From: Mark Crosby (crosby_m@rocketmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 13 1997 - 16:02:29 MDT
Rick Knight wrote:
<I see nothing illogical, inappropriate or even simple-minded about a
description like "lighter energy form".>
This is a ‘cheap, New Age’ description to me because it provides
absolutely no useful information about how such a form of existence
functions or how to attain it. ‘Energy’ is much too simplistic a
description of something as complex as life, knowledge and experience.
Your earlier statements about wanting to fly like an eagle or
experience the sensations of other creatures seem inconsistent: One
the one hand you say, "matter-bound existence seriously limits the
quality and quantity of experience gathering", and then you talk about
"instilling my matter-emancipated consciousness into other physical
manifestations and assimilating the ‘knowing’ of the experience into
my being." The question is, what is this "being"? Calling it "energy"
just doesn’t cut it for me.
Perhaps you are really just unsatisfied with your current physical
manifestation and want to experience others, not abandon physical
manifestations altogether. I think this is what we all want, but I
don’t think that talking wistfully about "energy forms" is going to
get you there!
As Anders said:
< We need to be embodied in some sense to have experiences, to be able
to grow.>
Or, perhaps you feel that the ‘you’ you experience in dreaming, or
during meditative and psychedelic experiences, is this "lighter energy
form" AND it is ALREADY your PRIMARY being. For example, Terence
McKenna has suggested:
< the dream is a higher-order spatial dimension. In sleep one is
released into the real world of which the world of waking is only the
surface in a very literal geometrical sense ... We are not primarily
biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of
epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are,
in fact, hyperspatial objects of some sort which cast a shadow into
matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.>
Even if this is true, and I don’t think it is (biology comes first
IMO), it’s still an inadequate description for achieving that state
even psychically, let alone in some permanent physical way.
I find it interesting to note that Catholic theologians distinguish
"four properties of the resurrected body: Incapability of suffering
(also called IMPASSIBILITY), meaning that we will no longer suffer
physical evils such as sorrow, sickness or death; SUBTILITY, meaning
that we will have a spiritualized nature, in the sense of a spiritual
body ... AGILITY, meaning that the body will obey the soul with the
greatest of ease and speed of movement; and CLARITY, meaning that the
body will be free from any deformity and will be filled with beauty
and radiance."
Inadequate as this is, it is still a much more functional and
prescriptive description of what you seem to be seeking than "lighter
energy form". (It might even have some applicability for how virtual
beings would navigate in cyberspace.) It’s also interesting how
similar these properties are to the four 'Gates of Dreaming' that
Carlos Casteneda describes in his 1993 book, _The Art of Dreaming_,
but I won’t go into that (some possibly practical exercises but still
too much mushy talk about ‘energy bodies’).
If you really do believe this, that you are already this ‘energy body’
and it is primary, then you really have nothing to worry about: once
your current physical manifestation dies, your ‘soul’ will just move
on to another level of existence. No need to do anything special in
this world except keep your karma clean! (so that you don’t ‘come
back’ as a cockroach, for example, instead of an eagle ;-)
Mark Crosby
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