The Body, Mind, & Emotions As Identities
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
Throughout our lives, we are continually forming answers to the question of who we are. Yet these answers often do not come through really looking to the core of our being, but instead from how we want others to perceive us. They are answers from the ego, and they come in numerous forms. Regardless of how we identify ourselves, the process of saying we are any “thing” requires that we draw a line between what we are and what we are not. According to Ken Wilber in the book No Boundary: Eastern And Western Approaches To Personal Growth (1979), “What you are actually doing, whether you know it or not, is drawing a mental line or boundary across the whole field of your experience, and everything on the inside of that boundary you are feeling or calling your ‘self,’ while everything outside that boundary you feel to be ‘not-self.’” (4)
The body is one of the boundary lines that people use in defining who they are. For some people, their sense of self includes their bodies, while for others, their bodies are simply vehicles for their minds. Another such boundary line is to accept the whole mind as self or to only accept certain parts of the mind (called the persona) as being the self. This can be seen when someone denies her/his deep anger and instead puts it off on other people and situations. The boundaries of self that people draw vary between individuals and between times in each individual’s life. At one point we may feel our identities linked to a certain body type or emotion, yet within a matter of several years, our bodies and emotions often change. This continual changing in how we identify ourselves shows that identities within such boundaries are not the same as the unchanging true Self. Ellen Grace O’Brian states in A Single Blade Of Grass: Finding The Sacred In Everyday Life (2002), “If we analyze our life, we see that most of what we think is ‘us’ cannot be us. Is the body us? No. Because the body we have now is different from the one we had ten or even five years ago. Is the mind us? No. Because our thoughts are also changing, even more than the body is changing.” (46) Another way to realize the illusion of these boundaries of self is offered by Gangaji, who encourages us to look deeply to the core of any sense of separation. “When you inquire into that separation, simply, obviously, immediately, you find that it is just not there.”
As we learn to dissolve these boundaries our sense of self encompasses more and more, and we move toward the true Self, which is boundless. Ken Wilber suggests that the true Self is like the ocean water, while all the ideas of self that we have within our boundary lines are like the various waves on the ocean. Each wave is made of the water, yet if we only focus on the wave, we may not realize it is made of water. We have learned to look at life with our minds, and thus we apply our minds to trying to know the true Self. Yet it is the mind that holds one’s sense of self within the boundaries of thoughts.
Many spiritual teachers and traditions focus on quieting the mind, for the true Self can not be realized when the mind is full of thoughts. According to Eckhart Tolle in The Power Of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment (1999), it is the mind which is the largest obstacle to self-realization. Many peoples’ minds are out of balance, constantly racing between thoughts. Although it may seem that we are in control of our minds because we can use them to solve a problem or focus on a project, Tolle states that if we cannot turn off our minds, we are being used by them. As such, the mind is destructive. Tolle states, “You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.” (13)
What happens when we identify with the mind, body, and/or emotions is that we seek happiness through gratifying these senses of self. We may focus our lives on stimulating our minds, pleasing our bodily senses, working through our emotions, and trying to keep our bodies from aging. Yet what seems to happen is that the moment we are not stimulated, we find ourselves unsure of who we are and our place in the world. We thus try to fill our lives with tasks and preoccupations in order to not experience an underlying sense of disappointment, longing, and searching for something more.