The Experience of the Body from the Perspective of Pure Consciousness
How exploring our true nature can dissolve the inner conflict associated with physical discomfort
This is something that has been really present for me lately having had many conversations about chronic body pain recently, people asking me questions, as well as having experienced getting sick with nausea and vomiting a couple of weeks ago — which I’m grateful for — has been a fantastic opportunity to learn new ways to express how the body is experienced through pure consciousness, and how that liberates us from inner conflict.
It seems to me that in our collective cultural conditioning, we often create a distinction between body and mind. People who live up in their heads and people who are “grounded” in the body.
From the perspective of pure consciousness, however, those are two versions of the same thing. Both lead to pain and seeking, though they seem to be different. If you live in your head, the aches and pains might be financial. If you live in your body, the aches and pains will seem to be in your muscles.
It’s been my observation that so long as you think you’re living inside of a body, that your consciousness is contained with the brain, you will be seeking in one way or another. It’s only until there is a realization that you are the space from which experience experiences itself that seeking ends totally and radiant happiness becomes the unconditional basis for existence.
How the Body Was Invented
Imagine that before any experience was happening, there was simply an empty space of consciousness. Uncontaminated pure consciousness. An empty canvas for life to paint itself on. Infinite. Timeless. In this experience, there was only awareness. There is nothing inside it. No body. No world. Nothing. Just pure emptiness.
From that fertile space of pure consciousness arose some sort of energy, a vibration of some formless energy — doesn’t matter what. Let’s just say a brushstroke of red for metaphorical purposes.
Following that the brushstroke of red, there arose another manifestation of that same exact undivided formless energy of consciousness: a thinker.
The thinker and the brushstroke of red, both two manifestations of one undivided energy happening within the infiniteness and timelessness of consciousness.
Then, the ‘thinker’ became a center that believed itself to be separate from the rest. It believed itself to be separate from the brushstroke of red, and all other surrounding brushstrokes.
As it looked outside of itself, it saw what seemed like big, scary, and unpredictable brushstrokes.
The thinker needed to make sense of the experience of the brushstrokes being separate from it, outside of itself. So it invented sensory perception. The senses are what the thinker uses to justify the separation between the thinker’s seemingly private inner world and the giant world outside of itself — both of which are one undivided energy of pure consciousness.
The senses delineate an artificial border between what parts of consciousness are within and what parts are without.
But what is sensing? In order for there to be a sensory experience, there needs to be a sensing device.
And so, the final piece is set in place: the body. The body was invented by the thinker to fill that role. To justify the notion that consciousness is not all one energy. And so it says: “I exist within my body and the body is perceiving a world outside me.”
It used separation as means to justify the body, and the body as means to justify separation. And so you could say, in a sense, that pure consciousness believes itself to be inside of a body, perceiving a world outside of itself.
But the body is no more than an idea, suspended in the mind, in consciousness. It has no solidity to it. From the perspective of pure consciousness, the body is a dream. Yet it feels real. This is normal. Dreams feel real. How real something feels is merely an example of the power of your mind.
Let’s go over the thinker’s illusion:
- There is a division between the inside and the outside world.
- Sensory perception justifies this division.
- The body is the house of perception and the home of consciousness.
- The power of thought is hidden.
- This creates the convincingly real-feeling but false reality that you are anything but pure consciousness.
Undoing The Body Image
If life is like an ever-weaving tapestry arising as the energy of consciousness, and you are that pure consciousness, then the thread of the body is no further or closer to you than the thread of the wall across the room or the thread of the sky which appears to be so far away.
Your body is not further or closer to you than the birds chirping outside your window. All experience is happening together as one movement in the space of consciousness.
It is all part of the mosaic of experience. Can you actually experience something outside of consciousness? No. And if not, then how do you really know there is something outside of consciousness?
So when you feel a sensation that seems to be originating from the body, that sensation is actually occurring within consciousness. The raw experience of feeling is a generalized experience.
This means feeling has no localized source. It occupies the entirety of consciousness. Only through the lens of the thinker does it appear localized.
When the feeling is observed through the lens of the thinker, through the lens of separation, it appears as though the feeling is originating in some part of the body. From there, there is an attempt to push it away if it is unpleasant, to fix it, or analyze it. This creates inner conflict.
There is a superimposition of the thinker’s thought-created body image on the raw feeling, and from that underlying assumption stems most of our actions that are fruitless.
We reach out to a specialist who deals with pain in one specific spot. At most, that gives us temporary relief, but it’s not long before the conflict comes back in some other form, because the true cause of the conflict, the thinker — that which superimposes in the image of the body on top of sensation — has not been exposed. Its false reality is still believed and thus the awareness of who you really are, which would free you from conflict, is obscured.
This is why those pursuits are fruitless. They play within the rules of the thinker’s world.
It’s important to understand that the sense of inner conflict when we are in pain is not caused by the sensation itself but by the thinker.
The only reason how we could even believe for a second that the body can feel is that the thinker superimposes the image of the body on the generalized feeling arising within the infinite field of consciousness. This superimposition creates the illusion that feelings can originate from the body. Again, this is merely an example of the compelling and convincing nature of thought.
This thinker, peering at the sensation through the image it has created, then analyzes, judges, resists the feeling. It perceives the sensation as a foreign invader which must be dealt with. And so it takes out the rubber gloves and the guns to try to exterminate it.
However, without the thinker creating that separation between you and how you feel, you become how you feel. When all superimposed images dissolve, the veil of separation falls away, you see that you are the raw sensation and inner conflict ends.
In that experience, harmony is restored. The false identity of the body is exposed to the light of consciousness and dissolved, and you rest in the infiniteness of consciousness — the source of unconditional happiness where you have actually always resided.
It often takes great willingness to see all this while we’re in the midst of pain, but it’s never impossible.
Practical: Nausea Story
Okay, so this is all just talk until you really see it. And I had the fortunate experience of getting some powerful nausea a few weeks ago that had me lose the entire contents of my stomach over the course of a day or so.
Since I was a kid, I have always hated nausea. I hated the way it made me feel.
When I was 10, I remember having such an uncomfortable experience with nausea. I was lying in my bed, and I just wanted it to go away so badly. I remember being with my Dad, and he was supporting me by talking to me about sports. He was helping distract me from how I was feeling. At the time, I didn’t understand I could feel better by anything except distraction. The discomfort was too much to bear. I couldn’t look at it.
Now fast forward a couple of decades later, as I was lying down in my bed, feeling uncomfortable nausea, I was curious. I was watching to see separation in action. And I could feel the fluctuations of when the thinker would come up and try to push away the feeling, to judge, analyze, separate, and so forth… I could see the thinker superimposing this image of the body, attempting to distance itself from the experience, to “contain” it.
Simply by seeing that, there was an aliveness that took over me.
It was a merging into the experience — a realization that I am the nausea and the nausea is me, and so there is no reason to be afraid of it or in conflict with it. It is the thinker, the image-maker, that created the feeling of conflict, and blamed it on the nausea.
But also, without the thinker labeling a certain feeling as “nausea,” there was no nausea.
Without the interruption of past conditioning distorting this beautiful feeling of presence into something it wasn’t, there was only an exquisite experience of being alive. I didn’t need a distraction. I didn’t need to fix it, understand it, analyze it, judge it. Not one bit.
I was truly loving being fully present in the feeling.
