The Three Brothers - Part 1 The Body

	The Three Brothers: A First Look at Self-Awareness In 3 parts: Who am I? My body? My feelings? My thoughts? Part 1: Am I my body?

Three brothers trapped in a pen, looking out from behind the fence and wondering when they will be fed. They are going to market. They were “born to die”. But before they do, they are pampered and cared for properly – for up to 6 months, feeding from their mothers, helped by milk supplements if she hasn’t got enough milk. They play in the sunshine, they run and jump on the fresh, green grass. They bleat and call, and their mother answers them, always. They lead healthy and happy little lives. And then they are inevitably shipped to market and sacrificed. Their bodies are required for higher purposes. Life is sweet, oh so short, if they could be aware of it… To them, humans are like Gods:  caring for them, yes, but prescribing their fate, as in Greek epics.

To become “aware” of ourselves, we have to start by noticing something. So let’s take the first of the “Three Bothers” – instinct, the one on the right of the picture – and talk about him. He is trapped in a pen, says the introduction. The pen is the body. When do we notice our bodies? When we look in the mirror and see if we’re getting a little too plump, or see a few more wrinkles? Or maybe when it’s a bad hair day? Or I’ve just bought a new jacket and want to see how it fits? That’s not what we mean by body. That’s looking at our outer clothing, the way we and others see us from outside. Our bodily functions normally proceed without our noticing them. Until you get a cold, you don’t notice the way you breathe peacefully through your nose. Until your throat gets sore, you don’t think twice about swallowing your favourite titbit. When you knock your knee against a chair and “see stars”, you notice you have a patella, and it’s pretty delicate!

Our “awareness” of our bodies is quite low on the scale of daily activities, unless we train for sports or do physical exercise. But the body is a marvellous thing. It mostly operates below the threshold of awareness, taking care of everything for you: breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure, nutrition, excretion, instinctive reactions, skills and special abilities that you have maybe worked on, sense perceptions through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and the skin, all vying with one another to get interpreted in the brain so they can produce reactions… and so on. Billions and billions of cells (no one can really know how many), all doing their work properly, until they start acting up for some reason or other. And they are all “you”, although most cells die out quite quickly and are replaced by new ones, some say every 7 years, some every 10, but they’re all still “you” – the “you” that may persist as long as the body lives.

Obviously, all this “work” going on without too much input from your “awareness” is a good thing. It keeps you alive. It regulates itself. It shows there is intelligence at work in the universe whether you are aware of it or not. This intelligence works in our human body, and it works in the terrestrial body of the Earth. Today we are coming to a more global outlook and understand that whatever humans do affects the whole planet and the planet will invariably adapt to what we do, and this is the true working of intelligence: adaptation. The kind of adaptation we need to understand ourselves and our capacity to experience Awareness.

What do we achieve by practising Awareness and placing this sense of Self in the body? This is a first step to understanding the universe, which is not somewhere “out there”, but inside us. Awareness assists our understanding by taking us out of our thinking and emotional processes to focus attention on some of the simple things we so often take for granted. We are so absorbed, so wrapped up in our thoughts and feelings most of the time. We are captured by our very artificial, abstract, man-made world, especially nowadays. The world seems real enough to our sense perceptions, but how “real” is it really? To start finding out, it is enough for our purpose of practising Awareness to bring our attention regularly into the body. If we are not lucky enough to live in contact with Nature – in the countryside or the mountains, where we can be inspired by non-man-made things – we can certainly commune with Nature by centring on a few natural processes inside ourselves.

This is how we can see if we are attentive, and if there is a “body” and something else which I call “me”. I sometimes command the body to do things I don’t like, and at other times the body does things without my thinking about it. I force myself to get up in the morning even if I don’t really “want to”. When driving I step on the brake as soon as I see something crossing the road even without thinking. So there should be no doubt that “I” am not simply my “body”. Although I am inextricably bound to this body, inhabit it and have to learn to live with it, if we look closely, we can see a body, a pattern of feelings and a thought process. These are our three brothers, like the ram lambs in the picture. Or maybe the “three bags full” of the nursery rhyme “Baa, baa black sheep…” (although this may have other meanings too). So where is Awareness in this picture? It is somehow “outside” the body, the feelings and the thoughts. Awareness is not a thought, or a feeling. You can think and talk about Awareness, but that is not being Aware. So where can we place Awareness? Answer: the Awareness in you is you. Long periods of awareness means you are more present in your own life. Only fleeting moments of awareness means you are missing out on life – not necessarily on instinct, bodily movements, feelings and thinking, no. That can all happen with minimum awareness. But a lot of other things can also happen with minimum awareness: stress, nervousness, pain, suffering, misery, discontent, irritability, fear, dislike, misunderstandings, anger, arrogance, resentment, injury, cruelty, hatred, violence… Because only greater Awareness brings a sense of proportion to life, where you begin to conquer man-made, social conditioning and rise above your basic human condition.

So here’s something practical to do about Awareness, to test out the assertions made above. It’s no use simply reading about Self-Awareness, higher states of consciousness, spiritual development or human evolution. We have to actually be able to practise it and come to our own understanding of it. This is why the International Self-Awareness Day blog aims to make this journey practical, apart from being theoretical. But only YOU can practise it. No one else can do it for you. And it’s the only real way you can change the world. By effecting this change – or allowing it to happen – within you.

Awareness Exercise 1

Awareness can be sensed first in the body. It is the opposite of a physical exercise in which you tense or contract a set of muscles. We should call tensing muscles “feeling”, whereas placing Awareness, or a sense of “me” in a part of my body, is called “sensing”. If you haven’t already tried it, this is what you can do:

Decide to spend 10 minutes with yourself, by yourself. Choose a quiet place where you can sit down without any interruptions. Pick any part of your body. The hands are good to start with. After breathing calming seven or nine times (or however many you want) to start relaxing, place your “Awareness” or sense of “I” in your right hand and repeat mentally: “I am in my right hand. I wish my right hand to relax.” You do not tense your right hand at all, you let it relax. Do this three times over, experiencing a sense of “being present” in your hand.

If you find your thoughts wandering, try to connect with your breathing, so that you have some degree of attention on your inspiration and expiration, and the rest of your awareness is on the sensation of “you” being in your right hand. You may have a slight tingling sensation in your hand, perhaps warmth or a certain degree of heaviness.

After three times in your right hand, switch to your left hand and do the same. Then try going back to your right and then your left again. Three times round each hand for three whole rounds equals a total of nine times. Slowly and calmly.

If following your natural breathing makes you feel drowsy, or you see your thoughts wandering, or you get stuck, try counting numbers with each breathe, or change your breathing rhythm, holding your breath for say 2 counts in and 2 counts out, and then change back to natural breathing again if necessary.

What happens? Were you able to maintain your attention? Awareness or attention is what makes you specifically human.  The fact that "you" can place Awareness in your body – or find it difficult at first but others can – indicates that you are more than your body. It is a reality that you can see for yourself.  If you are interested, ask about a complete “I-Placement” session for the whole body.