Theos-Talk Archives (October 1995 Message tl00577)

Keith:

>The body is often talked about in the Christian and Puritan
>traditions as corrupt and leading us to corruption, that is "sin".
>It is seen in most traditions as something to be transcended.
>But is it the body or the kama-manas that is causing the "sin",
>leading the body to indulgences etc?

It would seem like none of the seven principles are corrupt per
se, but it depends upon their undeveloped nature as to how much
they mislead us from the truth and from true living.

>The body has a special consciousness of what to do without the
>help my mentality or will. It knows and remembers.

Yes. It is guided by a will of its own. There is a center of
consciousenss in us that governs it, apart from the personality
or human Ego that we know ourselves as.

>However, I have a question as to why our body and feeling
>nature might be seen as more "perfect" because it is "automatic".

I'd say that the "automatic" nature of it comes from a controlling
intelligence, from sentiency, from another center of consciousness
that helps to form our aggregate nature while alive.

>I am thinking of things like cancer also. Is something like
>cancer a karmic debt?

The notion of "karmic debt" comes from the "banker's model" of
karma. It fails to take into account that karma arises in the
"inbetween-space" between individual lives, and is not an abstract
quantity of energy with an existence of its own.

While it is true that we can say that what happens to us is the
result of our previous actions, we're really saying that what we've
made ourselves into at this very moment of time is the results of
our past. We are our karma, and as we change ourselves, we change
our future as well, including what and how our karma will "come out"
in the future. We're not predestined to a certain experience, where
it will happen regardless of how we change in the intervening time.
Cancer may happen due to the interaction between us and the rest of
life, or it may not. As also will physical death happen at some time,
without any sense of "debt" or "punishment" to it. It is just life
happening, through our interaction with the external world.

The body has its wisdom, but it is not the physical organism itself,
but the center of consciousness within us that lives more directly
in and through that body. We are composed of many centers of
consciousness, in a "living coop", and our position in that organiztion,
while alive, is the lower human Ego, the Manas or Kama-Manas. Each
center in our complex structure of life has quite a degree of
intelligence of its own, and it's amazing what they all can become,
when they come together to form the living human!

-- Eldon