Is consciousness dependent upon the body? Or is the body dependent upon consciousness?
How to certainly know which statement is true of our experience?
Take the first hypothesis under our contemplative microscope, the hypothesis that consciousness is dependent upon the body. What does this really suggest? It suggests that without the body, consciousness would not exist, that when the body dies, consciousness will also die. It suggests consciousness is limited to the body. Is that verified by the evidence of our experience? Let's see.
There's a lot riding on the answer to this question. If we really are dependent upon the body, we are destined to die into absolute nothingness, non-existence. Finito! No more experience, zilch! So without further ado, let's check the reality of our experience to discern the utterly fallacious constitution of this hypothesis.
Look at what 'dependency' really implies. For a relationship of dependency to exist, for one thing to be dependent upon another, those things must be in contact. And to be in contact, they must be simultaneously present. This contact, in the simultaneity of the now, implies that they are connected. And connection implies that they are facets of one single medium, that they share the same reality. Furthermore, this reality-medium uniting the two things must be presently experienced, for the two things are presently experienced. Our experience of the two apparently distinct things is, in fact, the experience of this one, reality-medium.
And what do we mean when we refer to a single medium in which a multiplicity of things are connected? We are referring to a oneness of substance, out of which the multiplicity of things is made. The total medium is made of one all-inclusive, all-pervasive substance. So the two things, in this case the body and consciousness, are made of the same substance. And being that all there is to the body and consciousness is our experiencing of them, all there is to the substance out of which they are made is experiencing.
The reasoning of our direct experience reveals that the body and consciousness are made of the same substance. What is that substance, in the truth of our experience? If we meditate on the naked intimacy of what is really there, we find that this substance is only pure experiencing. The body is an experience, consciousness is an experience. Exploring the essence of what these experiences are, all that is known there is pure experiencing, the very same one substance.
What are the implications of discovering that consciousness and the body are one substance? This oneness implies that resisting the body is impossible. There is no way for our self, consciousness, to become other than the body, to be at a distance from it, and from that distance issue forth a resistance towards it. Moreover, the body - as all the movements of sensation - is incapable of perturbing or disturbing what we are, consciousness, for only one indivisible substance is present as the body and consciousness. A substance, which is irreducibly itself, cannot perturb or affect itself, just as a movie cannot perturb or affect the screen out of which it is made. There aren't two things there to interact, to create a perturbation.
What is the common name for experiencing the absolute absence of resistance and perturbation? Peace. That is what the body and consciousness are made of. Our self, this one substance of experiencing, is a body of conscious Peace. Delicious!
An objection may come; "I don't experience the body or consciousness as peaceful all the time." The reason we don't seem to experience the body as made of peace is that, in the process of believing thought, we give credence to an artificial and imaginary separation between the body and consciousness. When looking through the filter of this imaginary separation, there seems to be resistance and perturbation, because there is now one thing interacting with another. Remove that filter, in the same way that we have just done in this investigation, and experience is revealed as what it really is; a seamless oneness of the body and consciousness, and thus, peace itself, our one self.
So now, to take this investigation deeper, what remains to be seen? Although it is understood - experientially - that the essence of the body and consciousness is really one substance, there is at this stage in our investigation still a remaining possibility that our peace could be perturbed or affected by the cosmos, by the people, objects and events that occur to us, for the cosmos continues to be considered as other than what we are. Moreover, the possibility remains that our self could die or disappear, for the cosmos could be that from which our self has arisen, and as such, be that into which we could potentially dissolve. Therefore, this peace we have discovered to be the nature of our self could vanish one day.
If we look at the reality of the present, our self is not the one to vanish. Rather it is the hypothesis of our self being an emergent property of the cosmos which vanishes under our contemplative scrutiny. All we need do here is apply the same line of experiential reasoning that we have used already, to collapse the substantial distinction between the body and consciousness. And the reasoning we employ is simply that for two things to be present and be experienced together - in this case; our self and the cosmos - they must be connected. And to be connected implies that they are made of the same essential, irreducible substance.
