How do you get into your body?

What I mean by this question is looking around the room you can see things in the room and you can see yourself in the room perhaps sitting at a desk, perhaps in a chair looking at a phone. And yet while you can see yourself in the room, you also think you are inside your body. Now how do you get from looking around the room to also being inside your body to see it all?

Take your finger and touch your other arm. Where are you on the outside touching the arm, or inside feeling the touch?

How can you be both inside and outside?

Well the thing is these are the same.

Looking around the room you see a room. You see your own hands in front of you.

Feeling the touch of something you also feel in the room.

Even if you get a pain deep inside you it is still in the same room.

The surprising thing is you are not "in" that body. All the sensations and things you think are inside are just there in the room, the same one you can see.

So actually there is just the seeing and the sensing and there is no one "in" there.

So where are you?

Well it is you who is seeing and sensing!

And this is the incredibly simple mistake that messes everything up. You are not what is seen and sensed, you are the one doing the seeing and sensing.

So that person you see in the room, the arms, the legs, the sense of weight in the chair, the breathing--all this--you are not it, you are the one who is sensing it.

If you think for a second how else could it be. You know that you need to see, to actually see anything. If you close your eyes the world does not continue, it depends on your eyes being open, it depends upon you seeing. So everything you see and sense is being seen and sensed first before it appears. You can't then be involved in any of this afterwards, you are involved at the very start of the world appearing. This is why you say "I am seeing" it is because the world that is sensed is being sensed by you.

But if I am not this body in the room then where and what am I?

The answer is it doesn't matter, all that matters is the world that is created through senses. I mean if the world wasn't created through the act of sensing then seriously what is the point of me anyway. I can't exist in an empty vacuum. So the answer I am looking for is somewhere in the sensed world, and since we just argued that none of that is me, then we can ignore the question. It has no answer, and most importantly I don't need to know.

Wow news flash: what? I don't need to know what I am and where I am? Well clearly not because you are sensing the world quite happily without knowing! And Seriously what does "knowing" add when its all working perfectly anyway!

So there is the conclusion, we don't know what we are and where we are, and it doesn't matter at all!

===

Now that was a clean walk through this argument but it dodged so many pit falls I will try and examine them.

(1) So can't I argue that the body in the middle of the room is doing the sensing. I mean it is clearly that body that is doing the seeing. But which body do you mean? You mean the one you are already sensing! Chicken and Egg. This is why this needs to be examined in the "present moment" to decide which came first. But obviously sensing came first, we then decided what was there and in the mistaken argument we decide that is what is sensing. Well in a narrative, doll like, story way yes that body is doing the sensing, but it not really doing the sensing because it is being looked at so it can't do the looking at the same time! And that goes for all the sense. Staring at your reflection in a mirror you can't be the person in the mirror because you are doing the looking AT the person in the mirror. If you were the person in the mirror you would be looking out! When you decide that is me, it is a storyline, like acting in a film, it is just a reflection of your body, and it is not seeing.

(2) Maybe I am outside the world. If everything I am sensing is already done then the person sensing it must be outside the world. It is like there is a massive unknown "me" outside the world which has a brain, and that brain has made a computer model of itself which is what it calls the world. Like in the Matrix, Neo is living in an hallucination created by an AI called the Architect, but in this mistaken view it is the real me. The real me does everything that happens in the hallucination, it is a perfect mapping, but the difference is that is not known, but creating an internal model of itself then it can know itself. And that knowing itself is what we call reality.

Now this is a very powerful idea, but it is wrong on two very important levels.

(1) it creates an infinite recess. It must model what is going on in inside itself, which is inside itself etc forever. Now this in many ways is analogous to that infinite loop we set up in those moments when we become aware of our self. And then we become aware that we are aware of our self... it is a vivid experience and it does sharpen the mind. But there is nothing at the bottom of this metaphysical rabbit hole.

