Iain Atkinson

“This is my body, which is for you”

Of what can I say “this is my body”?

In stillness now, in the relative quiet of writing or reading, in relation to what sensations or perceptions can I say “this is my body”? 

I feel a pulsing ache above my right eyebrow. I feel the weight of having-hips&bum-on-seat. I feel that my eyes look at this phone screen, coordinating with my thumbs to type, signals firing around my brain I guess, but I don’t particularly sense that as happening, not right now. What I feel is the brightness of the screen perhaps exacerbating my headache. I feel the perhaps. And I wonder if this phone is part of my body. Let’s imagine it. 

This phone is my body, which is for you. 

You say it too. You enter into the idea. 

This computer is my body, which is for you. This idea we each have of the other, this is our body, which in each case is for you.

My work in meditation is peace and bliss. For these reasons I sit and meditate. They are the end and aim of my thought. In identifying my body and offering it to you, I offer us both peace and bliss.

I feel an anxiety deep in my gut, an anxiety over revealing my guts so blatantly. I feel as if my guts are hanging on to themselves, refusing to be laid bare by my writing this blog in this way, in this way in which I’m revealing how I think, the kinds of things that go through my bodymind when I sit to meditate, or when I’m walking around, or trying to fall asleep, or countless times. They are a story in my mind which it would be tempting to take as me an individual, but which is a universal me, an eternal story, appearing newly though it is.

This is the eternal gospel: these guts are my body which is for you. I think and feel that as I bring attention deep into my gut. Let’s look, gut, how are you feeling now I’ve written this paragraph and a half since I mentioned you? Let’s take a very deep breath.

“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12). I can present my body. Where? On a table to be slaughtered? In this case, no. I present my body when I become present to my body. I present my body to you, for here is my body for you. My body is now a sacrifice, as was Christ’s when he said “here is my body, which is for you” (1 Corinthians 11:24). A sacrifice will die, as a gift for another. My body will die, but will be for you. In being for you, it takes on another life. But my body is a living sacrifice. Still alive now, not yet dead, it is a dead thing which, being for you, is alive again. Before death, it is alive again as if after death. Though I am not yet dead, here is the resurrection body.

Presently, the resurrection body. This is the great and final resurrection of the dead. All who are in their tombs hear his voice, and rise, either to eternal life or eternal condemnation. This is my body, which in being for you is your body. This is Christ’s resurrected glorious body, which is your body and mine, and the body of all the dead, risen from their graves.

“Present your bodies as living sacrifices”.

The body of a small boy in Gaza was bombed, then shot at point blank range by a quadcopter drone.

I sit and meditate on his precious life, whoever he was. The preciousness of his body. I imagine holding my own son, dead age 6 with a bullet-wound hole the size of a football (as described by a doctor on a video I saw) on his back and “all his organs missing”.

I sit and remember, and listen.

Whenever I think of my own embodied sensations and internally say “this is my body, which is for you”, there is peace and bliss. Now I feel a burning on my tongue, a slight tingling in my feet, and the weight of my bum on the chair. Suppose I say and think, and now write, “all this is for you”. I imagine you doing the same, reader. I imagine that we meet in this mutual imagination. I imagine that these imaginations are the giving of our bodies which we are imagining.

I see all this imagination as an embodied act. Some vessel deep in my right thigh, no, more like the inner and lower leg, pulses. I see it as my body. I to whom the body is presented am not a soul divorced from the body. I marry and accept the body unequivocally. So I to whom the body is presented am a body, a body which in now being noticed is presented. So there is an iteration of the thought: “this is for you”.

Think of yourself. Think of you as you are now, thinking about your body. Who are you who are thinking about your body? Are you male, female, or otherwise, for example? Well notice, and now say of that male, female, or otherwise body, “this is my body, which is for you”.

The body is beginning to change, I feel it. I remember that Palestinian boy. Though you can’t see him walking around again, he lives, and in the body. He has risen from the grave. He is this body, your body and mine.

