Another Choice

For, if we are indeed meant and destined to evolve to another mode, inclusive and unitary, of consciousness, how could the material body be excluded from it?

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Since our first plunge into the inner axis and its first realization in our physical consciousness, we have clearly felt and experienced, as one experiences physical evidence, that the deep inner being, unlike the vital or the mental being, is intimately and directly close to the body and that the body recognizes it with unreserved trust. There is between them a sharing which escapes our external or surface intelligence, a sharing which even seems to transcend the very concrete boundaries of birth and death, as the very emotion of this sharing reveals itself as ancient as it is new in the present.

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The inner axis one has discovered, or which has made itself known, is a reality as physical as that of burning oneself in the glowing embers of the hearth or diving into the cool water of a river and each time one is ready, in one’s physical consciousness, to align to it, it occurs in the body, the body is the milieu of the experience. And one can each time verify the body’s spontaneous adhesion to the pressure of the consciousness-force and, in this movement of self-giving and happy recognition one could not say precisely who is inhabited by this tranquil ardor: is it the body or is it the deeper being, or else is it the union of the two? This adhesion seems incomparably purer, more authentic, immediate and entire than that of any other part, physical, vital or mental, of one’s present human individuality, even though those parts do consider themselves more “developed” than one’s body – this body on which they nonetheless depend every moment for their expression and their very human existence.

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