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A changing experience of "body"
RichardH
Veteran
I have been noticing how through meditation the sense of body, of "this body", has changed from pre-practice days until now. There has been a kind of progression. It looks something like this.....
1. I am a mind subject inside my body. My body is bound by skin. It is me, mine. Beyond my skin is an indifferent world that is not me. Me and my body are a warm spot in a cold world, I need to draw near to other warm spots. I am very aware of my existential vulnerability.
2. My mind and body are one thing, but this perception wavers. I also have a perception of the space in which my body moves. I am part of the world, I am connected to it, but it is still not me. There is existential vulnerability but it remains superficial.
3. I am a still silence and my mind and body are objects along with the world, The body sense and the sense of the environmental space in which the body moves, are a single sensation.
There is no existential vulnerability. There are superficial disturbances.
4. Mind, body, and environment, are a single sensation, There is no subject seeing this, there is only the body and mind belonging to the karma of the world . The world is self luminous. Alone. There is no existential vulnerability. There are no superficial disturbances.
At this point in practice body sense 1 is gone. When some heavy karmic button gets pushed there can be moments of body sense 2. The default mode is body sense 3. In times of strong practice (like on retreat) there is body sense 4. The basic movement over time is of the sense of "body" including more and more until it includes the totality of experience. It goes from being a discreet object within a field, to being a field in which descete objects live and move, to being both. This is not a created sense, it is already there, just screened out, so this is an uncovering process.
1. I am a mind subject inside my body. My body is bound by skin. It is me, mine. Beyond my skin is an indifferent world that is not me. Me and my body are a warm spot in a cold world, I need to draw near to other warm spots. I am very aware of my existential vulnerability.
2. My mind and body are one thing, but this perception wavers. I also have a perception of the space in which my body moves. I am part of the world, I am connected to it, but it is still not me. There is existential vulnerability but it remains superficial.
3. I am a still silence and my mind and body are objects along with the world, The body sense and the sense of the environmental space in which the body moves, are a single sensation.
There is no existential vulnerability. There are superficial disturbances.
4. Mind, body, and environment, are a single sensation, There is no subject seeing this, there is only the body and mind belonging to the karma of the world . The world is self luminous. Alone. There is no existential vulnerability. There are no superficial disturbances.
At this point in practice body sense 1 is gone. When some heavy karmic button gets pushed there can be moments of body sense 2. The default mode is body sense 3. In times of strong practice (like on retreat) there is body sense 4. The basic movement over time is of the sense of "body" including more and more until it includes the totality of experience. It goes from being a discreet object within a field, to being a field in which descete objects live and move, to being both. This is not a created sense, it is already there, just screened out, so this is an uncovering process.
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Comments
The skinbag theory sounds too hollow even in daily life with normal conscious states. I mean, the body-mind interconnection is just too obvious.
In meditation, I sometimes get to the point where the body sort of falls away and isn't noticed any longer, but the subject-object dichotomy is still there.
Cheers, Thomas
The OP was not an attempt at a theory. It isn't trying to prove or disprove anything. It is a description, a painting, of the experience of "body", and how this has changed over the long term . It might ring a bell, it might not.
I meditate and meditate and......Buddha Amitabha has not appeared with my lotus flower yet....so...I just keep on meditating and meditating....
That avatar was use once by a fellow in the San Francisco Bay area. That you?
Just be cheerful and open mindedness in your meditation. When we meet in the Land of Ultimate Bliss one day, you would know the real self. The fellow is just another body of our truth self
....also I take it your not my old acquaintance from the bay area.:)
First of all I must thank you for your clear description... you are able to articulate the experience very well
I once asked Thusness about the body-mind drop-off question. It is a rather similar sort of question...
Anyway, I (and Thusness) would call experience 3) the experience of One Mind, and 4) the experience of No Mind.
What you described as 4 is No-Mind, but to have effortless and constant experience of 4), insight of Anatta need to arise.
The center and still point will not disappear as a result of intermittent experience of no-mind. It requires deep insight of Anatta to realize the fundamental flaw of wrong view as the cause of the center. The center is the karmic tendency to hold, but in actual experience, it is just the world that is self-luminous. Always and only this vivid obviousness, nothing else.
So forget about the still point at the center of a turning world, all points on the surface of a sphere are 'A center'. The article on Tada! will be helpful.
Any wording that employs the concept of body and mind is bound to be dualistic. However, the skinbag theory -which is a deprecative name for the theory of embodiment- exaggerates this duality to the point of insanity. It just feels wrong to me... on the other hand, the mind/body duality runs incredibly deep... I don't think that wetness and water describes the idea of interconnectedness accurately, because the physical and the nonphysical have no common conceptual ground, or perhaps... whatever common ground there is lies beyond words.
Yes, I know. I tried to relate to it, but it appears that I could not.
Cheers, Thomas
I dont see "interconnection" at all. Interconnection is based on there being two things to connect. There aren't. "Common ground" implies a split where there is none. It is only an experienced mis-perception. There is no ground to return to.
"In the colder autumn air, the trees are changing colour and fallen leaves line the gutters of the streets. And seeing this, we know winter is coming. But although most of us sitting here today have seen this happen again and and again, year after year after year, we don't really know what the cold of winter will actually be like. We have memories of cold fingers, the sound of snow crunching underfoot, memories of having to put on many layers to protect ourselves from an icy wind. But memories of cold are not the reality of cold. It is what it is and we will know cold when it is...cold. Tada. And now, before the snow comes, we see the colour fading from our immediate world as the trees lose their leaves and bare branches stand out black against a graying sky. And mixed into, and swirling along with the leaves in the street, are discarded paper cups, gum wrappers, used Kleenex and the odd sandwich wrapper. All swirling in the wind. Is it beautiful? Is it ugly? Neither. Is it good or bad? Neither. It is Tada"
http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2010/04/tada.html
Be honest now, what you really wanted to say was..."Man-Boobs"
My experience with this is limited, but it is reminiscent of the Khemaka sutra: </snip>
Thanks. This is a good sutta. I remember Ajahn Amaro talks about two kinds of 'self' conceit, one is called Sakkaya-dhitti (something to do with personality conceit), the other one is a more subtle sense of self that I cannot remember its name.
According to Ajahn Amaro, Sakkaya Dhitti is removed even at Sotapanna (Stream Entry) level. At this point the stream enterer no longer says 'I am this and that', however, the very core and subtle sense of 'I am', which he described (as I remember it) as a subtle sense of a center, a subtle observer, is only completely and permanently dissolved at the level of Arhant via deep insight.
This....
"Just like a cloth, dirty & stained: Its owners give it over to a washerman, who scrubs it with salt earth or lye or cow-dung and then rinses it in clear water. Now even though the cloth is clean & spotless, it still has a lingering residual scent of salt earth or lye or cow-dung. The washerman gives it to the owners, the owners put it away in a scent-infused wicker hamper, and its lingering residual scent of salt earth, lye, or cow-dung is fully obliterated".
....seems to refer to the lingering absence of an obsever, rather than the presence of a subtle observer. When there is no subject, no center, there can still be the wiff of it's absence. When it is truly clarified, this absence is forgotten.
Yet there is a sadness when the pet gets ill , then it is seemingly lost in the quagmire of thoughts about me. Even when the body is seen as it is, which is form , there is still the question of the other aggregates. so ease up on the body and look at the I , Me, and Mine. This is what is inevitably comes up in my contemplations, that this body is just skin, but there is an emotional center that makes it me. Good Luck..
Same