The Body Is Not a Thing
El cuerpo no es una cosa
A student asks whether it is possible to live without the habit of seeing the body as a thing. The teacher describes the body as direct experience rather than as an object, and explores why the body seems more "real" than other appearances by comparing dreaming and waking life.
The Body Is Not a Thing
A student asks whether it is possible to live without the habit of seeing the body as a thing. The teacher describes the body as direct experience rather than as an object, and explores why the body seems more "real" than other appearances by comparing dreaming and waking life.
I've been wondering how this is for you. A question appeared: is there another way to relate to the body in day-to-day life, besides seeing through the illusions and the kind of work we do here? The habit seems to be seeing the body as a thing. But that's not what it is. I don't know what the body is. In a way, it's something really mysterious. So I guess my question is: can you live without that habit of seeing the body as a thing? I know the question is not very clear.
It's very clear. The quick answer is yes, one hundred percent. I would even say: living without the experience that the body is a thing. I call it an experience, but it's an interpretation too. So, living without the interpretation that the body is a thing is one hundred percent possible.
Since you asked how it is in my experience: that's my experience almost all the time. And when it's not, I'm aware of the interpretation. There's a usefulness to it. For example, when I think of the body as an organism that needs medication, then in that framing it's a thing. It's an object, separate from the space around it.
Mystery producing magic
But in day-to-day, moment-by-moment experience, it's just magic. It's the mystery performing magic. And everything is that for me: the body, the laptop, the smoothie. It's this whole kaleidoscope of mystery producing magic. The mind is the same to me. The mind, the body, others, and the world: it's all mystery producing this magic. It's all magic.
Other traditions would say it's Buddha nature: the body is the Buddha field, and everything is Buddha nature. "Buddha" means awake, so it's awake nature. Everything is mystery, aliveness. "Aliveness" is a tricky word, because it could separate what's alive from what's dead or not alive, but I'm using it in that spirit.
The word "magical" also refers to beauty and love. There's a pleasantness to it. It's not magical and scary, because there is magic that is scary. It's magical and joyful, alive, bright, luminous, and clear. And it's always changing, always coming and going. Nothing is inherently there on its own. Again, leaning on the description from another tradition: it is all dependently originating. Nothing arises from itself; it's all dependent. This is also what the latest theory in quantum physics, emerging in the last five years, describes. It is exactly what Buddhism describes.
I get it. I feel I have the experience you describe in pockets of time. So I guess it's the desire for that to be more constant.
You have the experience I'm describing all the time. But a lot of the time you also have the illusory interpretation that it's not the case.
Yes.
The only difference is that for me, the false interpretation, when it's there, is conscious. I'm aware that it's an interpretation. The rest of the time it's not there, because I don't find it interesting. I find reality, the direct experience, much more interesting.
Preferring reality to thought
This is what I was pointing to in the meditation. First there is this fascination with the mind. It's absolutely captivating. I know that in my gut: the world of mind and thought is so fascinating, until I came to prefer reality. By reality I mean what is experienced without the filter of thought, without that constant veil in the way. I still have the experience of mind, and the mind is fascinating, but compared to this, there's no comparison.
In a sense, I have it all. I can still experience thoughts, creativity, imagination, and memory, and I find them beautiful and fascinating. It's just not comparable. It's not something I want to be involved in all the time. I don't find it interesting in that way anymore.
So would you describe it as a gradual disenchantment from the illusions?
Disenchantment, yes. It's gradual, and it's also both. Some of it needs to be sudden, and then aspects of it are gradual: the habits, the tendencies, the attachments. It's like a magic trick. When you understand how it works, that's sudden. Then you may have to see it a few times until it's obvious how it's happening. After that, you can't unsee it. You can't look at the trick and say, "Wow, that's magic. I don't know how it's happening." You know that particular trick, you see how it's done, and then it bores you.
Two kinds of magic
I'm using the word "magic" in very different contexts here. When I said earlier that everything is magical, that is completely separate from a magic trick. I'm not implying any similarity between the two.
The magic trick of the illusion is a trick that creates suffering. It's an illusion that creates suffering because we are fascinated by an illusion that claims to know what I am. Seeing through that illusion means being disenchanted, no longer fooled by it. When we see how the trick works, something dies. The illusion that had this kind of magic dies.
Why we hold on to the illusion
That's why we avoid waking up. That's why there's such a big attachment to the illusion. Something ends. Over time, and after the fact, it becomes very clear that it's so much better without it. This isn't always clear right in the moment, but once it stabilizes, it is.
Until then, it goes back and forth. Seeing through the illusion momentarily is amazing, because there's so much contraction, suffering, stress, and fear tied up with it. It's such a relief. But then we go right back into it, because we think, "That's okay. I got a release and a relief, but I still like my illusion." So we go back and forth: "Just give me some breaks here and there, but I want my illusion." This continues until we start to realize, experientially, that it's just so much better without it.
That takes time, and it takes deeper and deeper realizing. There are thresholds, like jumping off a cliff. It's scary, and sometimes painful, but on the other side it's, "Oh wow, this is so much better." And in my experience, it does get better and better.
