This is Truth. Consciousness –the boundless web of interrelationship connecting all things– is not something that you have, it is what you are. The conventional belief is that a sentient body has consciousness, but it is much more accurate to say that Consciousness has sentient and insentient bodies.

It is also Truth that you are one of those temporarily embodied beings, experiencing humanness.

These Truths do not contradict for the same reason that a leaf is also a tree, and a wave is also the ocean. The finite body that self-identifies with all these personal characteristics is also infinite Consciousness.

The problem is not the experiential embodied being itself; the problem is that all these ID tags create the impression that you are only the embodied being, and like the leaf and the wave, the body has a life span that feels mercilessly short and empty of any continuing isness. This isolation in the temporary is untrue, and it leads to a lot of desperate clinging and fruitless searching for permanence .

What we need to learn while embodied is that the very thing that is searching and clinging is the thing it is searching for: Consciousness, the eternally omnipresent web of interrelationship.

That’s why this is the revolutionary message for our time —not because embodiment is untrue, but because this is an age of hyperindividuality due to an overabundance of ID tags and information about the self. We are not so much embodied as we are embalmed in thoughts about the self, and our religions are no help because they simply extend the embalming into exclusive afterlife destinies and package them like vacation plans.

But we should also be cautious about assuming we know how this state came about. I’ve been thinking a lot lately in quasi-Jungian terms about the suppression of the Divine Feminine, which is the primary source of insight into the sacred role of embodiment in human spirituality. We should know by now that the suppression of sacred truths never makes them go away— it pushes them into the subconscious to be metastasized in all kinds of strange ways. I strongly suspect that the often brutal suppression of the Divine Feminine by patriarchal religion bent on premature self-renunciation (we can’t very well renounce what we don’t know) fed directly into our atomized, secular materialism that fetishizes the self instead of integrating and transcending it.

If we ever want to see the potential of full integration of body and Consciousness –between self and Self– come to fruition, we need a non-dual spirituality that doesn’t annihilate the former in favor of the latter. We need it to explain that, like the tree leaves and the ocean waves, the Self selves, and you are that. This is the primary focus of “The Peasant and the King,” which addresses this glaring need in great detail.