ADVAITA SIMPLIFIED – Part I: You are the Sensor
Advaita Simplified
In progressively ascending order of Difficulty* for mind to understand.
(* – Difficulty implies that some effort is needed in re-orientating the habitual pattern of the mind to a new worldview)
Step 1: You are not what you perceive.
You see your body; you are aware of your thoughts; you are pleased with your possessions; you are proud of your lineage. None of them is the real “You.”
Metaphor 1: If the chair you see can’t be you, can the body you see be you?
Metaphor 2: You get a sense of having a distinct body (called embodiment) from multiple sensory inputs. If the sensory inputs are removed, you do not know whether there is a body at all for you. In other words, you get disembodied. This happens to you every night in your deep sleep (when there are no sensory inputs received by your brain).
Step 2: Your thoughts or your movements are not really yours.
You may claim that you are able to think and the limbs obey your command to move. You may say, hence, your mind and body are yours. But this is pure fallacy. Neither your thoughts nor your body movements are under your control. You become aware of the thought or movement after it occurs and then you claim ownership to it post facto.
Experiment 1: Thought Control: Close your eyes and decide to have no thoughts just for 30 seconds. Watch yourself if you were really thought-free (unless you have been a meditator). If you are the true owner of your thoughts, you must have been able to control them, make them obey your instructions. But you cannot!
Experiment 2: Body Movement: You may claim ownership to the body because you think you can control the movement of your hands or legs, say you can walk out of the room. If you examine meticulously, no movement of the limbs takes place unless a thought to move precedes the movement. Even if you would like to wiggle your finger, a thought to wiggle has to arise first and then the finger moves. But we have already seen in Experiment 1 above that the thoughts themselves are not under our control. How can then the follow up action be claimed to be under our control?
Further, Neuroscientists proved three decades ago that your conscious awareness of taking a decision to wiggle the finger is delayed by at least a fifth to half a second. The brain initiates the preparatory process of giving instructions to the concerned muscles etc. much earlier than you being consciously aware of the decision. Recent repeat experiments with modern sophisticated equipment showed that the brain begins its actions by as much as 7 to 10 seconds ahead of your awareness of deciding to wiggle. Scientists have been able even to predict what your decision is going to be (when there is a choice) by studying the pattern of activity in your brain prior to you being aware of your own decision.
Experiment 3: Making Tea: Suppose you decide to have tea. Why the tea-thought and not coffee-thought or something else? A thought occurred first and you claim ownership to that thought afterwards. Then your legs move. Which leg has moved first – right or left? Have you made any decision? No. The body itself made the decision. Similarly, tea-making happens and you claim doership of making the tea (action). Neuroscience calls these as the confabulation by the left brain.
Step 3: A ‘self’, a ‘soul’ or a ‘me’ does not exist within us.
A sense of a ‘me’ or a ‘self’ for me is brought about only by putting together a bunch of sensations happening at the moment combined with some memories about myself. This ‘sense of a self’ including a sense of ‘my body’ is highly fragile and imaginary. There is no permanent entity or a spot for ‘self’ in our brain. We forget our ‘self’ when our very life is under threat and our body just acts to save itself. We may even disregard to consider our limbs as ours on occasion.
Experiment 1: Rubber Hand Illusion: We all experience our body to be part of ourselves. It is a fundamental aspect of ‘self’ awareness. Right? How strong is your internal image of your own ‘self’? Let us do an expt.
Seat yourself in a chair. Place a rubber hand on a table in front of you next to your real hand. Conceal the real hand behind a cardboard screen. Ask a friend to brush the real hand and the rubber hand at the same time. In about 10 – 12 secs, you will feel like the rubber hand is your real hand. On top of that, your brain begins to disown your own real hand. The temperature of the real hand begins dropping!
Video: Rubber hand illusion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxwn1w7MJvk&feature=player_embedded
Experiment 2: Body Swapping: Such a perceptual phenomenon does not happen just for a limb or a part of the body. It can happen to your entire body through suitable manipulation of the sensory information received by you. People mistook in experiments that the mannequin in front of them to be themselves. A sort of parakaya pravesha!
Video: Body swapping:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rawY2VzN4-c
Experiement 3: Another interesting fact is that your brain considers the tools you use as an extension of your limbs. For example, if you are an instrumental musician, say pianist, your brain considers the piano keys as an extension of your fingers and the sensoriomotor connections adopt accordingly in your brain. Thus your tools too become part of your ‘self’. Even a prosthetic leg is treated as owned by your brain. Your ‘self’ is what you train yourself to be.
Step 4: You are the sensor which perceives all the things.
Whatever you notice is an object – your body, mind, thoughts, feelings, smells, tastes, sounds, friends, spouse, child, house.
You can never see or feel the sensor because “You” are that very sensor who perceives.
Metaphor 1: Eye: The eye cannot see itself. Anything seen by the eye is not the eye.
Metaphor 2: Mirror: Imagine a vast absolutely clean mirror. Anything appearing within the mirror is a reflection. Those things are not the mirror. Can the mirror see itself?
Continued in Part 2
