Bodiless Body-Experience

Abstract

A bodilessness in the consciousness of a body [#302] My body dissolves into a micro-foam of impermanence, zooming into the fractal edge of pre sent which endlessly unfurls fern-fronds of scintillating *now*-fuzz.[#1832]The experience seems to be similar to a thread which forms a seam and holds on one side the body and on the other side infinity together, so both are there and yet they are not there, because they are put together.[#3218] This is a long chapter, and for good reason.To me, perhaps the greatest surprise in evaluating the voluntary self-reports from our study was how many of our participants chose to describe pure awareness as involving an attenuation or even a complete disappearance of body bound aries.Unexpectedly, I found that if one asks meditators to describe a paradigmatic experience of "pure awareness," they frequently devote most of their description not to the phenomenal character of minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) itself, but to extended episodes characterized by a loss of body bound aries, a dissolution of the sense of self, a merging of sensory modalities, and an impression of "becoming one" with the world.They often describe a global mode of experience in which pure awareness has switched from background to foreground.It is as if the background has become so dominant that what was previously the foreground now becomes translucent, with some of its structural features gently fading out or vanishing altogether.This is one common way in which body-experience changes in pure awareness.However, if one looks carefully, there are actually many dif fer ent ways for body-experience to change in this context.Let us take the attenuation of body bound aries as our starting point.What I will call the phenomenology of "bodiless body-experience" is a special case of the experience of 24 Bodiless Body-Experience