The following words from Almaas ring true, for me. People that I interact with daily are centred, for the most part, in the rarified atmosphere of their imaginal world; and some cannot at all grasp that there may be a difference between how they conceive their world to be, and their actual phenomenological, lived-world of embodied experience.
Douglas Harding’s Headlessness is a classic example – people think that the little buzzes and sensate squiggles in the space of awareness are directly a ‘head.’ They don’t get that this ‘head’ is a concept, a referring thing, meant to point to the actual experience. A typical seeker’s response, to a experiential inquiry question, is to go straight to conceptual understanding.
In an interview Almaas said: “Most people live in one part of themselves. They live in their thoughts, or their emotions. It is rare to find a human being who truly lives in his body. Most people are not that interested in their bodies, not in a real way. People are interested in their bodies in a superficial way. They take baths and go running, things like that. But to actually feel the body, sense it, make it a real part of themselves, that’s a different story.”
May all human beings inhabit their bodies.