We cannot go out of the body because we are not in a body.

The body is in us.

What is within is our physical, mental, and emotional makeup, noted and navigated (mostly unconsciously) by our attention. But just who is doing the noting and navigating? No one in particular. As mystical or transpersonal experience demonstrates, there is no discrete entity inside, no tenured tenant, no independent inner dweller, but only the personification -- or, more precisely, the personalized dramatization -- of the movement and focal coalescing of attention through our body and mind. Hearing occurs, awareness of hearing simultaneously occurs, and “I” presumes to be the “hearer,” when in fact there is, as the Buddha taught, no one inside doing the hearing.

What we essentially are -- with regard to our apparent embodiment -- makes its appearance not in a body, but as a body. This does not necessarily mean that we literally are our body, but that our body expresses rather than contains us.

But what about OOBEs (out-of-the-body experiences)? Does not their existence prove that we are in a body? Not necessarily. They simply show that substantial dissociation from the physical is possible at times other than when we are sleeping. We don’t then so much exit from the body as let the body exit from us; we are then conscious, but not embodied-conscious. The sense of separation that characterizes an OOBE may be simply that, a sense of separation or tangible apartness, perhaps triggered by the settling of attention in zones of the brain that are ordinarily activated through intense shock or stress. Many of those who endured horrendous abuse as children have said that they watched the violation of themselves from somewhere close to the ceiling. Pure survival.

Though some OOBEs arguably occur beyond or even independent of the physical body, the majority of OOBEs may simply be taking place in subtle, or seemingly non-physical, regions of the bodymind, registering their presence through the very same mechanisms as “ordinary” experience. Many OOBEs may also be lucid dreams (dreams in which one knows that one is dreaming) that are only partially lucid and therefore are taken literally, as though one, for example, is indeed standing a few feet away from one’s sleeping body, rather than simply dreaming that one is doing so.

According to various wisdom-traditions, at death the body is shed, dropped, let go of, but we, or something resembling us, persists. The physical dimension of the body drops off -- or is radically deconstructed -- at death, and we, so the transpersonal story usually goes, ordinarily feel lighter and freer for a while, as if bodiless, but before very long typically assume another bodymind, perhaps more rarefied than our earth-bodymind, but nonetheless as seemingly real as the body we had in our just-departed life was to us.

And so we apparently move -- or are irresistibly moved -- through dream-like realms pulsating with the fleshed-out consequences of our life’s dominant habits and hungers, as well as with the possibility of a truer life. Sooner or later, the story continues, those longings of ours that are less than our longing for full awakening inexorably draw us toward another round of waking-state physical embodiment -- unless there is unqualified recognition that all that is occurring is but dreamplay -- thereby mechanically fulfilling the current blueprint encoded throughout “us” both by our needs and by what we are doing with those needs.

But we don’t have to die to experience this process. It’s happening right now, even as we dream that we aren’t dreaming.

We are what we are seeking, but our attention is usually elsewhere, enslaved to the mindset that makes a goal out of what is already the case. We’ll look anywhere but inside our looking. How can we find What-Really-Matters, when we never truly lost It? Call it God’s Joke. What’s uncorked by getting the joke is the realization that we have been doing, among other things, some very serious dreaming, pretending we are the roles we play in our dreams, especially the role that features “our” body.

The key is to witness -- and, at the same time, unguardedly feel -- our body with unmuddied attention, not from a mentalized or compartmentalized distance, nor from a supposedly higher consciousness (which makes just more distance, however spiritually correct it may seem), but directly, letting awareness and sensation meet with minimal mediation or buffering or sedation.

A rare subtlety is called for here, along with a willingness to microscopically explore the edge of the edge. Perceive your body from a place of no-distance. This, done deeply and without rehearsal, helps us to navigate toward the very heart of primordial vitality and openness.

To thus feel our body, to sense its multileveled energetics and deep structures with such care, is an art in which compassion, patience, and the spirit of exploration all coexist. In the map-eluding Wonderland that the body “becomes” when we thus feel it, we meet God in the flesh, God-as-flesh. Then our physicality, in intimate embrace with wide-open yet still finely-tuned awareness, becomes an embodiment of the Source of the body. God incarnate.

This is simultaneously no big deal and mind-blowingly real. Eventually, we feel-intuit God not only with little amoebic extensions of ourself, but with our entirety. Such feeling-intuiting is not a matter of being inside or outside our physicality, but rather is about letting our whole being, even in its densest or most seemingly solid dimensions, resonate and dance with God. The ultimate participatory act.

The body asks only to be loved, lived, and illuminated. The body is not some separate mass, but is continuous -- and not just elementally -- with all that is. The body is precipitated Being, Light incarnate, prismed into form. It is not just matter. (And for that matter, matter is not just matter.) The body is not a burden with which we’ve been saddled. It is not an obstruction to realizing God.

We need to shift from having a body to being a body, and from being a body to Being. Even when the body dissolves in ecstasy or deep peace, it still exists as God’s Body, forever pregnant with form.

In permitting a fuller, saner embodiment of our essential nature, we make possible a life for ourselves that is of benefit to all beings, regardless of our moods and circumstances, regardless of the dramatics of purification. In this, we develop a radical intimacy both with what dies and with what does not die.

Embodiment arises, unexplainably and with hyperbole-shattering import and beauty, seeded with an evolutionary imperative that makes possible the eventual emergence of self-organizing and ultimately self-conscious structures through which suffering’s myriad classrooms can become places of healing and Homecoming.

All the worlds are here in this very moment, dreamily mandala’ed together, their common key floating in the open secret of incarnation’s flesh-dance. Know your body without using your cognition, except perhaps as an aide in initial scouting scans. Allow intrinsic awareness to tour and explore your body until it is obvious that your body is not yours, but is simply Energy, Consciousness on the move, elementally and feelingly and paradoxically continuous with all that is.

It is crucial that we not only love what outlives this body, but this body also, for it too is a weaving of the Real, a unique flowering whose rise and beauty and singularity ache to be known before its demise.

This piece has no end. Nor does the body.