When a part of the body is anesthetized, for example, the legs, the feeling that I am not the legs is clear. To consider that I am the body I have to feel it. Actually, I am calling “my body” the nervous sensation that my memory has cataloged as my body. My grandfather had his leg amputated due to gangrene. My father had not told him that they were going to amputate his entire leg, and he went into surgery thinking that they were only going to amputate a couple of his toes. As the anesthetic wore off from his system, he began to complain that he had pain in a foot that he didn't have. This is called in medicine the persistence of a phantom limb. But the entire physical body is like a phantom limb that appears or disappears in images of joy or pain.
At this very moment, your cerebral cortex appears only as a concept from this phrase, but in 10 minutes it will disappear like a ghost. You don't feel it and for it to exist in your experience you have to make a mental image of that part of the body, an image in which the cortex itself is active. The image production of the cortex is not the cortex. The cerebral cortex is a concept that belongs to a physiological system. With this conceptual system we make a description of something that is truly a mystery, since the cortex is made up of neurons, neurons are composed of molecular systems, molecules are composed of atomic systems, atomic systems of subatomic systems, and these subatomic systems can be described today in terms of string theory or membrane theory, and God knows in what terms in 50 years.
What then do you think you have in your brain, a cortex, a set of cells, molecules, atoms, leptons and fermions, vibrational strings that generate the entire range of subatomic particles? Your body exists as a sensation or as a concept. As a sensation it is an image of your Volitional Soul projected onto your Sensitive Soul. As a concept it is an image of your Volitive Soul projected onto your Intellectual Soul. When you talk about your body you generate the narrative of a mask that began to be built in your childhood, when some physiological deficiency or some well-being [in which some transpersonal volitional seed that you brought from other lives (or if you prefer, from some ancestor) was expressed , in which some mask of transpersonal identity was given shape]. When we put a foot in our mouth in the crib for the first time, we treated the foot as an object, and we “knew” that that thing was both “ours” and was not.
Whatever identity you think or feel about yourself is a limited mask. You are the Unfathomable Mystery, the Reality without Beginning and without End.
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