The legend of Adam and
Eve has been interpreted in various ways troughout history, often with sexual
connotations.
Personally what caught my eye is that after eating the
forbidden fruit they immediately realised that they were naked and tried to
cover themselves. What it could in fact mean is that they turned their attention
to the outside and were not satisfied to just "Be" anymore but felt the need to
be "Something".
They became preoccupied of their identity towards the
outside, how they were seen and how they saw themselves. The clothes they put on
are in fact "inner clothes", a "mental mantle", something they identified
themselves. They were not satisfied anymore to just be, they saw themselves as
naked and empty, they decided to put on some external identity instead of
growing to be themselves.
Sometimes when we wake up early in the morning
we experience this kind of nakedness, our dreams of the night have stripped us
of our identities, we forgot who we were, what we were, we forgot all about our
identities in this world. This is the moment when we haven't put on our inner
clothes yet, when we feel naked in front of the world, when we don't have yet
the mental mantles of identities and motivations that we use to protect us in
the world. We face then the fear of who we are in this world, our nakedness in
front of it. Then slowly we put on our mantles of identities, our sexual, human,
familial, professional, social and other identities that motivate us and
reassure us. The world and ourselves are not that big question anymore, we are
"something".
Various meditative traditions recommend the early morning to
start meditation. The Indian tradition calls that best meditation time the hour
of Brahma, the "Brahma Murta", before sunrise, when the dawn slowly rises in the
night sky.
The early morning is the moment when we haven't put our inner
clothes on yet, when we don't know where they are and for a short moment we
don't know where we have put them. Sometimes it takes some time to collect them
all.
This moment is the best for any introspective activity because we have
the chance to see ourselves as we are and the world as it is, not trough the
layers of the identities we put on and desperately cling on. All the
frustrations that we feel during the day, we realise at that moment that they
are not about us, they are just about those clothes we put on and believe they
are us.
The fear we feel sometimes when we are "naked" is in fact this habit
of searching for our mental mantles, "Who am I?", "WHAT am I?" "What am I in
this world? Am I? I must be "something"?".
The fear is not the nakedness, it
is not You, it is the reaction to nakedness.
If we could calmly face
ourselves "as we are" without the immediate need to be "something" maybe we
would discover that there is more than we think in that "nakedness", that "we"
are inside, nor as a concept but as a direct perception of our nature in action
at this very moment.
In fact, the Brahma Murta gives you a great opportunity.
All the worries, all the smaller or bigger obsessions that occupied you yesterday
are gone for a short period of time. In that period you may realise that all those
things that "tortured" you yesterday, absorbed you completely, are not present yet.
You haven't put your "mental clothes" of worries and obsessions yet and you have the oppotunity
to realise that YOU are not dependent on them, they are not YOU.
You become able to discriminate between yourself and the construct of thoughts and emotions
that imprisons your mind and body most of the day.
There is a lot about yourself
and your own patterns of thoughts and energies that can be learned during
the Brahma Murta.
The period, sometimes the minutes after your awakening in the morning, can be very important.
At that moment you might experience the layers of the "clothes" that you call "you", not all together, not amalgamated and undistiguishable as you probably percieve them during the day, but one by one, in the order you "put them on".
In that state, you might realise individual layers and the relationship between them. You might realise that each layer is something that you do, something that you feel, and then do again as a reaction, that they are feedback loops or processes linking to other processes and actions.
It may not be necessary to go out of your bed and meditate in the cold, even if doing so can have its own specific effects. You can stay in your bed and remain in an intermediary state where you haven't fully put your mental and energetic clotes, allowing you to put them on and take them off many times in alternance. It could allow you to distinguish them better, better discriminate what they are and what you are doing in each layer. You can also see their relationships and what they really are.
You might slow down the process of putting on your layers to such extent that you could realise where do you reach for what you call "you", what do you reach for and why - what do you do with what you reach for. What feedback loops are established between those images of yourself - which are your relationships with the world - and other images of other relations.
How is it connected with your "emotions" - in fact your body energies, the energetic meaning of those images.
You might begin to uncover the system of references you call "you".
I mentioned the morning, but it can be the evening, the night, or some other moment when you put on or also take off your mental clothes - everyone has some individually best suited times. The evening and the time before sleep are periods when we tend to take off our mental clothes and we may better distinguish between their layers and their respective relationships.
We may dissociate them better and discriminate between them.
So next time,
when you wake up early in the morning, before putting on your mental clothes try to experience the emptiness
and nakedness of the Brahma Murta, perhaps will you
have a glimpse of yourself free of the coercion of daily obsessions and fears. Perhaps will you
feel the free inner causality that it is really YOU.