Inner Integrity and the One Who Experiences
La integridad interior y el que experimenta
A reflection on how inner honesty reveals that whatever we experience, including the body and thoughts, cannot be what we fundamentally are.
Inner Integrity and the One Who Experiences
A reflection on how inner honesty reveals that whatever we experience, including the body and thoughts, cannot be what we fundamentally are.
Because this is a simple exercise of looking within, there needs to be a really strong desire to see the truth and to have integrity. I describe it as inner integrity.
External and inner integrity
External integrity is how I relate to the world and other people. If I do what I say, if I say what I do, if I am honest, that is external integrity. Then there is inner integrity, which asks: do I tell myself my own truth, or do I lie to myself?
There is obviously a bridge between these two. I can tell myself the truth but withhold it from others. Or I can lie to myself, and then, even though I might think I am telling the truth to others, I am simply saying something that is not true, because I am not true within myself.
The body is experienced by something
Given that, the question is this: if you look at your experience, you can see that everything you know and experience about the body is experienced by something. That which is experiencing your body cannot be the body. That which is experienced by this subject I am referring to cannot be what is being experienced.
For example, if I look at my hand, I have sensations and I can see the hand. I can experience my hand through sensations that arise. We know there is a nervous system involved, but let us say that experientially, right now, I have sensations and sight. Now, am I the hand? If there is inner integrity, the answer is no. I could not possibly be my hand. At minimum, I am more than my hand. We know that if I lose my hand, I will still remain.
If you keep doing that process, you will see it applies to everything you experience that is your body. And the same applies to thoughts. Every concept, every thought is experienced by something.
The distraction of the mind-body problem
This can get tricky if we have a scientific mind, because we will come to a point where we have to contend with a fundamental question in science: is consciousness or matter fundamental? The solution is to see that it does not matter. What matters is the experience right now.
What matters is to see that every time there is a thought, there is something experiencing the thought that cannot be a thought. Every time there is a relationship to the body, there is something experiencing the body. The mind-body problem, the question of whether matter or consciousness is fundamental, is actually a distraction from this. It is an irrelevant question, because what I am talking about can be realized without contemplating the scientific problem. It has been realized long before science existed. And when it is realized, the question of what is fundamental is really not relevant.