I'm Not My Body?

Who is not the body? What is the body?

People steeped in spirituality often say, “I am not my body.” Some say this because they firmly believe that they are an individual soul that enters the body at conception, temporarily occupies it, and then eventually moves on. Others say this because they feel a sense of themselves as an open, boundless aware presence within which, and as which, the whole universe appears and disappears.

In some versions of spirituality, the body is regarded as dirty and evil, and only pure spirit is holy and worthy of salvation. And in much of spirituality, there is a sharp division between mind and body, matter and consciousness, the material and the spiritual. This split isn’t there in Taoism and Zen, which is probably why I gravitate to them. Although I use the word spiritual to describe the nature of what I do, I’ve never really liked that word because it can mean so many things that I don’t mean.

From my perspective, this aliveness, this body-mind-world, this here-now-presence is one, whole, seamless happening that no word or concept can capture. And we are not other than this. We cannot get outside of this. We can only be this. And it very much includes the body and the experience of being a unique individual. But the more closely we look at “the body” and “the experience of being a unique individual,” the more unpindownable, ungraspable and evanescent these both seem to be.

This is a chapter in my book NOTHING TO GRASP:

Is the Body Real? Am I the Body?

There is only a stream of sensations, perceptions, memories and ideations. The body is an abstraction, created by our tendency to seek unity in diversity....It is like seeing the surface of the ocean and completely forgetting the immensity beneath.
—Nisargadatta Maharaj

There is no contradiction between body and spirit, between mind and matter. These are just words we use to understand one thing.
—Zoketsu Norman Fischer

A wave does not have to stop being a wave in order to be water.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

People steeped in spiritual ideas often say to me, “I know I’m not the body.” And I say, you are the body! That’s not all you are. You’re not limited to the body or encapsulated inside the body. You’re everything! And no-thing. What exactly is “the body” anyway? Look closely, and you’ll find that “the body” is only a mental image, a concept, an abstraction.

Everything is changing, so what we call “a body” (or “a river” or "a chair" or "a mountain") is not really the same "thing" from one instant to the next. No continuous form exists or stands apart from everything else in the universe. Everything is one undivided, boundless event.

Tune into sensing rather than thinking, and it is immediately clear that this so-called “body” is not a solid, enduring thing at all. It’s a mass of ever-changing, vibrating, pulsing sensations and activities. In the world of sensation, you cannot actually find where this body begins and ends. No boundary between “your body” and “the room in which you are sitting” can be located in sensation. The boundary is conceptual.

Close your eyes and explore the “boundary” between your body and the chair. You can find sensations, but where in those sensations do “you” end and where does “the chair” begin?

As you breathe, look to see where the border is between “inside of you” and “outside of you.” Do you find an actual place, a solid border, a real boundary of any kind?

When we think about the body, it seems solid and persisting and separate from everything else. When we sense the body instead, we discover ever-changing, undivided formlessness or flux.

The difference between thinking and sensing is like the difference between an anatomy book and a living person. Cut open a living person and everything is moving and pulsating and slippery and changing shape. It’s not neat and tidy and fixed and clearly delineated like the anatomy book, and it doesn’t hold still because it’s alive! The world created by thought is like the anatomy book. It’s abstract and frozen. Sensation is alive, ephemeral, vibrating, moving, ever-changing, ungraspable. But even thinking, the raw actuality of it as it is happening, is equally alive, ephemeral, moving, ever-changing, and ungraspable – every thought is an energetic flash that is gone almost before it arrives. But the content that thinking unfolds in the imagination, the picture-story that thought paints, that is what seems solid and fixed, although if you look closely, you see that even that is nothing but flux. Your stories, beliefs, opinions, ideas and self-images are always changing.

