Note: (I am moving to 5 point font - it doesn't cost any more than 3 point, and is much easier to read...)

To live in the world is to have a body. I like to start with something that cannot be denied.

I just got an uplift from some notions about "reality" that Fairy Faye offered, referencing Maharshi the Great, and I got to thinking about how many things I take for real that are ultimately not going to be "real."

So I am waiting for Fairy Faye to give me a metaphor for this waking up that helps me live with a little ease that the moment of truth will not be unendurable. I am hoping for a really great metaphor that lifts the cloud cover and shines the light.

In the interim ...

But I keep thinking of the beautiful Maharshi, and Wilber, and Obama, and the athletes in the Olympics, and I must say...

 ... right now the topic du jour is bones.

After all, what is more beautiful than beautiful bones!

Maharshi, Obama, and the beautiful athletes in Beijing are all ... splendid bone carriers.

Have you seen Maharshi?

Without going too far afield, let me come back to the point, which is: to live an Integral life is ... to stack everything onto a structure. A frame. A framework that holds and ... uplifts in the eternal dance of delight.

If you can read this, you have a body, and that body is a system of ... bones.

When I was young, my grandmother, who had singing bones, used to serve up bone marrow for a sandwich spread. An old Slovakian treat! But now, I am thinking, we don't even think of marrow. We are not even aware that there is marrow.

Marrow - how many people even use that word? Or know what it refers to? It is a dying word, and with it, our awareness of the truth of embodiment is dying.

Take a look at the people in your community over the age of 80. Look at how beautiful their bones are. You cannot live to be over 80 without having singing bones.

Singing bones? What are they? Resonating bones. Bones with marrow that is alive and resonating.

Do my bones feel like they are springing with life? Or do I think and sense them as sticks? Honestly, yes or no, do I feel that my bones are living and breathing, or just sticks that hold up the meat?

Or worse, am I oblivious to me bones, and just focused on the surface manifestations of my skin?

This is ridiculous. Really ridiculous. To spend time thinking about the skin, when the bones are the source of health and well being.

Immortality requires bone consciousness. Bones contain the life force that was acquired and stored before birth. Muscles and tissues contain the life force acquired after birth.

When I become aware of the prenatal life force in my bones, I vibrate in an immortal way and become beautiful.

Our bones are the only solid crystalline substance in our body. We can now measure the electromagnetic fields that our bones receive and send out to our organs, blood and nerves.

My bones are my tuning fork and they transmit that deep and rhythmic pulse of energy that connects my cellular reality to the stars. The energy of the cosmos comes down and is refined into my bones.

As Arthur puts it, Ad Astra. Back to the stars. Putting your cosmic energy back out, through your bones, to where it came from. A circuit of life.

Ever wonder why why you cannot escape your mother? It is a question of resonance in the bones. You feel your mother in every second of your life because she is ... literally ... in your bones!

Every minute proportion and resonance comes from ... her!

Your mother's life force built your bones and your bones are your tuning fork that vibrates through you and gives health to your organs and blood.

And for this reason, the ancients always felt it made sense to be buried with ones parents. It does. Bones never die. Flesh rots but bones keep on shimmering with life force. They transmit the spirit well beyond our alloted days.

Bones are wands that sprinkle spirit.

Take in cosmic energy through the fingers and toes. These are the portals of exchange. Draw the energy in and let it mingle. Feel the energy trickle and flow through every bone in the body.

But that is not enough. Squeeze every muscle and press that cosmic energy into the bones. This burns out fat in the marrow and replaces it with vibrant and living oxygenated marrow.

By squeezing life force into the bones, you squeeze out toxins in the marrow. At that point, your muscles are "dancing on" the bones instead of "hanging from" the bones. The bones are shimmering now and you feel like a place that the universe wants to visit.

Ken Wilber's work has sprung from and been sustained by his wonderful bone harmony.

Healthy bones sing and resonant the universal reality of love and flow.

