S3E4 Subtle Body & Reversal

This episode elucidates the final stage of the Siddha’s alchemical endeavors, which is known as reversal, or “ulta sadhana”. In reversal, the breath, mind, and seed of the human being are coagulated into a stable substance and directed into the subtle body to be transformed into the nectar of immortality. We look closely at the nature of this process and the specifics of the subtle body itself, which is found to be lunar in its nature: an ebb and flow of spirit and essence, coming into and passing out of being like the waxing and waning moon in its journey across the night sky.

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Episode Transcript

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Welcome everyone. Let's do a summary of last time, though, in our discussion of the tantric universe and the Siddha practice that proceeds in it, we noted that following a stage of preparation and purification, the vibe of practice changes to something that we called fettering, immobilizing, binding, sealing off. And this technique of bringing things to stillness, we generally called immobilization, and it's a stage in the practices we're discussing, and it's designed to bring immobilization or a stopping specifically to the the rhythms of externalization, because those rhythms and those behaviors and those desires cause us to lose essence faster than we make it. Immobilization is a multi valent symbol in the text that we looked at. It's called swooning, if you'll remember, swooning is very interesting. It has lots of meaning, lots of subtlety, nuance. On the one hand, it's a little bit like falling in love, so it has a relationship to ecstasy. But on the other hand, we also saw that it has a relationship with fainting, with also what was called torpor, T, O R, P, O R, that's kind of a listless heaviness that resembles death. And so this swoon that shows immobilization in the text is the full expression of this coming to a halt. And not only does it stop things, the swoon is the stoppage of these rhythms in the body all this motion. It's a coagulation of sorts. So it's a stabilization of sorts that means that this stage of practice is about trying to resist the tendency of the most subtle things about us to evaporate so breath and mind and what the cities call seed are the are the most subtle things about us, and they tend to volatilize. They tend to evaporate. And so when the breath is swooned and made heavy, it becomes still. When the seed is swooned, the mercury is swooned, it's coagulated, turned into a paste. And therefore those subtle things don't evaporate quickly, and when they've been immobilized that way, they can be channeled in a different direction. Last we talked about the classic techniques in Hatha and Siddha based practice for bringing to stillness each of these levels of the human you have, Asana for the physical level, pranayama at the level of breath, bandha and mudra at the level of seed, and then mind follows all of these techniques. All of these bandhas have, in their essence, this notion of regulating and stopping and and managing fluid flows in the body, and also respiratory flows. Last time, we also brought it all together, or brought it home, in the sense that we have to remember that breath is essence. Breath is also mind, breath is also seed, and breath is also metal. And you could reverse those things, those statements I made, also essence is breath. Mind is breath. Metal is breath. So what happens to the breath? Happens to all of this subtlety of this episode is about the subtle body. In part it's also about the reversal process, a little bit about what that's like after things are immobilized. The next stage is reversal, or what is called ulata sadhana. And most everything in the city traditions are in terms of reversal of the flow. Those are patterned on the subtle body. So before we start talking about the complexities of this idea, I think it's a good idea for us to ask ourselves, what do we mean when we say the word body? What do we see if we had an image? What? What do we think of one of the scholars that we've relied heavily on in this study that we've been making of history leading up to modern yoga is James Mallinson. Here's what malinson says about our predicament when we begin to talk about the concept of body from the east and the concept of body generally from the west. Quote, the predominance of scientific and medical realism in popular yoga discourse has tended to obscure or displace traditional visions of the body, and has therefore Mutatis mutundas reshaped the perceived function of the practices themselves. And so Banda and Mudra, which we just mentioned as techniques that are designed in Hatha to regulate flow and bring to stillness. Those are examples in the modern world of what he's talking about here, where, where the traditional vision of the body has been displaced by the Western anatomical vision of the body. There's a lot of discussion around Banda, especially is about, is discussion about fascia, and discussion about subtle muscle contraction, and discussion about the structure, and discussion about how bonda might integrate right even advanced movements, how it might be necessary and so on. The practices, as I have come across them in the ways that they're taught in the culture at large generally doesn't characterize them as things to employ in a context of fluid dynamics and in a context of breath dynamics like pneumatics. I've seen it strongly. Let me use make a word up, anatomicalized, right in that way. So when we say body, we have to be careful that that's not that anatomical. Western body is not the first body that