The Immortal Body of the Soul

As soon as we start on the path to enlightenment, we begin to wonder about our own personal life, and that becomes very important to us even to the point where sometimes it could make an aspirant rather selfish, because he becomes more interested in himself, his own personal life, than people around him.

This is one of the things on the path that really should be avoided, and again, a complete change of perspective is needed. We have to change our perspective and begin to realize that beautiful body of the soul which has been growing through the many, many lifetimes that we have spent on the Earth. It's an indestructible body, and each lifetime it grows a little bit stronger in its inner nerve system. That is called the soul, or the psyche.

This body has been in existence for some thousand years or more on this planet, through the reincarnation process, and it is rather mature when the individual asks for the realization of the Self. It has lived so many lifetimes and gone through so many different experiences that in its maturity it wants its last experience on this Earth, that of Self Realization.

So, therefore, our individual existence, our individual life, should be identified with the immortal body, not with the physical body, not with the emotional body, not with the intellectual body, not with the astral body, which of course, is the instinctive-intellectual body, but with the body of the soul that has come along and had one body after another. It's come along on the physical plane and had a physical body. Then it was overshadowed by an astral body. Then it was overshadowed by another physical body. Then it was overshadowed by an astral body. Then it was overshadowed by a physical body. And the layers went onto the body of the soul--the instinctive, the intellectual, the physical. And now, in its maturity, the layers are coming off again.

We drop off the intellect. We drop off the instinctive actions and reactions. The only thing we want to keep is the physical body and the body of the soul. And that is the path that we are on. And when this begins to happen, when the beautiful, refined body of light and the physical body merge as one, we see light all the way through the physical body, right into the feet, into the hands, through the head, through the torso, through the spine. We're just walking in a sea of light.

This inner light is so beautiful. All day long my head has been filled with light. It feels that if I were to reach up and put both hands around the top of my head, there wouldn't be a head there. It feels like there is nothing there. It just goes on and on and on into endless space, as I look back up within the head. When I look into the back of my neck, I see an array of, they look like, wires, and these, of course, are the nerve currents that run through the spinal cord. They're all bright and active and scintillating, drawing energy from the central source of energy. And, of course, if you looked into the central source of energy, what would you see? You would see light coming out of nothing. That's what it looks like, light coming out of nothing.

-Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

http://www.himalayanacademy.com/study/mc/daily_lesson_html/lesson_8.shtml