Are you your body-mind? It would certainly seem so. Every sensation we experience – taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing – reinforces that perception. But is there more to the answer than a yes or no can provide?
We are raised for good reason to believe in the physicality of the reality that surrounds us, and our senses confirm its existence every minute of the day. Objects appear at different locations in space, and it takes time to move from one to another. You are there, I am here, and between us is a distance that can be measured. Everything appears to be separate.
But just as the body-mind is an object also, it needs a witness other than itself to verify it as such. Thus, as we set forth on our spiritual journey, and as this question of identity arouses our curiosity, the quest begins to discover who or what this mysterious witness could be.
But right off the bat there’s a catch. The witness is subjective. There is no “thingness” to find, and the body-mind struggles with what to make of its formless nature. Hmmm. Nonetheless, you’ve become intuitively aware of a possibility beyond your human reach. It feels like an identity that is not yet fully rendered.
As you think about where to look next, a second setback intrudes. Your ego makes a play to take the lead. “I am the body-mind,” it announces. “I am all you need or need to know. Trust me, and I will guide you to the good life.” Hmmm, again. The ego has been promising this for as long as you can recall, but in its pledge of many pleasures, disappointment and regret have never lagged far behind either.
Looking around, you wonder if you have been hypnotized to accept a limited reality that is not having the happy effect you were seeking.
Then, out of the blue, a vivid childhood memory comes to light. You remember being given the picture of a tree and told that an angel was hiding somewhere within it. At first you saw only the tree: its branches and leaves and texture, until suddenly, as if by magic, the angel’s shape appeared in a layout of the leaves like a secret revealed. The angel had been there all along, merely hidden from ordinary vision.
An idea begins to dawn in you. The angel is like the witness, watching and awaiting discovery. It is your hidden nature, the consciousness at the core of your being. Your body-mind is merely its latest means of transportation, which you have fitted with various features and self-definitions.
Once you have seen the angel in the tree, your whole world looks different too. The witness is seen as a higher aspect of yourself. Infinite possibilities continue to unfold.
This entire new perspective is an invitation to a new and greater experience of truth and happiness too. It is an offer to enter the realm of the Self, where all becomes transparent, where the temporal is rendered eternal.
Yet, letting go of the ego’s point of view can still seem scary. We have attachments and unresolved fears that are deeply rooted in the dream of ourselves as all of those sensory features and self-definitions. Now, though, clarity and hope are in focus also, for in seeing the angel, we have learned to question the limits of our conscious awareness.
We are nothing if not divine. The depth and breadth of our latent awareness is inexpressibly vast, and it, as we allow, like the angel in the tree, is there to lift our spirits to discoveries of endless delight.