we see. As we go on through this material, you'll also notice that there's not a definitive vision of the yogic body. What what we see is that there are elements of what has come down to us that seem to appear in different traditions over different periods of time in history, and that that everybody is engaged in the idea that there's something like a subtle body, but they're not all in agreement about how complex it is, or what it looks like, or so on and so forth. So there's considerable diversity here. What happens in this episode is that I have focused on the real, the common or robust similarities in several of these visions. And most of us in the modern world were heard. Will have heard something about the subtle, the aspects of the subtle body that I'm going to describe, but maybe not all of them, and in this way. So I want to say one more thing, the that is very interesting and very paradoxical, but it it is subject to the paradox that emerges when you begin to talk about yoga, and you realize that the word is not used the same across the traditions. So the subtle body is not only something that we are, quote, unquote, born with. In this sense, we could call the subtle body an endowment. I am endowed with this relationship that the gross body and the causal body have with this mediator of a subtle body. It is something in a way that you can think of as, quote, already having. But you can't only think of it that way if you want to broaden into the vision of the of the Siddhas and the Hatha yogis, and especially the non dual Tantrics. The subtle body is also quote, and this is malinson, I believe, and also mark Singleton's word. It's also installed into the system via visualization and practice imaginative interaction. Okay, and the particulars, the specifics of this installing the subtle body through practice, like through practices like visualization and imaginative interaction that usually is directed by a particular tradition. So this one's really. Holly, interesting. I think this is the paradox of of self creation, how something could emerge out of itself and become subtly different, not only in degree, but also possibly in kind. The when we think of the yogic body, we don't think of the anatomical body. We think of fluid dynamics and flows. And second, okay, there's no one vision of this body. I'm going to present some really robust, common things. And third, it's not only something that we were born with, but it's also something we create. Well, Ayurveda is a pretty strong, pretty important teaching here at the Shala, and one of our sources is vamadeva Shastri, and his American name is David Frawley, and we've learned a lot from him over the years and his view of the Vedic system and Ayurveda and so on. And so I thought I would just pull some stuff from Dr Fraley and give the broad lay of the land. In general, there are three bodies that are spoken of, and that is in this modern context that I'm talking about that we're in right now. In general, most of us who do Ayurveda and look at Samkhya and so on and so forth. We have these ideas that there's a karmic body, there's a causal body, that there's a subtle body, sometimes that's called the astral body, and that there's a gross physical body, sometimes that's called the gross body. Sometimes it's called the Boga sharira, or the body of enjoyment. So these three bodies are in a particular relationship. Most of the focus in this episode is centered around the relation between the subtle body, or what I've also called the astral body, and the gross body, or what I've called the body of enjoyment. The causal body itself is very subtle. It's not available to directly to the senses, and our knowledge of it is mediated in some sense, by the subtle body. So we really focus on the the two of subtle and food body or enjoyment body. Now the we'll start with the gross body. It's the physical body that's manifest in time and space. It's generally what we see in a certain sense. But it's not that anatomical body of the West. Remember that it has 16 parts in it, so it's, it's a composite body. It's made up of of, quote, unquote, different things. Number one, it's made of the five elements, earth, water, fire, air and space. And then you have the 10 quote, unquote sense organs. You have the Yan indriyas, smell, taste, sight, touch and hearing. And then you have the five senses, or sense organs, of action, elimination, moving, grasping, speaking and sexual emission. Now that makes 15. It has 16. It's also composed of a particular part of the mind called the lower mind. And you can think of lower here also as outer mind, that's lots of times called Manas. Manas is concerned with with registering and collecting sense data, and organizing that sense data, you know, relative to the script that is built into the repetitive nature of the, you know, of the subtle of the, excuse me, the of the gross body, the food body. So if we move to the subtle body. The the teaching that I keep coming across is that the relationship between the subtle body and the gross body is that of overlay. So let me just say that now, to put that idea in your mind, it's going to become more clear as we go on. So the form of the subtle body is the form of the gross body. And so you can think of it as having hands and a head and feet and pelvis and so on. And so the gross body and the subtle body, they look like one another. They're images of one another. The subtle body serves as the energetic base, energetic basis, excuse me, or template, like a pattern for the gross body's expression and also function. And so the reason the the gross body, or the food body, that can be seen in time and