(2) The most dangerous part of this mistake is that we just shift the search for "me" from the hallucination of reality to some unknown projection of "me" that lies outside the experiential world. This is the reverse of (1). The model that comes from sensing is now being used to map into the real world that is being sensed to try and project the existence of the real "me." The problem is we just decided that the body in the middle of the room is just the sensed object and is not "me" so how can that entity which is not me be projected into the "real world" an become me. I am doing the sensing, I am not the sensed. And if I am not the sensed, and I can't be sensed then why am I searching for myself.

(3) Perhaps I hide in more abstract things like thoughts and feelings. We can cut that one short. These are the same realm as the senses. I am thinking, so I can't be a thought. When Descartes says "I think therefore I am" he is having a thought, but he is obviously not a thought. Indeed having established we are not a thought, one wonders where else his speculations can go. The same for emotions. I am no more emotions than I am thoughts than I am anything I can see. I am the one who is thinking, and feeling and sensing. But I extend no further than those thoughts, feelings and senses. When there are no thoughts, feelings or senses then how do I know I am? We have established nothing in our thoughts, feelings or senses is "me", then when there are no thoughts, feelings or senses then there really is no place for "me."

Now giving up on the me is hard, that must be accepted. There will be grasping for it everywhere. We will try and think, and feel and sense just for the sake of it to feel proof that we exist. We will gain "memories" and do things because this way there is proof that we exist. But there is no proof that we exist, and these struggles come from not quite being able to just realise it doesn't matter if we exist or not. It makes no difference. Plus if we don't exist then there is no one for it matter to.

Things just are as they are.

===

Now I'm just flagging a concern here about the analysis:

The crude truth is that you are the one who senses, not what is sensed. The opening question comes from the usual shortcut we make of saying they are the same. But this sets up the first paradox the "looking in a mirror" paradox of: if that is me "over there" how do I get from there to here where I am looking at the reflection from into there.

The insight is that the whole thing is not you, you are observing and processing the entire mirror experience and you are not anywhere: neither there or here.

Now this is where we need be very careful.

The depth of this statement is totally uprooting. Done properly there is no self anywhere. All "selves" either "there" or "here" are manufactured by the true self.

And this sets up the second paradox which is the concern.

If all selves are manufactured by the True Self then isn't that self also manufactured? This becomes nihilistic and we lose everything. Buddha warns of this!

So how can all selves be manufactured by a True Self, that somehow escapes being an object of observation and speculation.

Well we must accept that firstly the True Self cannot be sensed or be speculated about. The reason is that it does these things! It can't both do these things and usefully be subject to these things. The horse pulling the cart necessarily cannot then be pulled by itself. If the True Self does the seeing, feeling and thinking then it is the horse pulling the whole show. There is no sense in that horse then seeing, feeling and thinking about itself.

So what is left for this True Self to be?

And this is where the appreciation of Emptiness (Sunyata) and Non-Self (Anatta) comes in.

Lets go back to the start.

There is a world. After all if there is nothing then what are we going on about here. There aren't even any thoughts to be thinking.

Now we can argue that this is all created either by brains or Matrix like computers. That is great, but not everything can be created by these brains or computers because what creates them? So we can't pull the rung on everything and be nihilistic. There must be something behind it all.

But if we then decide that this "something" is a regular thing then we should be able to see it, feel it or think it. We are looking in the mirror trying to grasp our self in the reflection. This is now the other extreme of nihilism where we think we are a thing in the world that we can touch. But if we have tried this you know you cannot touch your reflection. However you can see your reflection and can think about it. But as above if you examine this it is not true: your reflection is not really you.

So we are stuck. We are not nothing, but we aren't something.

This makes sense. Both something and nothing are things we assign to objects in our experience.

So we get to the end of the road here.

Looking in the mirror there is actually nothing anywhere that we can truthfully call "me." Not even the experience of it.

"me" just doesn't fit.

So the end of the road done fully just leave the world as it is. The feelings as they are. And the thoughts about it all as they are. What changes is that the temptation to foolishly put our hand into shadows in the hope of gripping a solid "me" in there is gone.

