The Manas's Habit Energy of Clinging to the Body

Ru Chun: During sitting meditation, it felt as if a force from within was about 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 clinging severely to the body, unable to 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; the sensation felt very real and vivid, and it startled me 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; even while asleep it keeps guarding itself.

Commentary: This is a phenomenon of the qi meridians penetrating the crown of the head. When the whole body is being regulated and renewed, one will feel as if the body is about to be torn apart by the impact force of the qi meridians. For ordinary people, the manas indeed clings very strongly to the body, with heavy attachment to it. This is a habit of the manas accumulated over 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 constantly together with the physical body, constantly aware of the body's condition, and can swiftly control the whole body through the central nervous system of the brain—even during sleep this is so. Therefore, the physical body reacts to states very rapidly.