Addressing Life

Its easy in a dissociated age to forget how to live. Mystics may ask us to forget the body and its limitations, but this can be a conflicting message to those for whom a body is the highest personal reality.

It then becomes important to address what is the self and the higher self, not as something apart from body, or bound up in figments of a promised alternate reality, but rather relating directly to what has import to the individual.

One may ask, even, what is the body? Am I caught in a notion of body that is self-limiting? For example, a skeleton strung together by wire, or a cloud that can barely feel itself? Is the body forgotten, or does it move when the mind moves? Should it move? In what way does the body accommodate the self? Is it configured in order to appease the self, or is it always speaking of an escape from itself?

In order to solve these questions, I would like to ask, is it a body insofar as it is a body (a self-evident closed loop) or is it a body insofar as it is, insofar as it has being? In the first case we take the body for granted, even when it is a question. This has the effect of marginalizing the importance and reality of its sensations--even in thought. In the second case we are asking, of what does it consist, in what way may I realize it?

By looking into the meanings of sensations, presence, personal space, and related modalities, we are also asking what it is to be, and expanding the notion of self-as-life.

These notions are worth touching on, simply because while they have great bearing on the nature of experience, they are rarely the subject of western philosophy as it is known to me.