In fact, your body includes the entire universe because nothing is really separate from anything else. Your body is dependent upon and made up of sunlight, water, air, food, stardust and atomic energy – we could say that the whole universe is appearing as you. And furthermore, you might notice that the whole universe is appearing in you, isn’t it? When you look for the boundary between “you” (aware presence) and “the world out there” (perceptions and sensations), between “perceiver” and “perceived,” between “inside” and “outside,” between “subject” and “object,” what do you find? This imaginary boundary that we call “I” is an idea, a mental image, a kind of mirage, isn’t it?

The “I am not the body” pointer that we hear in many spiritual teachings is an attempt to point beyond the illusion of encapsulation and separation. It is an attempt to question the exclusive identification with the body as what “I” am and the tendency to take the body (it’s condition, appearance, tendencies, behaviors and abilities) personally. The “I am not the body” pointer is an attempt to point out that “the body” is a concept we have learned, not our actual present moment experience, which is actually boundless and seamless, ever-changing flux.

But instead, the “I am not the body” pointer often seems to inadvertently point people toward dissociation and some disembodied notion of being nobody or nothing. People get the idea that they aren’t supposed to care about the body (or the world), that the body is merely some kind of illusion to be discarded or ignored. The real illusion is how we think about the body, how we conceptualize and abstract it, how we imagine it to be solid, separate, independent and persisting. And above all, how we imagine an owner who occupies the body, a “me” who is encapsulated inside, steering the body through life like a car or a ship. This “me” wants to get enlightened and is therefore supposed to “not identify as the body,” and is instead trying to identify itself as pure awareness. That “me” that thinks it has to identify or not identify as this or that is the root illusion. But the body itself is totally real. Not the conceptualized body that we think about and imagine. But the actual body, which is no-thing that can be grasped or separated out from everything else. The real body is pure experiencing, pure being, pure awareness. It is the whole universe.

I have found working with the body to be one of the most powerful ways of realizing boundlessness. Martial arts training and other movement practices, singing, chanting, dancing, lovemaking, meditative explorations of bodily sensation, somatic awareness work such as Feldenkrais – these have all been profoundly liberating, transformative and enjoyable. Working or playing with the body can dissolve imaginary limitations and reveal the wholeness of being in ways that cannot be grasped or formulated by thought. These nonconceptual explorations happen on a deeper level than the cognitive mind.

Our suffering is mental and conceptual – it is all about the stories in our heads – the map-world rather than the territory itself. Anything that brings us out of our heads, out of our mental spinning, and into the aliveness of non-conceptual presence and awareness is potentially very liberating.

Go deeply into the body and you’ll find no body at all. In every sense.

—from Nothing to Grasp

In Buddhism, form and emptiness are not two. Emptiness refers to the way nothing can exist independently of everything else, the way nothing is pindownable, the way every apparent form is passing away in the moment it arrives. Emptiness is not simply the open space of awareness in which forms are appearing. It is the very nature of the forms themselves. Emptiness is not some “thing” apart from everything else. Emptiness appears as form, and form is always empty. This isn’t a nihilistic kind of emptiness. In fact, it could just as well be called fullness. It is this very moment, life as it is.

And Buddha Nature is not some ethereal state, but rather, it is simply this, life itself, this very moment, just as it is. It is the tree in the garden, the ostomy bag full of shit, the barking dog, the crumpled cigarette package in the gutter, the blossoming flower, the sound of rain, the sound of the leaf blower, the car crash on the freeway, the politician we hate, the erupting volcano, the gentle breeze, the night sky—the full catastrophe as Zorba the Greek famously said. It can’t be pulled apart. You can’t step outside of it. You can’t pin it down. The appearance is ever-changing and the awareness or presence is ever-present, and these are not two separate things.

What is this whole happening? The very question seems to place “you” outside of “it,” and therein begins the confusion, the search, the sense that something is missing. But right now, there is simply this. Reading these words. Breathing. Maybe a pain in the leg. Maybe a bird cheeping. And this vast open listening presence beholding (being and holding) it all.

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Love to all…