In this article we will discuss the all-important mind-body connection and the vital role the body has, not only in physical growth, but also on spiritual growth.
The body is the spirit in flesh and should not be considered a degraded, evil, or dirty thing. It is our soul in flesh and must be respected and understood.
The Body: The Body as a part of Nature
“Biologically your body is yours by virtue of the mineral, plant and animal life from which it gains its sustenance.
You would not feel imprisoned as you often do within one corporal form, for you would understand that the body itself maintains its relative stability because of its constant give-and-take with the materials of the earth that are themselves possessed of consciousness.
You could to some extent feel your body coming together and dispersing constantly, and understand how you hover within it without fearing your own annihilation upon its dismantlement.”1
The Body is not a Machine
“Your beliefs tell you, again, that the body is primarily a mechanism—a most amazing machine, but a machine, without its own purpose, without any intent, a mindless assembly plant of assorted parts that simply happened to grow together in a certain prescribed fashion.
Science says that there is no will, yet it assigns to nature the will to survive—or rather, a will-less instinct to survive.
And because [the body] is a machine, it is expected to decay after so much usage.”2
The Body as ‘Spirit in Flesh’
“Generally, people believe that ideas have little to do with the living flesh.
The flesh seems physical and ideas do not.
Those given to love of the intellect often make an unnecessary separation between the world of concepts and that of the flesh.
If it seems to you that the soul is degraded by its alliance with the flesh then you will not be able to enjoy your own sense of grace, for you will not consider it possible.
While it is true that the body is the living materialization of ideas, it is also true that these ideas form an active, responsive, alive body.
The body is not just a tool to be used. It is not a tool, to do your mental bidding.
It is not just a vehicle for the spirit. It is the spirit in flesh.
The stuff of the body should not be considered as some metaphysical result, but as a living gestalt of responsive flesh.
Though you organize this living material it has its own right to fulfillment and existence.
You are not a soul encased in inert clay.
The “house of clay” does not immediately deteriorate when you leave it. It disintegrates at its own rate.
The idea is to love and protect and cherish, and express the body that you have.”3
The Body is the Living Soul
“The soul does not exist apart from nature. It is not thrust into nature.
Nature is the soul in flesh, in whatever its materializations.
The flesh is as spiritual as the soul, and the soul is as natural as the flesh.
In your terms, the body is the living soul.
The body constantly heals itself, which means that the soul in the flesh heals itself.
The body is often closer to the soul than the mind is because it automatically grows as a flower does, trusting its nature.”4
The Body as Your Living Sculpture
“Your body is your own living sculpture – not only the shape, structure and nature of its form, but the miraculous sense-knowledge of its being and the unique effect it has upon others.
The sculpture itself is also endowed with the power of creativity given to it by your Self.
Those innate bodily abilities also help sustain you as you continually create the image.
The source for all of this creativity springs from your own inner identity, which is never completely materialized in flesh, and so you always have unused portions of creativity at your command.”5
Spirituality and Creaturehood
“You cannot appreciate your spirituality unless you appreciate your creaturehood.
It is not a matter of rising above your nature, but of evolving from the full understanding of it. There is a difference.
You will not attain spirituality or even a happy life by denying the wisdom of the flesh.
You can learn more from watching the animals than you can from a guru or a minister – or from reading these words.
First you must divest yourselves of the idea that your creaturehood is suspect.
Your humanness did not emerge by refusing your animal heritage, but upon an extension of what it is.
When you try to be spiritual by cutting off your creaturehood you become less than joyful, fulfilled, satisfied natural creatures, and fall far short of understanding true spirituality.
If your core belief stresses your spirituality to such an extent that it cuts off needed sensual expression, then it has become restrictive and will end up strangling that spiritual experience that it was originally meant to express.”6
Denial of the Flesh
“Philosophies that teach denial of the flesh must ultimately end up preaching a denial of the self and building a contempt for it, because even though the soul is couched in muscle and bone it is meant to experience that reality, not to refute it.
All such dogmas use artificial guilt, and natural guilt is distorted to serve those ends.
