The body, the form we see in the mirror and with which we identify the “I” is not inherently alive. This can be a startling idea until one reflects upon it, but the truth is that the body only expresses life as long as it is quickened by consciousness. In these terms, the tongue is not aware of what it is saying, the eye does not know what it sees, and so on. Once the enlivening consciousness is withdrawn, neither the tongue nor the eye is able to express life any longer, and the body’s inherently inert state is revealed. Thus the body cannot die, because it is is never alive, except insofar as the consciousness dwelling within it for a time animates it, and this consciousness, the true and unseen self, cannot die. The ancient Vedas have this to say of it:
The Self is not born; it does not die.This truth prompted Seth/Jane Roberts to state that “we’re as dead now as we’re ever going to be.” The difficulty in experiencing this comes from the Particle self’s tenacious identification with the body, for it is our nature as Particles to measure reality by what is seen rather than what is unseen, and in this, from a more expanded perspective, the Particle has things exactly backwards.
Fire does not burn it; water does not wet it.
Birthless, deathless, it goes on from age to age.
It is only partly correct, then, to state that the self is “in the body” since, from a more awakened vantage, the body is in the self. The experience of this, however, goes far beyond the mere stating of it. One way to get at this experience is to regard the one we see in the mirror as a construct, a version of us much like the one we might see in a dream. In any dream in which we behold ourselves in this way, in this or that situation and so on, we likely would not notice that there we are existing simultaneously as the dreamer. In other words, we are observing some Particle version carrying out the local action of the dream story, and this Particle version is the self, but the one observing, the one who is not in the dream but from whose point of view the dream is unfolding, that is also the self. As protagonist in the dream and as observer, we are bilocated, with one version of self local and the other, not.
The same model can be “caught in the act,” as it were, in our waking experience, for the one who is aware, despite identifying with the body, is not “in the body.” Rather, the body is in it in the same way that the dream is in the dreamer.
If one catches this angle of vision, something nonlocal turns inside out. It is difficult to lock into language for the simple reason that language is a Particle invention, and as a rule presupposes Particle assumptions. There are ways in which language can point to or perhaps evoke such fringe meanings, however. Poetry, for example, has this power. So does humor in certain forms. Zen koans are famous for this iconoclastic effect.
The point to contemplate here is captured beautifully in a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez, a Spanish poet who translated the verses of Tagore from the Hindu. The poem is entitled, I Am Not I:I am not I.Encountering this “I that is not I” illuminates conscious creating from the inside out in a way that cannot be imagined in strictly Particle terms. It is the doorway of homecoming and immortality. To know this less local I is to wake up from the long sleepwalk of Particle life and, as another poet, T.S. Eliot describes, “to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.
http://www.fieldproject.net/realities/?s=field+theory