So how does this change anything?

Well lets look at the main problem of life in general: the denial and then worry associated with death. At first as a kid we don't want to know anything about it, and then we get entombed by it knowing that our life is short and will be snatched from us.

But wait there is the "me" in there. We reach into life and think we can grasp our self! It is not there.

We should be as concerned about our own death as we are anyone else. In fact less.

When we think about death we either have it down as "my" death or "your" death. In there is either "me" or "you." Grasping for "me" has its logical counterpart in trying to grasp at other "mes." If I have a me then so must everyone else. It's a logical deduction. It is also not true. If I have no me then neither does anyone else.

Now this can slip into nihilism so caution is needed. We think if no one exists and there is no one to die then it doesn't matter if they die. That is exactly like saying when we see a dead dog in the road: oh that is not my dog it doesn't matter. Well whether it is your dog or not, it has still be hit by a car and killed. Ownership changes nothing. Likewise whether there is a self in a person doesn't change the facts of death. There life is over, they can't do anymore, perhaps there is some pain, their friends and family will miss them: it is over. These are the facts. But no one actually dies, any more than anyone is experiencing the world beyond the experience itself. The world and life is the experience, not the presentation to be experienced, watched and enjoyed separately.

So in answer to the opening question: we don't get into our body because there is nothing but the body.

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Still having qualms over this post.

The setup in the mirror is problematic.

The first thing to note of course is this image on the blog page is an image. It is just colours and shapes and it is seen in the visual space. There is no one there! Not in reality. The person there is a "narrative" person, a story-line, a mental description we create for the image by recognising "things" in the picture. "It is a picture of a man looking at himself in the mirror" we tell our self. This is all done in the realm of thoughts. There is obviously no one there in "reality"! The person who is there in reality is not actually seen. It is you looking at this image.

It is logically necessary that in order to see, we cannot be seen.

This is the logic that has been explored in this blog to be identical with Godel's Theorems. Otherwise you end up with this paradox:

It is a paradox because it created itself, it is founded upon itself and that means it does not belong to this world, it belongs to itself. And yet it is presenting itself as part of this world and there is the paradox. In this world we ask how did it come into existence when it needed its own hand to draw itself. It is static, the hands must be fully formed at the start, and so it is not a picture of "drawing" and the hands cannot have drawn. Mapping into Buddhist terms it contradicts Dependent Origination, in that it is dependent on nothing other than itself. And the obvious thing, like above with seeing, is that it is a picture is drawn by someone who them self cannot be drawn namely Escher.

We have the world of thoughts here where we can interpret pictures and make inanimate shapes "hands" into "things" which we can inject with all kinds of powers like "drawing" but this is all done in the world of thoughts. It is not in the picture.

And that mirrors (irony) the man in the mirror above.

So in all cases "I" cannot be a member of the world I sense and explain.

Which is a paradox because is this blog not trying to explain that?

I cannot be in the world I think.

And that takes us to the Paradox of Descartes. Descartes does correctly identify that in the moment of thought there is a reality beyond those thoughts upon which those thoughts are contingent. There is a thinker. This is obvious in modern conception because we need a brain to have thoughts. Thoughts don't just appear like Escher's Drawing Hands. So in a sense "I think therefore I am" is meaningful. And Descartes was very conscious of the potential pit fall here. He is not deducing from thoughts that he exists. That is a genuine paradox since he needs to exist in order to have thoughts, so the thoughts do not think him into existence. He was trying to frame this into an axiom that thoughts themselves imply something beyond thoughts, that is not itself thoughts.

Now I don't think Descartes had the machinery to do this. Indeed this blog struggles. It is the task of Enlightenment to be able to handle this.

Going back to the person in the mirror, and role playing this. We know the experience. We can see ourselves in the mirror solid and clear and discrete and understandable. And we deduce that this is the reflection of myself. But that "myself" is none of these things. It is a shiny liquid thing that gains solidity as it grows into its extremities like the arms, the body.

