How does our perception of the physical change when we notice our nature?
Here is what I find for myself.
CONVENTIONAL SENSE
As a human being in the world, I use and relate to objects as anyone else. I move around. Try to avoid walking into things. Make use of objects. Enjoy experiencing certain things with this body. And so on. All the ordinary and usual things humans do.
CONSCIOUSNESS
And in terms of what I more fundamentally am in my own first-person experience, this looks a bit different.
To myself, I am consciousness. And the world to me – any experience at all – happens within and as consciousness.
That includes this physical body and anything physical. It happens within and as consciousness, and within and as what I am. It’s as if I can put my arm through it.
A night dream is created by consciousness, and it is made up of consciousness. And so also with this body and the physical world. My experience of it is created by consciousness. And it’s made up of consciousness.
To me, my nature is the nature of my body and any physical object.
If we are so inclined, we can say that all inherently is consciousness AKA God, Spirit, the divine, Brahman, and so on. And if I take a slightly more grounded and sober approach, I’ll say that to me, I am consciousness, and to me, the world happens within and as consciousness. It happens within and as what I am.
IN DAILY LIFE
In daily life, I operate in the physical world as anyone else.
And I also notice the dreamlike quality of the physical world. It’s created by consciousness. It’s content of consciousness. It’s made up of consciousness. This helps me hold it all a bit more lightly.
SHIFTS HIGHLIGHTING THE CONSCIOUSNESS NATURE OF ALL
When I was fifteen, there was a shift where it felt like the world – including this human self – was very far away and seemed like a dream. In hindsight, I see this as a shift into a simple observer-observed duality and a perception of all as consciousness. (It was terrifying and confusing to me at the time. A year later, this shifted into oneness and the perceptions I write about in many of these articles.) This shift gave me an early visceral sense of the physical as consciousness.
Later, I have continued to notice and explore this, including through inquiry and sense-field explorations.
When I explore how my mind creates its experience of my physical body, I find that it’s a combination of mental representations and sensations. In general, certain mental representations (mental images and words) are associated with certain physical sensations, and the mental representations give meaning to the sensations while the sensations give a sense of solidity, substance, and reality to the thoughts. That’s how a sense of a solid physical body is created. And when this is explored in some detail, we see through the illusion and the sense of solidity softens. (Living / Kiloby Inquiries is a good way to explore this.)
Note: I have written similar articles on distance, movement, time, doership, and this human self.
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