I was walking down the corridor on my way to take a pee . . .

Question: Robert, from your last video clip I have found a bone for you to gnaw on if you have the appetite. There was some discussion or a question to one of the participants; "what is the self?" My instant answer to that question was; "I am the knowing". The knowing of all my thoughts, feelings and perceptions etc.

I know this how? It relates to a single out of body experience, where one evening in a Burmese monastery I was walking down the corridor on my way to take a pee when I found my awareness about 4 or five metres behind my body. When I say awareness, it was just a simple knowing of my experience; as soon as thinking became involved I was back in the body.

Now, I can't reproduce that experience at will and I have no real desire to but, it has given me a reference point that seems to continually point me back to this "Knowing" as who I really am, and when I can reside in that knowing I feel great peace and a certain freedom to find a little joy within my existence. Would you care to sink your teeth into that?

Robert: My teeth? OK, I’ll bite.

That is what I call splitting, a kind of dualism in which the unity of “myselfness” and biology seems bisected. You experience the body as an object of perception that is not “you," as if some “myself” could be present and aware without a body.

To say, “as soon as thinking became involved, I was back in the body,” presumes that such splitting is possible factually as in the dualistic notion of the soul or a “life force” separate from the body without which the body is not alive. A more neutral report might be, “I seemed to be watching my body from a distance, but when I thought about it, that feeling disappeared.”

Since I presume that awareness or experiencing, which is the same thing precisely, is something that brains do, the idea of “knowing who I really am,” when the “really am” denotes disembodiment, imagining “myself” as a non-biological entity, seems a great leap to make from a brief moment of an altered, unusual point of view.

To be clear, the split between body and soul is an ancient belief that humans of all epochs have embraced. I am dissenting. Consciousness is a mystery that no one has solved. Those who claim that consciousness exists independent of physics, chemistry, and biology have the burden of proof.

I understand that when one is seeking peace and joy, as you said, splitting “myself” away from the body may seem to promise a path to a kind of promised land in which “I” am not dependent upon a mortal animal body, subject to all manner of illness, injury, pain, worries of all kinds, and finally old age and death. From a certain angle, that could seem like an attractive proposition: “All I have to do is keep ‘knowing who I really am,’” and residing in that, freedom and joy will be mine to savor.

Perhaps, having watched me speak on video, you asked me to sink my teeth in this because you want it debunked. I will oblige. There are many voices clamoring to teach the path to transcendence, but relatively few like mine. I have no such thing to teach, but only a point of view about this aliveness we share.

The only freedom I know is to be as you are right now, beyond explanations. In my experience no one is choosing and deciding, including deciding whether or not to yearn for explanations or choosing, if one does desire explanations, which ones to embrace. What is, is, and can be no different. In the next moment, a new “what is” will arise, and no one will have chosen that either.

Can you choose what to think next? Can you choose how to feel about what you think next? Try it. So much for “free will.” No one is doing this, I say. No one is making it happen. It all arises as it does. You cannot make “great peace” occur, no matter how much you desire it. You cannot choose to be free. Some are; some aren’t. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

That’s how I see it, but I might be entirely wrong. Perhaps there really are souls that exist apart from and superior to bodies and brains. Perhaps human bodies are only “meat suits” we’d be better off without. That’s about as dualistic as it gets, but enough metaphysics. I’ll speak from the heart.

In the 1980s—I’ve written about this—I underwent an undeniable awakening experience followed by several years of difficulty in coming to terms with it, so I don’t discount your experience on your way to pee. What you saw and felt is what you saw and felt, no denying that. But people have all kinds of experiences. Feeling like a "knower of experience" is an experience—one among the countless experiences that make up a day, a year, a life.

In my view, experiences and the knower of experiences are one and the same—just two words for being alive. Can there be a knower of experiences apart from experiences? Can there be experiences without their being known? In other words, the “experiencer,” is a ghost in the machine, and what “I” am is experiences—one after another, after another, etc., like waves coming ashore and breaking on the beach.

Experience is a hall of mirrors. We cannot know what any of it means. Honesty about what one knows or can know may not rescue one entirely from confusion, but it’s all we’ve got. To admit human limitation, particularly in the matter of knowing what “myself” is, seems essential. Otherwise, prescientific traditions, such as the immortal soul, can replace a proper skepticism toward experience with groundless magical thinking.

Everything is experience. There is nothing else. Experiencing is the same as noticing, and noticing is what I mean by the word “awareness.” The religious and “spiritual use of that word to indicate an exogenous, non-biological, infinite awareness in which “all of this is arising” is not what I mean by the word “awareness.”

An experience of dissociation from the body does not prove or even suggest that there can be experience without a body. The human mind is far more powerful and mysterious than we seem able to comprehend. The human mind is like a magic theater in which all manner of effects can be displayed.

Many of us have had unusual experiences and wondered what they might mean. Does your Burmese experience mean that the “real you” is a disembodied spirit? You seem to be saying that. Could the experience of watching oneself from a distance occur without a human body and brain? If that’s what you wanted me to sink my teeth into, with the proviso that I am only saying how it looks to me, here goes:

The body is this aliveness. Awareness is part and parcel of this human primate aliveness, not separate from it or distinguishable from it in any fashion except in conjecture, speculation, or religious dogma. As far as we know, without out a brain, there is no awareness—no soul or non-material essence that could be aware. Mind is what the brain does, not some field in which brains “arise.”

This mortal situation may seem inconvenient, but without a body, there is, I say, no "you" at all. The yearning to split "awareness" from the body and brain or otherwise to deny biology leads to all kinds of attractive fictions that may be born of wishful thinking.

Metaphysical speculation is never dispositive. As in politics, people take sides and devote themselves to the side they are on, knowing that such conversations never end and no one can be proven wrong. What freedom can there be in that?

I find freedom in the ordinary life we know we have—factual, biological existence: You get cut, you bleed. If you bleed long enough, you die and sayonara to awareness.

Without a living, breathing body, there is no metaphysics, so for a living, breathing human to assert that “myself is not the body” seems a bit rich. More than a bit, actually. From my vantage, it’s a bootless assertion that cuts the heart out of living.

I understand that some people love to use religion and metaphysics as foundations for extracting "meaning" from experience, particularly from experiences that seem out of the ordinary, but that ain't me, babe. Living can be difficult enough without having to make it mean something on top of it.

To embrace this aliveness without the burden of conclusions is freedom—freedom from the known, from the past, from beliefs and traditions. From that perspective, I don’t know what your out-of-body experience means, and despite the ubiquity of those clamoring to teach “spirituality” to which I referred earlier, no one else does either.

The wise among us know they don’t know. They always have. That's my take on it.