space, behaves like it does, and the the way that it repairs itself, is to follow this plan that is expressed by the subtle body. So you can think of it like the plan, and you can think of it and think of the gross body like the like the thing that's put together when you follow the plan, it's has 19 parts, and they are similar to the gross body. First there's the five elements, then there's the five organs of action, and the five Carmen tree is the five organs of cognition and action. Sorry, then there's the lower mind and there's your gross body. But to that gets added three parts of something that we would call higher mind, and so you have five elements, five senses, five organs of action, one lower mind, that's 16 plus three higher mind. And in higher mind are ego, intelligence and conscious awareness. That's ahankara, ego, buddhi, intelligence, or the intellect and chitta, awareness itself, pure awareness, those three parts of the higher mind are not, are said to not exist on the physical level. So we get to them through imagination, and we get to them through intuition. They're very, very, very subtle. So why is there a subtle body? Or what does it do in addition to what are its parts? Well, first of all, remember again, that the gross and the subtle body are images of one another. David Gordon white calls the subtle body, the living being, or he says, the Jiva. And so the Jiva is a word that I have always understood to mean embodied soul. And it was very interesting for me to hear that I could consider the subtle body, the sukshma sharira, as that which is truly alive and as the soul. What the Jiva does, what the soul does, therefore, is mediate between the causal level or the causal body or the level of the the ultimate true self, which is, remember, not available to the senses. It mediates between that and the body of enjoyment, or the body of the five elements, the food body. So the Jiva is, is the mediator, the one that brokers a certain relationship between that which is very subtle and not directly perceivable by the senses and that which is the stuff of the senses, the content, the content of the senses. Now here's some details about the subtle bodies that are really beautiful. They give us an image that that we can sort of see, imagine in our minds. David Gordon White says, When the Jiva is, quote, clothed in the body of enjoyment. It becomes lunar at certain points in its cyclic existence, filling out and diminishing in the unending course of births and deaths around the core of the immortal soul, like the moon itself, this transmigrating body is also fluid, so we know it's okay, at least according to these scholars, to think of the subtle body, in some senses, the soul, we've seen it play a role of mediation between the Very, very subtle that's only accessible, but through intuition and Revelation and the gross the outer world. Now we see that it also is a continuous motion, and that it's like the moon. It's lunar. It has a cyclical existence, so it fills up and then it diminishes. And it does this over and over and over. And as it's filling up and diminishing, it's swirling around this core, quote, unquote, core of the immortal soul, which it's mediating in relation to the gross body. So now we see that the soul is also fluid, engaged in this rhythm that comes from a directed and organized fluid, dynamic. What kind of images, right? Should we emphasize here? Remember one that there is an element that's Holly intangible here that's an essence, something extremely subtle. The external senses cannot get to it. Therefore, we need the mediation of the soul in order to have a relation with that level. Remember that the relationship between the gross body and the subtle body is one of overlay or one of clothing, and remember that it's the subtle body that gets closed in the body of the five elements. Remember that we have a rhythmic flow that is actually moving or swirling around, circulating right around the stable core. And. Of the self. So we're dealing with fluid. We're dealing with the image of the moon, which is a deep, deep, deep image in the tradition, if I say a little bit about that, in the mythic world of the Veda and through the brahmanas, and continuing on through history, the moon is understood to be a drop of reproductive tissue. And that reproductive tissue, or semen, or I just say reproductive tissue is is being diminished as it goes through the the waning moon. It gets smaller and smaller and smaller in the sky, and it's losing its juice right in this and so the soul does that too. Starts off kind of full, if you look at it in a certain point of the cycle, and then it loses that. And then there comes the new moon. And the New Moon is the moon disappeared altogether. And then there's a resurrection. And we get the waning moon, where we start again with the crescent, and all of the subtleties of the lunar cycle, until we get the full moon, where it's filled back up again. And then the cycle starts over, over and over and over, and it goes. So my soul is behaving like that. The moon is also reflective. There is an aspect of the moon. If the soul is like the moon, then we have to note how the soul might relate to light. And if the moon is an image of that pattern, then the soul also reflects a particular light, and that light would be the light of the deepest self, the truest self, the source. So I think those are beautiful images of my soul coming and going, filling out, being full and having vitality, and then having going through periods of when I don't have that vitality, and I come to rest, and I need to be rejuvenated. You know, somehow I think it's important to understand