Body is Faster than Mind

In order for a world to be perceived by our senses and mind, it must already be generated in a non-dualistic modality in what we commonly (and biologically) call "the nervous system." This is the presupposition, and for some experience, underlying all perception and cognition. For this reason, we claim that time is the movement of the whole and particulars are unfolded sequentially.

When perceiving a flying insect, some necessary perceptual conditions for the insect to appear are space and all of the form and colors that are not the insect. At some ulterior level of awareness, what we may call an implicate awareness, all of the conditions necessary for the flying insect to appear--even on the rudimentary level of forms--must somehow reside in our living experience. It would not be possible for a flying insect to appear without that ulterior, implicit awareness; all of the living and dynamic conditions necessary for the appearance of the insect must be present in an ulterior and subtle experience. To illustrate this in more common yogic or even "spiritual" language I have chosen a quotation from a well-known Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda: "God is consciousness. There is essentially nothing in the universe but mind or consciousness."* To put this in language that is more readily accessible, we may recast this quote as follows: "Experience is everything. There is essentially nothing in the universe but experience. The universe is experience." In demystifying the quotation, placing our emphasis on direct experience in a radically phenomenological cast, we have, hopefully, open to the possibility of a direct experience of the "truth" of this incarnate, implicit awareness.

It is in this manner that we can understand, quite directly, the notion of the body being faster than the mind. It is the dynamic openness of the "body" that holds the movement of implicit awareness. This is not the objective or medical body, but the feeling body in a most subtle sense. Sounds and forms move within the various body feelings as the source and home of life's movement, i.e., experience. Sound may be felt as stemming from the heart-center as a seed giving rise to sonorous movement. The bird's song happens in us and the tree to our left. This implicit awareness does not cancel out the objective world but situates it as the dynamic movement of the life of the body. The body makes possible, through its feeling dimension, the objects of perception of the senses. The necessary conditions for the insect's flight such as space, form, and color are an implicit context for an insect's flight to be perceived. The speed of this body openness makes it seem as if the world is independently given from its own side. Objectivity then becomes independence. The world is cast away into a sort of material spatiality that renders it the "natural" world, instead of an incarnate one.  








*Darecki, Y. (2017). Spiritual Path - Yogananda Quotes. [online] Yogananda.com.au. Available at: http://yogananda.com.au/gurus/yoganandaquotes10.html#path [Accessed 23 Jun. 2017].