Using physical techniques to explore non-physical concepts?
Can you experience anything non-physical through the senses? Physical, emotional, spiritual, mental. Surely emotions and thoughts have some if not all manifestation in physicality…they both influence physical symptoms/experiences. But are they wholly physical or are there aspects that fall outside of chemical/biological/anatomical explanations. Then what about spiritual, is there any cross over or manifestation into physicality of spiritual experiences. Or do mental, emotional, and spiritual things just have increasingly subtle manifestations in physicality.
Assumption is that we only have the 5 senses…smell, taste, sight, touch, sound. Being physical in nature are they restricted to experiencing only physical things. Are there other perhaps subtler senses that we use to experience/categorize non-physical stimulus?
What is a spiritual experience anyway? What about concepts of prana or the energetic body, are these physically experiencable things or do you necessarily need to leave behind the usual 5 sense to grasp their non-physicality/essence/domain?
Through various yoga training it has been said (or perhaps only implied and it’s I that have concluded) that there is a non-physical experience of the self or of concepts of existence. Think samadhi. Yoga, the way I have learned is a physical technique, you do specific things with body, breath, and mind, and somehow this opens/leads to a non-physical experience. Assumedly something not dependant on the usual 5 senses.
The more science/anatomy/biology/etc I learn the more of my experiences in yoga can be explained. All my experiences with tags like “possible understanding of thingness without adjectives…more exploration needed here” slowly get filed away under anatomy or biology headings. So what is left? And why am I attached to this need for mystery, for something more, something beyond the apparent absurdity that my incomplete jnana theories resolve to.
Is it even possible for physical techniques to shed insight or allow experience of non-physical ideas. And being so firmly defined through the physical senses how can you even recognize such a experience if it came, it might seem so foreign as to be practically invisible.
Where does physicality begin and where does it end. Is there a hard stop somewhere, or is everything “physical” and some things just more subtly so. Things we call emotional or spiritual requiring just more delicate concentration and fine-tuning/understanding of the usual five senses to experience.
This part of my worldview is under renovations, still looking for experience and design ideas to flesh it out. The suggestion that everything is “physical”, some things just to an exceedingly subtle degree is taking some political heat from the ego. Which is usually a sign that it’s on the right track, or at least is fertile ground for further exploration.
Never a dull moment when I let out the jnana yogi aspect!
Jivan