Can you show me a prince or princess who does not have beautiful bones?

To live is to be a prince or princess, or a king or queen, with all of the majestic bone harmony.

We love great bones because we know that bones are life.

Feel every bone, one by one, and feel it ... want to pulse.

This too is life. This is life. This is where we live. There is a reason why we have a body. It is not an accident.

Put that symphonic resonance of bone consciousness to work and we have a structure to start from.

And .. when in doubt, ask ... can I feel it in my bones? Does it feel right with my bones?

And by the way, insist that your bones be set down in Mother Earth. Cremation is a great idea ... but a bad way to honor your ancestors, who provided the life force to give you a body.

If anyone asks, do you want to be buried, tell them ... you are goddamned right I want to be buried! Right next to my parents! My bones are theirs! They gave them to me. And we will sing together for a long long time!

Honor your mother and father and grandparents by letting your bones be settled in Mother Earth where they can resonate and sparkle and shimmer for a long long time.

That's an Integral idea too.  

Hey Schalk, my hat's off to you.  That's a lovely piece.  Bury me in the black soil .... wow, such ring and resonance, hey?  I think your non-conceptually-fitted earthlove carries a feel the conceptual just doesn't touch, fun and useful as this latter otherwise can be.  And to keep things in the realm of not real, how about not not real?  Earth guy out.

Hi Schalk,

 

Bones of course represent structure; they serve the same function in human anatomy that closet rods and clothes hangers do with one's wardrobe; which is to say that without them we'd be more of a heap than a Holon. And from my view bones represent beauty to the extent that they represent fitness of form.

 

But your paean to bones, emotionally satisfying as it is, falls off a great precipice on its insistence on burial for human remains. I never really thought much about a greater context for this question until i read about the traditional Tibetan way of dealing with this subject. Tibet of course is a land locked stony if not mountainous country with very limited fuel resources, yak dung being a chief fuel. These conditions led them to an alternative solution for dealing with human remains; ‘bone breakers’ were employed to dismember corpses and feed the flesh to birds. Reading of this practice a light of greater context went off in my head. “Oh, i get it! It's the ancient quadratic formulation: interred in the earth, consigned to the waves at sea, the torch of cremation, and food for the birds: earth, water, fire, and air!”

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

 

 

Schalk, that was quite a trip!

Charles:

When conversing with you, I know one thing - you are a feisty who is always ready to be contrarian! I hold you up in that pantheon of lords of dominion who have refused to give away their sovereignty. My hat is off to you!

There is a church in Mexico City (San Angel district) where many of the priests who have served in the church over the last 300 or so years are standing in boxes with glass coverings. I really like that. Am not sure if the skeletons are glued to stand up or if they are fixed to the back platform with wires. But it seems like the gradual ebb of the life force in the marrow does more justice to the natural rhythm of the lives.

Let us not forget that much of what is presented as Tibetan custom is pre-amber magic. I am not sure what to make of a reference to that custom.

For my purposes, I like to just sit and feel all of my bones one by one. There are a lot of bones that we ignore in our awareness. By doing a bone roll call, I bring back to awareness all of this "kit" and I think there is some kind of corresponding neural firing that matches this roll call and restores sanity. At a minimum, when living in bone awareness, it is hard to be tense.

Just as an exercise, rub the palms of your hands vigorously over the pubic bone to stimulate blood flow, and then just try to sit in an awareness of that bone. It is amazing how different the world starts to look.

It is a fundamental tenet of Taijiquan that you cannot do it properly until you can sink all of your bones and the sinking causes massive relaxation of every muscle except the largest ones needed to keep from falling down. When you watch Taijiquan done as a muscular practice it begins to seem like trying to drive a car with the accelerator fully pressed down, the emergency brake on, the foot brake on, and another vehicle behind trying to push.

I guess the model I am trying to point at is one of being embodied in a way that is highly fuel efficient.

Our notions of embodiment and movement are still very internal combustion. Bone awareness seems to suggest a move toward solar power and much less friction.

