#23 Body Mind Dualism, Consciousness and Meditation

Siim Land (0:01)

Could you imagine a feeling of nothingness?

Just complete stillness and emptiness.

You don't feel anything particular that can be described as having an experience.

You're not sad, not happy, not resentful, not motivated or inspired.

You're simply there in the present moment, with no thoughts running through your head, no future plans you're gonna do, no anxieties about the past, no attachments. Just it.

What is this it? What I'm talking about is the core essence of existence itself. What's it like to be anything and to experience something? It's consciousness. There are many definitions as to what consciousness is, why do we possess it and how it expresses itself. What is consciousness?

I'm definitely not qualified enough to tell you that, but I've done some research and I've had a few experiences about the nature of this thing that literally creates reality itself. Most of my enquiry focuses on meditation and that's what we'll be talking about in today's Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land. You might not have known this about me, but I have a bachelor's degree in anthropology, which is the study of humans and human cultures. My thesis was called Body Mind Dualism and the Nature of Consciousness in Transcendental Meditation. I did fieldwork with a group of meditators in Estonia who had been practicing for decades and decades. In this episode, we are going to go into some of the most profound concepts and ideas I got during my study and some of the revelations I experienced. I have to warn you, this episode is going to be quite dense and filled with scientific as well as spiritual jargon. I must also say that I am no expert in this topic and I know nothing about it. Just a newbie, so there's probably a lot of things that need to be reinterpreted. Nevertheless, I feel confident in sharing some of the main ideas. If you want to support this podcast, then make sure you leave us a review on iTunes, subscribe, hit like or those social media shares, because it's the least you can do to spread the messages. But for now, let's delve into the topic that gives meaning to everything else, because without it, nothing would even exist.

Body Mind Empowerment I'm just gonna start off by reading the introduction of my thesis, the Mind Body Problem. I first came into contact with meditation when I just graduated from high school. Of course, I had heard about it previously, but it always remained to be this mystical and weird thing. Something only yogis and spiritual people would practice. To be honest, my initial interest for trying it out came from the selfish desire of improving my mental performance. To sharpen the blade that we call the mind. The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma.

It worked. I was able to enhance my focus in life, the ability to concentrate for many hours, and be more in control of my own behavior. As I continued my practice, I never had the intention of progressing further with it. There are many stories and ideas about topics such as enlightenment, awakenings and other epiphanies, but only a few can actually tell what they all mean. I do not claim to be enlightened because, in my opinion, any claims of the like would immediately falsify me as a fraud. That's why, throughout this thesis, I take the Socratic position of I know nothing. Despite that, I still had several strange occasions while meditating, wherein it seems as if I enter an altered state of consciousness. Although I'm completely awake and aware, both my body and mind feel at one instance estranged from me and at others fully united. In search of getting at least some explanations, I had decided to do my research on this topic. Let me tell you why you're here. The underlying conflict and tension of this thesis and my meditation experiences involves the notion of body-mind dualism. It was Rene Descartes in the end of the 17th century who notoriously brought it to surface as it exists in science today by saying, I think, therefore I am. The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how mental states, events and processes like beliefs, actions and thinking are related to the physical states given that the human body is a physical entity and the mind is non-physical or the relationship between these two worlds of body and mind. Cartesian dualism takes the position that mental phenomena are non-physical or that the body and mind are distinctive from one another with the latter existing separately from the former. An anthropological account on the mind-body problem represents more the view of embodiment. Such an approach stems from the School of Phenomenology pioneered by the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Maurice Morel-Ponty, the latter of whom wrote that Quote, The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be involved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them. Phenomenologists take the position that consciousness originates from the body and is the body projecting itself into the world. Individuality can never be understood as long as the world is made into an object, because both universality and the world lie at the subject's core. It's realized only, quote, if the world is the field of our experience, and if we are nothing else but the view of the world. Therefore, it can be thought that an individual's consciousness is never an individual thing, standing distinct from the world and culture. I found much inspiration and assistance from a phenomenological approach, so which is why I decided to include it in my research. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it.