When the body/mind was searching for enlightenment, it felt as if there was an entity (like a volitional operator) located behind the eyes looking out at the world. When the body/mind saw that who it had thought is was was wholly imaginary, the sense of being an entity looking out through the eyes ceased, and awareness was no longer centered in or connected to the body in the way it was before.
Today, when the body looks around, there is a field of awareness that looks rather than an entity with a locatable and felt position. It never feels as if someone, a person, is looking; there is simply looking. Bernadette Roberts wrote about this in her first book, but her words took on a new meaning after the one who was thought to be searching for the truth was suddenly perceived to be a figment of imagination.
Roberts claimed to have lost a great deal of body awareness when the sense of selfhood collapsed (at least for a while--I don't know what her current level of body awareness is), so I assume that there is a wide range of possibility concerning how different body/minds respond to this insight phenomenon. She wrote that taking care of the body was like taking care of a plant, and she had to remember to do the simplest care-taking tasks (combing hair, brushing teeth, checking the body's appearance in a mirror, etc). She theorized about how self-referentiality and reflectiveness permeate the body in many subtle ways that are only discovered when the self-referencing activity ceases. It's been a long time since I read her book, but as I remember it, what she wrote correlates strongly with what you described in your post.
Today, when the body looks around, there is a field of awareness that looks rather than an entity with a locatable and felt position. It never feels as if someone, a person, is looking; there is simply looking. Bernadette Roberts wrote about this in her first book, but her words took on a new meaning after the one who was thought to be searching for the truth was suddenly perceived to be a figment of imagination.
Roberts claimed to have lost a great deal of body awareness when the sense of selfhood collapsed (at least for a while--I don't know what her current level of body awareness is), so I assume that there is a wide range of possibility concerning how different body/minds respond to this insight phenomenon. She wrote that taking care of the body was like taking care of a plant, and she had to remember to do the simplest care-taking tasks (combing hair, brushing teeth, checking the body's appearance in a mirror, etc). She theorized about how self-referentiality and reflectiveness permeate the body in many subtle ways that are only discovered when the self-referencing activity ceases. It's been a long time since I read her book, but as I remember it, what she wrote correlates strongly with what you described in your post.
