Body / No-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....You have never questioned your belief that you are the body….it attracts attention and fascinates so completely that rarely does one perceive one’s real nature. It is like seeing the surface of the ocean and completely forgetting the immensity beneath. The world is but the surface of the mind and the mind is infinite. What we call thoughts are just ripples in the mind. When the mind is quiet…it dissolves and only reality remains.

--Nisargadatta Maharaj

The ‘secret’ of life that we are all looking for is simply this: to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment.

--Joko Beck

Let the body act as may suit it. Why are you so concerned with it? Why do you pay attention to it?

--Ramana Maharshi

By touching deeply the phenomenal world, you can touch the noumenal world -- the world of no birth and no death....When you touch deeply the historical dimension, you touch the ultimate dimension, and when you have touched the ultimate dimension, you have not left the historical dimension....A wave does not have to stop being a wave in order to be water.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

One teacher says that the secret of life is nothing more or less than present moment sensory experiencing, and another teacher insists that we are not the body and even suggests that nothing perceivable or conceivable is real. Is awakening about being fully embodied and awake to present moment sensory experiencing or is it altogether beyond the body and the senses and even beyond consciousness itself? If we only hear these different pointers ideologically, they seem to be totally contradicting one another. But if we really hear them, perhaps they are pointing to exactly the same realization.

Toni Packer, my main teacher for many years, often draws attention to bird cheeps, the sound of wind, the sensation of our body meeting the chair, breathing, the beating of the heart. In her book The Silent Question, Toni writes:

It isn’t the content of the listening (such as birdcalls) that matters, but rather it’s the quality. Likewise in seeing, it is not what is seen that is of importance but the amazing fact that in the wholeness of seeing, the seer may disappear altogether! In complete seeing and hearing the ‘me’ is no longer the driving center, creating a dualistic world. Instead of the experience of ‘me’ and the flower or me and the birdsong, there is just the wholeness of what is heard and seen (touched and tasted) – too marvelous to describe in words: it is the ending of separation!

This wholeness (the ending of separation) isn’t something to get an idea about or think about, and it isn’t the content of any particular experience, such as the birdsong, but rather, it is the nondual seamlessness of the listener and the sound, for in reality, they are divided only by conceptual thought and language. The actual experience is undivided hearing. The aliveness is in the listening presence, the wholeness of being.

The body turns out to be a wonderful field for meditative exploration. By tuning into the body with awareness, by exploring it as pure sensation, we discover that there is no “body” (except as a mental concept, an abstraction of thought), and we discover that the whole universe is our body. The boundaries are not really there.

This realization isn’t something mystical and exotic. It is rather something so simple, so immediate, so obvious, so ever-present that we tend to overlook it because our attention is absorbed instead in the ubiquitous abstractions created by conceptual thought that are overlaid on top of bare being.

The actual experience Here / Now is nothing but ever-changing sensations. “The body” is an idea, an abstraction, a concept, a mental image, a thought-form. We can conceptualize a boundary-line between what we think of (and mentally picture) as “my body” and “the chair,” but when we look for this boundary-line with awareness, we find only ever-changing sensations and no clear delineation between “body” and “chair.” If we look with awareness for the place where “inside of us” turns into “outside of us,” we cannot find it. We know from modern physics that at the subatomic level, there is no solidity or substance and no boundaries. And this is our actual present moment experience right now if we pay attention to sensations and perceptions rather than to ideas and concepts. But we tend to ignore our actual experience in favor of the conceptual overlay that is so deeply conditioned and easily mistaken for reality. We mistake the map for the territory. We know from ecology that everything depends on everything else and that you cannot remove any part without altering the whole, but we easily overlook this in favor of our conceptual picture. We imagine a world of separate parts -- including “me”-- parts that can all be pulled apart and rearranged. Thus we imagine, “I could be somewhere else right now, and that would be better.”