Knowing full-well that our essential substance is this pure experiencing, that all we are is this pure experiencing, what could the substance that connects our self and the cosmos be?
The cosmos is solely an experience to us. The trees, flowers, people, objects, the sky, planets, sun, moon, black holes seen in telescopes, are all only known through our experiencing of them. None of these apparent things have been verified to exist independent of experiencing. Nor could they ever! There is no 'them' separate from experiencing.
Only experiencing is experienced. All we have - all we are - is this experiencing-substance. We can only experience, and what we experience is made of our experiencing.
The form we experience, the cosmos in this case, is not 'ours' in the sense of a possessed object that is acquired and can one day be lost. The cosmos is not an object to us. There is no separation here for a subject-object relationship to exist. The cosmos is 'ours' in the wisdom that it appears in our experience, in our self. The cosmos is made of the experience of what we are: this experiencing-substance.
Just as we feel the body is 'our' body because we intuit it to be made of our self, in the same way, the cosmos is our cosmos, for the only substance there is our self. All that we experience as the body, consciousness and the cosmos is our experiencing-substance. We are the body, consciousness and the cosmos. They are three names for our self, for one substance.
Wowweee!
Now, what are the implications of this understanding? There is no distance or separation between our self and the cosmos. We are one and the same presence. In such wise, just as it is impossible to resist or perturb the presence of our self, for we are indivisibly one presence, whatever we experience in and as the cosmos, being made of our self, is impossible to resist or be perturbed by. Our experience of the apparent cosmos is, thusly, at all times only peace itself.
Again the objection may come, "I don't experience the cosmos as peaceful all the time." Again, the cause for this seeming absence of peace is the belief in a separation between our self and the cosmos. Looking through the filter of this belief, resistance and perturbation seem to occur. Remove this filter, by removing the belief in separation, and experiencing is revealed as what it really is; peace itself. The entire cosmos is made of the experience of peace.
"Hey now", an objecting thought may chime in, "What about the 'Big Bang', the explosion that supposedly initiated the beginning of the cosmos? The prevailing theory in physics at the moment is that the cosmos began, and will inevitably end. So, there is a remaining possibility that our intrinsic peace is destined to end at the end of the cosmos." Ok, so let's check this out with our intelligent reason and experience. Does the beginning and ending of the cosmos imply that our intrinsic peace is destined to end?
For the cosmos to have a beginning, it must have arisen from a source, and it must depend on that source from which it arose, and therefore, our self - which is now understood to be the total cosmos - must depend on that source. What could that source be? That source can't be nothing, or non-existent. For, simply and accurately put, nothing is nothing. Non-existence is-not. Nothing or non-existence cannot give rise to something, that is, being. There is nothing there in nothing out of which to make being.
Only being is. And it is the only one out of which the cosmos and everything can be made. And that's our experience! All that exists is made of experiencing.
We experience the Is-ness of all that Is. Scan the entire panorama of all experiencing and find only the experiencing of being. There is no being independent of experiencing.
So here, we have the whole understanding. This self-experiencing-substance that we are, which appears as the total cosmos, is dependent upon the presence of being. And so again in our understanding it is clear, to be dependent upon that means we are that, as one essential, seamless, irreducible substance.
All there is as All-Being is this self-experiencing-substance that we are.
Our initial question of dependency, then, is moot. There are not two things in being to be dependent on one another. Only the presence of being is present as an indivisible oneness. And it is, being all alone, unlimited. There is only itself, our Self.
So what about death? If all there is to All-Being is our Self, our one substance, is there a possibility that we could disappear?
Into what would we disappear or die? Is there anything other than All-Being? No! Being is the only One that Is.
Being the only One, Being, our Self, is eternal, timeless, never-ending. Phew!
An eternity of being this self-experiencing-substance, which is peace itself; appearing to itself as all possible things. Hallelujah!
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