Are we more than our mind and body? It’s a bit of a strange question and something that has been debated time and time again, but I personally think that there is more to us then just our mind and body. I also believe that it is possible to experience a sense of oneness in the universe but impossible to identify our selves with that experience of oneness. I will try to explain what I mean in this article.

Overall, our being consists of a mind, body and something else that I will refer to as an awareness. It could also be called consciousness but I have chosen to use the term awareness because I find it less convoluted.

There is an awareness that allows us to observe our mind and body and it is something that is unique in and of itself. For instance, our mind consists of our thoughts, but we can observe our thoughts just like we can observe our body. We can also turn off our thoughts and just sit within our own awareness and just be. So with that, we may conclude that our being consist of our mind, body and awareness.

In moments when our thoughts are turned off, our observing awareness takes over and we become connected to a sort of oneness within the universe. In such moments there are no thoughts and no identification of self. There is only awareness, and so in these moments - we are “one.”

However, once we begin to think, even if we are thinking about our own awareness, we fall back into our identity of self and we separate our self from our awareness and the experience oneness. We enter back into the mind and the world of thought and we lose the experience of awareness.

THE MIND AND IDENTITY

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Our mind consist of the thoughts inside our heads. It is the language of our internal dialogue and it allows us to reason and to think about the world. It also allows us to create our identity.

Our identity is made up of words and labels that we hold onto which ultimately become a part of us and which separate us from everything else. In general, we gather up words and ideas such as, our name, gender, ethnicity, our roles, titles, personality traits and so on and so on, and these ideas basically create who we are. These words and labels that we become attached to, are created by and arranged within our mind, so we can say that our identity is a product of the mind and it is different than our awareness.

Overall, creating an identity is a process in which the mind separates the “Me” or the “I” from everything else. Each word or label used to create our identity, functions as a method to separate us from one unified whole. Basically, if we didn’t have words which allow us to think then there would be no way of distinguishing anything from anything else and therefore separation would not exist. Instead, we would be a part of one unified whole. We would perceive the world as oneness.

Example

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This is a bit confusing so as an example, imagine that our language consisted of only one word – “water.” The word itself is not important other than to demonstrate a point. I chose the word “water” for no particular reason.

Now look around the room you are sitting in and imagine that everything you see is called “water.” If everything is called “water” then there is no separation. Not only are the objects in front of you “water,” but the space between them is also “water.” The air around you is “water” and the particles which make up the objects are also called “water.” Literally everything is “water,” so there is no separation there is only unity.

Everything is one unified whole, called “water.”

This is not to say that our sense perception changes in this scenario. Things around us would still appear to look different to us (i.e. a chair would still look like a chair). What changes is our perception of reality and how we relate to the world around us. Things in our world would look different but they would still all be perceived as “one.”

BACK TO IDENTITY

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So, our identity is a breakdown of separation which is created in the mind through the use of words. We start out with one unified whole and break it up further and further, separating it out into individual parts. We break up the unified oneness into many individual parts through the use of labels. Then in order to create an identity we cling to specific individual concepts that we choose and make them a part of who we are.

Ultimately, the mind separates the world into individual parts and anything that we identify with becomes a part of who we are.

HERE IS WHERE IT GETS FUCKY

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Since separation and the self is created by the mind through the use of words, our identity as an individual, is a product of our thoughts. Our identity (the self) is something different than our awareness and it is not something that can truly be claimed as a part of our identity. We can ultimately be aware, or we can think, but we cannot do both. Once we claim our awareness then we are no longer being aware, we are actually thinking and once we start thinking then we are no longer being “aware” which means that we again separate our self from oneness.

In order for a person to claim something as their own they must think the word ‘I’ or perhaps say the phrase ‘this is me’ and once they do that, then they are no longer existing as the awareness, they are actually thinking about their identity. Basically ‘I’ cannot exist without the thought of ‘I.’

CONCLUSION

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Our existence as an individual identity is due to our thoughts creating separation. Without thought there is no separation and we are simply awareness. in such moments we lack an individual identity and experience oneness. However, when we claim the awareness and identify the "self" with it, it becomes a thought and we are back to being separate.

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Thanks For Reading. Feel free to comment and share your own thoughts on the subject.

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