“In the twinkling of an eye”. I feel that twinkling.
“The trumpet will sound”. Hear it in thought, and think that thought as true sound, the sound that the dead hear.

Anxiety flees because this body, while mine, yes, is also for you. Or even, the one who says “it is mine” is another. Another comes and says “it is mine”. It’s no longer my responsibility, or mine to worry about.

When I ask myself what I feel in my body, I’m not even sure I feel the weight of my body any more. I can if I think about it, but can I consider whether the feeling is present when I don’t think about it? Suppose I meditate on these words “all of this is for you”. I gently roll my head around, releasing spinal tension, being not stiff-necked.

When I return to the question about whether I feel my body when I’m not thinking about my body, a sudden and sharp pain graces somewhere close to the bottom tip of my spine. It’s like the whole diffused feeling of my buttocks on the chair and the weight of the mass of my body was no longer diffused, but was centralized to a point. I release all effort, all sense of the need to breathe or move. Pulsing in my inner leg again. No more burning on my tongue. A major pulse in the leg. A tension in my nose. More leg pulsing, as if in a vein deep in the, what is the name of that muscle? Below my bum, my glutius, is it called a “glute”?

I’ve been sitting here working on other things. The hamstring tension and pulsing release continues. Let me bring attention, deep breaths, and prayer here and now. Lord please release the tension. Lord show me something new here, do something new in my body. Please bless me, raise me, resurrect me.

From Daniel: “multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awaken, some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt”.

Please Lord show me about the great and final resurrection, in which the dead hear the voice of the Son of God. Allow me to be your evangelist, telling the people about the final resurrection. Give me understanding. Give me language. Give me lived experience. Show me where and what the dead who are now raised are.

They are in your legs. They are raised in and as you who still live, as a living sacrifice. Though they were sacrificed, or slept in the dust of the earth, they now live in your body, have been awakened in your awakening mind. We are the one risen body of Jesus Christ, the risen body of that Gazan boy.

I feel that the faith in the resurrection, as well as the urgent need to realise it, make it happen. Now, naturally (one thinks), I cannot make it happen. That thought is palpably fair, but what happens is that when I notice and drop that thought, of having to give every effort to realise the resurrection, to resurrect, to figure out if it’s true, etc, then my body relaxes into the peace which I have learned is truly resurrection. So yes, I can’t do it (alone, as an individual), so I drop the idea, then I find that no longer I live but Christ lives in me, and I am raised.

I find the resurrection body sexy. They are the body of reality to which I am physically making love. It is this body, my body, which is for you, and in your using it, ends up (having always originally been) your body which is for me. What I want to do is enjoy it, enjoy you, and with my whole body.

I find that I who am finding the resurrection body am the original one, the only one. I find a unity and purity in saying “I find”. I find that this I who I find is every “I”, originally “I”, the learning of the human organism to say “I” through copying a parent or an other, through lovingly gazing at them, through the twinkling of the eye.

I feel a twinkling of the “I”. In this resurrection body, I twinkle. The whole resurrection body is twinkling like the little star we all sang about. How I wonder what you are. See that I find “you” about whom I’m wondering right here in my saying “I”.

This is the resurrection body, which no longer insists that a suffering or sinful agent is at the basis of action, which no longer inserts the fallen agent there, but witnesses that it is a witness who acts, a forgiven witness.

When I woke up this morning, I prayed “thank you”. And I found it tiresome and passé to be thankful for breath, for consciousness, or for daylight, because I am equally happy asphyxiated or asleep in the dark. So I felt thankful for what was more immediately present: I. The same I who was asleep. The I now being thankful, even though I can also not be thankful. This thankful I I experienced. I looked it in the I.

“This is my body, which is for you” were Christ’s words. As I say them now, they are Christ’s words. Saying them, I find Christ, and I believe that “this” to which the words refer, this twinkling I being found, is Christ’s body. This “this”, ostension, is the body of Christ that is the “I” of Christ, i.e. the objectivity and subjectivity of Christ, the fullness of the revelation of Jesus.

