Few weeks back, from nowhere, my right leg got a muscle spasm …
Since I ignored it in the beginning, as if to gain my complete attention, the spasm soon got bad making even walking and moving the leg a herculean task…
It was similar to … in the loudest voice you call someone standing next to you … yet you fail to reach the sound to that person … an embodied body-less feeling …
Is that even possible !!!
Even with greatest intentional effort from my mind, I was unable to move my leg … as if that thigh muscle didn’t belong to me and my body …
That one week gave a deep reflective experience of being in close touch with the body and its inherent and embodied “i”… in its truest sense.
As I tried to manage my pain, and also “watched” continously the origin and extent of pain, I saw two fascinating inner stories unraveling …
In the rigmarole of the debilitating pain, I became eyes to see the two distinct “I” …
The overseeing and the concerned “I” … who tried to focus on the beginning of
The “i” caught and imprisoned in the thigh muscle … feeling the entrapment of the hurt.
On one side, I felt that something which was otherwise never noticed – namely the ability to move my legs freely – was becoming impossible … and on the other side, I saw the pronounced presence of the “i” caught in the thigh muscle …
A conversation … that was perhaps subtle … and not even available to my conscious awareness … was ongoing … between the disembodied, yet concerned “I”, and the “i” entrapped in the hurt thigh muscle.
In our academic and even experiential reflections … we tend to neatly separate between the I, and the body which can rightly make the claim to be owning that “I”. But is that division true or is it a boringly theoretical one?
Physical pain, and reflective awareness upon it, gives an opportunity to rendezvous with the “i” that enlivens the body invisibly and silently; and also the “I” who didn’t have an origin in the body, but just watches the body with great intensity …
In the above lines, I wrote about the two “eyes” …
The graceful, thoughtful, and watchful “I” whose responsibility became heightened watching the “i” caught in the hurt muscle …
Is there a third “I”?
Perhaps, yes! And not in any order of importance or linearity.
The “I” which is not watching the “i”, nor concerned about it … who encompasses both the overlooking “I” and the hurt “i” … which is neither disembodied nor embodied … but perhaps is the grand space of Consciousness where all the stories are played, concluded, and started … !
About Consciousness 