Sukshma-Sharira / Linga-Sharira
Sūkṣma-Śarīra / Liṅga-Śarīra (IAST)Translation: "Subtle Body"
A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy
Sanskrit: सूक्ष्मशरीर
Transliteration: Sūkṣma-Śarīra
Translation: "subtle body"
Definition:
- The sheaths of vital airs (Prāṇa), mind (Manas), and knowledge (Vijñāna) constitute the subtle body. They are called the Prāṇamaya-Kośa, Manomaya-Kośa, and Vijñānamaya-Kośa.
- The subtle body consists of the internal organs (Buddhi, Ahaṅkāra, and Manas) the organs of knowledge (Jñānendriya), the organs of action (Karmendriya), and the five vital airs (Prāṇa).
- It is also called the Liṅga-Śarīra or the astral body.
Sanskrit: लिङग
Transliteration: Liṅga
Translation: "“mark”; “characteristic”; indication; form; reason"
Definition:
- Śiva’s sacred symbol representing his creative power. An oval-shaped emblem made of stone, metal, or clay.
- The outward symbol of the formless Reality. The merging of the form with the formless is materially symbolized thus. The distinctive sign through which it is possible to recognize the nature of something. It is a “mark” of Lord Śiva.
- According to Vīra Shaivism, its followers (Liṅgāyat) wear a Liṅga on their person. It represents Lord Śiva and is the object of worship or adoration.
Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad (Swami Krishnananda)
"The subtle body of ours, the astral body, is called, in Sanskrit, Liṅga-Śarīra or Liṅga-Deha. Liṅga is a mark, an indication or a symptom. The subtle body is called a symptom, an indication or a mark, because it determines the character of the physical body which is its manifestation. The physical body is nothing but the form that is cast in the mold of the subtle body. The subtle body is not visible to us, and it is internal to the physical body. Of course, there are certain things which are internal even to the subtle body....The internal structure of the body is not the physical structure. It is constituted of a different stuff altogether, called Tanmātra, Mānās, Buddhi, and the like. Tanmātra are subtle vibrations that are inside physical things, and all physical bodies. The vibrations materialize themselves into forms, and in this sense the vibrations are called Nāma, and the forms Rūpa.
The Nāmā and the Rūpa of the Vedānta philosophy, or of the Upaniṣad(s), are not the names and the forms with which we are usually familiar in our social life, but they rather correspond to what Aristotle called in his system, form and matter. Form, according to Aristotle, is the formative power of an object, and matter is the shape this power takes by materialization, concretization, etc. The subtle body may be regarded as the Nāmā, and the physical body the Rūpa. It is the Nāmā, or name in the sense that it indicates a form which is the object corresponding to it, namely the body. The Liṅga-Śarīra, the Sūkṣhma-Śarīra of ours, is our name. That is our real name, and if at all we name ourselves as Gopāla, Goviṇda, Kriṣna, etc., that name which is given to us at the time of Nāmākarana, the naming ceremony, should correspond to our character within. The name should not be in-congruent with our essential nature. The real name is within us. It is not merely a word that we utter with reference to us. You may call a man, Kshīrasāgara-Bhatta (ocean of milk), but he may not have even a little buttermilk in his house.What is the use of calling a poor man as Daulat Rām? There are names that we give without any connection with the nature or the status of the person, and the internal structure of the subtle body. The real name, Liṅga, indication, mark, is the Sūkṣhma-Śarīra, and it is the determining factor of the physical form, the body in which we are engaged.
This subtle body which is vibrant with desires, unfulfilled, puts on a form called the body, for the sake of the fulfillment of the desires. This putting on of a body is called birth; and birth cannot cease for us as long as the subtle body is not extinguished."
The Atman Project (Ken Wilber)
THE SAMBHOGAKAYA: THE SUBTLE REALM
"Beginning with (to use the terms of yogic chakra psychology), the sixth chakra, the ajna chakra, consciousness starts to go transpersonal. Consciousness is now going transverbal and transpersonal. It begins to enter the true "subtle sphere," known in Hinduism as the suksma-sarira, in Buddhism as the Sambhogakaya (the technical term I have adopted). This process quickens and intensifies as it reaches the highest chakra—called the sahasrara—and then goes supramental as it enters the seven higher stages of consciousness beyond the sahasrara. The ajna, the sahasrara, and the seven higher levels are, on the whole, referred to as the subtle realm.
For convenience sake, however, we speak of the "low-subtle" and the "high-subtle." The low-subtle is epitomized by the ajna chakra— the "third eye," which is said to include and dominate both astral and psychic events. That is, the low-subtle is "composed" of the astral and psychic planes of consciousness. Whether one believes in these levels or not, this is where they are said to exist (or rather, where they are said to reach maturity).
The astral level includes, basically, out-of-body experiences, certain occult knowledge, the auras, true magic, "astral travel," and so on. The psychic plane includes what we would call "psi" phenomenon: ESP, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and so on. Many individuals can occasionally "plug in" to this plane, and evidence random or higher-than-random psychic abilities. But to actually enter this plane is to more or less master psychic phenomena, or at least certain of them. Patanjali has an entire Chapter of his Yoga Sutras devoted to this plane and its structures (which are siddhis, or paranormal powers). I should also mention that most researchers in the field of parapsychology feel that the astral and psychic realms are really the same body, and so in general we speak of this realm as the astral-psychic.
The whole point of the low-subtle—the astral-psychic—is that consciousness, by further differentiating itself from the mind and body, is able in some ways to transcend the normal capacities of the gross bodymind and therefore operate upon the world and the organism in ways that appear, to the ordinary mind, to be quite fantastic and far-fetched. For my own part, I find them a natural extension of the transcendent function of consciousness."
