The Habitual Tendency of Manas to Grasp at the Body

Ru Chun: During sitting meditation, it felt as if there was a force from within trying to tear my body apart from the inside out, and I involuntarily felt afraid, so I came out of that state. Is this a phenomenon of the manas grasping at the body so severely that it cannot break through for the moment? A couple of days ago, just as I fell asleep, I felt a small hole opening at the top of my head; it felt very real and vivid, and I was startled awake. Afterwards, when I carefully examined the sensation, it was merely a dense, tingling numbness that had arisen at the top of my head, for some unknown reason. The manas has a very strong sense of self-protection; it guards itself even while asleep.

Comment: This is a phenomenon that occurs when the qi channels are penetrating the crown of the head; the whole body is being regulated and renewed, so it feels as though the body is about to be torn apart by the impact force of the qi channels. For ordinary people, the manas indeed grasps at the body very strongly, with a heavy attachment to the physical body. This is a habituation of the manas from beginningless kalpas: because of ignorance, it takes the physical body to be real and to be its own, and takes the states it faces to be real as well, and so it avoids the unwholesome and pursues the wholesome. Why can the manas make the physical body flee from a state so quickly? Because the manas is with the physical body at all times, constantly aware of the body's condition, and can swiftly control the entire body through the central nervous system of the brain—even during sleep this is so. That is why the physical body reacts to states so rapidly.