again, that we're in this interesting dynamic with this image. That is, yes, we are receivers of that at birth, that it's what brokers the relationship with the higher in this situation. But remember, it's also an installment. It's also something that has to be built or created through practice. It has to be stabilized, in other words, so that this flow that it is is not a flow that tends to evaporate the now, if we look into the tantric universe in particular, and the Hatha Yoga universe in particular, you get several images of the subtle body that I think are important to know, really, because everything in this series, as you know, is contextualized kind of inside this Vedic sacrifice, this dynamic of fluid and fire and wind, or food and heat that transforms and breath that keeps feeding the fire. So I want to run through these divisions and give some give the images that go with the territory, right of how this body is laid out, knowing in general that it also is an image of our physical body. So the two basic divisions that I've come across are a division that is horizontal, that's a division of the subtle body between upper and lower. And then I have one that is a division between the right and the left along the vertical axis, which is one that I knew about more than the upper and the lower division before doing the reading that I did in history in the study to try to know more about the roots right of modern practice. So we have horizontal, that's a division between top and bottom, and we have vertical, and that's a division between the right and the left. So the the right and the left division is created by the central channel called the Sushumna Nadi. I believe that means she who is most gracious, and that right side of the body has particular characteristics. On the left side have particular characteristics. The naval is the landmark, an outer kind of landmark that that gives us the level of the horizontal distinction between upper and lower. How does this work out? So let me talk about, generally, about the division between upper and lower in the upper part in the area of the head, in the subtle body, the cranial vault. It's called is the moon, and the moon is. It is also a lake of this subtle fluid, this essence that we're producing, this juice that we've been talking about over these last several episodes that are dealing with citta practice. The sun is in the lower abdomen, in the area of the digestive tract, in the area of the genitals, and that sun is has all the qualities of a sun. It's a fire and it's eating and it needs to breathe and so on. So we have the moon in the head and the sun in the lower abdomen. The moon in the head, in this case, is masculine, which is interesting, right? Because now the masculinity is identified with the moon, and I had always heard the other up until i i started to educate myself a little bit more, and the sun in the lower abdomen is considered to be female. Now, if we if we look at the right left division created by the central channel that goes vertically, what we see is a gendered presentation, but the genders change. It's more complex here than what we thought. Now, remember, the king of the moon is in the head, in general, in the subtle body, and the sun is in the abdomen. When we get to the Sushumna, the right side of the body is the male side, okay, and that's the sun side. So see how that's opposite the above and below division. And then we get to the left side of the body. The moon is the female side. And that, of course, is the opposite of the king in the cranial vault. And so in the upper lower division, the male is on top and the female is in the base, where desire is. And in the right left division, the male is on the right and is the sun, and the female is on the left and is the moon. If it is the case that this body is a body of fluid, dynamic and flow like the moon, it's liquid. It fills up and diminishes and cycles right over and over, then we should see each of these two divisions of the subtle body that I have come across as dealing specifically with certain flows. I think it's safe to say that the upper lower division is dealing with juice, the flow of the liquid of the essence, and I think it's safe to say that the right left division is dealing with the flow of breath, the juice and the breath, remember, are not two. I want to go into the details of the images of the subtle body that I just gave you these basic images of above and below and right and left, and that we're dealing with fluid dynamics and replenishment and diminishment, like endless cycles of that. So I've already said that the sun in the lower half is female. It's associated with menstrual blood. It's associated with fire, the Agni that's down there, but also the fire of desire. And so the sun is given a feminine gender in that first division that I presented, basically, this is a symbol of several things. It's a symbol of the blazing heat of the dry season in India, when the sun really just drinks up all the juice that is in the environment that. And then there's the rainy season, which is the moon time, which brings the liquid kind of back. And so the fact that this sun down here is associated with number one, that hot dry season, we see it as a great power of fire, right? That has to be fed this son in the lower abdomen is also called kalagni, and that means the fire of time. So in this rich image, there's the redness of blood, the heat of blood, the power of fire, the blazing, destructive heat of the sun, and also time. All of that is really comes together, I think, in the metaphor of a desire, a certain kind of desire, in the in the parlance of the yoga tradition, these