Sandy: If we have three bodies, which one experiences physical suffering or is it all three? I have a chronic health condition and live with constant physical pain.
Sundari: The causal body doesn’t suffer. Experience, including the apparent suffering, occurs in the subtle body. The gross body seems to be experienced and to suffer, but it is inert, and it is experienced in the subtle body. The subtle body reflects awareness, and in that reflection, you know the gross body and can infer the presence of the causal body. The causal body isn’t experienced directly; you infer it because your tendencies, the vasanas, are in the subtle body and must arise from somewhere. The place they come from is the causal body. The content of the causal body, that is, the vasanas, apparently do affect the subtle body, and that this is how suffering happens.
Physical pain is prarabdha karma which has its origin in the causal body. It can be self-inflicted karmain the form of binding vasanas (bad diet/lack of exercise). It can also be the result of congenital conditions, such as birth defects or a predisposition for certain illness. Or it could be caused by karmafrom things out of our control, such as car accidents, etc. Pain is rajas which causes (and is caused by) tamas, in a vicious circle. These two troublemaking gunas create a deep vasana in the subtle body, which keeps perpetuating the problem on the gross level unless the psychological/spiritual issues (binding vasanas/samskaras and/or identification with the body/lifestyle) is addressed. Addressing the cause of the pain requires both the corrective lifestyle changes to be made – and kept – and Self-knowledge in the form of guna yoga and karma yoga.
If no intelligent lifestyle changes are made nothing will change. Self-knowledge will not help you if it does not translate into all areas of life.
It is undeniably true that the subtle and gross body you are born with are the result of “good or bad” karma for the jiva. We do not choose them, Isvara gives us the subtle and gross body we get. Some people are born strong and healthy, both mentally and physically, and some not. It is auspicious to be born with a human body and a body that is strong and healthy. However, we can do much to maximize the health of the body in the way we take care of it through knowledge-based nutrition and exercise. The question is: How much do we put this into practise? It is one thing knowing something is good for you and another living it.
The body is not real, yet although the body depends on the mind and not the other way around, a healthy body which is well taken care of nonetheless makes it much easier for the mind to be peaceful, sattvic. A body sick or in pain affects the subtle body making peace of mind (sattva) very difficult. Therefore taking care of the body is not about the body. It is about peace of mind in the subtle body. It is not about longevity for the body either. Without a healthy brain we will not have a healthy body and vice versa, so how long we live does not equal quality of life.
The subtle body pervades the gross body, except for the fingernails and hair, which is why you can cut them without feeling anything, whereas the brain, which also does not feel physical pain, would cause death or disability if damaged because the subtle body does pervade it. However, even though the gross body does not pervade the subtle body, it can and does affect it. For example, if the gross body gets sick, depressed, has a headache or an unhealthy lifestyle, we can take actions to remedy this which will affect the subtle body, making it dull (tamasic), extroverted (rajasic) or clear, calm and peaceful (sattvic).
The subtle body has a similar relationship to the gross body as consciousness has to mithya (the apparent reality). There is an interdependence from the jiva’s perspective – but not from consciousness’s point of view, because the body and consciousness exist in different orders of reality: the subtle body, which contains the gross body, is mithya, or apparently real (not always present and always changing), and consciousness is satya, real (ever-present and unchanging). The gross body is “within” the subtle body, and the subtle body is “within” consciousness (you). There is no way to understand this or discriminate consciousness from the objects that appear in you unless you to step out of Maya with Self-knowledge.
When the body experiences chronic pain, there is no point denying it. The point of understanding that nothing in the mithya world is real is not denial. Denial will not make mithya (the effects of ignorance, or duality) go away. Only knowledge, the ability to discriminate the Self from the objects that arise in you, will mitigate physical or mental pain by seeing it as not-Self. If the body is in pain, you are not in pain, and you are not the pain. You are the knower of the pain. You cannot be what you know. You observe the body in pain and do what is necessary to heal it, like guna management/mind control, the appropriate medication, diet, exercise, etc.
