©2007 Mark B. Anstendig
The exercise of this creation is for God to create the illusion of seemingly material beings that experience themselves as separate entities from him and as having free will, but that are actually completely in his control, doing exactly what he created them to do.
The body is a machine. It is the most complicated machine ever conceived. And it is, in our experience of it, mated inextricably with consciousness.
For his purposes, God had to create a machine that could start from pre-birth, be born as a baby with undeveloped conscious abilities, and could develop for quite some time on its own, before the consciousness in that body reached a state of development where it could in any way be able to logically control the body. In other words, that machine had to be conceived so that it would take care of itself from the very beginning in the womb and after birth without the consciousness in it doing anything to help, direct, or otherwise influence the way it functions. The body has to be able to take care of itself with precious little real help from its consciousness for many, many years. Although the person experiences itself as though it is ruling the body with its consciousness, it is exactly the other way around. The body rules the consciousness and the exercise of God is to create an entity that experiences itself as in control of itself and its body, while it is the body controlling the mind, actions, needs and everything else about that person, and the consciousness that follows suit, fitting its thoughts and impulses to those of the body. This is the greatest illusion of human life: that the person experiences the illusion that it is freely “doing”, in control of itself and in control of its body, when exactly the opposite is true most of the time, and is definitely true at birth and during that early time of life, when all of our basic habits, reactions, impulses, etc., are being formed.
The purpose of this paper is not to untangle and sort through the above tangle of consciousness and the body. That will be written elsewhere. Here it is intended to define/explain what The Path of Liberation is, what the Path does, and why the Path does it. For that purpose it is first necessary to point out that the body must take care of itself, first without any help from the consciousness mated to it and then, for a very long time as it grows up, with precious little help from that consciousness. By the time the consciousness in the body is adequately formed to be able to have a real influence on the body’s working, the body’s habits, mannerisms, attitudes, etc., and all the conscious patterns related to those physical attributes are firmly formed and difficult to change, even if the consciousness in that body wanted to change them. In fact, it is generally considered impossible to really change a person.
But the body is a machine. In order to make it so that it could take care of itself by itself, without the help of the consciousness mated to it, it could not be made to function as rationally and as well as it could if a consciousness within that body were helping direct the process by directing how it moves, its posture, its breathing…..everything about it that a consciousness in a body could be able to be aware of!
That is the exoteric of the path! The exoteric is the how, what and why some things works, as opposed to the esoteric, which is the artistic quality and principles, or lack of them, with which something is done.
The point being made is that the grown up human body that contains a fully formed human consciousness can function much more rationally, finely, and meaningfully than it functions by itself, if the consciousness mated to it were trained to work with it, without adversely affecting that which the body has to do to keep itself alive and functioning well.
Because the functioning of the body had to be made to be extremely precise in very intricate ways in order for it to take care of itself and stay alive without help from the consciousness mated to it, those ways of functioning cannot simply be arbitrarily messed with or changed, without messing up the way the body takes care of itself and keeps itself healthy (or not) and alive.
THE MAGNIFICENCE AND COMPLEXITY OF THE CONCEPT
We have established that God had to conceive and execute the most complex machine we or even a God could imagine, one that would keep itself alive without any assistance or help from the consciousness mated to it. But, in order for the machine to be able to do that, the machine could not be as finely and rationally functioning as would be possible if consciousness and body worked together.
And here we get to the ultimate insight into this body-as-machine, and its true glory:
In order to create such a way of changing body and mind so that already established and very necessary functions will be preserved so that they continue well by themselves, or even might be improved by the process, God had to create a very precise way in which this change has to occur. Otherwise those necessary functions that the body has been doing and still must continue to do on its own would be changed, probably adversely affected, and the functioning of the body messed up in various ways one would probably not even recognize until some illness or “condition” showed itself, if ever. That necessarily intricate way of accomplishing this change was created as a step-by-step “Path” that has to be followed very carefully in very precise order. It is designed so that, in certain moments, like deepest meditation, God himself can cause subtle changes to happen that the person, himself, would not be able to conceive and execute. The whole, long, step-by-step process is called “The Path of Liberation”, because it involves changing or “liberating” certain unnecessary interactions of muscles and other parts of the body from each other. That is the meaning of “Liberation” in “Path of Liberation”. The usual misunderstanding of the meaning of “Liberation” in “Path of Liberation” is the liberating of oneself from various concepts of mental understanding, as well as liberating oneself from extraneous circumstances of life. That is a wrong understanding of the word liberation by people who do not understand what The Path of Liberation is.
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