The Body of Bliss

Back to the bank scenario. Let's look at the rest of the people standing around aghast at the poor guy with the heart attack. Most of them are decent, hardworking people. Some are passionately interested in sports. Some love to cook. Others wants nothing more than to go home, plop down on the sofa, and watch TV.

Very few of the people here are seriously interested in spiritual life.

The doesn't mean they're bad people-it just means they've got other priorities. Their Ananda maya koshas are undeveloped. They've never tested the Ananda, the bliss, of deeper meditative states. The possibility of expanding their awareness to experience higher states of consciousness has probably never occurred to them.

In these people, the body of mystical awareness is not enlivened. If a person doesn't exercise and eat right, her physical body is unlikely to be in good shape. If people don't meditate, or spend some time praying and contemplating a higher reality, them the ananda maya kosha, or subtlest body, atrophies.

I studied the Taittiriya Upanishad, the source of this doctrine, many years ago with the yoga master Swami Rama Bharati. I can't emphasize strongly enough that to the adepts of the Hindu tradition, the five separate and distinct yet interlinking bodies are just as real as the circulatory or respiratory systems are to us. The yogis say they use these different bodies as vehicles for travelling through different spatial dimensions.