This “this” is the one who was looking for Christ, the eye. You who awaited Christ, you virgin with a burning lamp, find your very body, your very twinkling eye, to be Jesus, to be the ancient one who has always been, to be the body of all bodies, the being of all beings.

What does this mean? It means we can all enjoy each other unconditionally. It means Christ’s crucifixion is his total consent to being physically enjoyed in any and every way. It occurs to me that, just as to “encourage” is to “give courage”, to “enjoy” is to “give joy”.

I see something about how my body and your body are one here in the body of Christ. But can I believe it’s the great resurrection of the dead prophesied by Daniel, by Jesus, by scripture?

For any given dead person I imagine, I now imagine that this very imagination is an embodied connection to that person. In the nascence of this understanding, I was once reflecting on how I worshipped the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”, and I complained to God “how can I know you, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when I don’t know those men, when I have only the vaguest idea of who they are?!”, and God puzzlingly replied to me “your vague idea of them is mine too”. The vague idea that God should have a only vague idea of these men with whom he walked so intimately was indeed puzzling. But I understood it and it comforted me physically. Now I’m trying to explain this puzzling thought.

The idea I have of A, I, J, may indeed be vague, but now I conceive it as the essence of an embodied connection to those men, the very person who they are, the very embodied single person who they are, the very God of them who they are. They didn’t recognize themselves or each other as God, but now I, the Lord, recognize them as that God I am, that vague but concrete idea, that solid cloud in the sky now descending, the sky falling in on our heads apocalyptically. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are now raised to embody the Holy Trinity. The Holy Spirit can be seen as a grandchild who proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). My vague idea of these three historical figures is a physical reality, “in” my body as much as “in” theirs, in which we’re all raised to be embodiments of God, very God on earth, very much new names of God, very much saints on earth, very much God dwelling on earth with human beings.

So where is Abraham? Where’s this resurrected man? As I think of him, I see a series of images, a series of movements, I sense what previous generations called a spirit moving here and there, but today I can call a physical man embodied here and there. Where is his consciousness? Where does Abraham understand himself to be physically? I receive an answer as soon as I ask. Faithful imagination reveals the answer imminently. His is a body that most passersby wouldn’t see. But it’s a body, historically and actually raised from the dead, physically and spatially located, very much also the body of Christ, the body of thought, the body of the twinkling eye, the body that says “this is my body, which is for you”.

Abraham now holds, on my request, that little Gazan boy tenderly in his arms. They look hopefully over the earth, imagining for us all that great and final resurrection from the dead.

Since I drafted the above a few weeks ago, I have a continued experience of the lightness of my body. I have frequently been thinking “my body is pure light”. I more frequently see flashes of light around me. Yesterday, this thought “my body is pure light” occurred to me as I lay in bed at night, and right at that moment my heart flashed blue below me.

All the earth is shimmering light around me.

As I have stilled my body in meditation over the last few days, I have been taken higher. I felt a sharp shooting pain through my teeth one night, it reappeared through my jaw as a more pleasurable tension-releasing buzz yesterday afternoon. I believe that as I recall these phenomena and challenge myself to write about them, they will amplify in both me and you, in writer and reader, as co-discovering incarnations of the one.

A beautiful dream I had a few years ago: a few nights after a dear friend my age died, in a dream I was sat with my wife and my friend’s family, all of us looking at a fire in a fireplace. I turned behind me, looking away from the fire, and saw on a sofa my friend lying down, gazing at me with love. To be honest it was quite a romantic sight, she was beautiful, in red night-wear. I experienced this event as if I was awake, not to say it was a vivid dream, but that the part of my mind experiencing this was quite a quotidien guy, who, grieving the loss of my friend with her family and mine, was then amazed to see the friend alive: resurrected! I began to yell with all my belly “Jesus!”, but as the first syllable began to come out, a man put his hand over my mouth. It was David Hawkins incidentally. And then David and some other agents grabbed my friend and whisked her away, as the scene ended.