Bringing awareness to the present moment, to sensory experiencing, to the actuality of the body, erases the body and the self completely, meaning that it erases the mirage of separate and enduring things and the imaginary boundaries between them, and it leaves only this seamless and all-inclusive boundlessness.

The real body (no body at all) is not a cadaver or an anatomy book picture. It is alive and fluid and moving. Experientially, it is nothing but ever-changing sensations. And in fact, it's an ever-moving process of blood circulating, cells dividing, nerves firing, heart beating, lungs expanding and contracting, food being taken in, broken down, disbursed or eliminated. The body is in constant exchange with the environment, the skin is porous and breathing, flaking off, regenerating, the breath is coming in and going out. Your body now is not the same body you had ten years ago, or ten days ago, or even back when you started reading this page less than ten minutes ago. Everything has changed since then -- your hormones, your neurochemistry -- the whole universe has moved. It is nothing but ceaseless change.

We can’t ignore the relative world in which we seem to be separate individuals in a world of other individuals, but we can learn to discern ever more subtly the difference between the anatomy book and the living body, between the map and the territory, between the thought of “me” and the actuality of present-moment experiencing. We can discover for ourselves that the actuality of the present moment is ungraspable and impossible to capture with thought, and that the deeper we go into the actuality of the body in direct experiencing, the more we find no-thing (no body) at all. And yet, this nothing (or nobody) is not some nihilistic void, but rather, a vibrantly alive overflowing presence.

This aliveness does not hold still. A friend of mine who was a surgical nurse described the shock of interns making their first cut in a living body. They’ve studied the anatomy book, they’ve dissected the cadavers, but now they’re cutting into a living organism and suddenly everything is slippery and pulsating and moving, blood is gushing out, everything is moving. This is real life. Nothing holds still. It’s a mess. And yet right in the heart of this messy impermanence, this utterly thorough-going flux, is true stillness, order and intelligence.

“Show me the Holy Reality,” a monk once asked the Master.
“It just moved!” the Master replied.

However we try to freeze the world conceptually, that is never the actual Truth.

Just as we have these seemingly contradictory teachings about the body, we also find some teachers telling us that the world is an illusion while others say that enlightenment is all about being a bodhisattva who cares deeply for the world. Again, it can seem that these are contradictory and irreconcilable teachings, but as with the apparently opposite pointers about the body, if we look more deeply, we may find that these seemingly divergent teachings about the world also point us to the very same realization, the very same reality. Ramana Maharshi expressed it beautifully when he said:

The world is illusory;
God alone is real;
God is the world.

The world that is illusory is “the world” we conceptualize. Like “the body” we conceptualize, this world is an abstraction, an idea, a map. And the stories we tell ourselves and each other about this mirage-like world are all in the end fictional. But when we discover God (boundlessness, seamlessness, emptiness), we discover the Reality of the world, the water in every wave.

There is a very powerful exchange with Nisargadatta Maharaj recorded in a chapter called “Living Is Life's Only Purpose” in the book I Am That:

Questioner: A message in print may be paper and ink only. It is the text that matters. By analysing the world into elements and qualities we miss the most important - its meaning. Your reduction of everything to dream disregards the difference between the dream of an insect and the dream of a poet. All is dream, granted. But not all are equal.

Maharaj: The dreams are not equal, but the dreamer is one. I am the insect. I am the poet - in dream. But in reality I am neither. I am beyond all dreams. I am the light in which all dreams appear and disappear. I am both inside and outside the dream. Just as a man having headache knows the ache and also knows that he is not the ache, so do I know the dream, myself dreaming and myself not dreaming - all at the same time. I am what I am before, during and after the dream. But what I see in dream, I am not.

Q: It is all a matter of imagination. One imagines that one is dreaming, another imagines one is not dreaming. Are not both the same?

M: The same and not the same. Not dreaming, as an interval between two dreams, is of course, a part of dreaming. Not dreaming as a steady hold on, and timeless abidance in reality has nothing to do with dreaming. In that sense I never dream, nor ever shall.

