand and conceive of the body as a way of living, experiencing and of perceiving through the medium of our embodiment. The body is the medium of the field. A person perceives not simply through eyes and ears alone, but through the whole body. Our body is an instrument of perception. Our body is an instrument of knowingness. The embodiment of awareness is the lived embodying of primordial awareness that liberates our being in the world. The embodiment of awakened awareness pulsates in resonance with and within Being itself.

Embodiment of Being-ness

The knowingness of luminous spacious awareness embodied is an existential and foundational experience. The felt sense of embodied awareness is the felt sense of the embodiment of Being. The felt sense of this embodiment is experienced as the realm of subtle energies; the realm of radiance; and the realm of the resonance of non-duality through the expanse and extension within dualistic appearance. Awareness embodied transforms our way of being in the body. Our body becomes the medium of awareness, knowing awareness as Being in one self, and Being in others. This embodying of awareness of awareness itself brings forth the deeply felt sense of Being of our own being. Embodied Being-ness is the experiencing of pure presence, pure spaciousness, pure luminosity, pure openness, and the pure pulsation of energy. Embodied awareness brings a sense of protective porousness and fullness of expansion.

Awareness perceives through embodiment. Awareness pulsates within the spontaneous movements of Being in Being`s self-manifestation within us. This embodied awareness transforms the experiential human body into the body of energy and light. This embodiment of light and energy brings forth the body of light, embodiment as luminous flesh.

Kundalini Metaphor

The kundalini is not simply a mental construction, but the unfolding of embodiment of primordial awareness manifesting as radiance, manifesting as spaciousness and manifesting as energy. The kundalini brings forth the embodiment of light, the embodiment of luminous knowingness; a knowingness that infuses perception, infuses the senses, infuses thinking, infuses feeling, and infuses seeing, smelling and touching. A person is both touched by, and is touching embodied Being-ness within themselves and the world. A person experiences the lived body as infusing the physical body, the body as object. Transformation and realization take place within embodiment. Embodiment dissolves dissociation and experiential fragmentation. The embodiment of luminous awareness infuses the instinctive and integrates the instinctive into the field of self-illumination.

Transformation as an Embodiment Process

Awareness has resonance and is resonance. The resonance of awareness is luminous energy and this vital-ness supports us in life, supports us in illness, and supports us in demanding and saturating circumstances. This resonance of awareness is a relational experience that goes beyond our interpersonal mind.

Our mind can be integrated within our field of awareness. When a person is in awareness of awareness, the experience of the field of Being is completely present and completely pervasive. In this awareness field, we may experience the singularity of a person; the singularity of an event or the singularity of a thing as the manifestation of the field of Being. We more easily experience the Being-ness of beings through our own embodied being. It does take one to know one.

There is a spontaneity of experience that reflects our experience of the spontaneity of self-arising awareness. The fusion of the field of Being within our embodied personal awareness brings forth the bliss of samadhi which is actually the bliss of the world as Being itself. This bliss is the field of bliss that overcomes suffering. Here the word samadhi means ongoing experience of absorption in the field of pervasive awareness. Samadhi is not an altered state, or trance state. Here samadhi is the natural experience of the being-ness of our own being as Being itself.

There is the experience of being touched by grace or being touched by the radiance, the energy and presence of Being itself. Being which is not a being but Being manifests Being in all the beings. The surging of Being manifests the movement of the ontological ocean and the ontological waves which are connotative of the experience of the unfolding of primordial self -arising awareness in «us as us ». Rather than an abstract cognition of Being, this deeply bodily felt sense of Being is initially a secret unfolding of presence, and then becomes openly Being itself, as us and as the world surrounding and embodying us. The touch of embodied awareness is the touch of Being manifesting through a being to another being as the field of Being itself.

Vital-ness as Forms of Experience

Vitality permeates the field of awareness as the field of Being. Vitality permeates experience. The subtle inner intensity of the field of awareness creates vital forms of experiencing. This dynamic felt sense of the field is not a cognition, and not an affective reaction such as liking or disliking or either aversion or compulsion. The field of awareness or the awareness field itself is the unfolding experience of vitality and forms of vital-ness.

Within the awareness field as the field, there is a sense of being informed, a felt sense that is not an emotion or an affective reaction. There is within the field as the field, a sense of knowing that is not conceptually based but is direct and unmediated knowingness. Awareness manifests vital forms of experiencing. This is the power of the field of embodied awareness. In truth as Merleau Ponty describes, the body is the medium of the field. Embodiment is the medium of the field of awareness, the field of Being in «us as us ». Awareness is Being’s knowingness.

These vital forms become the realm of the perceptible, the realm of experience. These vital spheres of experiencing take on many forms and most directly permeates our experience when we are in the field of awareness.

Vitality as Manifestation

Vitality is the manifestation of Being-ness, the manifestation of Being manifesting Being-ness within beings. Vital forms manifest the Being-ness of Being. These vital experiences are within the boundary of a being as psyche, and a being as soma. These vital experiences are within and permeate the boundary of ontological and ontic reality. This is the intertwining of psyche and the somatic actualities of embodied awareness. This is the intertwining of mind and awareness continuum, the intertwining of soma psyche continuum.

We experience our sense of inner most awareness as the light of vital-ness. Vital-ness is often experienced as the movement of light, the movement of energy, and the movement of the vibrational dimension as subtle embodiment. We experience different and various spheres of experience that are forms of aliveness, vital-ness and luminous energetic vibration.

Self- Arising Forms of Vital-ness

There are self -arising forms of personal experience which are expressions of vital-ness such as: the sense of well-being or sense of wholeness or sense of fullness or sense of unboundedness or the felt sense of flowing-ness. These fields of experience are not motivations, or drives or cognitions or emotional discharges. Vitality is a sense of force or power which is the power beyond words and letters, and arises out of the field of primordial awareness in its self- manifestation, as our own experience.

Necessary Distinction between Mind and Awareness

To understand these forms of vital-ness we make the distinction between mind and awareness. The mind is the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, fantasy and memory. The mind knows forms of beings and things. Mind knows difference. Awareness knows Being. Awareness is direct non conceptual knowingness of Being within beings and things. Awareness is spaciousness, awareness is illumination and awareness is energy. Awareness is both stillness and movement. Awareness experiences its own self as Being. Awareness knows Being. Awareness is Being as Knowingness and knowingness as Being within us as our own being.

This difference between mind and awareness is emphasized in the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism understanding of Dzogchen. This same distinction between mind and awareness is made in contemporary Continental philosophy and Phenomenology. This distinction between mind and awareness is made most explicitly by the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau Ponty. This same distinction is made in other eastern philosophical traditions such as Hindu Kashmir Shaivism as expressed by Swami Muktananda and in Daoist Qi Gong traditions as expressed by Dr. Yan Xin. This same distinction is made in Gestalt Psychotherapy by Erving and Miriam Polster, as well as in the psychoanalytic understanding of transitional awareness as expressed by Donald Winnicott.

Vitality, as the psychoanalyst Daniel Stern suggests, is more form then content. Vitality is not an emotion or affect or mental cognition as such. Vitality is not a thought, or phantasy or memory. Vitality is not the mind as such. Vitality arises from the nature of awareness and prefigures the mind. Vital forms are of the nature of awareness and manifest through and within mind. Vital forms are of the nature of awareness that manifest through and within mind and the mind’s embodiment.

Vitality is not a particular sensation, nor an emotional affect, nor imaginal fantasy. Vital form is the quality of primordial awareness itself infusing sensation, infusing emotional affects and infusing the imaginal and infusing actions. Vitality is a qualia[1] of the awareness field.