Q: What are the teachers talking about when they claim that I am not separate from the world around me?
/Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, Death Valley, CA
Clearly my body is separate from the chair I am sitting on and from the room that I am sitting in.
Can you help me see what the teachers are pointing to?
(Before reading the following, consider first reading Q: The tree over there is separate from me here, right? if you haven't done so already)
It is only the mind that tells us that there is a "me" "in here" and a "not-me" "out there" and it is the belief in this conceptualization that leads us to believe in separation in the first place.
Let's explore some experiential exercises to see if we really agree with what our mind tells us. If you can find a quiet place to do the exercises, you may find them easier to follow.
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While sitting on a chair, place your hand on your leg. Let it rest there for a moment.
Without moving your hand, and with your eyes closed, explore your experience. Allow your focus to gentle move to the sensations you feel in the hand and in the region of the leg beneath the hand. Let the mind quiet as you explore the sensations of pressure, touch, etc. No words are necessary in this exploration.
The thought "I feel my hand on my leg" may rise in your consciousness, but is that really your experience? Is that really what you are feeling prior the mind's labeling the experiencing of sensations?
Do you feel your "hand" and "leg" or is it instead more accurate to say (based upon your experiencing in this very moment) that you feel sensations (pressure, tingling, perhaps a slight vibration, etc) and that it is your mind that then conceptualizes the sensations into "my hand" and "my leg"?
We are not trying to convince ourselves here. What is the actual experience before the mind translates it?
Let yourself stay with this exploration until you can feel the sensations prior to the mind's translation.
Through this exploration we also discover that there is no experience of the boundary between the hand and the leg (because the immediacy of the experience is just sensations) and again it is actually the mind that "defines" the border between the "hand" and the "leg".
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Ok. Now move your attention to the soles of your feet.
Now stop. Prior to considering your feet, based upon your immediate experience, did your feet exist? Asked another way: When you were not considering your feet, did you even experience them? Were they in the foreground of your experience when you earlier explored the feeling of your hand upon your leg, or were they simply a concept that your mind may or may not have considered as you explored the sensations of your hand upon your leg?
How about your shoulder blades against the back of the chair?
As you were reading that sentence… what experiential evidence did you have prior to that moment that supported for certain that your back even existed? Don't let yourself be fooled by the mind… Are you absolutely certain, experientially speaking, that your back or your foot (etc) existed when they were not in the field of your attention (and thus when you had no sensation that suggested they existed)?
Be clear: All we are trying to explore here is our immediate experience. No claim is being made that our hand or leg or foot or back doesn't exist. Instead, we are simply trying to know our experiences, our experiences prior to the mind's conceptualizing them into "hand", "leg", "foot", "back", etc.
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If you are following me thus far, let's continue…
Place your hand on a table. Let it rest there for a moment.
With your eyes closed, explore your experience of the feel of the hand on the table.
(If you have difficulty ignoring the mind's conceptualization, perhaps imagine that you are doing this exploration with a friend, and with your eyes closed they place your hand on a book, or a piece of smooth wood, or upon the table without letting you know which surface they are putting under your hand.)
Without conceptualizing the table, how can you be certain that your hand is touching a table? Isn't it more true to say that your experience is that of tingling sensations and the feeling of pressure? Isn't it a conceptualization that the mind makes that translates the sensations into "I am feeling my hand on the table"? Experientially speaking, is the hand and the table separate, or are they experienced as simply sensations (and thus, neither an object, and therefore not independent of each other)?
Be sure to make your own conclusions here. Only your own experience can really guide you.
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What we are attempting through these exercises is to discover that we experience our body first through raw sensation and then the mind conceptualizes that experiencing into "my body" with concepts such as my hand, leg, foot, back, etc. We also experience the world in a similar way; we experience it through the sensations of touch, sound, sight, etc (which we could call perceptions).
For the reader's who still finds it difficult to follow the claim that the experiential order is 1) Sensation -> 2) Conceptualization -> 3) "Body" (or "World"), consider the following:
When you stub your toe on a rock or bang your leg against the corner of a table, does your mind first claim "rock" (or "table") and then your body's sensations exclaim "OW!"? Of course not. It is first sensation (pain) and then conceptualization (naming the body part that bumped into the named object).
With a little practice with explorations like the above, we can see that in fact we experience sensations first and then conceptualize those sensation into "my body" or by extension, into "not my body", and thereby into "me" "my body here" and into "not-me" "the world over there".
So based upon the immediacy of your experience, how can you be so certain that you experience separation?
Isn't it more true to say that you don't experience separation at all, but instead simply conceptualize it after the experiencing of sensations (and perceptions)?
Let that sink in for a moment.
Doesn't it strike you as significant that it is only thoughts (the mind) that insists on separation?
If we don't actually experience separation, how can we be so certain that it exists?
Without the mind, there is no separation.
Without separation, there is no "you".
Without "you", there is no "me".
Without "me", no "you"
No me, no you.
No separation.
Only this.
This.