 

Schalk, I was very moved by your bones poetry. When you made it, were you aware that I would be effected? I had the most amazing day before you made this post. I was able to teach my friends son about toning and how it makes different parts of the body vibrate. Experiential anatomy for kids. The six year old boy was getting very interested in the blood, we played with cutting off different blood flows in the body and then I shared how in the bones is the marrow where the blood is made. We were going around the body and pointing out how the different organs work together. To have the blood which is apart of the circuitory system ( centered in the thoracic cavity) to be deeply involved with the skeletal system ( center is the sacrum)had him curious. To have a child at six try to get intouch with the bone marrow and his blood was amazing. Toning into the belly, heart, head, and above lead to the study of the organs and what organs are more important based on how quickly you would die if you cut them off. We were vibrating in the body and out and he was able to make the connection between vibrating crystals outside the body would also vibrate the cyrstal structures of the body, mostly the bones. I was able to get him to tone into the bones on the top of his head which was making much sense and when the vibration went higher above the head then the crystals outside the body were in trouble of exploding. He had huge flashes going on in his mind. To read your post the next day was amazing and made me speechless. Rolfing, yoga and bones are my specialty.

Man thinks he knows what his bones are about. Then that would mean he knows what gravity is about, and that would mean he knows what space is about which brings up time and the search for immortality which the bones have a vibratory laugh on its finality.

Thank you so much Schalk for validating the bones.

Happy Friday Schalk,

 

>>>Let us not forget that much of what is presented as Tibetan custom is pre-amber magic. I am not sure what to make of a reference to that custom.<<<

 

The point i was trying to make when referring to Tibet was to put the customs surrounding disposal of corpses around the world in a deeper broader context. Since that time i've discovered that air burial -if that's the correct term- has been practiced in places other than Tibet.

 

My surprise at seeing that these various practices fit an ancient quadratic formulation, namely earth air fire water was from my view, relevant and significant. I suppose in the same way that the yellow pads of KW that were central to his discovery of a quadratic formulation of a slightly different kind, where singular and plural, are inextricably interlaced with individual and collective.

 

Quadratic formulations appear elsewhere. Consider the circle as representative of Spirit, i.e. in the sense it has no beginning or end; and then consider circumscribed within it the cross of Matter, and we have what is called the glyph or a symbolic representation of the Earth itself. From my view this is worth noting otherwise a person introduced to integral theory might think that the importance of quadrants had just sprung into existence in the minds of recent thinkers. When a more complete or proper view might consider this more recent formulation to both include the former as well as transcend it.

 

There is a great deal more that could be said about quadraplicities. Perhaps the most important thing to understand about division by four is that it results in tension. Which is to say that things according to integral theory tend to tetra arise, the result is that each of the four are continually pushing and pulling on the others. The result is a sort of built-in instability, without which i doubt any sort of growth would be possible. Also built into this system is a division by three. Its role is to sustain and support. Consider an ancient pyramid from Giza for example; its base is quadratic, but its four sides are in turn bases of triangles the apexes of which meet at a central point. And while the culture that created them certainly came from a mythic past, the qualities associated with the number structure, mainly tension (4) and support (3) appear to be transcendent, perhaps even eternal. In this context my guess is that the number three is perhaps analogous to what KW calls Eros, or the notion that evolution has built-in impetus and is going somewhere, whereas the tensions or interplay of the four, devoid of deeper insight can easily be relegated into what he calls ‘frisky dirt’.    

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

 

THANKS SCHALK FOR BRINGING BONE AWARENESS TO ALL OF US.

ONE OF THE MANY REASONS I ENJOYS WILBERS WORK IS HE BROUGHT WEIGHTTRAINING , JOGGING AND NUTRITION INTO THE GAME OF SPIRIT. SO MANY OTHER SPIRITUAL PATHS LEAVE THIS OUT OF THEIR PRACTICE.