In whatever terms, the devotee is told that there is something wrong with earthly experience.
You are, therefore, considered evil as a self in flesh by virtue of your very existence.
This alone will cause adverse experience, making you reject the very basis of your own framework of experience.
You will consider the body as a thing, a fine vehicle not in itself the natural living expression of your being in material form.
Many such Eastern schools also stress – as do numerous spiritualistic schools – the importance of the “unconscious levels of the self,” and teach you to mistrust the conscious mind.
You attempt then to further banish the characteristic enjoyment of your own creaturehood, denying the lusty spirituality of your flesh and the strong present corporeal leanings of your soul.
You will try to rid yourself of very natural emotions, and so be cheated of their great spiritual and physical motion.
On the other hand, some leaders may give little consideration to such issues, but still be deeply convinced of the misery of the human conditions, focusing upon all the “darker” elements, seeing the world’s destruction ever closer to hand without really examining the beliefs that arouse such constant feelings.”7
Your Body Changes, Your Identity Remains
“For a moment, think of your body as one large cell in the moment of its being.
You, the larger self, have many bodies, each turning into the other as one dies and is reborn; yet You maintain your identity and your memory even as the smallest cell in your present body does.
This is merely an analogy but it will explain your body’s concept of itself; for while it knows it “dies,” as now its portions do, but is also aware of is “future” transformation.
Within this framework it protects and maintains its own stability and survival.”8
Your Body Continually Changes
“Your bodies not only change completely every seven years. They change constantly with each breath.
The death of physical tissue is merely a part of the process of life as you know it in your system, a part of the process of becoming. And from those tissues, as you know, new life will spring.
Within the flesh, atoms and molecules constantly die and are replaced.
The hormones are in a constant state of motion and alteration.
Electromagnetic properties of skin and cell continually leap and change, and even reverse themselves.
The physical matter that composed your body a moment ago is different in important ways from the matter that forms your body in this instant.
If you perceived the constant change within your body with as much persistence as you attend to its seemingly permanent nature, then you would be amazed that you ever considered the body as one more or less constant, more or less cohesive, entity.
You try to maintain a constant, relatively permanent physical and subjective self in order to maintain a relatively constant, relatively permanent environment.
So you are always in a position of ignoring such change.
Those that you refuse to acknowledge are precisely those that would give you a much better understanding of the true nature of reality, individual subjectivity, and the physical environment that seems to surround you.
All through your lifetime, portions of that body die, and the body that you have now does not contain one particle of physical matter that “it” had, say ten years ago.
The body that you had ten years ago, my dear readers, is dead.
Yet obviously you do not feel that you are dead, and you are quite able to read these words with the eyes that are composed of completely new matter.
The pupils, the “identical” pupils that you have now, did not exist ten years ago, and yet there seems to be no great gap in your vision.
This process continues so smoothly that you are not aware of it.”9
The Body as Pattern
“Your physical body is a field of energy with a certain form.
Body is also pattern.
While the material that composes it changes constantly, the pattern maintains its own integrity.
The form is etched in space and time, and yet the pattern itself exists outside of that framework – the body is a projection, therefore, into the three-dimensional field.
In a manner of speaking, your bodies blink off and on like lights. Their reality fluctuates, from your standpoint.
For that matter, so does the physical universe.”10
The Body as Eternal Consciousness
“The consciousness of the cells within the body are eternal.
The physical framework is itself composed of immortal stuff.
The projection in time and space may disappear, in your terms, wither and die.
The main identity continues to exist, even as the consciousness of millions of cells still exist that at one time were part of the body.
While inhabited by the usual human consciousness, the living body operates as an intense focus point.
There is nothing to prevent you from viewing your body from a standpoint outside of it, except that you have been taught that consciousness is imprisoned within the flesh.
The body is a sending and receiving organism; your home station, so to speak, and the focus for your activity.
You can, however, consciously leap from it – and you do often, when for a while, particularly in the dream state, you view the world form another perspective.”11
Your Body is a Product of your Creativity
“Your body is the basic product of your creativity on a physical level.
