Are you old enough to remember the song Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd?

Hello.
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home?

It came out in 1979 when I was eighteen, and I remember being intrigued by the idea of a question like that. Could a person be alive and not at home in his body? Amusing. Or so far withdrawn into the darkness of his psyche that he couldn’t be reached by a normal knocking on the eyelids, an insistent rap on the skull? Hmm.

Let me put it to you this way: Where are you? I know, your first answer will be something like I’m at home, in the living room, at the computer desk. OK. That’s where your body is. Where are you?

Maybe you like to think of yourself as a spark of consciousness riding around comfortably (numb) in the damp and mushy mass between your ears, looking out through your eyes. That’s sort of what it feels like, huh? Like the driver at the top of a big machine.

Let me share something I read in a book recently. And yes, I really do push away from this computer from time to time and read a bit.

“The generally accepted belief is that we humans live inside our skin bodies; that we live in there with a peculiar assortment of gadgets which enable us to navigate them around in a limited sort of way. Enclosed in these skin casings we are supposed to get information from the “outside world” through the senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. I was taught this as a youngster and was supposed not to question it as I grew older. And I didn’t for a long time. But the thing puzzled me, bothered me. I could not understand how it was possible for me to live in such a damp, dark, disagreeable, disillusioning, badly arranged, badly ventilated, and uninviting place as the inside of a human body. Nor could I reason how it was I knew so much about the outside of my body while I was supposed to be imprisoned within the thing. It did not seem to make good sense.

Then one day a wise and experience spiritual traveler told me a startling and unforgettable thing. This: that I did not live inside my material body at all. But outside of it. Completely outside of it. Said he: “That skin contraption you call your body is yours, but not you. Keep that distinction sharply in mind if you want to get anywhere in existence. Your body is yours. But not you. It is no more you – that is, the real you – than your overcoat, or your automobile, or your fountain pen. You are consciousness. You are a mental not a physical, being. That which you have been calling your body is a mental concept. It may appear to be physical substance. It may seem to be and feel very real. But sooner or later you will be compelled, in one way or another, to realize that it is a mental concept, a formation of your own thinking, and so subject to your own thinking.”


from Letters to Strongheart
by J. Allen Boone, pp. 13-14.

Now let me pose the question again. Where are you? And just to really piss you off: Where are you going?

[to be continued]