The Body Electric

So I opened the infamous Eckhart Tolle book, "The Power of Now." I've read snippets of Tolle, but I concluded a while back that it was watered down Buddhism for the Oprah evangelist crowd. That doesn't mean it's bad, by any means, but just that I could acquire similar information from other sources. Anyway, I was feeling spiritually needy this morning, after a highly mediocre Wednesday (tummy troubles, head ache, highly mediocre studio class performance) so I picked up this book (along with my slew of trashy but fun sookie stackhouse mysteries). I just opened it to a rather pertinent page in the jucispeak realm, so i thought i'd bring it up for discourse.
Transformation through the body
Why have religions condemned or denied the body? It seems that spiritual seekers have always regarded the body as a hindrance or even as sinful.

"On the level of the body, humans are very close to animals. All the basic bodily functions- pleasure, pain, breathing, eating drinking, defecating, sleeping, procreation...we share with animals. Humans woke up in what seemed to be an animal body-and they found this very disturbing...Unconscious denial of their animal nature set in very quickly. The threat that they might be taken over by powerful instinctual drives and revert back to complete unconsciousness was indeed a very real one. Shame and taboos appeared around certain parts of the body and bodily functions, especially sexuality. The light of their consciousness was not yet strong enough to make friends with their animal nature, to allow it to BE and even enjoy that aspect of themselves...They now saw themselves as having a body, rather than just being it.

The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the body...Although such an experience can be fascinating and can give you a glimpse of the state of liberation from the material form...you will always have to return to the body, where the essential work of transformation takes place. Transformation is THROUGH the body, not away from it."

Fascinating, isn't it? That so many cultures struggle to drown the existence of a feminine body in cloth, or to pretend that a woman's wobbly bits are not what makes her divine. While the body is impermanent, evanescent, always changing, the body "conceals the splendor of your essential and immortal reality." Whoah! I like that. When you fight against your body, you fight reality. "The body that you see and touch is only a thin illusory veil. Underneath it lies the invisible inner body, the doorway into Being, into Life." Now, I'm not going to advocate the moderately pretentious language Tolle uses sometimes, but on this note, we agree. So much of our culture, our religion, denies the true essence of our bodies: aging, pain, injury. We focus all of bodily love on what makes us better than other people, or worse, rather than valuing it as the manifestation of the divine, whatever that may be. It's like when you see a beautiful old woman with silver hair in a bun- she can't hide her age, and she doesn't want to. Age is beautiful. Or a child with tiny hands and gaps in their mouths from lost teeth. We are creatures still, and we constantly deny it. Truths are hidden in the folds of our skin, in the space between our teeth, in the deep caverns of our ears. Are we here to observe them?