That’s what you assume. But from the perspective of divine love you recognize that the body is not as fundamental as presence. As long as you identify with the body, the body seems to be the fundamental ground and everything else happens to it or from it. But when you are on deeper ground, when you’re seeing on the level of divine love or a deeper dimension like the supreme dimension, the absolute dimension, then your identity is in a place that holds the physical but is deeper than the physical. And then you realize that all consciousness comes from that deeper dimension. Not from the body. One way of seeing it is to imagine that the physical body perhaps adds more discrimination and differentiation to the soul than the soul can have on its own. However, while we are living physically and learning to realize ourself physically, maybe our soul can develop a capacity for discrimination and experience which it didn’t have before, which it can then use after the body is gone. So you then have the body of light that I talked about earlier. It’s another body, a spiritual one.

But when we understand the boundless dimensions, the boundless world of being, we recognize that the world we live in is actually an expression of the purity of being. We begin to see that the physical world—and even the world of strife, pain and suffering—is not a separate world from divine being, because it’s not separate from love or awareness. The physical world is the divine being, but looked at from a limited perspective. It’s the same with the human being, the human soul. You can experience yourself from a limited perspective, or from an open perspective. If you look at yourself from an open perspective, you are light, a body of light. You are presence, you are fullness, you are consciousness, you are beingness. If you look at yourself from a limited perspective, the perspective of your images and identifications, you become the clunky physical body that has a problematic personality. So just as there’s a real self and a false self, there is a real world and a false world. Just as the usual personality is the false self, the usual world is the false world. And the real world is not somewhere else, just as the real self is not somewhere else. It’s just a matter of a correction of one’s perspective. Looking at things without obscuration, we begin to see the world as it is. 

You might not have thought about that, but scientifically, it is known that light is ageless. We don’t experience that because we are not traveling with light; we are looking at it from outside. This is just like looking at our True Nature from the outside, from the perspective of the physical body: We keep experiencing the passage of time, and therefore we assume that time must pass for our True Nature, too. But if we are in the stance of our True Nature, things can change around us, and our body still changes, but the experience is that there is no passage of time. And that is because the experience of that body of light is agelessness, endlessness—always now, now, now, never changing, that ever-fresh now, this very moment always.

Each boundless dimension reveals more of the nature of the soul and her objective relation to true nature on the one hand, and the world of manifestation on the other. We will discuss the contribution of each dimension in the following chapters, but reserve for the last chapters in the book a full discussion of the nature of the relation between true nature and the soul. Divine love reveals that the soul is an inseparable offspring of true nature, a child of the divine. The soul is a body of light, a drop of grace that embodies the total potential of the transcendent, but in a particular and individual manner. She is a potential necessary for the emergence of further possibilities within true nature. This dimension also reveals that the soul is the expression of the love and grace of true nature, and the carrier of this love in the world of manifestation. The soul is the manifestation that can consciously experience true nature in all of its fullness and splendor, contemplate its knowledge and mysteries, reflect on its miraculousness and majesty, and celebrate its beauty and magic. The soul is the organ of experience and expression of true nature and, hence, the organ of consciousness of Reality.

The next step, which is the most difficult one, is to recognize what the body is. Basically, you see that you are the divinity, and you are also a particular condensation out of it. And that condensation becomes a body of light. You recognize that the body itself is light; it is this divine love, but in a particular form. So we can see that at the beginning, when we are identified with the body, we are not even identified with the true body. We’re identified with an image we’ve developed of what the body is. We don’t even know what the real body is. When we’re free of that mental construct, that story we developed about the body, we can begin to experience what the body truly is—a body of light. Because when you know that everything is light, you recognize that even your body is light. It’s very difficult for people to develop an awareness of this because our familiar experience of the body is so physical. I mean, your body hurts, right? And we can say from the scientific point of view that the pain is real. Well, it’s true, sometimes the body hurts. But who says a body of light can’t hurt? The body of light is pure awareness, and when it hurts it’s due to an intensification of sensation in that field of awareness. And there are two ways in which we can experience such an intensification of sensation: one is painful and the other is pleasurable. Now, when we recognize that the body is a body of light, that isn’t necessarily the same thing as what people sometimes mean when they refer to “a body of light.”  People can use that term to describe the sense of there being a body of light inside the physical body. That is a specific development of the soul, which does happen, but it’s a more limited experience where you’re still subject to the duality between the physical and the divine.

One insight possible at this stage is the experiential recognition that the structure of being a bounded entity is based on identification with the body. The soul begins to see the crystallized nature of this deep conviction that she is the body. However, in the course of penetrating the sense of boundedness through the grace of Being, she is in for a pleasant surprise. As she witnesses the revelation that all forms are forms of love and light, she recognizes that one of these forms is her own body. Her body turns out not to be what she thought it was, not what she was identified with. In effect, she has been identified not with her real body, but with an idea, an image of her body, a reified concept of the real thing. Now her body reveals its own true nature, as a body of light. It glows with the inner luminescence of light, a light that possesses the fluidity and softness of love.