Q: If both dream and escape from dream are imaginings, what is the way out?

M: There is no need of a way out! Don't you see that a way out is also a part of the dream? All you have to do is to see the dream as dream.

Q: If I start the practice of dismissing everything as a dream, where will it lead me?

M: Wherever it leads you, it will be a dream. The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realise that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of the dream and not another. Love all, or none of it, and stop complaining. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done.

When we truly see that everything perceivable and conceivable is a momentary dream-like appearance and not a solid, persisting, objective reality that is "out there" somewhere, then we realize that the drama of our life and the drama of the world do not have the seriousness that we give to them. When we see that this dream-like mirage includes not only the world "out there," but that it also includes "me" as I think of myself, and even the barest sense of conscious presence, then we realize that no advantage or disadvantage is real in the absolute sense. When we see that all of our choices, decisions, preferences, intentions, interests, inclinations, thoughts and actions come from the Totality and not from “me,” the phantom operator, and that this is true of everyone else as well, then we are instantly free of guilt and blame, vengeance and retribution. There is no self and no other. This is true compassion. It doesn’t mean we approve of genocide, or that we allow child molesters to run free, but we see that those who commit such atrocities could not have done otherwise in that moment. We have compassion for them. We see that every action arises out of an infinite web of causes and conditions. Hitler could not have “chosen” to be Ramana Maharshi anymore than Ramana could have “chosen” to be Hitler. What we call “Hitler” or “Ramana” or “me” or “you” is not really a solid thing with some kind of objective reality or some kind of independent will, but rather, a boundless process that is inseparable from everything else in the entire universe. There is nothing to resist and nothing to seek.

We are not encapsulated inside a body living in a world "out there" as we had imagined, and as it turns out, seeing this doesn’t in any way deny the actuality of the body or the world either. If anything, we become infinitely more sensitive to the reality of both the body and the world. We see clearly that the whole universe is one seamless breathing, waving, thinking, singing, dancing, sensing, awaring, body-ing, world-ing, clouding, clearing, living, dying, being from which nothing stands apart. And we realize that this whole appearance is a kind of display or play, and that this play includes absolutely everything -- the beautiful and the horrific, clarity and confusion, pleasure and pain, enlightenment and delusion. Paradoxically, in recognizing the dream-like nature of the play, you don't become detached and distant, but rather, totally intimate. In the words of Wayne Liquorman: "As you walk the spiritual path, it widens, not narrows, until one day it broadens to a point where there is no path left at all." Everything is included.

“You are not your body” points to the realization that “you” and “your body,” as you think of them, are nothing but ideas. It doesn’t point to denying or ignoring the body, or to some kind of mystical disappearance into thin air. Likewise, saying that “the world is a dream” points to the realization that “the world” as we think of it (a solid objective reality “out there” apart from us) is a dream-like illusion, a conceptualization, a kind of mirage. It doesn’t mean there is no world in any sense or that we go around insisting genocide is only an illusion. Genocide is every bit as real as this moment right now. But how real is that, or put differently, what is real Here and Now?

If we zoom far enough out, this planet is nothing but a tiny dot of light, and finally it disappears completely. If we zoom in close enough, at the subatomic level, we find mostly empty space and nothing solid. Either way, zoomed in or zoomed out, the world as we know it with all our personal and global dramas is no longer here. This realization puts the world drama and our personal dramas into perspective.

As ways of exploring the nature of reality, both zooming out and zooming in can be powerful ways of waking up. Advaita teachings often emphasize zooming out. Sensory experiencing, the body, the world, and the entirety of conscious experience are seen as a kind of veil (Maya) that hides or obscures Ultimate Reality. In such teachings, there is often an attempt to detach and transcend, to see that nothing perceivable or conceivable can be what I am. Neti Neti -- I am not this, not that. These teachings encourage you to discover that what you truly are is prior to the world and the body. You are Boundless Awareness, or in some teachings, you are That which is prior to any notion or sense of "boundless awareness." The danger here is that the mind keeps trying to picture an object that is prior to every other object, rather than recognizing the Ultimate Subject that is being and beholding everything. The Ultimate Subject is not an object. It is the water in every wave. It is the screen that is present before and after the movie, that is equally present in every scene of the movie, and that is never disturbed by the movie. It is the no-thing-ness of everything, the formlessness of form. It is at once awareness and the content of awareness, form and emptiness, no-thing and everything. It is all there is, and all there is, is it.

