Is the self made of cells?

In the mid-1800s the theory was finally proposed that all living things are made from cells. This is called the Cell Theory. This means that I am made of cells. Every part of my existence in the world is actually broken down into tiny individual parts called cells. There is no part of me that is not divisible into tiny cells.

So where am I?

We probably hold a belief that I live in my body somewhere, or I am a part of my body somewhere. But every part of my body is tiny cells.

Do I exist inside a cell?

Or is my self made of cells?

Without thinking too much we can see that there is no room for the self in the body. There is no home for the self in the material world.

That is quite a step. We are saying that "I" cannot be found in the world and the world cannot touch me.

This is very weird already. Something is not right. And yet everything is right!

Don't we think that everything that exists can be found in the world? And yet I cannot be found in the world. Do I exist?

We may start to think: well I do exist, and if it is not in the world then it must be in another realm. So we kind of continue to believe we exist in material form, just in a world separate from the body made of cells.

So is our existence in this other world made of other-worldly cells?

We can stop this day dreaming. All we are doing is trying to carry on believing we exist in the body after having been shown that the body is made of tiny cells and there is no room for us.

We need to give up thinking we are anywhere!

This problem we have in taking this step is because we are convinced that we do take some physical form. If it can't be the body we try and invent other forms. But what do this "forms" do for us? They are like statues, or piece in a game of chess. But unlike us they are static, fixed and unchanging. Like statues they do not live.

This is what holds us back. Obviously our experience of the world is dynamic and alive like a film always flowing forwards. We are not static. Yet we try to think of our self as some how in terms of a fixed thing. That usually takes the form of a body. But we just pulled the rug from under that. The desire to grasp for something else to hold onto is a response to what is called "emptiness." That feeling is actually us facing the truth of our self. Like a bird when it first flies probably has a sense of vertigo, but think the freedom once that is gone! In exactly the same way, when we stop trying to hold on to a fixed solid form like a body (not made of cells), we begin to discover the boundless freedom that is our real nature.