Origins: Where Suffering Comes From (1) — The Body
In the beginning there was only chaos. The first desire — "I want" — became consciousness, became light; light condensed into matter, into the body. And that is where suffering began. This is not the teaching of any religion.
This comes from no religion — it stands apart from every existing religious explanation (or, perhaps, contains them all).
In the beginning, there was only chaos. Only darkness.
Within the chaos — no one knows from where — arose the first desire: "I want…" This was the first, the original, Awareness, or Consciousness.
💡 Desire ➞ Consciousness
This original consciousness was the first "light," the first current of "energy." Its arising divided light from shadow: wherever the field of consciousness could reach became "light," and everything beyond its range remained in the original state of chaos — the "dark," the "shadow."
Because there was now consciousness — a desire to live through some experience — the material world began to form. Within the range touched by the "light" of consciousness, different kinds of matter slowly began to condense. But turning formless chaos into form takes enormous energy; the consciousness poured out its energy and, through the accumulation of time, matter gradually came into being.
💡 Desire ➞ Consciousness ➞ Time ➞ Matter / the physical world
The material world itself is a projection of this consciousness, created so that it could live through the experiences it wanted to have.
The physical world is born heading toward collapse
By converting energy, consciousness condensed a material world that can actually be touched and experienced. Consciousness is also the energy source that composes our bodies: every mother converts the energy of her consciousness into her own vitality, spending ten months bringing a life out of nothing. And each of us, by our own consciousness, keeps supplying our body with energy, growing from an infant into an adult through the passage of time.
The physical world exists through vast amounts of consciousness-energy, converted across time. It is like a sandcastle on the beach: we carefully wet the sand and build it up handful by handful, but given time, the water that binds the grains always dries, and one gust of wind scatters it. Our material world is the same. Energy always disperses — and once the force that condensed the matter is gone, every material body drifts toward decay.
Have you ever noticed that even if you never did any particular upkeep on the house you lived in, the moment a house sits empty for a while, its walls, kitchen fittings, furniture, even the bathroom fixtures — all the small things start to break down? A toilet used for ten years stays fine while someone lives there; leave the house empty for a year, and the plastic parts around it begin to crack. The sealant around the stove discolors and crumbles, fast.
Consciousness is the energy that builds the body
When the original consciousness first entered a body, it felt — for the first time — enormous amounts of energy being drawn out of it. This is why, when my own consciousness returned to my body, the first sensation was "It hurts!" In the state of pure consciousness, no energy is consumed; in the state of the body, energy must be spent constantly. Consciousness entering the body produced the first feeling of "suffering."
And from there, suffering began. Consciousness endlessly spends energy to hold the body together, while the body — belonging to the material world — is forever moving toward breakdown. So consciousness spends even more.
♥️ Thank your heart and your consciousness for giving so much energy to sustain this body that belongs to the material world.
Body, mind, spirit — the connection
A great deal of scientific and medical research now shows that mind and body affect each other. We all know that even pancreatic cancer — the deadliest of cancers — has patients who, in ways doctors cannot explain, live with it for many years. In recent years cancer has increasingly been understood as a disease of "stress"; many newer approaches no longer treat attacking the tumor as the primary strategy, but regard cancer as a kind of immune-system disease.
When we are too exhausted, our mind (= consciousness) no longer has enough energy to compose the body. The law of the material world is that once matter forms, nature moves it toward decay — so our consciousness must keep pouring in energy to hold the body together. The mind is like a powerful magnet holding iron filings that would otherwise scatter; when the magnet weakens, the filings begin to obey gravity and fall away.
When your mind is too tired, there isn't enough energy to sustain the composition of your body. You start to get sick — even to produce mutated cells. Our subconscious, the deep layer of the mind, driven by the most primal fear (the next essay explains where fear comes from), grips the body even harder — and the result is an even greater drain on the mind's energy. Then come depression, mania, the whole range of mental illness…
And the same in reverse: when the body is overused and overdrawn, the mind must spend that much more energy to keep it existing…
The body is the only way to produce "experience"
Why did the original consciousness spend so much energy composing a material world? Why does every being pour out so much consciousness-energy just to maintain a body of flesh?
💡 The first step of transformation through suffering is acceptance: accept your body, accept your condition, accept the energy your mind is able to give, accept everything about this body — the beautiful and the ugly alike.
Because only in the material world can consciousness experience anything — through a body made of matter. Only by going from formless to form can consciousness truly have "lived it." Your consciousness decides what you are here to experience; whatever shape it takes, it is the way your consciousness judged most fitting.