The Pulse of Being: Spandana and the Phenomenology of the Inner Body

We grow up believing that the body has an inside and an outside, that the skin divides our private self from the world around us. This is the enduring legacy of dualism: the world here, the self there, the body as a container for consciousness. This dualistic inheritance frames the body as a static object we have.

But there are other ways of knowing the body and, critically, other ways of being the body.

In the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, perception is not something that happens passively inside the head. The body is not a thing to be analyzed; it is the living field through which we exist. It is where the world appears, touches us, shapes us, and is shaped in return. Merleau-Ponty’s profound concept of reversibility, where the seeing body is also the seen, and the touching body is also the touched—offers a powerful critique of the boundary between inner and outer.

Yet, Merleau-Ponty’s exploration stopped short of fully developing what yogis know from millennia of practice: that the body is not only visible, tangible flesh, but also luminous depth, vibration, resonance, and subtle dimensionality.

This is where the Yoga of the Inner Body enters the conversation.

The Body as a Felt Dimensional Presence

We move past the mythologized body of abstract chakras and symbols, and beyond the fragmented body of anatomy textbooks. This practice focuses on the felt body, the one we encounter in stillness. It is the body that reveals itself only when we stop trying to look at it and start learning to inhabit it.

In deep, sustained meditation, something remarkable happens. The usual sensory rhythms soften, conceptual thought falls away, and the space between thoughts begins to vibrate.

And then something moves—not outwardly in the limbs, but profoundly inwardly.

This is the subtle pulse, the vibration, the quickening that ancient yogic texts call Spandana: the trembling of the life force as it becomes perceptible. This is not imagined or visualized; it is a direct, somatic encounter. It may begin as a barely noticeable ripple in the hands or lips, a subtle pulsing in the spine, or a tingling that spreads without clear direction—as if awareness itself were acquiring a texture. This is not “energy work”; this is awareness touching itself!

Spandana as Luminous Field Dynamics

The inner body, in this sense, is not a hidden interior of a physical object, but rather the thickness of experience. Spandana reveals that the body is not still; it is always trembling with life.

When the channels of perception clear, the body’s intrinsic field dynamics become undistorted. We find that the inner and the outer stop appearing as two different realms. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of breathing as the first form of reversibility, the body breathing the world and the world breathing the body—finds its ultimate expression here: breath itself becomes Spandana, a pulse of consciousness.

This phenomenon aligns directly with modern contemplative science. The tingling, the inner light (or phosphenes), and the sense of expansion are not simply artifacts of concentration. They are the subjective expression of what your associated research terms the Interosomatic-Visual Enactive Loop, the dynamic process where sustained attention stabilizes the underlying bodily-attentional field, leading to maximal coherence in the nervous system.

The movement toward this maximum state is the progression from subtle vibration to unitive luminosity (the Level 6 Experience of our taxonomy of inner light experiences), where the observer and the observed merge.

The Doorway to Immanent Coherence

This framework matters because it liberates the experience from symbolic overlays. You don’t need to “believe in” esoteric maps to feel Spandana; you just need to be still enough to feel what has always been there.

This is the foundation of the Yoga of the Inner Body: a practice based not on mythic metaphor, but on direct embodied phenomenology.

This is a yoga where:

• Sensation becomes Knowing (the validation is internal and direct).
• Vibration becomes Presence (the pulse is the presence of Being).
• The inner body becomes a doorway into the sacred—not transcendent and elsewhere, but immanent, pulsing, and coherently shimmering here.

When the body begins to vibrate, something is waking up. It is the body’s own intrinsic depth, its own light, its own knowledge of itself. This is the pulse of Being; this is Spandana; this is the beginning of inner awakening: the realization of Immanent Coherence. In this state, the luminous ground of consciousness becomes experientially present, dissolving the boundary between self and the world.

Source: Sarukkai, S. (2002). Inside/Outside: Merleau-Ponty/Yoga. Philosophy East and West, 459-478.