Cadavers, Meditation, Anatomy and the Body

Sitting still, following the breath, the grass grows by itself. The stream outside flows softly, fish swimming with no direction. Art ideas flow to my mind, scrolls, bodies, and life stories, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Buddha, my breath.
In and out it goes, softening the mind, softening the gaze, eyes open looking at nothing, gravity below, my sense of perception fades away, no eye or ear, no cushion no back no knee. Some time later the bell rings, and people get up to walk. I am back to my senses, filled with energy, clear, I find myself still sitting, another hour goes by timelessly, another bell rings, instructions for another type of meditation, I can’t hear, just watch softly, like a quiet, slow silent movie, I drop again, feeling myself dissolve, where do I go?
Last weekend was an intensive meditation weekend at Marpa house, a beautiful residential Shambala center. This followed some meditation classes we had at the huge and well-kept Shambala center in Boulder.

Is there a soul to this body? Are we just flesh and bones?
As we arrived to studio 50 in a commercial area outside Boulder, the smell of formaldehyde was in the air. The room, or big warehouse space rather, was very clean, high ceilings, and some black boards. In the far end I could spot two large metal tables with a top that looked like a shiny silver coffin.
Tod, the anatomy specialist gives us a long intro in preparation for the experience. We then put on white coats and gloves, almost like we were a bunch of doctors about to enter the surgery room.
We roll over the metal tables and some other tables that have blue or yellow plastic bags to the center of the room. These could easily be identified as containing bodies.
We start with Frank, then we look at William, the bodies have names, after death names. The bodies are real, but lying lifeless, somewhat dissected, there is something less human about them. The “life”, the energy is missing. Someone said the soul is missing. This body, 80 years old when it stopped functioning on its own, before it donated itself to science, was alive, moving, digesting, seeing, thinking, where is the thinker now? What happened to the memories? Are they stored in the non-functioning hard drive called brain? Were the feelings a matter of the sense organs only? What was the force that kept it going, and where is that force now?

Muscles, tendons, and bones, each cadaver is dissected to different layers. Digestive system comes out, I hold the pancreas, stretch the small (but long) intestine, hold a brain split in two, move the jaw as I look at the gold sitting on the teeth, touch the ribs and observe the pelvis.
The first moment at the cadaver lab, reminds me of identifying my dad at the morgue in the hospital in Be’er Sheva Israel, but there he was still in one piece. Back then I still had memories to tag to the freshly dead body. Sounds and touch I could still feel through my mind.
Then I let this memory go. The bodies in front of me, with all their history, are now just bodies. History behind they can almost seem like animal parts that I recognized at a hustling kitchen or a whole foods store.

Richard Freeman, our Yoga Guru (teacher) bends the bones of the leg to place them in Padmasana, the lotus sitting position, and a crack sounds, the meniscus was torn. Ouch, good thing there is no one to feel the pain anymore.
It’s another reminder that this body is not really ours. I remember walking into the super sanitized room where Eran, my dear friend was laying, Cancer swimming in his blood, tubes in his veins, and a look in his eyes so different than a few months earlier when we were traveling in the north east of the US.
Eran’s body was so different, was it still him? A week later Eran’s body stopped functioning. Where did Eran go? Did he stop functioning? Was there an essence, a “Purusha”, an ever-prevailing energy that slipped out of the tired body and kept going, formless. This body of ours, changes so easily all the time. So many of its functions happen without consulting with us. The breath flows in and out, the heart beats and we don’t need to think of it. At times our body weakens, and we feel sick. If this is our body, how can it be doing things we don’t want it to?
If we loose an organ or an arm, is it still our body? We can take another organ away, and another, at what point does it cease to be our body? We sure are the caretakers of this body, this functioning machine that hosts our sense organs, our brain and all the tools to function in this material world, but is this all we are?

Looking at my fingers as they type away, I smile with gratitude.