Every day, I begin with the intention of engaging in deep concentration, of being aware. I know that this will be more than something about to happen in my mind. My body will be intimately involved in my being aware. While this will be an experience of my being conscious, it will be an experience that feels deeply rooted and braided in my body.
Even my most removed experiences of awareness feel intimately connected with my body. Awareness begins with my body as I feel the sensation of movement or of stillness. My experience of awareness is something like a step removed from that sensation. I am aware of what it is like that I am sensing the position or movement of my body. While it might seem that I am aware “in my head,” I am very aware that this is rooted in what is happening in my body.
So much seems held in the confines of my body. Memories seem intimately connected with the minute structures of neurons in my brain. If that physicality is impaired, the memory is impaired. Yet the memory is an awareness that feels distinct from the body that it inhabits.
I experience the world through my senses, but the awareness of sensation seems removed from the very senses on which it is based. I wonder about the way in which the non-physical is braided with the physical.
My body holds that spark of life that first appeared in gradual steps millions of years ago. And that spark seems somehow connected to the awareness of which I am conscious. Did my consciousness evolve with that spark of life and where will it go when my body can no longer support its presence?
Some day, the physical substance of my own body will be recycled, just as it now consists of material recycled from previous life forms. What of the consciousness that seems to inhabit that body? How will the braiding unfold. Perhaps my consciousness is simply a fragment of a larger consciousness that has received some kind of individual identity by being braided with my physical body. My own body is borrowing a fragment of something much more vast, perhaps infinite.
Without the confines of my body, without the confines of time and space, I wonder what form my consciousness will take. Some days, I touch the outer limits of what that might be like. Some days, my awareness momentarily steps away from my body and lightly touches that vast arena of no time and no space. Some days I allow my body to totally relax and take a break while I dabble in a place where there is no place.
I am happy with my body, and I have learned so much through it. I am also very aware that it is impermanent and will some day take on different form. The braiding of my consciousness with my body will come to a conclusion. That will be a day of great change. I may perhaps become aware of what continues.