The Rainbow Body

Father Francis Tiso, a Catholic priest, has written an astonishing book, Rainbow Body and Resurrection, about the phenomenon of the rainbow body in Tibetan Buddhism. The rainbow body is pretty much exactly what Obi-Wan manifests when his Jedi robe falls empty to the floor, what Luke manifests when his wafts empty into the air. At death the physical body of a practitioner of high spiritual attainment is said to “dissolve into atoms without remainder.”* The real-life rainbow body differs from Luke’s or Obi-Wan’s dematerialization only in that the dissolution takes a bit of time, typically about a week.

*Rainbow Body and Resurrection, p. 26.

Astonishingly, the rainbow body isn’t mere legend. Far from it. In his book, Father Tiso documents the case of the rainbow body of Abbot A Chö, which took place in July, 1998. He bases his account on the testimony of a half-dozen eyewitnesses, whom he personally interviewed in the summer of 2000, just two years later. 

Father Tiso is left with no doubt that the phenomenon is real, and he’s led to this breathtaking conclusion:

Both the rainbow body and the resurrection are claims that make statements about human possibilities attainable by all human subjects under certain conditions. What has been imagined to have taken place in one person may be imagined as happening to anyone. . . .  The deeper impulse of religious imagination . . . stretches out . . . to make universal claims about the nature of the human person, and those claims are what demand a change in our lives.

Rainbow Body and Resurrection, p. 7.

Or, more simply, letting the Jedi robe fall empty—dematerializing the illusory body given us by The Matrix—is a potential we all possess. It’s universal. It’s as much a part of our nature as whatever the genetic switch is that lets Clarke’s Kids spontaneously evolve their über-mind-meld—except that Clarke’s putative switch is entirely fictitious while our potential for the rainbow body is absolutely real. And don’t forget that dematerializing is one of the supernormal powers Jesus shows off to his disciples once he has attained the Glorified Body after his resurrection—supernormal rather than supernatural because that’s precisely what Jesus is showing the disciples, precisely the astounding assertion Father Tizo is making: literally dematerializing is a possibility “attainable by all human subjects under certain conditions.” There’s nothing supernatural about it.

Two further things:

First, to realize the potential of the rainbow body demands, Father Tiso tells us, a change in our lives. A radical one, we may assume.

Second, Father Tiso, from his perspective as a Catholic priest, notes that Buddhism surprisingly lacks a ritual

comparable to the Christian Eucharist . . . in which the entire cosmic process can be summed up and directed towards a transcendent and definitive future. This reluctance to embrace a liturgical analogy for the cosmic process has always puzzled me.

Rainbow Body and Resurrection, p. 7.

Maybe the traditional Eucharist is nothing more than “a liturgical analogy,” but the Über-Eucharist sure as heck isn’t. As Flannery O’Connor famously said, “If it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” The Über-Eucharist is a liturgical technology, the ritual—an algorithm, we might call it—that both directs “the entire cosmic process” towards, and more importantly effects our “transcendent and definitive future”—what Clarke envisions in Childhood’s End as The Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis. 

The Über-Eucharist, in short, makes it so.