I understand the appeal, and I understand the confusion. Strangely, though, it's often very hard to remember. It really fades. I can remember suffering, but more as a vague memory, a vague image. I do remember the struggle around it, the drama, how much storm there was. When I look at those memories now, they seem almost funny. But I know it wasn't funny. I know it was life and death for me. I was suicidal. It was no joke. It's strange how I can't really connect to it anymore.
This is great. What I wanted to ask, I guess, is for something that might help me see where I'm still hanging on to illusion.
The cost of an illusory view
Well, you brought up the body, and the relationship to the body as an object. That perspective is illusory. It's practical only in very specific, limited ways. Taking it as reality will create all kinds of distress and friction. Whenever we experience what is through an illusory perspective, the distortion will be unpleasant.
Yes.
If I'm a man and I believe I'm a woman and live life that way, there's going to be a distortion, an incongruence. I'm saying that only as a very simple example. Or, if I am a human being and I believe I am a goat, and I go through life believing I'm a goat, it's going to be a difficult life.
So what would be a good way to go to the opposite side of that habit of seeing the body as a thing? Would it be something like reminding myself that I don't know, that the body is a total mystery?
The body as direct experience
That's too intellectual. I would ask: what is your experience of the body right now? That's the only thing that's real. "I don't know what the body is" is also an interpretation. In a sense, you do know: the experience of the body right now is what you know of the body. Nothing more, but nothing less.
Now, if you tell me the body is a thing, that's not it. The body is this really strange, never fully knowable experience of tingling sensations that move, and so on. In direct experience right now, it doesn't have a form or a shape. There's an image in the mind of toes and bones, but that's not the body right now. That's an intellectual knowing of the body as an object.
For me, the experience of the body right now is a few areas of tingling, bubbling sensation, and the rest is just nothing, emptiness. There are no feet. I'm not experiencing even a little bit of feet, or a little bit of what I'm calling "me." That's it. That's the body. It's really mysterious, and it's really lovely. When it's uncomfortable, it's, "Oh, there's a bit of fiery sensation there." That's the body, not as an object.
It's not "the object body, which intellectually I don't know." No. It's the sensation, the perception itself. What is this? I have no idea. It's amazing. It's pretty much perfection. And it's imperfection as well, in that it comes and goes. It is born and it will die, and that makes it even more perfect, more and more precious.
Why the body seems more real
In ordinary waking consciousness, the experience of the body is always there, while other parts of experience change more. If I walk out of this room, the smoothie that's right here will be gone. Out on the street, the smoothie is gone, but the body remains, in a sense. That doesn't mean I am more the body.
What does it mean?
It simply doesn't mean that. That's an interpretation. The experience of the body is more permanently present, and other things are not, so "therefore I am this and not that." That's a fallacy. It's not logically correct.
Dreaming and waking
One way to explore this is with a different experiment. Consider how waking reality feels more real than the sleeping reality of dreams, the dreamscape. Why is waking more real? I would say: because it's stable. Every day in waking reality, things are where they always were. It's a lot more stable. Dreams are different every night. And within the dream itself, everything can change. I could be one person or another, in this world or that world. It's always coming and going, much more unstable.
Now, suppose dreamland became more stable. Suppose that every time I went to sleep, it was the same: the same family, the same room, the same bed. And suppose it became progressively more stable, while waking life became less stable. At what point do you decide which one is real, or more real? It's just relative. We simply interpret whatever changes more slowly as more real.
This is the brilliance of the wisdom of the East. In Sanskrit, the word for "real" literally means "what does not change." Therefore, what I experience in my dreams and what I experience in waking consciousness are equally unreal, because everything in this waking world also changes. It just changes more slowly.
Mm-hmm.
So it's not that the dreaming world is illusory and this one is real. They're equally unreal. This one is just more stable. So then, what is real?
This is closely related to identification with the body. If I go out into the street, what doesn't change, or changes more slowly, is the body. Everything else changes quickly. I walk around, and everything changes, but the body does not. Therefore the body seems more real, in the sense of being what I am.
But in the awakened view, sleeping consciousness and waking consciousness are both obviously unreal, in the sense of not being fundamental. And "I am the body and not something else" is also seen to be false and unreal. It's obvious. It's like waking up from this consciousness and recognizing that this experience of being this person in this world is as unreal as the sleeping dream. Then there is just the relatively real.
Which is simply not believing the thoughts, the projections.
What reality is
Yes. It literally is the interpretation that something is fundamentally real. Reality itself does not have objects, and does not have fundamental forms or properties. In a sense, it is empty. It is peaceful, and it is beautiful, and it is everything as well. It is not separate from what appears. It's not that there's a reality, and then things appear inside it and come and go, and the reality is real while the things are not. No. It's all reality. Its fundamental nature just isn't forms. It isn't things.
These are words. But if what they point to is recognized, it will be seen that it's already this. It always was this, and it's obvious. These words might not be the right ones to elicit that recognition. And if you do recognize it, you'll most likely say, "But the way you described it isn't really it." Yes, I know. It's hard to describe, because the mind interprets the words and imagines it being some way, even imagining it as something without form. It's not that.
It's like a fish swimming around in the ocean, looking for the ocean. Really.
I've been going on and on.
Yes, that's lovely. Thank you.