From its integrity all other constructions in your lifetime must come.
Your greatest artistic endeavors must arise out of the soul-in-flesh.
You create yourselves on a daily basis, changing your form according to the incalculable richness of your multitudinous abilities.
So out of the soul’s resplendent psychic richness do you spring with your free will and desire.
You in turn create other living creatures.
You also produce forms of art – fluid living constructs that you do not understand, in terms of societies and civilizations – and all of these flow through your alliance with flesh and blood.
Man’s physical world, with all of its civilizations and cultural aspects, and even with its technologies and sciences, basically represents the species’ innate drive to communicate, to move outward, to create, and to objectify sensed inner realities.”12
The Body Is Geared to Act
“The body is pragmatically practical, and above all it wants to explore and to communicate.
Communication implies a social nature.
The body has within it inherently everything necessary for its own defense.
The body itself will tease the child to speak, to crawl and walk, to seek its fellows.
Through biological communication the child’s cells are made aware of its physical environment, the temperature, air pressure, weather conditions, food supplies — and the body reacts to these conditions, making some adjustments with great rapidity.”13
The Body’s Defense Systems
“The body’s defense system is automatic, and yet to a certain degree it is a secondary rather than primary system, coming into mobilization as such only when the body is threatened.
The body’s main purpose is not only to survive but to maintain a quality of existence at certain levels, and that quality itself promotes health and fulfillment.
The cells that compose the body do not try to make sense of the cultural world.
They rely upon your interpretation, therefore, for the existence of threats of a non-biological nature. They depend upon your assessment.
If that assessment correlates with biological ones, you have a good working relationship with the body. It can react swiftly and clearly.
A definite, biologically pertinent fear alerts the body, and allows it to react completely and naturally.
You might be reading a newspaper headline, for example, as you cross a busy street.
Long before you are consciously aware of the circumstances, your body might leap out of the path of an approaching car.
The body is doing what it is supposed to do.
Though consciously you were not afraid, there was a biologically pertinent fear that was acted upon.”14
Overexerting the Defense System Due to Imagined Fears
“If, however, you dwell mentally in a generalized environment of fear, the body is given no clear line of action, allowed no appropriate response.
Look at it this way: An animal, not necessarily just a wild one in some native forest, but an ordinary dog or cat, reacts in a certain fashion. It is alert to everything in its environment.
A cat does not anticipate danger from a penned dog four blocks away, however, nor bother wondering what would happen if that dog were to escape and find the cat’s cozy yard.
Many people, however, do not pay attention to everything in their environments, but through their beliefs concentrate only upon “the ferocious dog four blocks away.”
That is, they do not respond to what is physically present or perceivable in either space or time, but instead [dwell] upon the threats that may or may not exist, ignoring at the same time other pertinent data that are immediately at hand.
The mind then signals threat — but a threat that is nowhere physically present, so that the body cannot clearly respond.
It therefore reacts to a pseudo-threatening situation, and is caught between gears, so to speak, with resulting biological confusion.
The body’s responses must be specific.
The overall sense of health, vitality, and resiliency is a generalized condition of contentment — brought about, however, by multitudinous specific responses.
Left alone, the body can defend itself against any disease, but it cannot defend itself appropriately against an exaggerated general fear of disease on the individual’s part.
It must mirror your own feelings and assessments.
When you sense threat or danger for which the body can find no biological correlation, even as through cellular communication it scans the environment physically, then it must rely upon your assessment and react to danger conditions.
The body will, therefore, react to imagined dangers to some degree, as well as to those that are biologically pertinent.
Its defense system often becomes overexerted as a result.
The body is, therefore, quite well equipped to deal with its physical stance in the physical world, and its defense systems are unerring in that respect.
Your conscious mind, however, directs your temporal perception and interprets that perception, organizing it into mental patterns.
The body, again, must depend upon those interpretations.
The biological basis of all life is a loving, divine and cooperative one, and presupposes a safe physical stance from which any member of any species feels actively free to seek out its needs and to communicate with others of its kind.”15
Your Thoughts Direct the Body’s Expression
“Your physical body is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version — the physically alive version — of the body of your thoughts.
