Shavasana is known as the corpse pose. It is said to be the most important posture of a yoga practice. After four years of trying, I still can’t do it. I have always felt unable to absorb additional energy. Perhaps it’s because my house is already full. Do I believe there is much about existence that I don’t know or fully understand? Of course. I feel my relationship with God is much like a vast nebula that I am lost in. All I have is a strong rope that keep a hold of. It leads to the center of the nebula, to the truth of existence. I can share what I have seen, heard, smelled, tasted and felt. I have not died, so I can’t tell someone what eternity looks like. I just have my temporary house that my soul is renting, for now.

Last year, I watched someone go through a grand mal seizure. At one point you see the empty shell of a body left behind and the brain resets. The body and soul must then be resewn together, and the person becomes confused and disoriented. Did the soul get ejected? Where did it go? This is just a floating contemplation, perhaps worthy of contemplation.

Is the body perhaps, simply a dwelling that houses a soul? What is the composition and nature of the soul? To describe such a thing would be as futile of explaining red to a person who has been blind their whole life. To convey its essence would be as tapping on the hand of a deaf person to describe the sound of a river roaring over rocks in the mountains. When lighting rages in the brain and it resets the entire body, when control is lost, does the soul become temporarily ejected? The body can only hold value if a soul resides within. Can souls then die? Does the body become a mausoleum for withered dark, lightless mass of indescribable energy? Carrying the lost until time expires, and the incomprehensible weight of reality descends.

From the Book of Matthew 22:31-32 in NIV translation.

“But about the resurrection of the dead–have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but the living.”

From the Book of Matthew 12:43-45 NCV

“When an evil spirit comes out of a person, it travels through dry places, looking for a place to rest, but it doesn’t find it. So the spirit says, ‘I will go back to the house I left.’ When the spirit comes back, it finds the house still empty, swept clean, and made neat. Then the evil spirit goes out and brings seven other spirits even more evil than it is, and they go and live there. So the person has even more trouble than before.

The body is a house for souls. If God lives there, the house if full of light, bright as lighting. If the soul thinks it isn’t even real, and is a starved and dying in the corners, the demons pour in and fill the body like sludge. Could it be, perhaps then, that the vibes, the energy that leaks out of us every day is a reflection of who is living in our house.

We are all at different spots in the vast nebula of existence. Reality can only hold one truth, I am unable to format existence, I simply dwell within it. If you see a light flickering deep in the distance, illuminated a void, it doesn’t belong to me I am just allowing it within my house to warm my soul and keep the bugs away.

-Zachary W. Gilbert 2024