Wednesday Night Lecture with Loriliai Biernacki

This presentation looks at the subtle body in relation to both a contemporary biology and a current technology of transhumanism. As hopeful Google tech entrepeneurs like Ray Kurzweil propose, a technological promise of a human immortality is within reach, with the idea of an encodable self, its memories and desires as so many bits of information that might be detached from the physical body and transferred into a durable metallic body. I counter this here with a different model for self, a microbiological metaphor for thinking about incarnation and the body, a fermentation metaphor, what I will call here a yogurt model for self. This draws on Indian ideas of the subtle body to give us a different way of thinking about incarnation. We will look at images from Tantra, at the slippery boundaries where a person leaves the body, disincarnates, particularly while still alive. I will give two examples that reveal a sense of the slippage between the body and the subtle body that can move between bodies in the case of yogis who leave their meditating bodies to inhabit other bodies.