It is not that your thoughts just trigger chemical reactions in the body, but that your thoughts have a chemical reality besides their recognizable mental aspects.
Consciousness – human consciousness – is not dependent upon the tissues, and yet there is no physical matter that is not brought into being by some portion of consciousness.
In your present situation you arbitrarily consider yourselves to be dependent upon one given physical image: You identity yourself with your body.
Your body is you in flesh.
The energy that moves your image comes from the soul.
Through your own thoughts you direct the body’s expression, and it can be of health or of illness.
Out of a knowledge of the contents of your own conscious mind you can definitely heal most maladies of the body within certain conditions of your creaturehood.
Your body is the physical mirror of your psychological state.
It is powered by the energy of the universe.
It actually springs into being in each moment.
Your mind and your body come from the same source, from universal energy.
You are powered with vitality.
You must seek meaning in your lives.
When you lose the sense of life’s meaning, for whatever reason, this is reflected in your body.
Cancer, for example, has become the symbol for the body’s vulnerability, in current years — the proof of man’s susceptibility to the body.
It is a disease that people have when they want to die — when they are ashamed to admit that they want to die, because death seems to fly against sane behavior.
Remember, your body is changed biologically by your thoughts.”16
Mind Forms Matter
“Your body is a mental expression physically materialized.
Your scientists are finally learning what philosophers have known for centuries – that mind can influence matter.
They still have to discover the fact that mind creates and forms matter.
Now your closest environment, physically speaking, is your body.
It is not like some manikin-shape in which you are imprisoned, that exists apart from you like a casing.
Your body is not beautiful or ugly, healthy or deformed, swift or slow simply because this is the kind of body that was thrust upon you indiscriminately at birth.
Instead your physical form, your corporeal personal environment, is the physical materialization of your own thoughts, emotions, and interpretations.
Quite literally, the “inner self” forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts.
You grow the body.
Its condition perfectly mirrors your subjective state at any given time.
Using atoms and molecules, you build your body, forming basic elements into a form that you call your own.
Each emotion and thought has its own electromagnetic reality, completely unique.
It is highly equipped to combine with certain others, according to the various ranges of intensity that you may include.
Each of you act as transformers, unconsciously, automatically transforming highly sophisticated electromagnetic units into physical objects.
You are in the middle of a “matter-concentrated system,” surrounded, so to speak, by weaker areas in which what you would call “pseudo-matter” persists.
Each thought and emotion spontaneously exists as a simple or complex electromagnetic unit – unperceived, incidentally, as yet by your scientists.
The intensity determines both the strength and the permanency of the physical image into which the thought or emotion will be materialized.
Your thoughts are as active as your cells, and as important in maintaining your physical being.
Your thoughts are also as natural as your cells.
Your thoughts propel you toward survival and growth also, and in the same way that your cells do.
If you find yourself in physical difficulties health-wise, you cannot say: “Why doesn’t my body stop me and assert its own wisdom?” because in the truest sense there is no division between your thoughts and your body.”17
The Mind-Body-Spirit Complex
The following is paraphrased from The Law of One.
The Body
The body, as you call it, is the material of the density which you experience at a given space/time or time/space.
This complex of materials being available for distortions of what you would call physical manifestation.
The Mind
The mind is a complex which reflects the inpourings of the spirit and the up-pourings of the body complex. (The mind is a receiver. It receives messages and information from the spirit relating to the ‘whole’ self, or big-picture identity of the Higher Self and all its cosmic implications. It also receives messages from the body relating to the particular life being lived.)
It contains what you know as feelings, emotions, and intellectual thoughts in its more conscious complexities.
Moving further down the tree of mind we see the intuition which is of the nature of the mind more in contact or in tune with the total beingness complex. (Intuition is the part of consciousness that is more deeply connected to the whole self, or Higher Self. It is a deeper connection within the mind and relates to the big picture.)
