Let's Get out of our Heads... The Body Is the Interface...

Sep 23

9 min read

For most of our lives, we are taught a fairly simple idea about consciousness. The brain creates it. Neurons fire, chemicals move, electrical signals travel through an impossibly complicated biological network, and somewhere within all of that activity, we appear.

Thought, memory, awareness, imagination, Love, fear, and that strange awareness inside us that somehow knows it exists.

It seems reasonable. Damage the brain and consciousness can change. Memory can disappear. Personality can shift. Perception can become distorted. Change the chemistry of the brain and we can change mood, awareness, even our experience of reality. There is no question that the brain and consciousness are intimately connected.

But there is a difference between demonstrating that two things are connected and understanding exactly what that connection means.

So, let's play with another possibility.

What if the brain does not actually create consciousness? What if consciousness is experienced through the entire biological organism? The brain, nervous system, senses, organs, chemistry and even the trillions of cells making up the body together form an interface through which consciousness experiences physical reality.

What if consciousness isn't simply located somewhere behind our eyes?

What if it is embodied throughout us?

Right now, it feels as though you are looking directly at the world around you. But that isn't exactly what is happening. Light reaches receptors in your eyes, those receptors convert information into electrical signals, and your brain processes those signals into the experience we call sight. Sound begins as vibrations moving through the air. Those vibrations eventually become neurological information that the brain translates into voices, music, thunder, laughter and the thousand other sounds that make up our world.

Touch, taste, smell, temperature, balance and pain work through their own biological systems. What we experience as reality is information being detected, filtered and translated by the body.

And we already know the filter is extraordinarily narrow.

Human eyes perceive only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our ears detect only a limited range of frequencies. Infrared and ultraviolet light exist beyond our vision. Radio waves pass through the room unnoticed. Countless physical processes surround and pass through us without ever entering our conscious awareness.

None of those things become unreal because we cannot sense them. Our bodies simply aren't equipped to experience them directly.

That raises an interesting question. If our senses reveal only a portion of physical reality, why do we assume they reveal the entirety of reality available to consciousness?

Imagine sitting inside a car. You don't experience everything happening inside the engine. You get a dashboard. Speed, fuel level, engine temperature and a handful of warning lights give you the information necessary to operate the vehicle. The dashboard isn't lying to you, but neither is it showing you everything.

Perhaps the human nervous system works in a similar way.

Evolution did not necessarily need to create an organism capable of perceiving the complete nature of reality. It needed an organism capable of surviving and navigating its environment. We needed to recognize food, danger, faces, movement, distance, pain, pleasure and one another.

That doesn't make our perception false. It makes it useful.

Perhaps what we experience through the body is something like a biological dashboard. Reality enters through our senses and the nervous system translates it into a form we can navigate.

And perhaps what we call the world is actually the world as rendered through a human interface.

But the Interface May Be Much Bigger Than the Brain.

This is where the idea gets more interesting.

We tend to talk about intelligence, memory and awareness as though everything important happens in the brain. But the human body is not simply a brain dragging around a collection of supporting parts.

It is an astonishing community of living cells communicating continuously.

Cells sense their environment. They respond to chemical and mechanical signals. They exchange information. Immune cells recognize threats they have encountered before. Cells change their behavior based upon conditions around them. Tissues coordinate activity. Hormones carry information across the body. The gut and brain communicate constantly. The heart, lungs, immune system, endocrine system and nervous system participate in an enormous web of biological communication.

None of that proves that an individual cell possesses consciousness in the way a human being does. Calling cellular signaling consciousness would go beyond what biology has established.

But it does challenge the picture of the body as a collection of passive machinery waiting for the brain to issue commands.

The body is alive with information.

So, what if our mistake is imagining consciousness as something contained exclusively inside the skull?

What if consciousness is somehow embodied throughout the organism?

In every one of the trillions of Cells that make us up. Like drops to the ocean, each cell contains the whole of our consciousness just like the drops of the ocean contain the ocean.

