Rosemary Brown had marked spiritual experiences from an early age. Later, as a widow with children, she found herself forced to rest at home following a workplace accident. To pass the time, Rosemary sat at the piano and found her hands guided to play unknown music. In her story we find yet more support for the assertions of Indian metaphysics and pure yoga.
By now you are all aware of the wisdom of ancient India which states that this entire world is inside you, and thus any thought or idea, from any time or person, is available to you. Your consciousness is infinite in size, and it is called brahman. That word, brahman, is often translated as God, or a Hindu God, or something that is bigger than us and controls us. But that’s not what it’s about.
The human mind works with these concepts more easily via the idea of a “subtle body”. Imagine it as a large sphere of fine-grained energy, which in turn creates the physical body sitting inside it. Both bodies move around together. As my human body walks to the cafe, my larger subtle sphere comes along too – and it overlaps with the subtle spheres of others.
The function of the subtle body is interesting. It does everything that is creative, non-linear, and non-verbal. Everything that comes out of left field, all the ideas and concepts that seem to appear and disappear in a flash are floating around this subtle sphere. Also, the subtle body doesn’t die and isn’t really bound by physical laws. As long as the human form is alive, the subtle form remains hovering around it, presenting ideas that may or may not be noticed.
Our amateur pianist, Rosemary Brown, later realised the music she was playing belongs to Franz Liszt, a composer who died in 1881 and was now invisibly guiding her hands.
The subtle bodies of Rosemary and Franz were interacting, superimposed over one another. Rosemary went on to associate with several other dead composers, and she fascinated the British public during the 1960s and 70s with her uncanny “abilities”.
For us, today, it is useful to understand that an individual may experience a close or distant relationship with their subtle body depending on their beliefs and lifestyle. A harmonious relationship between the brain and the subtle body is indicated by characteristics such as:
- comfort with risks
- ease and spontaneity
- enthusiasm and zeal for life
- embrace of conceptual thinking
- glowing desire for ephemeral outcomes
- joyous and all-attractive countenance
- physical lifespan up to 300 years
A distant and poor relationship between the two bodies is demonstrated by:
- willingness to sacrifice joy and passion for material benefit
- acting as though the talking/emailing mind is the only mind
- behaving as though this incarnation is the only chance at life
- discomfort or slander toward non-materialist or non-linear worldviews
- increasing misery as the quantity of unheeded desires stack upon one another, burdening the ego until the point of no return is reached and a fresh body is needed
No matter the quality of relationship between the subtle and physical bodies, at the point of human death we release that human body and quickly wake up into expansiveness, brahman.
Death need not be a big deal. If our beliefs push us to think of human death as a horrible tragedy, then the dying process can be so jarring that we quickly and reflexively create another physical body in order to “resume living”, to take care of unfinished business, and to once again experience familiarity. It is better to approach the transition with ease.
It is best to spend your entire life learning to look through the “eyes” of the subtle body. This can be through what is loosely known as “meditating”, or being lucid while asleep, or dreaming while awake, or reading sacred texts with confidence that you are worthy of interpreting them yourself. Such activities are marked by feelings of exhilaration, appreciation, and confidence.
Fixation on physical safety and what people sometimes call “grounding” can really be a disservice. You might even say it is the opposite of what yoga encourages. You are not only the physical body – it is a small part of you, it is inside you. Refusing to honour the non-physical senses means ignoring sensations that would otherwise be handled as naturally as sound and vision. Such obstructions are inconvenient and are the very definition of illness.
I am the large subtle body that houses and nourishes the small physical body.
Don’t let your chattering mind ignore the majority of you. You created the physical body and brain in order to have specific experiences. Spend your life learning to perceive more, natively, yourself, without looking for validation or approval. If you really desire to “ground” or indulge the earth element, just meditate upon your heart, hṛt in Sanskrit.
The centre of subtle and physical are the same. This might be a nice point to describe a meditation technique. Click the little + button if you want to see it.
Subtle Body Meditation
- Close your eyes and travel to the right of your physical body, maybe 20 metres, or to the wall of the room you’re in. Feel as though you are there. Keep your eyes closed, turn and look at your physical body. There it is, good. Anchor yourself there, to the right side of your body.
- Now take yourself to the opposite side, the left side of the room. Go to the opposite wall or a similar distance. Now turn around and look at your human body from this location. There it is, good. You are anchored far to the right and far to the left side of your human body now.
- Do the same for in front of your human body, go there to the front wall. Turn around look at your human body. You can see the front of your human body. Good. Place an anchor there.
- Now go behind your human, to the back wall. Turn around and look at the body. There it is, good.
- Now go above your human, up through the roof if there is one. Turn around and look down to top your human body. There it is, good.
- Now go below your human body, perhaps down into the earth, Turn around and look up to the feet of your human body. There it is, good.
- Now revisit each of those locations, promptly, one after another. Right, left, front, back, above, below. Do that a few times. Right, left, front, back, below.
- Now be in all of those locations at the same time.
- Be in the centre as well, the heart of the subtle and physical body.
- Be in all of those locations at the same time.
- There you are, good.
Let’s look at one other example of subtle body shenanigans.
Telepathy Tapes podcast episode three is a fascinating look at the way autistic children show evidence of telepathy. Groups of non-verbal autistics have been found to be completely lucid and intelligent inside their lived experience, but with no physical means of communication. Almost like being in a coma, or one of those sleep paralysis situations. Trapped alive! Able to perceive and think, but unable to voice anything.
For readers who are electrified and intrigued by this, for those in whom the spark is lit, for those who would open a channel between the brain and the subtle body, this is a permission slip.
You may remember when you were non-verbal, when you were a little baby and identified mostly as the subtle body, rather than the human form you created. You were telepathic then. I’ll say no more. The memories will come spontaneously.
How wonderful that there are people investing time and energy exploring the doorways available, doorways apparent, even in the face of tedious skepticism.
It’s quite a workload, being a sceptic. You have to perform the partial suicide of continuously ignoring your own first-person experiences of telepathy and similar events. When you do that for a few years, they kind of go away, they seem to stop happening, more or less, and the job is done. You become “safely” imprisoned in a materialist worldview, left to the extra-sensory deprivation and neuroticism that follows. Social media and emails are your future. If collective social hypnosis doesn’t succeed in drowning out the gnawing sense that there is much more in the air around you, then you can go to therapy.
For those of us electrified by direct perception of non-physical experiences, for those of us who cannot shake the intrigue of mirrored “inner” and “outer” worlds, then heroines like Rosmary Brown give insight on how we might each reconcile our selves.
For anyone who was subjected to a Western upbringing, the first hurdle is to really respect your own experience, rather than swallowing the claim that your testimony is not reliable. Cultivate the view that you are a large subtle body, and that you created this physical human body for the purpose of tactile experience. You can re-learn to trust your perception of subtle energy, telepathy, and knowledge of things that you “shouldn’t have been able” to know.
Yoga and the subtle body gives unprecedented freedom to uncover yourself gradually and joyfully. It’s backed by the ancients and is s l o w l y being confirmed by materialist science.
It’s also delightfully “hidden in plain sight”. Someone reading this would probably have a copy of the Yoga Sutras on their shelf, which in the last two chapters is extremely mystical.
Yoga is non-duality, yoga is non-materialism. When taught in this authentic manner, it presents an excellent doorway and structure.
How impressive that you created it for yourself!