The karma comes to the subtle body, which a jnani knows belongs to Isvara. The dharma field, or Total Mind (Isvara srsti), remains unchanged if one is “enlightened” or not, which means prarabdha karmawill play out according to the laws that govern the dharma field, i.e. the gunas. Prarabdha karma is the momentum of past actions that fructify as your life experiences. But when moksa has obtained, you are trigunaatita, beyond the gunas, so the mind does not condition to them.
As health or illness is a result of karma, if we superimpose what belongs to Isvara onto the individual, or jiva, then we are thinking as a person, not as consciousness. This means that you think the karma comes to you, and therefore the suffering belongs to you – because you are identified with it. If you know that you are consciousness, you see the suffering taking place in the mind (subtle body). So you are free of the suffering, both mental and physical.
Karma is a difficult topic and it depends on who you think you are. Karma is real if you think it is real; it is often almost impossible to understand, because the one trying to understand it is in the dharma/karma field and part of the field. It is trying to understand the mind of Isvara as a jiva. It cannot be done. Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita: “On the topic of karma, even sages are perplexed.” There is no karma for an enlightened person (jnani). The individual, or jiva, identified as a jivaaccumulates karma that seems to come to the body-mind-sense complex. But when moksa happens, the karma burns up. However, we must look at what “burning up” actually means. Karma does not burn up for consciousness, as there is no karma for it, because nothing ever happened. It is not a doer. Karma is not real, from the perspective of consciousness.
But the jiva lives in mithya and must live abide by the laws that govern the Field of Existence – such as the laws of nutrition that apply to everyone. Karma is just an idea in the subtle body that causes suffering. So “burning up” karma happens when the jiva is no longer identified with the subtle body and knows that it is consciousness. This does not mean that the karma does not still play out for the jiva. Remember, the body belongs to Isvara: it is prakriti – matter, made up of the five elements. The momentum of past actions, prarabdha karma, which is Isvara delivering the fruits of jiva’s actions, plays out as long as the jiva is alive. When prarabdha karma is finished, the body dies. Thus, as stated, if you do not make the changes to your lifestyle that render the binding vasanas non-binding, Isvaraassumes you like the pain and will keep delivering the same karma.
Karma “burns up” for the subtle body because it is only ever “in” the subtle body, not the physical body nor the Self. Because the body is just meat and inert, there is no karma for it either. It seems to take place in the physical body because the physical body is “attached” to the subtle body. Because Isvara is consciousness, from its point of view (causal body) there is no karma. Isvara is called karma phala datta, which means “the one who delivers the fruits of the action,” which implies that Isvara is a doer, which is incorrect. Karma is simply the endless playing out of the gunas.
Problems arise when the doer thinks it can make the body “whole” through its own actions, which one can to a significant degree with knowledge and intelligent living. While modern medicine has made great strides in many areas of health, it has also caused many problems. Thankfully, there is a movement towards taking responsibility for our own health through intelligent diet and exercise, something the medical field as a whole has not paid attention to.
However, there are illnesses that are not the result of one’s state of mind and are not under the control of the individual, no matter how healthy your diet. Take Ramana, for instance: he was a great saint who lived a pure, sattvic life and had a great state of mind, yet he died of cancer. Although, more than likely, his cancer was also related to his lifestyle or eating habits. India has one of the worst health records of any country because of their high carb- and sugar-based diets. There is no avoiding the fact that our bodies are part of our environment and not separate from it. There is a constant flow of shakti from one to the other, positive or negative. We ignore the laws that run the dharma field at our own cost. Ramana did not care about his body or its state of health; he was a great saint. For most of us, we do care because a body in constant pain is very hard to ignore and a great burden to bear.
Of course it takes extreme dispassion to deal with chronic illness or any pain we can do nothing about. This is where dispassion and karma yoga are so important from the jiva or jivanmukta level. One can work with Isvara regarding illness and body pain by one’s attitude to the thoughts that give rise to illness/pain and to the thoughts which come as a result of illness/pain. Coping with chronic pain, which is rajas, makes the mind dull, tamasic. Even though it is very difficult to maintain a sattvic mind when the body is in a lot of pain, it can be done with the right attitude and knowledge, as I mentioned before.
