* The mysteries of our bodies * Captive to thoughts and emotions * The ultimate mystery: the Consciousness *
The mysteries of our body
Our senses tell us that our bodies are solid and constant. But in reality, our bodies are constantly changing, like a flowing river. With each breath, a huge number of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms enter our body, are incorporated into our cells, and the same number leave our body when we exhale.
In less than a year, 98% of the atoms in our body are replaced: the liver is renewed in 6 weeks, the skin in 5 days, bones are replaced every 3 months, and the 'raw material' of hereditary DNA is replaced in 6 weeks.
The atoms of your 1-year-old body are now outside your body: in the air, in the soil, incorporated into other living organisms, grass, wood... the whole planet is recycling itself in a continuous cycle. We live in a close interconnectedness with everything, everything is in constant transformation, in flux. The only constant is change. Yet we experience the permanence of the "Self". Could it be that we are not our body?
In the captivity of thoughts
What are the thoughts? The philosopher Descartes declared "I think, therefore I am". This misconception still affects our identity today. Our thoughts, like the cells of our bodies, are constantly changing: a thought appears and disappears, giving way to a new stream of associated thoughts associated with the original thought. And between the thoughts there is a space. This space is the field of consciousness in which the thought appears.
Do a simple, but all the more shocking experiment:
Suspend reading for a while, set yourself a clock. The aim of the experiment is to stop you thinking. Measure the time, how long you are able not to think.
So, how long was it before the next thought came to you? 5-10 seconds, maybe more?
We pride ourselves on our ability to think. But are we really thinking? Do we actually want to think? Our experiment shows that it is not we who think, but thought that holds us in its grip. It is the constant flow of thought that obscures the fact of the existence of consciousness.
That is why the medieval mystics said: “Between God and you, there is only thought.”
The trap of our emotions
Emotions work in a similar way: they appear and disappear in the space of consciousness.
Emotions, however, have a huge impact on our lives: they can cause lasting addiction. Each emotion has its corresponding neuropeptide, a kind of hormone produced by the brain and released into our cells through the bloodstream. These peptides are very powerful compounds, so if they bombard our cells for a long time, they become addictive. And once you become addicted to an emotion, you unconsciously create situations in your life that satisfy your addiction. If you are addicted to anger, you seek out situations in life that satisfy your cells' "anger" peptide addiction.
Our bodies are constantly renewing, they are not permanent - so we cannot be the body. Our emotions and thoughts are not permanent as well. However, what we call the 'I' is permanent. So, it is time to ask the question: If we are not the ever-changing body, the ever-changing emotions and thoughts, then WHO ARE WE?
The realm of the ultimate mystery: the Consciousness
Science has now studied the world down to the smallest detail: it has dissected the human body, dissected it into organs and then into cells, and looked inside the nucleus. But when it finally put the pieces of the body back together, all it found was a dead, lifeless puppet... life had somehow drained out of it in the dismemberment process. We know all about the structure of the mouse eye, in Latin terms, numbers, statistics and equations. But what we know very little about, and what we regard as the ultimate scientific challenge of the 21st century, is consciousness itself.
Two young fish are swimming and meet an older fish:
- Isn't the water beautiful today? - The older fish says hello in a friendly way. The two young fish swim on, and one of them says: - Water? What is water?
You see all kinds of objects around you, but you ignore space. We have been taught to selectively focus our attention only on the visible, the "solid", so that we ignore the unmanifest: the space in which objects appear; the silence on whose surface sounds ripple. Consciousness itself is the space in which our perceptions, emotions and thoughts appear, the mental image of the world is projected into the space of consciousness.
Our consciousness is constantly flooded with feelings, emotions and thoughts, and as we pay attention to these contents, we ignore the space in which the contents are appearing.
This conscious space is our ultimate Self.
Excerpt from the book "The Mysteries of Consciousness” by Ervin Kery