Yes, Feeling It

(Continued from the previous chapter: I Feel Youuu)

So it is here, in the body, that the spark of life shows itself. All the dreams of spirituality come to be fulfilled in the earthliness of a physical individuality. All the fears, the joys, the hopes, are sensations felt in a palpable objectivity.

The cycle of existence begins in water, where the first cell began to move. Matter wanted to wake up. The quanta of reality wanted to realize they existed, and they organized themselves into cells that, in harmonious community, breathed life into an organism that gives shape to a mind and welcomes universal consciousness into a world of mud and winds.

A mother, a womb fertilized by spirit and fruitful with multicolored lives, materializes with her own atoms a structure that walks upon her skin and inherits the cyclical nature of polarities. Life and death are the cycle of life. Above and below, heaven and earth, male and female. Duality is a vivid experience that opens the space for the dream of being someone to unfold. The dual mind creates its own seeds, which inherit its physical essence, and they are called thoughts.

The cycle that governs this character defines a process of ripening that begins with the original innocence called childhood, to travel the vast worlds that dwell beneath its feet. A body of clay gathers its nature from the earth, where so many other bodies left it. Unfinished traumas, memorable joys, manifold experiences, eternal knowledge: all these things are stored in the mud of life by the consciousnesses that went on without them. They are gathered up later, when a new body is formed from this same mud, a body that is born, lives and dies again. Reincarnation, shall we say?

As this being begins to know itself, to realize little by little where it is standing, the phases of its ripening go by. At first, the fragility of being a baby teaches it that one must survive. The urgency of survival then activates in it a mechanism that inherits the dual nature of life: Pain and pleasure.

Rejection and attachment, ugly and pretty, good and bad, right and wrong. Wrong and right, more or less and less than more.
The drunkenness that flares up in the brain of man from working between these two extremes places him in situations where the bloodiest turmoil traps him. Suffering is the creaking of bones that keep growing, built by the knowledge that they are a latent spark of earth.

Though it sometimes takes longer than others, suffering fulfills its function. The confusion of minds lost in their own created images subjects them to a series of collisions, and these are what begin to call them back to earth. If we walk through a cloud forest dreaming of dramas and disparities, the branches will surely stop us in our tracks. Reality is raw when we haven't cooked it yet.

And how do we name the idea of confusion in a material realm? Only by knowing that where consciousness has not yet learned to handle a body, the body is tense. That is, confusion is a synonym for tension.

Responding to different patterns, each body grows differently. Some small, others plump, others muscular. Every body, following its individual path, keeps reacting to its experiences, piling up mechanical memories of rejection and pleasure. The learning of discerning what is good and what is bad for survival is stored in the muscles and tendons, which grow used to responding the way they learned.

Heavy backs, dry throats, aching heads, even outright cancers. Every human being piles up their share of confusion as best they can. They have not yet remembered that if they exist, it is because they exist here, and here is the only place they can exist.

But just as a mango that was green turns yellow, the human being who was ignorant becomes knowing. Slowly, self-knowledge soaks into their cells. Slowly, suffering expires, and the possibility of not being distracted by childish things opens in the mind. The mind becomes transparent so that vision can radiate clearly, and its eye can see that, despite so many reveries, the truth is simple and immediate.

Man begins to identify, with the touch of his presence, what it is that triggers his pain and his pleasure. Man then begins to let these stimuli happen without being forced to react to them. Man learns, through the insistent force of his experience, breaking free of his shell of inexact duality, to recognize the branches of the cloud forest he is walking through. Man comes to know that he is here.

So what happens? What is awakening?

One awakens when the truth is inescapable. We are here.

Being here, no past is necessary, nor is it necessary to store up anything for the future. Everything that has been piled up through experiences can be thrown away. Everything that has been feared against further experiences is useless. And so, the body relaxes.

We see, then, that awakening is relaxing. Surrendering, dying. The heap of beliefs is discarded, not back into the mud but into the void of its own illusion. No tension is involved in the body's movement, and it can now be moved by the very life that nourishes it. The sense of "person" is no longer recorded in sickly tensions, and the being can now flow freely.

The cycle of life continues on its way.