The Human Body: Temple or Factory?
   Once upon a time a great Guru had two very accomplished disciples whom he decided to test for worthiness. Summoning the first, the Guru tells him, “Go out into the world and bring back the most precious thing in all Creation.” After many arduous ordeals, the disciple finally decides that the most precious thing in Creation is the Lord Himself, without whom anything else could exist. He prays for the Lord to appear to him so he can take Him back to his Guru as instructed, and finally, after much meditation, the Lord appears to the disciple and inexplicably bows at the disciple’s feet. The amazed disciple says, “Why do you, the supreme Lord, bow to me, a mere mortal?”
  “0 noble one!” the Lord exclaims. “I bow to the human body that you inhabit. Without a human body, a seeker could never experience God, nor could God experience His own Creation.”
   The disciple then returns to his Guru all alone, and the Guru asks him sternly, “So, have you returned empty-handed’?”
   “No, Baba,” the disciple replies. “I bring you this human body, which is the most precious thing in all Creation.”
   Delighted, the Guru applauds him for his successful quest.
   Next, the second disciple is summoned, and the Guru instructs him thusly: “Go out into the world and bring back the most worthless thing in all Creation.”
   After many ordeals, the second disciple ends up trudging toward his Guru’s ashram, having failed to discover the thing whose worth is lower than all others. Suddenly he steps in something quite repulsive: a pile of human defecation. “Ugh!” he exclaims, disgustedly wiping his bare feet in a clump of grass. “I’ll take this back to my master, for it is surely the most worthless thing in Creation!”
   As he bends over to scoop it up, the disciple hears a tiny whining sound, like a cry from a small animal; meanwhile, the feces slips from his fingers each time he tries to pick it up, and the tiny whining sound continues until finally he realizes that the cries are corning from the excrement itself! He kneels down, puts his ear close to the loathsome pile and hears it moaning, “Ohh, Ohh! Leave me alone! Oh, I’m so miserable!”
   The disciple commiserates with it, saying, “I know how terrible you must feel, little pile of filth, being the most worthless thing in all Creation.”
   “Me?” the feces exclaims. “You’re the worthless one, not me! You and your miserable human body! Look at me! Part of me was once a sweet, delicious piece of fruit, beautiful to behold. Another part was golden grain, swaying gently in the summer breeze. A third part was a lovely vegetable, luxuriating in the fertile earth. And look at what the human body has reduced me to! You are nothing but a shit factory! You take beautiful things and turn them into shit! Oh, Ohh! Go away and let me be!”
   The disciple returns all alone to his Guru, who asks him sternly, “So, you have returned empty-handed?” “No, Baba,” the disciple replies. “I bring you this human body, which is surely the most worthless thing in all Creation.” Delighted, the Guru applauds him for his successful quest.
  
   The human body: is it a temple or merely a “shit factory?” Is it the most valuable thing in Creation or the most worthless? As this story effectively indicates, Yoga tells us it is both. Our physical body is of no value to us if we identify with it—if our awareness of self is limited to just the body—because this false identification limits the scope of our being by truly tragic proportions. If, however, we identify not with the body but with the Self which dwells within it, our body becomes a divine temple and a vehicle which carries us to Liberation; as such it is of inestimable value.
   According to yogic science, a human being is the most perfect vehicle for subjective Consciousness in all of Creation, for only in a human body can a soul come to know every level of reality and attain Liberation. To achieve total union with the universal mind, even celestial beings must come down to earth and inhabit a human form, say the yogic texts. Let’s now look at the total structure of a human being and find out why this being alone is capable of plugging into every level of Creation, even into Shiva himself.

Man as Microcosm
   It may sound arrogant to say this, but the universe seems to have been built with human beings in mind. In terms of physical magnitude alone, the human body is the exact mean between the largest and smallest material entities in Creation. A super-red-giant star (the largest object in the physical universe) is just as much bigger than the human body as an electron (one of the tiniest of material entities) is smaller.
More importantly, spiritual scientists assure us that the relationship between human beings and the whole of Creation is exactly the same as that between acorns and the oak tree from which they spring: in other words, each of us contains the entire macrocosm in seed form. According to Yoga, then, Creation is like a great circle with its center in every human being, and each time a human is created the cosmos becomes re-created in perfect miniature, as illustrated in Figure 14.
   A human being is, according to Yoga, a highly complex system of consciousness consisting of four interlocking bodies of graduated density. Our most subtle vehicle, the supracausal body of the Self, is said to be the size of a lentil seed; next comes the causal body, which is the size of a fingertip, followed in density by the subtle (or astral) body, which is thumb-sized, but because of the aura it produces, it appears to be even larger than the gross physical body. As Figure 14 illustrates, in each of us Shiva’s abode is situated slightly external to the top of the physical skull. During the process of human creation, Shakti issues from Shiva and descends through what will eventually become the physical head and spine, and within the subtle body she installs a series of chakras, each corresponding to a separate realm of the macrocosm. The primary chakras are six in number and, since this figure prominently in the process of Yoga, it’s important to understand their nature.

   A chakra is a focal point of psychic energy, something like a command post for the regulation of vital force at each of the various levels of our being, in much the same way that the nerve centers (plexi) function in our physical body. As Shakti creates the last and lowest chakra (muladhara) our physical body comes into being and then, for all practical purposes, Shakti becomes dormant at this point. Each chakra she installs during her descent is like a psychic tie-line containing special circuitry to connect us to its corresponding realm of the macrocosm. Just as our physical senses connect us to the physical universe, so too we have more subtle psychic senses which can function through each of the ascending chakras, permitting us to perceive and “know” every realm in Creation.
   Yoga tells us that the human body (meaning all four bodies working in concert) is the only instrument in Creation that contains a connecting link to each and every level of reality. For this reason, the human body is considered the highest vehicle for evolving consciousness in all Creation. In it, the cosmic axis (macrocosm) has been duplicated as the spinal axis (human being). If we remember back to the section about Shiva and Shakti, we’ll recall that Shiva represents unmanifest existence and Shakti is manifest existence—everything in Creation. Shiva and Shakti together constitute the universal mind, or God. Another way of saying it is that Shiva is the mind of God and Shakti is God’s body because all of manifest Creation is quite literally the physical form of God. With this understanding, we can now fully appreciate the biblical contention that each human being is made “in the image of God,” for the entire macrocosm is God’s body, and each of us is a miniature version of the macrocosm.
   For reasons discussed earlier (and others which follow in the next web pages), ordinary human beings do not enjoy spontaneous access to the more subtle command centers within us. Conscious only of our physical bodies and limited minds, most of us are restricted to perceiving just a tiny portion of the Earth Realm alone, while imprisoned in individual bogus universes made of one percent experience and ninety-nine percent imagination. Most human beings are oblivious to the other levels of reality and completely unaware that each of us is Shiva himself, cloaked in a complex of sheaths or veils
   The average person is like a gigantic computer in whose memory banks is stored all the knowledge in Creation, yet through lack of proper maintenance most of its circuitry has become jammed. Getting these dormant circuits activated once again is the purpose of Yoga.
   The word “yoga” means “union”—union among all the various levels of our being—and this word is used to designate the goal of total union each practitioner is reaching for. The actual process through which this union can be achieved is also called Yoga, as is the system of specific techniques used to activate and sustain the process all the way to completion.
The key to how it all happens inside us is a mysterious energy known as Kundalini. The word may sound Italian, but it’s really Sanskrit, and it’s one of the most important words we will ever meet.