I  NOW WILL BRING MORE BONE AWARENESS TO MY BODY .  MY BODY ALSO WANTS TO THANK YOU TO SCHALK. LOL

---

Bill Kilburg,

Maybe someone who's actually Indian will help us our here, in my college religion class the professor talked about "sky burial." An Indian custom of building tall, hollow stone towers with a grate on top. Corpses were put on top, birds ate the flesh, the bones fell through the grates.

On the relationship of bone awareness and weight training.

By oxygenating the blood, before embarking on weight training, there is a very deep packing of the "qi" or "chi" into the bones (and organs) which burns out fat in the marrow.

This deep packing of "chi" during weight lifting is much more important to health than the ancillary growth of muscle tissue. I mean, muscle tissue is most useful inasmuch as it permits our structure to support itself without straining the tendons. Or to put it bluntly, the body does not really care about large biceps. They add nothing except the ability to carry grocery bags.

The body thrives however on the deep packing of oxygenated blood (chi) into the bones and organs during weight lifting.

Schalk, To add,  the balance in the bones is a play of intrinsic and extrinsic muscle groups. So weight lifting done without the awareness of the intrinsics can lead to a over develeoped extrinsic system that impedes the intrisic system and its deep connection to breath. Thus the oxygenated blood and its abilty to get deep into the bones can be blocked by improper weight training. The extrinsic system is supposed to support the intrinsic system in core processing or dense chi , light chi balance. The intrinsics as a muscle are postural muscle that do not tire easily but are not as powerful as the phasic musles or extrinsics. The phasic muscle are powerful but tire easily. Gravity is the background field that the intrinsics or postural muscles are relating to and the extrinsics are supporting the intrinsics. If the balance is not sufficiant then the extrinsics get over involved and the experience of weight and effort is the norm. I beleive that the modells used in weight lifting and pilates have a deep misunderstanding of the core and how it relates to center of action and being with the central channel of the subtle body. The practitioner's self image can be imbedded into the extrinsic system in weight lifting or any athletic activity and thus crystalize like bones there personal fixations. Chi Chong is for sure is aware of the subtle body and its interelations with the physical body. A beautiful practice that allows for casual, subtle and physical harmony.  Big ego types might not think chi chong is challenging? Give me five minutes with some very, very simple stances and see what a joke all this effort against something outside of the body, like weight lifting misses the point completely. It has its relative benifts and really comes to not if the relations with the earth have not been awaken or improved. Perminant competancy.  Bones and the earth.   

Innerline:

Well said, well said indeed.

The Western preoccupation with surfaces - skin, muscle, shine, glisten, color, etc. is very very immature and .. lacking an appreciation of core principles.

It sounds very mundane, but the difference in embodied awareness that comes from feeling the bones and organs as the center or core of embodiment is enormous.

I cannot help but give respect to the notion that our bodily awareness model reflects the choices we make in the world.

The U.S. collectively is plagued with an awareness model that emphasizes ... surface. Short-term profits, quick fixes, smooth skin, etc. We collectively ignore the organs and bones that drive and dictate health. Health in our body or health in our thinking or health in our exterior systems (housing markets), etc.

 

I like this:

"My bones are my tuning fork and they transmit that deep and rhythmic pulse of energy that connects my cellular reality to the stars. The energy of the cosmos comes down and is refined into my bones.

"As Arthur puts it, Ad Astra. Back to the stars. Putting your cosmic energy back out, through your bones, to where it came from. A circuit of life."

I've been exploring the sacrum for about three years now in meditation, lying in shivasana, and directing the breath there. More than any other bone in our body, it seems to be the most central and therefore most recipient of all the stresses in our bodies. I find myself releasing it especially on an extended exhale that lengthens the whole spine.

But just simply resting my awareness there in its crystalline structure, I get in touch with very deep holding patterns throughout the tissues of my body that release by themselves with the attention of my awareness.

For me, the sacrum is a gate to all the stress and tensions in my body and then the release of it.

Bruce

P.S. How do you increase the font size?