Consciousness, Gravity and Stillness: a Nondual Exploration

How would it feel to be free within the law of gravity? Not just floating like an astronaut, but really free, with heart, mind, body and soul?

If we are in free fall, and there is nothing above or below and nothing to the sides, are we not perfectly still?

We are trained to ignore gravity, though its imprint is found through every layer of living experience, be it mental, physical or spiritual. Often gravity is perceived to be in direct opposition to our freedom. The good stuff is “up”, the bad stuff is “down”.

When it comes to the riddle of why we are here, whether from the view of science or the perspective of the spiritual seeker, the mystery of gravity will be part of the wondering. To the spiritual seeker, the experiential realization of the sense of gravity can be a shift-maker.

In terms of the common sense of gravity, all of us, irrespective of our individual flavor, are sustained by the earth’s gravity field, just as we are falling together with earth as it orbits the sun.

If we believe in life before birth, then entry into the gravity field of the earth, through a body bound by the laws of physics, is a core part of perceived “reality” as a physical human being.

Yet how do we experience the pull of gravity?  Is there any part of experience which is weightless, i.e. not subject to the pull of gravity? If yes, how does it feel to be there?

Beyond the myth of five senses

Aristotle, whose categorization of perception into 5 senses survived modern science.

The doorway to experience gravity, as to all experiences either inner or outer, is through the senses. But what are these senses – the physical doorways through which we receive impressions of the physical universe?

Through our senses, we sense life and become conscious of our environment. Yet since Aristotle classified physical perception into five distinct senses in De Anima, the belief that we are limited to only five channels – vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch – has become something of a collective fallacy.

Even before we move to the meta-senses (the so-called 6th sense), we have a host of sensory capabilities beyond the archetypal five.

Among the less broadcast sensory faculties are some very familiar faculties with very fancy names. These include Thermoception: the sense of hot and cold.  Another is equilibrioception. The organ of equilibrioception is the vestibular labyrinthine system found in both of the inner ears. In technical terms, this organ is responsible for two senses of angular momentum acceleration and linear acceleration (which also senses gravity).

The sense of equilibrioception – especially the sense of gravity, weight and mass, is particularly beautiful to explore in meditation and inner inquiry. When the body is at rest and supported, it’s possible to open this sense by allowing the surrender to the gravitational pull, and receiving impressions of the weight of the body and its orientation towards the planet.

These impressions at first can be simply physical. We can notice that where there is stress, there is resistance to gravity. There is a physical reflex to clench the muscles of the body upwards, as if out of agreement with being on earth. The formula is simple. When we relax, the physical senses open up. The more the senses open up, the more we receive impressions of life. We become responsive.

Are feelings prone to gravity?

This sense of gravitational pull can move beyond the physical.

Gravity is embedded in our unconscious minds, through archetypal language. We “fall” in love. We also “fall” out of grace. We “fall” asleep, and we wake “up”. Spiritual seekers often describe the experience of “free fall”, as the bottom falls out of their habitual sense of self. Others will talk about transcendence, as if the they had “risen” beyond the earth’s gravity field. (Did you ever hear anyone claim spiritual descent?)

Dreams of falling are collective, and are conventionally put down to birth trauma. Yet dreams of weightlessness and flying also appear across cultural borders.

The up (heaven) and the down (hell?) are encoded not only through religious metaphor, but also in terms of our psychological orientation in space. We reach ‘up’ towards God. Hell is beneath our feet.

Gravity and Spiritual Healing

Gravity can be experienced within the “heaviness of heart”, or a sense of weight around the mind. Someone who is deeply confused around guilt, responsibility and obligation, will often move with head bent and have pain in the shoulders in the manner of Saint Chistopher, who carried the world upon his back.

This kind of energetic mass and weight experienced through the felt sense is calling for the surrender to gravity. In the surrender to gravity’s pull, transformation occurs in the separation between physical and existential. The physical moves down through the body and to earth; and the existential rises, to be reabsorbed by living energy.

Letting go doesn’t mean ignoring an energetic sense of weight or heaviness. On the contrary, it involves allowing our awareness to be in and around that heaviness, with softness and loving presence. When felt experience is ignored, it becomes unconscious. It gets caught in an energetic freeze. Paradoxically, allowance into awareness is the alchemy behind letting go. The reason for this is poignant: the awareness which is able to allow a feeling impression, is also that which releases it into freedom. Letting go means not trying to control, restrain or deny experience.

Through an expanded, permissive, feeling awareness, “heavy energy” is given the freedom to move according to physical laws. In allowing the physical sense of gravity, a spaciousness opens up.

Who is the one that is sensing weight? What is this, that can surrender experience to the pull of gravity? From where are we able to truly rest in peace within the physical universe?  Does this awareness also have a subtle weight?

When we come to peace, resting in unity with earth’s gravitational field, it can be worthwhile to connect to that same experience of weight or gravity within others, where ever they are now. We can expand this to a sharing of the sense of gravity with all living things: animals, trees, birds, and sense what happens. Nothing is excluded.

The sense of gravity is not included in the classical five senses, yet it’s realization as part of the liberation of the nature of experience seems to be both powerful and worthwhile. It has the potential to release unconscious resistance to life. This opens a greater vitality through a deepening embodiment as human, which is naturally accompanied by a greater freedom within physical form.

Gravity and Science

To date, gravity is one of the least understood aspects of our physical universe. The fundamental particle named the “graviton” is critical to quantum physics yet is still hypothetical. This particle is needed in order to bridge discoveries of quantum physics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein’s theory was recently proven, with the world’s first detection of a gravity wave – a ripple in the fabric time and space created by massive events in the universe. This fabric of time and space – so intimately connected with gravity, is not just a scientific postulate. It’s about the first-hand, existential impressions of you, here, now.

The first and last authority on the nature of time, space and gravity is conscious experience, beyond, before and after any mental thought. Only you can experience the wonder of gravity, by allowing it – here and now –  and by exploring the physical and energetic wonder and care of this force at the source of creation.

 

Georgi Y. Johnson is a spiritual teacher and author of I AM HERE – Opening the Windows of Life and Beauty. She is presently working on a new book: Stillness of the Wind, an Introduction to Nondual Therapy.