The body in consciousness - untangling the sense of "me"

So let’s take some time to just settle into the practice. Settle into your body. Settle into a posture that is low-key, gentle. A posture that doesn’t take life too seriously but is still bright and alive. And take some time to acknowledge the utter mystery of existence, of life. We don’t need to think about this, don’t need to try and formulate any questions or answer any questions, but just let your mind kind of open to the strangeness and the mystery of the very fact that we’re alive. If there’s any sense that we’ve got everything figured out, we know what’s what — just introduce that to the reality that really there’s a mystery at the heart of everything. Let this foster an attitude of divine ignorance. I don’t know. So important when we’re doing practices to explore our experience in this way: I don’t know it. And see if this sense of “I don’t know” can support a willingness to explore and a desire to really be here, to experience whatever we’re experiencing. With this attitude, we can just spend some more time checking in with the body and the heart. How is it to be here right now? How is the body? And you may have an answer to that question, but don’t hold it too tightly — let the question just be an invitation to look with more sensitivity, more subtlety. If I’m tired, if I’m anxious, if I’m restless, my mind is busy — how does this show up in my body right now as a felt experience? And opening to the emotional state that we find ourselves in — all the shifting flow of different moods, different emotional flavours. Even when we feel quite neutral emotionally, there’s a lot of subtlety going on behind this neutrality. Tuning into your emotional landscape too, allowing and welcoming whatever you find there. We’ll spend a minute or two with the breath, just allowing the breath to settle us, to bring us deeper into connection with our experience of being here right now. Then we’re going to start this exploration of consciousness and identification with the body and the mind. Actually going to start by tuning into sounds. And as a sound arises in your environment — or my voice, or whatever sounds are available to you — just be clear: this sound is happening in my consciousness. It’s happening in your consciousness. What does that mean? It means that a sound arises and it is known, and it is witnessed, and it is heard by awareness. This is the most obvious thing in the world. If there was no consciousness, there would be no sound. Another way to say this is: the sound is an object for consciousness. There is the Subject “me” (in inverted commas), and there is the object “sound”, “it”. So sounds arise totally without our control, as experiences in consciousness — experiences for consciousness — and consciousness just receives them graciously. It can’t really do anything else. Notice the sense that sounds are external to you. What does this mean? This means that the mind somehow knows that the sound is not me. It’s not happening in me, it’s coming from the outside world. We’re going to sort of play with this sense in a minute, but for now just notice that that’s present. So our normal interpretation of things is: external sound meets internal awareness, creating the experience of hearing. I’m just inviting you to recognise what’s already happening. You don’t need to make anything happen here. So next, find some experience in your body — and let’s say not the breath for this particular exploration. Something like the sense of the tingles in your feet, or just the experience of having shoulders, or some part of your body that’s not quite so central as your breath can be — tension in your forehead. Find this experience. And all we’re going to do is notice that in exactly the same way as a sound just appears in consciousness, so too do the experiences in the body. So in this part of the body, sensations arise. They are known by consciousness — just like sounds. This is happening completely without your control. Body sensations just happen. What we may be able to notice is that unlike sounds, there’s a sense that arises with the experience that this is me somehow. So the tingles in my fingers or toes, tension in my forehead, whatever it is — it arises as an object for consciousness. Excuse me — it arises as an object in consciousness, for consciousness — just in the same way as with sounds. But there’s a sense along with this that this is me. This particular object is internal. So a body sensation arises, it is known by consciousness, and it’s labelled in this subtle way: Internal. Me. Mine. Sounds arise, they’re known by consciousness, they’re labelled: External. Not me. Not mine. Habitually, this is how we sift our experience into “me” and “not me”. We want to just see this for what it is. This process we’re going to continue. And for the next part, we’re going to look for the experience that has the strongest sense of “me” attached to it. So just open to your whole body, your mind, your heart, and just see what most feels like “me”. Where am I in all of this? The question might lead to a kind of blankness or confusion. You might get the sense that you’re in your head somewhere, maybe in your chest. Which experience has the strongest sense of belonging to you, or being you? So for example, in my experience, it feels like the strongest sense of me is around my eyes somehow — I live here. So see what it is in your experience, and then hold this experience in awareness. And again, just acknowledge: this is an object for consciousness. This is an experience in consciousness. And very often when we do this, the sense of me or mine softens in the experience. It now just feels like I’m aware of the experience of having eyes, and subtle tension around my eyes, in my head. But there’s not such a strong sense of: this is me. We want to be very clear that experiences in the body cannot possibly be me — because I am watching them. This is just going one step further than we’ve gone so far. The sensations of the body arise, they’re met by consciousness to form the experience of the body. And we can be clear: anything that I can see, that I can feel — anything that is an object for my consciousness to experience — cannot be me. A fleeting experience, subject to impermanence, as all experiences are. It’s a flicker of light, a flicker of energy. We can continue this process with whatever body sensations, emotions, even thoughts that arise. We notice them. We spend a moment clearly seeing that they are an object, they are an experience. They are arising without our control as an appearance in consciousness. And we contemplate: any experience known by me cannot be me. With that in the back of our minds, we hold the experience of the body, the heart, the mind in awareness — and let it just be another experience. No different in essence from the birdsong outside, the traffic noise, the hum of your fridge — whatever else is going on. The construction of a boundary between me and the external world happens afterwards. The mind comes in and attaches this label: me, mine; not me, not mine. By staying with the raw experience, noticing that it’s just an object in consciousness, an experience in consciousness, we’re settling into an awareness that’s prior to this managing of things into internal and external. And if the mind wants to figure all of this out and ask questions like, “Well, what am I then? Am I consciousness? Am I something else?” — just leave those questions aside. We just want to apply this lens to our experience: whatever I know, as consciousness in consciousness, cannot be me — for it is an impermanent experience. So the body is just happening, the mind is just happening — flow of experience, all held by the steady, silent vastness of consciousness. We can rest with this sense for the last couple of minutes, really sensing and being clear: the body is an arising in consciousness, not the other way around.