Now we can argue all this materially. It is obvious we say that all we are talking about is the light entering the eye. That light puts an image on the retina and this is what we process into the visual world. So naturally we can't see our own face because that light doesn't enter the retina. What a mirror does is return that light to the eyes so we can see our face. All very simple QED.

But to conclude this we are accepting that the visual world we see is created from an image on the retina.

So when we stand in front of a mirror we are saying that this "whole standing in front of a mirror experience" is all created from an image on the retina.

So there is no "standing in front of a mirror" all there is, is the image in the retina.

We are have two descriptions that we are mapping onto one another:
(1) actually standing in front of a mirror with my face visible in the reflection, but not on this side. While my hands can be seen on both sides.
(2) The entire thing being flattened and landing on the retina.

In (2) light directly from our body and from the mirror collide in one image on the retina. We cannot tell what is reflected and what is direct. That is all deduced when we inject "meaning" into the image.

But what I am discussing here is just further analysis and injecting of meaning into that retinal image! Even the idea of a retinal image is injected meaning! It isn't there in the original experience. 

We can see that in another way. While we analyse that retinal image we find that it is upside down compared to the original object. We think "oh the real world is upside down." Yet there is no evidence of this. The reason is that these two worlds map exactly. The "upside down" relation lies outside the two worlds so it makes no difference within either world. It is like going to Australia: are people really upside down?

If we unwind all the meaning that comes from high level post processing or thinking about the visual image, we get back to the child like experience of just standing in front of the mirror. The experience as it is. The raw data of experience (although this already taints it with meaning and processing).

In that raw experience of standing in front of the mirror (or of Descartes doubting everything) there is just the experience free from any intrigue, labelling, detective work, interpretation, narrative. Someone once asked me what I thought of a painting and I said "it was okay" he then started the allegorical analysis and showed me the "depth" and meaning of the painting. But this process is not "in" the painting you bring that with you when you interact with the painting. And so it is in front of the mirror.

You do not see yourself to begin with. And the qualm I am talking about: you do not even realise you are seeing it.

On the internet right now there are some channels making the claim I have started to make here that: you are not what is seen, you are the seer.

But such a claim is already "thinking."

We should translate that into the Descartes Paradox: "you are not what is thought, you are the thinker" but that is a thought!

The temptation here is to always try and get some profit, capital or some take home to put in a box as a result of all this thinking and investigation. There are 18 years of blog here that you might expert to arrive as a theory that I can be famous for, something I can name, some take home, a book, some money, some achievement. If I had had a child they would be leaving school now and I would be expecting great things and them as they embark on life. Yet this is not how the world is. That is just petty Capitalism.

The ultimately result of this blog will be to achieve absolutely nothing, but hopefully unwind in a fully rational and controlled way. Unwind all the way back to nothing where it started.

This is what Buddhism means by Non-Self and Emptiness. When you unwind all the thoughts and investigations of the world you get back to nothing. It is obvious, tautological in fact. What can be there before you have constructed the meaning of the world? It must be beyond meaning.

So what does this mean for that morning gaze at your half sleeping self in the mirror.

(1) Firstly we acknowledge the spark of narcissus reaching out to grasp this enticing image, believing it is our self. We can waste a lifetime running our hands through the reflections water and being surprised to have only wet hands after the encounter.

(2) Secondly we pull back and extend that pullback through out our life. Nowhere in any of this lies "me." When I get that promotion at work, there is no one there to receive the promotion, and it is proof of nothing and no one. This is just a more subtle and advanced mirror. When someone insults us and take injury and seek revenge, we remind our self no one was attacked and no one did the attack. This is all just story that we add to the picture. This is just another much more tricky mirror.

(3) The ultimate conclusion, if there is nothing to find, is that we already have everything, and everything is already perfect. Perhaps don't worry too much if your hair is not quite right.