10 Jul The Rainbow Body
I’m sure like everyone I had a variety of responses while reading this week’s materials: excitement, disbelief, curiosity, and not-good-enough because I’ll never achieve a rainbow body or any other sort of incredible death. Intellectually, it is invigorating to imagine that a technology for Jesus’s resurrection might have been found, and while miraculous, phenomenologically sound. I also at times felt a bit skeptical, as I have read several biographies of Tibetan saints and through that learned how during the hagiographical process, the author will add in symbolic acts and events that are not meant to be interpreted literally in order to prove the subject’s saintliness.
It felt at home to learn that the approach to spiritual attainment is firmly grounded in the material body. The body is considered a vehicle for spiritual practice, and thus must be kept in excellent condition. The physical eyes provide a vital interface between the material body and the subtle body, and that is, after all, where the light gets in. Therefore the imagery of light is not a metaphor but an actual experience. Tiso says that traditions of spiritual practice have reshaped the body in order to make it a more fitting vehicle for the sacred. As a result of spiritual development, the body can be seen as a nexus of energies that manifests transformation.
The advanced practitioners of Dzogchen developed programs of training that can enhance one’s natural capacity for spiritual development. The rainbow body, also called the body of light, refers to a body at death that is absorbed back into the light essence, or it dissolves into light. There is often the appearance of rainbows near the location. The body gets smaller and smaller until it physically disappears, sometimes leaving only the hair and nails. The transformation is alchemical in nature.
Of course it is exciting to think that there might a technology that Jesus learned and is still being practiced. However, as Lama A Khyug said, “You do not see the rainbow body with the bodily eyes, but with the eyes of your heart … It is not helpful just to talk; one has to practice.”
© 2024 Catherine Auman
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