qualities are called pravritti, or the forces of extraversion, and we've spoken about those before in previous episodes where you see that we're trying to bring to halt the kinds of flows and the kinds of desires associated with those flows that would promote extraversion, that would promote, therefore, evaporation of our subtle substances. And so. Looking to master the basic desires that this son is representative of. That's the eating desire, that's the sexual desire, that's all those things, because those tend to get out of control and SAP us of our juice, and we can't apply the juice for liberation. So really the sun, the fire of time, Cologne the sun in the lower abdomen is is also a symbol for for ignorance. It's a symbol for externalized action. You might call it the natural attitude. David Gordon White says it's symbolizing the, quote, dispersal of the individual's life into a myriad of worldly concerns, paralleled by the dispersal in the lower body of seed. And so there you see a hunger for worldly things. That's basic desire every day, just as the story goes and you see a sexual desire. All the techniques of Hatha really are designed to begin to move against that level of desire. Now, if we go to the upper half of that horizontal division, remember that I have said, that is the cranial vault. That is the the moon and the lake in the head. It's also called the king. There's so many beautiful myths and stories about King moon and how he ends up totally depleted as a result of one thing and is rejuvenated through another act, another sacrifice, actually. So if the sun in the lower abdomen is is symbolic of the of the hot seasons in India, the dry seasons, then the the king in the head is symbolizes the rainy seasons, the wet season, or the monsoon season, because that's when everything gets watered again. That's when everything stops being dry and desiccated. It gets reintegrated, it gets filled up with life again. And so that lake in the head is where all of our juice is going to be. And normally, that juice drips down the central channel into the fire of time and is is burned up in externalizing behaviors. Remember, that's like average everydayness, or, quote, the natural attitude. So all the Banda and all the asana and all of those things are to bring that fire of time into a certain state and stop the drip of the liquid from the cranial vault down into that so that it can go back, it can be reversed and go back upward and become kind of a self generating thing Where transformation begins to happen. The moon is called nivritti, which means introversion. Remember, that's opposite of the Sun in the lower abdomen, which is proverity, or extroversion. Now let's give some details and some of the teachings that I received on the division that emerges as right and left. The Division is created by the central channel running vertically up through the body. So we've already said that the left side is considered to be the lunar side, and the right side is considered to be the solar side, and the right side is externalizing and masculine, and the left side is internalizing basically and feminine, and it has all these other qualities that go along with this rejuvenating liquid. And in the in the right side, we have all those qualities of extraversion and so on. So the the nostrils, this division is important to understand, because you have to understand the values given to the nostrils and how they connect to the subtle body in order to really get a deep understanding of pranayama in the hatha yoga tradition. And therefore, how is it that immobilization is going to happen via the breath, and how is it that reversal is going to take place via the breath so the right nostril on the right side of the body here is called the Pingala, and that is the side of the energy of the sun. And what's very interesting is that the nostrils, the channels on the right, criss cross over to the left side of the body at the level of the third eye. So the right nostril crisscrosses through that third eye and moves and re establishes itself in a loop on the left side of the body, and the same goes with the other side. So really, it's really fascinating to see how these nostril observations and these ideas about male and female and external and internal in relation to the nostrils shake out in relation to the brain, because pretty soon, because of the the influx of British medicine and ideas of looking at the body that way and organizing things, you know, that way, the. The the differences between the right and left brain and the character of the processing that those two sides do. Those findings, you know, from the West, correlate so strongly with what was observed by the practitioners here the city, practitioners here during pranayama. So it's very interesting. Notice, we have a criss cross here in a flip flop, the right nostril crosses through the third eye and accesses the left brain. So remember, this is from the right side of the body, and it's male, and it's externalizing and so on. And so the left brain is classic for the being the regulator, the emotional regulator, the sense of will, the the sense of kind of voluntary control, and so on that that comes from the prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal cortex on that left side it, it's also a style of processing on that side that's strongly linguistic in a certain way. And so it's like a binary processing, this, that, or it's like a linear processing, if I'm if I'm saying that right? So the left brain has those qualities, and those are associated right as male the left nostril, on the other hand, the female side accesses the right brain after it