There is appropriate action to be taken but that still does not guarantee any particular result. Nothing does in mithya. The results of any action depend on the nature of the action and NOT necessarily on the state of mind of the person taking the action; it is possible to get a negative result from a positive action and vice versa. Very importantly, the results of actions ALSO depend on the nature of the Field, i.e. Isvara. It is possible that we can do everything right as far as lifestyle and diet are concerned and still suffer chronic pain. Only you will know if this is true for you. Is your lack of health the result of the prarabdha karma from binding vasanas/lifestyle choices or prarabdha karma from factors you can do nothing about?
One of the most popular formulations of the causal mechanism in recent years is Eckhart Tolle’s “pain body.” He presents it as an organic entity that feeds on painful experiences, which is to say that pain itself becomes a vasana, then a samskara, and then a pratibandika – a deeply entrenched obstacle. There is some truth to this, as explained above, but it misses the main point: physical pain is always in the subtle body and not the gross body. There is no “entity” living in us creating pain, other than ignorance-inspired desire and fear. The process of causality is purely unconscious, although it seems conscious because of the proximity of the causal body to the Self. The “causal” body is a technical term that refers to the conditioning that causes us to act and to interpret our actions. It does not assimilate experience, it produces experience. The intellect assimilates experience.
The Self is not the causal body, although there is a belief in the spiritual world that it is. As the Self, we are always free of the structures in the Field of Existence set up by Maya that originate in the causal body. However, the causal body is the Self in its subtlest manifestation as the cause of everything. Separating it and its effects from the Self is the subject of James’ book on the gunas, the doctrine of Isvara-jiva. The sense that pain is conscious and seeks to renew itself is certainly understandable because the causal body, like the gross and subtle bodies, is pervaded by consciousness.
For many who have made pain an identity, pain becomes a cop-out, a way of justifying how hard done by the doer is, legitimizing complaint, blame and victimhood; or just a way to hang onto binding vasanas, to camouflage them with talk about Self-knowledge. Eating habits form binding vasanas that can be the most stubborn of all vasanas. It never fails to amaze us how much people are prepared to suffer rather than make permanent lifestyle changes, especially to the way they eat.
Thus it is sad but true that ill health and pain are so often the result of lifestyle issues that never get cleaned up properly, i.e. the vasana for freedom from suffering is not strong enough to overcome the vasana for the way we eat and live. We fool ourselves into believing we are living intelligently and eating properly, but we are not. If this is the case for you, rajas and tamas are doing a very good job of working together – rajas projects, and tamas denies. Only you will know. From what I observed of the way you eat, there is a lot you could do to make changes if you really want to manage the pain.
That said, there is always something “wrong” with the body, even when we are experiencing good health. It is not static but fluid, like a river, always changing and in a state of flux, and in a constant symbiotic relationship with the environment (Isvara, the gunas). It is a product of the gunas. The body you had a year ago, a month ago or yesterday is not the same body you have today, because the gunas are always changing, constantly revolving. Thus nothing in mithya ever stays the same. We have no control over it other than to look after it to the best of our ability.
But no matter how well we look after the body, Isvara is the final (and only) determiner of how long the body will sustain life. The body is on loan to you; you are not meant to and (definitely) will not be allowed to keep it! Take appropriate and timely action to look after it but surrender it to Isvara, who will take care of it. The right attitude, which is an attitude of gratitude for the gift of life “in a body,” is the best and sanest approach to the body and to life, along with a knowledge-based lifestyle. It is a privilege to be born with a human body because only in a human body can moksa obtain. And when the time is right, the body will be withdrawn and returned to the five elements from whence it came, and you as consciousness will not be affected by that one bit.
Even though taking care of the body is intelligent if you want to feel good and live life well, ultimately our problems as a jiva do not come from the body, its good or bad health. All our problems come from ignorance, from desire- and fear-thoughts, i.e. from binding vasanas.
~ Much love, Sundari
