For example, to believe that I’m not a body but I have a body is very useful at some point when I begin to recognize and deal with my body image. As I begin to realize that I am identified with a body image, it is possible for me to recognize that I am a consciousness or spaciousness that has a body. This insight may manifest as truth at some point, which then transforms my experience. But this truth is not final. A year or two later, I might start having certain issues that I recognize are there because I make a separation between my body and my soul. I think I am a soul that has a body or a body that has a soul. At the time, it was useful for me to recognize that I am a soul that has a body, but a year later that truth becomes a falsehood because I recognize then that the body is nothing but a manifestation of the soul. There is no body separate from the soul. The soul doesn’t have a body, like a possession; the body is as much a part of the soul as my feelings are a part of the soul. – Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, ch. 5
If you go to the level of dealing with the physical or the body image, you will see that your body image is not accurate. Most people don’t see their bodies, even in terms of shape, the way they really are. Many beautiful women don’t see themselves as beautiful. From these distortions in our self-image we build all kinds of psychological self-image compensations: I want to be beautiful, dress this way, cut my hair like this, have certain kinds of friends, have this kind of environment around me, get the best fashions, the whole thing. But at the bottom of it is a certain misperception of the body image. We need to understand the body image, to actually see what is really there, because the identity is very much involved with it. Understanding the body image, seeing your unconscious body image, contrasting it with what is actually there, corrects the misunderstanding. It will also eliminate the attachments, because the attachments arise from this misunderstanding. And this will bring in the next level of the void, what we call the dense space, because the body is dense compared to the self, and it is felt or sensed in this way. So another level of space will come that will erase or correct the body image by understanding the body image, which will itself eliminate the attachments to the body image, attachments on the level of the physical image. Now the truth emerges that I am not my physical image. First we free our identity, our external self-image, then we free ourselves from the external body image. It’s not a matter of whether I’m ugly or beautiful, tall or short, graceful or gawky. It’s not that I have a big penis and that’s why everybody likes me, or a small penis and that’s why nobody loves me, it’s not that you have or haven’t got something. The way my body appears does not define who I am. – Diamond Heart Book Two: The Freedom to Be, ch.4
The body is also an important instrument for living fully in this physical world. It allows us to sense, in refined and gross ways, the immediacy of experience, grounding mind and heart. The scrolls of hidden material accumulated throughout a lifetime are unearthed, understood, and clarified by listening to and feeling the visceral story told by the physical body. – Karen Johnson, The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 3
The complete multidimensional self can be experienced only in the fullest realization of presence. In this condition of primordial presence, thoughts, feelings and images do exist, but in a different way than they do in the conventional dimension of experience. These aspects of the self are felt to be completely inseparable from presence itself, not in the sense of two things tied together, but in the sense of coemergence. We do not experience the body as the container of the presence; nor do we experience presence as containing the body. These perceptions might appear in the course of spiritual development, but they are incomplete in that they retain the duality between presence and body. When the experience of oneself as primordial presence is complete, this presence is coemergent with the body. If we imagine being aware in an immediate way of the general shape and sensations of the body, its various parts and organs, and simultaneously aware of the protoplasm of the body, then we will have some idea of the experience of the body and presence being coemergent. The physical body and its protoplasm form an inseparable unity; they are not two things that are somehow connected. Similarly, primordial presence is the fundamental ground and substance of the body, inseparable from it, although it is itself not physical. – A. H. Almaas, The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization, Ch. 3