passes through the third eye, the right brain has a very interesting profile in relation to the left, whereas the left is a linear sense of processing, a sense of kind of emotional regulation, a sense of emotional control, a slowness and a sense of active effort and so on. That's where that comes from. The left side is much more what you might call all at once processing. So the processing isn't linear, it's not slow in that sense. I think I've heard people use the term to compare it to computer processing, like parallel processing. Let's say this phrase again, all at once, recognition. So whereas the recognition the left brain is a recognition of coming to be aware of something, step by step, as a process of reasoning and so on, the right brain is, is Revelation recognition, the aha moment, the symbolic brain, the intuition sort of thing, and that part in the vertical division is female. Now we noticed last time that if we talk about how this how the subtle body behaves in ignorance and how it behaves in awakening, or when immobilization and purification and reversal has begun to take hold. What we see here is that in extraversion, this is the vertical division, is still concerned about losing essence. It's still concerned about essence evaporating, and it assumes that extraversion is the the way that that that happens and so but here, instead of being about the drip from the lake in the cranial vault down into the fire of the sun, this is about where the breath is. So normally, in the natural attitude, the breath will move, will stay in the nostrils and go between the nostrils and the mouth, and it'll change dominant sides, the left side, to the right side. I think that we noticed in the information about this rhythm in the yoga therapy program that those oscillations happen about every hour and a half in general. So right side becomes this, left side becomes dominant, and so on. And therefore the brain states that correlate with those. You can see mood going here, changing here and so on. That's the average attitude. That's the normal everyday externalization phase that is said to be ignorance, and that's when we're losing juice, when reversal and immobilization begins to happen. That breath that oscillates in the nostrils is going to go inside. It's going to fall from those nostrils, as we saw in the last episode, and fall deep down to where there's almost no breath in the nostrils. That state of what we called swooning last time, is the state in which the nectar is not being evaporated through the actions of externalization. So I love the way that the two prominent divisions in the subtle body, the above and below, where the above is male and below is female, and then the right and the left, where the lower right is male and the left brain is male, and the lower left is female, and the right brain is female, and extroversion is the concern of all of it. And we have a liquid flow that's being regulated from top to bottom, the drip and the cranial vault. And we have a spiritual flow, or a pneumatic flow, of brain. Breath coming in and out the nostrils. I think we can see now an image of what happens to the breath, happens to the seed, what happens to the breath and the seed happened to the mind and so on. So I've already talked about reversal, actually, in the last couple of episodes about Hatha and what they're looking to do by intervening in the flow of the of the cosmic rhythm, this cosmic rhythm of manifestation and non manifestation and so on. We're now at the point since things have been immobilized and coagulated at the base, the breath has fallen down to the space in the Root Chakra, and the mind is beginning to follow suit. It also coagulated and falling down, swooning down to the base. Now things can begin to go up again, up through the central channel into the lake in the cranial vault, rather than dripping down. And the breath is going to go, and the mind is going to go, and the seed is going to go. So this traveling of energy upward is something that most of us in the modern world, who have been doing yoga a little bit, know about, because we've seen models that include the chakras. Now the chakras are really interesting, and I'm going to set aside a whole episode to talk about the chakras and the Kundalini. So right now we talk about reversal. We're just going to talk about them in relation to, well, I'm going to try to do it in relation to the Vedic sacrifice, but also just knowing that giving some specifics to this change of direction of the essence, starting to move upward, is all we're talking about now. We're really talking about the depth of teaching related to eat chakra and so on and so forth. Make sure to come in for the next episode, and that'll happen. So when we start to do asana and pranayama and meditation, and we practice bandha and mudra and so on, if we're doing that practice that descends from the Siddhas, then we're moving against the basic desires, the basic automaticity in the human system that produces externalization. Okay, so we're reversing the basic inertia of of ignorant existence. And the existential philosophers call that basic inertia, that hard to turn around, automatic response to life all the time. They call that the being toward death. And it's interesting that they agree, in a sense, with the with the Hatha yogis, because now we are internalizing, ceasing motion, so we save juice and breath and beginning to transmute. So this reversal is called ulata sadhana. That means regressive practice. It's also called Kaya kalpa sadhana, and that means bodily reintegration or regeneration. Here's a quote from David Gordon white, just laying it out about the basics