I took this dream as direct evidence that my friend is alive and well with Christ and His saints. I have a regular experience, the like of report of which I found it hard to relate to most of my younger life: I feel that my friend is with me. In a similar way to feeling and knowing my own life, the life I could call mine, I feel her life, the life I could call hers. I say this life is Jesus. Think of it this way: reading the gospels, I certainly come face to face with life itself, the life I could call mine, the life I could call hers. Truly I feel as if it’s her typing here as much as me.

I may have previously felt “but here am I acting, this is me, Iain” – but this has dissolved for me and is no longer a certain experience. I hear an insistent voice, at times, but don’t take its words to be obvious. I have called it sufficiently into question. I have seen that I was life before being named Iain. I have seen that life in my son before calling it Amos, and I see ahead of time that he will not stubbornly say in his head “but I am Amos, I am this little one”. I see that he came from his mother, from the water, from the history of the world, that he is all this history, all existence itself, lying calm and blue on the side of the paddling pool before his cord was cut and his lungs were expunged of liquid and he was traumatically enough forced to breathe and enter our outside world of human interaction and named Amos. What a day! I love you son. I feel we are one life: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In this resurrection body, birth trauma is overcome. The human body’s longing to return to the womb is satisfied, and the new earth is felt as a new womb. Without specifically remembering my birth, I know I was born. I embody the memory of being born. I conceive of a human being who was God being born. I can conceive God.

I feel now the embodied need to inhale being forgotten. I feel my breath slowing colossally. I feel reminiscences of that shooting pain in my teeth like kisses on my cheeks. I feel great temptation to lust (the whole history of my inner story on that subject) overcome as a sexual experience of being the resurrected body. I witness that my lust is equally a desire for my mother, a desire to breastfeed, a desire to return to the safety of not-having-yet-been-born, a fear of life on this earth, overcome in the actual resurrection and end of history, which is processing of birth trauma, and, again, overcoming of lust in the sexual experience of another actual body, the resurrected body of Christ.

A friend spoke to me recently about fear of death. Others speak about feeling the incongruity of this pleasant life with the suffering of others around the world.

I find that the appearance of the resurrected body is honest to the reality of death and the suffering of others, whilst being the bold proclamation that this comfortable life here and now is good. It is the good for which I could be grateful upon death, and it is the good which I affirm that the suffering others deserve. If others suffer, and deserve good, and if this cafe is good, why not enjoy it as such? Because of all the effacement around me, the ignorance of death, the stupidity, the addiction to caffeine, the unwillingness to love neighbours in the cafe. So love the neighbour, appreciate the caffeine, be not ignorant of death, and overcome it in the experience of life.

In this journey, I have been encountering the history of my lustful thoughts and habits. They kicked off when I left home, unsurprisingly. And all that overcoming takes is for me to view these thoughts and habits as false comforts for homesickness. Not that I could have simply returned home. But in returning home having left, in imagining the home of my childhood, in letting my heart feel the pain of not having-belonged even at home in my childhood, I meet myself deeply, I meet the life that I am, I meet God incarnate in childhood trauma, such has been my experience.

But, to some level of my surprise, the lust has not abated. In earlier adulthood, I imagined lust as a deformation of a simply holy life, which was just one or two good habits away, yet I was never quite there. Now I see that this normal life is the holy life, and lust is an enjoyable part of it. Lust does tempt me to fall, but enjoyably so. To overcome it, to hold my body against the fall, is to raise the energies up the spine (in gnostic language) and to redeem lust. Lust is inner embodied experience of another body. Lust is a clear sign that to picture another body is to know that other body. It is also, eventually, a revelation, that absence of that body is the height of satisfaction of desire for that body. I desire someone’s body. I desire to have, to hold, to penetrate. But if I did so have and hold, I would fall, and feel awful. What a paradox! But simple resolution: to desire is the good thing. To desire is to actually have. But in desiring I do not have. So, to not actually have is to have. I lack the desired body. What bliss!