THE HIGH-SUBTLE
"The high-subtle begins at the sahasrara and extends into seven (or more) levels of extraordinarily high-order transcendence, differentiation, and integration. I am not going to present an exhaustive breakdown of this realm—the reader is instead referred to the works of Kirpal Singh, who deals with this entire realm—of nada and shabd yoga—in a brilliant fashion. I will simply say that this realm is universally and consistently said to be the realm of high religious intuition and literal inspiration; of bijamantra; of symbolic visions; of blue, gold, and white light; of audible illuminations and brightness upon brightness; it is the realm of higher presences, guides, angelic forms, ishtadevas, and dhyani-buddhas; all of which—as we will soon explain—are simply high archetypal forms of one's own being (although they initially and necessarily appear "other"). It is the realm of Sar Shabd, of Brahma the Controller, of God's archetypes, and of Sat Shabd—and beyond these four realms to three higher and totally indescribable levels of being.
In Hinduism, this realm is called the vijnanamayakosa; in Mahayana Buddhism, this is the manas; in Kabbalah, it is Geburah and Chesed. Aspects of this subtle realm have been called the "overself or "overmind"—as in Aurobindo and Emerson (Aurobindo uses the term to cover aspects of the causal as well). The point is simply that consciousness, in a rapid ascent, is differentiating itself entirely from the ordinary mind and self, and thus can be called an "overself" or "overmind"—almost like calling the ego an "overbody" or "over-instincts," since the mental-ego transcends and reaches over the simple feelings and perceptions of the typhon. The overmind simply embodies a transcendence of all mental forms, and discloses, at its summit, the intuition of That which is above and prior to mind, self, world, and body—something which, as Aquinas would have said, all men and women would call God.
But this is not God as an ontological other, set apart from the cosmos, from humans, and from creation at large. Rather, it is God as an Archetypal summit of one's own Consciousness. John Blofeld quotes Edward Conze on the Vajrayana viewpoint: " 'It is the emptiness of everything which allows the identification to take place—the emptiness which is in us coming together with the emptiness which is the deity.' By visualizing that identification 'we actually do become the deity. The subject is identified with the object of faith. [As is said,] The worship, the worshipper and the worshipped, those three are not separate.' "At its peak, the soul becomes one, literally one, with the deity form, with the dhyani-Buddha, with God. One dissolves into Deity, as Deity—that Deity which, from the beginning, has been one's own Self or highest Archetype. In this way only could St. Clement say that he who knows himself knows God. We could now say, he who knows his overself knows God. They are one and the same."
THE SUBTLE REALMS: SUMMARY
[...]"I would like you to simply consider the implications of the possible existence of the subtle realm. What if the mystic-sages are right?
The whole point would be that in the subtle realm—and especially in the high-subtle—a very high-order differentiation and transcendence is occurring. Mediated through high-archetypal symbolic forms— the deity forms, illuminative or audible—consciousness is following a path of transformation upward which leads quite beyond the gross bodymind. This transformation upward, like all the others we have studied, involves the emergence (via remembrance) of a higher-order deep structure, followed by the shifting of identity to that higher-order structure and the differentiation or disidentification with the lower structures (in this case, the ego-mind). This amounts to a transcendence of the lower-order structures (the gross mind and body), which thus enables consciousness to operate on and integrate all of the lower-order structures.
Lex Hixon has described one form of the subtle deep structure called an "ishtadeva." The ishtadeva is simply a high-archetypal deity form which is evoked (and thus emerges) in certain meditations and is literally visualized with the mind's eye using the high-phantasy or vision-image process. I realize some people would say that the ishtadeva is "just a mental image" and doesn't really exist—but that is to simultaneously reduce all mental productions: might as well say that mathematics is just a mental production and therefore doesn't really exist. No, the ishtadeva is real—more than real—in its emergence from the ground unconscious.
Hixon describes it thus: "The Form or Presence of the ishtadeva [which is evoked by vision-image as he clearly explains] appears as vibrantly alive, composed from the radiance of Consciousness. We are not projecting the ishtadeva. The primal radiance which assumes the form of the ishtadeva is actually projecting us and all the phenomena that we call the universe." This high-archetypal symbol eventually mediates the ascension of consciousness to an identity with that Form: "Gradually we realize that the Divine Form or Presence is our own archetype, an image of our own essential nature."
This, however, is not a loss of consciousness but an intensification of consciousness through a higher-order development, evolution, transcendence and identification: "The ishtadeva does not disappear into us; we as individuals disappear into the ishtadeva, which now remains alone. Yet there is no loss of our individual being as we blend into the object of our contemplation, for it has been our own archetype from the beginning, the source of this fragmentary reflection we call our individual personality."
The whole point is that the gross ego has not simply swallowed the high Archetypal Form, but that the prior nature of the ego is revealed to be that Form, so that consciousness reverts to—or remembers—its own prior and higher identity: "We remain now as a transcendental center of consciousness expressed through the Form or formless Presence of the ishtadeva. We are now experiencing the life of the ishtadeva from within. We are consciously meeting and becoming [via higher identification] ourselves in our archetypal and eternal nature." Such, then, is one form of true transformation or development into the subtle realm, the discovery or remembrance of a higher-order unity that is now approaching Unity—that enters the transpersonal sphere of superconciousness and discloses only Archetypal Essence."
References:
- Grimes, John (1996). A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy: Sanskrit Terms Defined in English. Albany: State University of New York Press
- Krishnananda, Swami (1996). The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad. Retrieved from https://www.swami-krishnananda.org/mand_0.html. p. 51-52.
- Wilber, Ken (1996). The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development. Quest Books. p. 60-64
