Being ‘inside’ ourselves
As a ‘self,’ where are you? 'Inside' yourself, presumably. Inside your “mortal frame” or body. But what does such ‘being inside’ really mean? How can your self be 'inside' yourself?
I’m concerned here with the idea or sense of self as centre of consciousness (for ‘self’ has other implications too, involving the concepts of identity and agency). When we’re conscious of some aspect of the world, we can also become aware of our being conscious of it, and this is how a certain aspect of the sense of selfhood arises. It’s common to see this kind of self-aware consciousness defined rather simplistically as ‘the feeling of being inside your head, looking out’ – or words to that effect. But the reality (the reality of our experience of ourselves) is surely much more complex. For one thing, the way that the ‘feeling of being inside your head, looking out’ seems to privilege vision should make us suspicious. Close your eyes and listen instead. Does your consciousness of what you hear seem to be located ‘inside your head’? Perhaps it does – but if I tell you to listen to music as though the music is playing inside your body, and to feel it ‘move around’ inside you, you will find that you can readily do this and the experience of it is vivid (see Re-Imagining Your Body p. 115). Significantly, you cannot do it with what you see.
Next, taste something. Your mouth, strictly speaking, is inside your head (so long as we include the lower jaw in the head), but is the taste in your mouth ‘inside your head’ in the sense initially intended? No, it isn’t, it’s in your mouth instead, that is, it's more strongly, or more strictly physiologically, located. A smell, similarly, is inside your nose rather than inside your head. For some reason, taste and smell seem to be intensely focused in their physiological points of origin (though they also can seem to 'expand outwards' within you from that point of origin). But you don’t normally hear sounds ‘inside your ears’ – unless it’s a ringing in them (and you certainly don’t experience sights ‘inside your eyes’). This is the reason that putting a shell to your ear can cause you to hear a distant sea. But if your mouth and nose are not inside the (slightly abstract) 'head' where your consciousness is conventionally supposed to reside, what exactly is this ‘head’?
Next pinch your leg. Where is the pain that you feel? I would say that it is in two ‘places’ simultaneously (provided you pinch yourself hard enough): naturally enough it’s in your leg, localized at and around the point you pinch, but it’s also ‘inside you’ in such a sense that your pain seems to ‘fill you’. But it does not seem to fill your head. Only a certain kind of headache can do that.
What of your thoughts or your emotions and moods? Insofar as you are conscious of these, where does that consciousness seem to be located? Many would feel that their thoughts somehow seem to take place ‘inside their head’ (in that slightly peculiar, but also over familiar, sense of ‘head’ that we’ve been trying to get at), but where (‘inside you’) is your anger, your love, your feeling of security, your loneliness, your sense of smug satisfaction, your shame…? Perhaps when you turn these feelings into thoughts (‘I’m furious with him,’ ‘I just have to see her’…), then these thoughts seem to arise and have their being ‘in your head,’ but the emotions themselves can seem to be ‘located’ in the heart or in the guts, among many other ‘psycho-physiological’ possibilities.
But these are metaphors.... Aren't they? Well, yes. But not necessarily in a sense that implies 'not really true'. And if the heart is a metaphor, isn't the head likely to be one also?
What I think is ultimately more telling, as a reason for the over-location (that is, for the simplistically precise location) of our sense of self as centre of consciousness, than the fact that our sense of vision seems to be located ‘inside our heads’ is the fact that our inner verbalizations seem to take place there. But even this is far more problematic than it first seems. There are many times when you are ‘lost in thought,’ usually a kind of thought that is at least partly verbal, where the thought in which you are lost doesn’t seem to be taking place anywhere at all. Insofar as you are lost in it, you are inside it, rather than it being inside you! It is only when you become aware of your thinking process (as against merely aware of the thoughts), in other words when you ‘catch yourself thinking,’ that this process seems to become ‘located’. Your thinking needs to become self-conscious in order for it to seem to take place ‘inside your head’. Arguably, then, it is not the thinking as such that ‘resides’ there – it is something else.
Some would assert that what resides there is plain old you – you insofar as you are self-aware (aware of your thinking, aware of your seeing…). Barry Dainton, in his book Self, is as precise as this: you are normally situated, he says, “at a point an inch or so behind your eyes and between your ears”! (So much for the Cartesian res cogitans which has no extension!) But this is the grossest mistake. It is a mistake both in locating the self so precisely and in the way it abstracts the self from the experiences (the thinking, the seeing, the hearing…) in which the sense of it necessarily arises. Once your ‘you’ is abstracted like this, it becomes like a ‘thing in its own right’. As a consequence, it seems to become something you can have. What has happened here is that one particular form of sense of self (which is something you can have) becomes confused with your self (which is something you cannot have, because it is what you are). And what is perhaps worse, your ‘you’ becomes something ‘inside’ you in entirely the wrong sense, rather like a ‘driver in the car’.
What’s the lesson of all this? Surely that you are distributed throughout your body and that, as an embodied creature, you could not be anything else. The crude (‘driver in the car’) sense of a self ‘inside’ you is a legacy of Western dualism, which has long separated your body from the supposedly ‘more real’ you (soul, spirit, mind, personality…). We will only achieve a true understanding of how the body and the self are interwoven by leaving that dualism behind. This is a mere tautology, of course, so we can't leave the dualism behind first and then go on, on that basis, to achieve that true understanding. Instead, we need to find at least some of the many different routes that all lead to the falling away of the same structure of illusion.
Whatever one thinks of the usefulness of the Indian conception of the chakras (say for meditation or alternative medicine), this is clearly a much more subtle and sophisticated account of the way consciousness is located in (in fact throughout) the body than reductive Western dualism. Chakras are nodes or concentrations of energy associated with types of consciousness that are located within the subtle body (for they are not organs) but which interact with the gross (i.e. material) body by means of the nervous system and glands. Each of the seven main chakras (at or near the crown, brow, throat, heart, solar plexus, sacrum, and base of the spine) is a focus within the body for its particular mode of sensation, emotion and consciousness. Health consists in balance among all the chakras rather than dominance of any subset of them, since any such dominance must entail blockage or unevenness of the flow of vital energy (prana). Physical, psychological and even spiritual health, thus, entails a being fully in the body in a well distributed way. Over-location of the self in the 'head' is unhealthy.
One route, then. There are many others.