In a recent post for Elephant Journal I described the world that we commonly experience as maya, an illusion.

I suggested that the apparent solidity and realness of everything around us betrays a more fundamental level of reality. I further proposed that this fundamental level is somehow more real than what we regularly experience—the reality of grass and trees and human bodies.

Although I stand by what I wrote, there is a significantly different, and perhaps richer way to approach this subject. Perhaps our life experience is less maya and more lebenswelt.

The Lebens-what? Lebenswelt is a German word which means lifeworld. As is the case with so many German terms, a lot of meaning is packed into just a handful of letters. The word is used in the branch of philosophy known as phenomenology to try to capture how we experience the world prior to what we think about how we experience the world. It is concerned with immediate experience before the mind has a chance to color that experience—a tricky concept for most of us given how much time we spend up here in our heads.

In my previous post I suggested that by seeking out and tapping into the most fundamental level of reality possible—perhaps that of pure consciousness itself—we can transform our life experience or in some way ascend, perhaps toward a greater state of awareness.

Unlike the previous post, here I am suggesting that there are equally rich rewards to be found as we navigate this solid world—embodied as we are in our human flesh—living within the bounds of this corporeal experience. After all, that is what we generally experience as real.

To appreciate the power of our bodily experience we must take a step back (or several) to consider how we humans have developed in response to the natural earth environment.

Philosopher and Ecologist David Abram writes in The Spell of the Sensuous that the relative divergence of my bodily senses (eyes in the front of the head, ears towards the back, etc.) and their curious bifurcation (not one but two eyes, one on each side, and similarly two ears, two nostrils, etc.), indicates that this body is a form destined to the world; it emerges that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth.

In essence our experience of the world in which we are immersed captures all of human evolution, and the inescapable truth that we are very much beings of this earth.

This seemingly contradicts the previous post in which I wrote that we are star-dust beings with self-awareness. But can’t we be both?

We know that we are at least a body and a mind—indeed, some phenomenologists suggest that the body is the mind, that the body is the very thing which allows us to have a worldly experience to contemplate.

Perhaps we are, in fact, the very meeting point of a body, a mind, an ego, a psyche, a consciousness, a collective consciousness and a star-dust being. Perhaps we should make no attempt to separate those—we are all of them, simultaneously and inseparably.

Yesterday I took an evening stroll by a local river as the light began to fade; it was sufficiently dark that I was the only person who had ventured to this popular nature spot. But I was far from alone; an elegant grey heron—a local resident well known to me—spread its wings and took flight, reacting to my presence, landing moments later with perfect grace with a safe stretch of river between itself and me.

The wind freshened a little, somehow making the emerging darkness more intense. I zipped up my jacket and quickened my pace as my muscles awakened and my heart beat faster. A group of seagulls raced overhead, the light from nearby streetlights occasionally glistening their undersides as they escaped into the distance, their chorus betraying their presence as it echoed all around. As I turned a corner I disturbed a group of rabbits who scurried off in all directions, rustling a stand of bushes as they did so.

It was almost completely dark as I started for home, guided toward the warming glow of the distant town. Although this is a place I’ve visited many times before, the immersion into total darkness had the inevitable effect of unsettling me a little, indicated by the familiar bodily sensations of unease.

No sound was obviously reaching my ears now but they strained to pick out some noise, any noise; perhaps partly as defence and partly searching for something familiar to latch onto.

A duck flew by, close enough that the flap of its wings broke the silence; I smiled, as always, at the seemingly manic nature of its flight. My body responded to the image, viscerally imagining what it might be like to take flight myself. As I emerged into the glow of the first street light, the river-world and its inhabitants disappeared behind the gloom.

I had arrived back in the human realm; my senses rejuvenated by my short excursion, my corporeal tie to the non-human natural world confirmed by how I felt, and any desire to search for a more fundamental level of reality quenched—at least for the moment.

~

Author: Gary Thomson

Editor: Alli Sarazen

Photo: Matthias Ripp/Flickr