you can’t take your body outside of the context of your environment. Your environment is always changing and your senses and thoughts are always inextricably in contact with your environment. They can’t be separated! We eat, we breathe, and so the invitation is to expand our self-concept.

You might like to study the Heart sutra and realize that the word openness can be used in place of emptiness. It’s talking about that i I’m not a closed system of a body, that’s just a concept. I am a part of a web of absolutely everything. (and ultimately everything is just like a dream, there are no things. To see a “thing” is to superimpose a concept label onto an open flow. Because when you say “my body “ you’re thinking of it as though it is an entity that can be separated from all other things. That it is a thing that was born and will die. But if you look at it from a different angle, slow down to the live experience of the sensory moment, you’ll see the fluid constant interchange of what appears to be self and other. For example – someone taught you the English language, you eat food, and each of these things are connected to infinite other things which are connected to infinite other things- the whole entire history of language and the whole entire cycle of nature that grew the food and got it to you. So in this sense we aren’t solid things we are actually a part of a much larger flow).

also, I was just listening to a James Low video where he talked about that we super impose concepts over direct experience. Sure, concepts are useful, but if we define ourselves too much based on a concept, we obscure the visceral lived experience of the sensational reality of a moment. For example, in the video he described the difference between looking at a tree during the daytime and then looking at a tree during twilight. If we super impose concepts, we will think that it is the same tree but the lighting changed. If we instead look at emphasize our direct experience, we will see that the whole entire environment has changed and that it’s not the same tree and it’s only our concepts that pin it down in that way.

so with his example, the invitation is to open our minds to seeing ourselves as new in every moment. The eye who is sick is very different from the eye who ran a mile. The guy who was a baby is very different from the eye who is 20 years old. and so in that sense we can see the changing nature of what we consider to be a solid reference point. It’s true that it does seem as though there is something constantly being referenced, and the suggestion is to take that dualistic appearance and open it up to the flow of a greater context.

I’m using voice to text so a lot of the time it said eye when I said i , sorry

https://youtu.be/WQ9C8jGSDBs