Moving down to the roots of mind we find the progression of consciousness which gradually turns from the personal to the racial memory, to the cosmic influxes, and thus becomes a direct contactor of that shuttle which we call the spirit complex. (Even deeper within the mind, there are connections we can access that move through personal consciousness to racial (consciousness of all humans on Earth, past, present and future) and into the cosmic, which is the consciousness of all in the universe, seen and unseen.)
The Spirit
The spirit complex is the channel whereby the inpourings from all of the various universal, planetary, and personal inpourings may be funneled into the roots of consciousness and whereby consciousness may be funneled to the gateway of intelligent infinity through the balanced intelligent energy of body and mind. (The spirit is the channel we use to connect with greater realms of consciousness as mentioned above. The gateway of intelligent infinity is the spiritual gateway to Cosmic consciousness, or All-That-Is.)
Vital Energy
Vital energy is the complex of energy levels of mind, body, and spirit. (That is, the balanced combination of all three energies.)
Unlike physical energy, it requires the integrated complexes vibrating in a useful manner.
The vital energy may be seen to be that deep love of life or life experiences such as the beauty of creation and the appreciation of other-selves and the distortions of your co-Creators’ making which are of beauty. (That is vital energy relates to your love and appreciation for life, nature, life experiences, other people and other people’s beautiful creations such as art and music.)
Without this vital energy the least distorted physical complex will fail and perish. (No one, no matter how physically strong or ‘healthy’ they attempt to be can live without this vital energy.)
With this love or vital energy or élan the entity may continue though the physical complex is greatly distorted. (If someone who is fairly unhealthy in body, yet has high vital energy (love of life) they can still survive and have a good life.)
The Unity of Body-Mind-Spirit
“You will see that mind, body, and spirit are inextricably intertwined and cannot continue, one without the other.
Thus we refer to the mind/body/spirit complex rather than attempting to deal with them separately, for the work that you do during your experiences is done through the interaction of these three components, not through any one.
There is a dimension in which time does not have sway [metaphysical time/space].
In this dimension, the mind/body/spirit in its eternal dance of the present may be seen in totality, and before the mind/body/spirit complex which then becomes a part of the social memory complex is willingly absorbed into the allness of the One Creator, the entity knows itself in its totality.
This mind/body/spirit complex totality functions as a resource for what you perhaps would call the Higher Self.
The Higher Self, in turn, is a resource for examining the distillations of third-density experience and programming further experience.
This is also true of densities four, five, and six with the mind/body/spirit complex totality coming into consciousness in the course of seventh density.”18
That is, you literally become your Higher Self in seventh density.
Plato and the Balance between Soul (Mind) and Body
In a living creature, “suppose its soul is stronger than its body. When the soul gets abnormally passionate, it makes the whole body quiver from within and fills it with illnesses; and when it’s intent upon study and research, it causes the body to waste away. Or again, when it’s involved in teaching or disputation, in public or in a private house, surrounded by arguments and competitiveness, it heats the body and churns it up, and induces fluxes, which fool most so-called healers into blaming the innocent party.
On the other hand, the balance of power might lie with the body rather than the soul, so that a strong body has a petty, weak mind attached to it. If so, of the two fundamental desires that human beings possess – the bodily desire for food and the desire of the most divine part of us for knowledge…well, when the impulses of the stronger part win and reinforce their favorite, they turn the soul into something obtuse, dull and forgetful, and give it the worst of all diseases, ignorance.
There’s only one way to protect oneself against both these situations, which is not to exercise the soul to the exclusion of the body, nor the body to the exclusion of the soul. Then, evenly balanced and healthy, each is able to resist the other.
So the mathematician or the enthusiastic cultivator of any other intellectual pursuit has to pay his debt of physical exercise by attending the gymnasium, and someone concerned with developing his physique has to compensate with exercises for the soul by addressing all kinds of cultural and philosophical pursuits. There’s no other way for a man to come to have a genuine claim to both the two epithets ‘beautiful’ and ‘good’ at once.” Timaeus 88a-c
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Roberts, Jane, The “Unknown” Reality Vol I, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1977
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 30.2, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=30
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