of Hatha in relation to this, Hatha Yoga is the forceful channeling and control of the vital breaths and of the thermal energy, the tapas, or the yoga Agni of the subtle body. And so there you have it. Hatha is channeling and binding and immobilizing and directing the flow of the vital breath into the subtle body and then up through the central channel, through the chakras, that's thermal energy, that's also breath, and it's also seed that's going up there. This process of this energy of breath and mind and seed being immobilized and sent up through the central channel proceeds in six stages. And these six stages would be the piercing of the first six chakras. Now this term piercing occurs all through the Siddha literature, and it has all kinds of symbolic meanings. It's even a way that people identify certain Siddha practitioners, because they pierce their ears in a certain way, and so the ear pierced ones are identified as those that are practicing a certain kind of tantra and a certain kind of alchemy. Maybe the word for piercing is beta, B, H, E, D, A. The piercing that happens is the piercing of the first six chakras by the vital breath, prana, apana, Samana, vyana and udana, those five winds that are inside us that run the physiology, collect, swoon, fall down, and they begin to pierce the chakra as they travel up. And the seed goes with them, and the mind goes with them. This is said to produce prodigious heat. And I've seen some really crazy stuff said about what begins to happen heat wise, when the chakras begin to pierce by the vital breath, that heat is something that you see mentioned in many places, and it allows the city traditions to to imagine this upward process of piercing each chakra in very interesting ways that can. Connect back to the Vedic sacrifice, and then to, you know, forward to Tantra. So here's what David Gordon White says specifically about that the prodigious heat generated by the piercing of each chakra, coupled with the fact that upward movement is here equated with absorption, allows for homologization of each circle of transformation. And he means each chakra there, we can see each chakra as a homology with the cremation ground, the place of the final sacrifice and a pralaya, which means a cosmic dissolution. That's the resorption phase that we're in. We're in the pralaya. And so the minds of the Siddhas and the alchemists and the Tantrics, when experiencing this basic heat that emerges from the chakras being pierced by the seed and the mind and the vital breast, it made them see that in each of those levels of the chakras. This is like being in the cremation ground. This is the place of ash. This is the place of the final sacrifice. And so we're very far along now in the metaphor of the process. Remember that what happens to the seed, happens to the juice, okay, remember what happens to the juice? Happens to the metal? So we know that something of the nature of this, this upward movement, this transforming heat, this fire that is generated as a result of it in that fire, transmuting the seed and also the mind into Amrita, storing it in the cranial vault. This also now is described as pralaya, remember, the cosmic dissolution. And so this would be, let me make it quick, because it could go a long time. This would be the union, the divine union in Tantra. It would be the divine union between Shiva and Shakti, right? The the cosmic love fest that happens when they realize that they were never separate and they are reunified, you know, in a new way. That is the ultimate end of resorption, that's everything going back to the source and becoming one and ultimately disappearing. And then, of course, we know that it will reappear in this throb, or this heartbeat of cosmic rhythm as things begin to reabsorb, or not reabsorb, but re manifest and come out and make the world. Let's make a summary. Traditionally, there are three primary bodies, the gross, the subtle and the causal. We said this time that citta practice is really concerned with the gross and the subtle bodies and their relationship. The relation between the gross and subtle body bodies, bodies is one of overlay, or what David Gordon White said, remember being clothed, and so the subtle body is clothed in the body of enjoyment, or the body of the elements. And the dynamic of the subtle body is one of ebb and flow. It's like the alternation of the sun and the moon. It's like a river that drains dry and then suddenly begins to re emerge. And all that action is swirling around, if you will, this the eternal center or the core of the deepest self. The two flows in the subtle body that we noted were the flow of juice from the top and the cranial vault to the bottom, which is reversed in practice, and then we know the breath, the flow of the breath and the nostrils that keeps consciousness on the outer part of life, and that when the breath recedes and swoons, it goes away and consciousness goes inward. Hatha is designed Sid practice, I would say, is designed to arrest each of these flows and redirect them and make use of that heat that is created as energy goes upward through the chakras. And the end product of that is going to be Amrita, or the the the nectar that's in the lake in the head. This upward movement is also conceived of as the final dissolution, the absolute absorption of the Goddess and the source where she comes from. So in a way, this is that breaking point where the cycle disappears completely, almost as if into nonexistence, and then begins to re emanate and flow back down as the creation. So I hope this has been interesting. We sure appreciate your listening. God Bless You, and we'll see you next time.