My body desires. My body remembers the sight, the suggestion, the idea of another body, and lusts. There is light and information and thought about another body. Desiring, my body moves, in imagination or physical reality, towards that other body. But in the realization that desire is satisfaction, I let that other body go. And in that letting-go, I get what I desired, I see that the absence of body is presence of body. I do make a choice, I believe and know that this absence is the other person. I faithfully know that my deceased friend is with me. After faith has come lived experience. The experience is confirmed deep in my body, in my spine and my groin.

Porn is a problem not because it hypersexualizes life but because it’s not sexy enough. It infiltrates our relationships with others and tries to remove all the lust, the eros, the play, the touch, the gesture, the sexuality of it all. 

We desire touch, connection, and eros etc. We desire the other’s desire, we want to be wanted, to be valued physically, and we seek out this validation from porn. It seems so immediately satisfying, but again and again it shows itself shallow. Watching porn is like trying to satisfy our desire to eat steak by watching a hot dog eating contest. 

Teeth chatter, groin tension, I feel anxious, I process anxiety.
I process the embodied thought: “something is wrong here”.
I process deep worry. I carefully and lovingly consider it.
I know its end, I have seen it end many times.
I am confident of its end.
Just as I write that, the tension in my groin gives way to curious tingling relief.
Teeth chatter again, as Coldplay’s “Shiver”‘s chorus rings in the café.

Pulsing in my right collarbone.
Flash of blue light against the café bench.

We want to be wanted. We desire to be worshipped. 

“Christ in me, the hope of glory”. Christ in us is the hope that we ourselves will receive glory. We desire to be honoured, although we often in our piety efface this desire or call it sinful. It is not. God desires to glorify and honour us in every way. “He will not share His glory with another” – yes, but he has made us not “another”, but part of His body.

Spiritual awakening satisfies and transfigures erotic desire. In the in and out of penetrative sex, there is the most obvious picture of the fact that in erotic enjoyment there is both a movement towards and a movement away. Both are needed for full enjoyment. Pornography tends to vastly overstate the movement towards. The possession and get-to-it-ness of the game. Part of the solution is realizing and accepting that the movement away, the refraining, is also needed for erotic satisfaction. Chastity is sexy. Holding back satisfies as well as increases the sensual lust. 

For those who practice chastity and semen retention, there needs to be an understanding of this sexiness. Some say one must learn to ejaculate up the spine. One must take the psychophysical desire to project outward, and reinsert it inwardly. The flow of subtle energies up the spine and through the subtle senses satisfies the seminal energies. But it also heightens them! 

The angels are gorgeous. After all that chastity and virtue, many saints will get to heaven and be blown away by the sexual freedom God gives them. And again that heightened sexual desire among the stunning angels will be deeply satisfied in coming and going, in the simplicity of glance and gesture, of subtlety of oblique words, the mystery of art, and the glory of song.

Concluding thoughts:

Practice the experience of breath as an erotic act. Let your nose be a vagina and the breath of God  a phallus to your windpipe. 

The Hokey cokey/pokey is about sex. It gets kids started young in putting it in and out and shaking it all about, knees bent and arms stretched “ra ra ra”. But what are the words? They’re derivative (via hocus pocus) of the Latin mass, and the priests words “hoc est enim corpus meum” – this is my body. Today this Satanic parodying of the incarnation that teaches kids to try out sex before their time is redeemed in the revelation to Christians that the incarnation of Christ in my body is a satisfaction of all sexual desire. 

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,

Like this. (Rumi. Dubious translation)

https://www.rumi.org.uk/love_poems/

Google translate input:

This is my body, which is for you

Outputs:

The Holy Spirit is the source of life.

The Sunday of the dead.

The sun is shining brightly.

The Jewish people are the first to be born.

The Holy Spirit is the power of God.

The Lord is the source of all things.

There is a body in the universe.

There is a person who is in the middle of the world.

There is a person who is a divinity in the universe.

The body is filled with the sacred and sacred things.

The Buddha and the Buddha’s teachings are the same.

The practices of Buddhism and Yoga are the basis of life.

The practice of body and mind is a spiritual practice.