Other teachings, such as Zen, begin by frustrating all your attempts to zoom out. You come to the Zen Master to find Ultimate Reality and enlightenment, and to your great consternation, all the Master ever does is give meticulous instructions for cleaning the toilet and sweeping the floor! Finally, you realize that Ultimate Reality is not someplace else. By giving careful attention to the form of this moment, you discover formlessness or emptiness. You discover that nothing holds still. And yet, there is a great stillness at the very heart of everything. Stillness and movement, like form and emptiness, are found to be not one, not two.

I have found both of these approaches, zooming in and zooming out, potentially eye-opening and helpful. I tend to prefer zooming in because I've noticed that when we try to transcend or detach, the mind tends to create a new object, a transcendent something that is now thought to be the source and substance of everything else. That is perhaps the slipperiest of all illusions. We keep trying to imagine or picture “formless nothingness” or “the screen,” or "boundless awareness," or "The Ultimate Subject," as if this were some thing. It takes effort to keep this imaginary creation always in mind, to keep remembering that “I am formless nothingness” and not the person, the screen and not the movie. We fall into an inner conflict, attracted by the movie and at the same time trying to turn away and detach from it. When this detached witnessing is clung to as something special and separate, it becomes another veil, another form of dualism.

What all these teachings are really pointing to is the bare actuality of Here / Now -- the ever-present, ever-changing aliveness that cannot be grasped by conceptual thought. It cannot be grasped, and yet, it is impossible to avoid. It is this very moment, Here / Now, just as it is. Being awake is simply relaxing into the openness that allows everything to be as it is without trying to grasp it with thought, and without trying to push thought away either. Nothing needs to be banished or acquired or transformed in order to be what you always already are. And one of the most reliable ways of discovering insubstantiality, boundlessness and the absence of separation firsthand is to give close and careful attention to the bare sensory actuality of the present moment. Instead of trying to ignore or transcend the world of form (the body and the world), go directly into the apparent forms and see what is revealed. Discover for yourself how fluid and ephemeral and empty of self it all actually is.

Discover that true happiness, beauty, joy, and freedom is not in any particular form, but rather in the awareness or presence at the heart of every form. Happiness is then no longer dependent upon getting the perfect lover, or the perfect location, or the perfect scenery, or the perfect job. It is about recognizing true perfection here and now. And in this realization of fluidity and wholeness, our grip on all our most cherished beliefs and ideas relaxes, along with our need to defend “me” and “my” point of view. We may still have strong opinions, but we become more open to questioning them, more able to see and consider other viewpoints, less caught up in “being right” and “winning” and “getting even.” More and more, we can enjoy the actual messiness of life as it is. Our ideals for how everything “should” be are like the anatomy book or the cadaver -- dead. However hard we try, the living body will never be “perfect” like that, and actually, that's wonderful!

This alive and wondrous and utterly ungraspable IS-ness is true freedom. It is not the freedom to do what you want, but rather, the freedom to be what you are. What are you? Nobody at all, everything and nothing, and at the same time, at every moment, a particular snowflake unlike any other. The whole universe is showing up as you, as this moment, just as it is.

In simple beingness, there is no “you” and no “body” and no “world” and no “problem to solve” until thinking begins labeling the sensations and telling a story. And that story is only another momentary shape that emptiness is taking, just like the bird songs and the traffic roar.

Emptiness is nothing you can see or grasp or experience or possess or pin down. You can only be this emptiness. And in fact, you cannot not be it. And whatever appears is always only this, for there is nothing else.

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