Bread feeds your body. Emotional and spiritual digestion of experience–of the energies in the world–is what feeds your soul.
And how does one “digest” experience? By accepting it, then adding it to an existing flow of energy–both emotional and subtle–within oneself.
Kum Nye, on this account, could literally be rendered “the practice and science of emotional and spiritual digestion, which is to say internalization and integration and reradiation.”
What is the life of the body? Doing. What is the life of the soul? Being. They are intertwined.
I recently started reading Marcus Aurelius, and the Stoic philosophy is in important attributes identical to that of Buddhism. You are reject desire and aversion, and you try to “cling” to what is real, what is good, what is eternal. The Hindu phrase Sukkhadukhasamo (Happiness and pain the same) applies.
And spiritual digestion is health, and health is happiness.
This morning I was contemplating the odds of the survival of our Republic as something not run by leering bastards who sell themselves cheap and don’t understand anyone unwilling to do so. The odds are against sanity, decency, and goodness.
But then I thought to myself: all I can control is me. My focus needs to be on maintaining my own integrity–of keeping myself from being pulled to pieces and scattered to the four winds by inconsistency, lies, and denial–and the rest is out of my control. And here is the core truth I realized: this is simultaneously PRACTICAL and idealistic. It is the best of all worlds. It is very difficult, but intelligent, and generous to the extent generosity truly is a gift to the world.
I get moments of this, of connection even to “bad” energies, and it is FASCINATING. The sum product of “bad” energies and my own life is completely unpredictable. Beauty can be found in ugliness, joy in the processing of pain. Life can be a miracle where it DOES NOT MATTER what “happens” to you.
These are old teachings, old skills, not very common any more. But everything that was ever possible remains possible, in my view.