Poetry Chaikhana
Sacred Poetry from Around the World
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Poetry Chaikhana
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In these few brief lines, she seems to be exploring how spiritual transformation is also a physical transformation down to the cellular level. Our bodies become "finer and finer arrangements of light..." What a great line! I imagine the body as a shimmering web of filaments and cells, somehow elevated, made lighter, subtler, and vivified by the infusion of new awareness so the body's network reorganizes itself into ever more artistic patterns of itself.
You'll find intimations of this idea in various sacred traditions. The body of light. The body of bliss. Having a new body in Christ. The Kabbalist's Merkava. The perfected body in alchemy. The shaman's body. The adamantine body in Buddhism. The Taoist's immortal body.
Often these epithets are taken quite literally, even by advanced practitioners. But this 'perfected,' 'immortal' body is not necessarily free from difficulties and deathless in the physical sense. What most mystics speak of with these terms is that the body has been recollected into the full awareness: It is whole, complete. The body knows itself and knows it is alive. It is immortal in the sense that it knows itself to be alive. This is a way of explaining that the identity, while expressing itself through the body, no longer imagines itself to be contained in the body, so when the physical body dies, the body of awareness continues to live.
Most importantly, the body becomes a vehicle capable of participating in the greater wholeness of divine union.
Meanwhile, our cells are turning to air,
finer and finer arrangements of light.
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Ivan
M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright ©
2002 - 2011 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or
publishers.