What if every cell participates, in some way, in the experience of consciousness?

The brain may organize it. The nervous system may transmit it. The senses may focus it. But perhaps the experience of being us, emerges through the entire living system.

Think about how often we already describe human experience this way.

We say grief lives in the body. Fear sits in the stomach. Love fills the chest. Trauma can produce physical reactions years after an event has passed. A smell can suddenly return us to childhood before we have consciously identified why. Music can create goosebumps before the thinking mind has decided whether it likes the song. Sometimes the body reacts before we have words for what it knows.

Science can explain many of these experiences through nervous-system activity, hormones, conditioning, immune responses and other biological mechanisms. We don't need to replace those explanations.

Maybe, we can place another question beside them.

What if the body isn't merely reacting to consciousness?

What if the body participates in it?

What if consciousness isn't something we have inside our head, but something we experience through every living part of ourselves?

Then the phrase cellular memory becomes interesting too. Biology demonstrates several forms of cellular and immune memory, although that is not the same thing as a cell storing our autobiographical memories. Science does not show that the cells in our shoulder remember an argument from twenty years ago or that our liver remembers heartbreak.

Still, the larger question remains.

Could experiences alter the biological interface in ways that affect how consciousness moves through it?

We already know experience can change the brain. Stress can alter physiology. Trauma can change nervous-system responses. Repeated behavior can reinforce neural pathways. Even effecting the production of peptides. Environment can influence patterns of gene expression.

Our experiences literally participate in shaping the organism through which future experiences will be perceived.

The interface changes because of what has passed through it.

That is extraordinary enough without even trying.

And perhaps there is more happening that we don't yet understand.

There is an analogy that has fascinated me for years.

Imagine giving a radio to someone who has never encountered one. They turn it on and music comes out. Curious, they open it and discover circuits, wires and electronic components. They begin experimenting. Damage one component and the music becomes distorted. Damage another and the sound disappears completely.

Eventually they reach what seems like an obvious conclusion: the radio creates the music.

We know something they don't. The radio is receiving a signal.

Damage the receiver and you absolutely change the way the signal is expressed. Destroy the receiver completely and the music disappears from that particular radio. But nothing that happened to the radio necessarily happened to the source of the broadcast.

This analogy does not prove that the brain receives consciousness from somewhere else. Neuroscience provides enormous evidence connecting brain function with conscious experience, and we shouldn't discard that because another possibility feels more Spiritual.

But there remains a fascinating philosophical problem.

Why is there a subjective experience at all?

Why isn't the brain simply processing information?

Why does there appear to be someone experiencing the processing?

And perhaps the radio analogy doesn't go far enough.

Maybe the brain isn't the radio.

Maybe the entire body is.

Thoughts move through the mind, but something notices those thoughts. Emotions rise and fall, and something notices them too. We experience memories, sensations, desires, fears, dreams and impulses, yet somewhere within all of that activity exists the persistent experience of,

I am here.

Most of us naturally identify that observer with our biography. I am this name, this age, this body, these memories, these scars, these accomplishments, these failures and these relationships.

But Spiritual traditions have been asking a different question for thousands of years.

What if those things describe the experience, but not necessarily the experiencer?

What if consciousness, Soul, Spirit, whatever word works for you, experiences physical reality through the biological organism rather than being entirely generated by it? Think of it in terms of the 1999 movie the MATRIX. The higher conscious awakened self being plugged into the lower density realm of earth.

Then the body becomes something extraordinary.

It isn't a prison holding the Soul. It isn't some lesser physical thing we must eventually escape in order to become Spiritual.

It is the instrument that makes the human experience possible.

The body is the interface.

Think about what this interface allows us to experience.

Through the body, sunlight becomes warmth on skin. Chemistry becomes the taste of strawberries or coffee. Vibrations in the air become music capable of making us cry for reasons we cannot explain. We can touch another person, laugh until our stomach hurts, stand barefoot in cold grass, feel desire, hold a newborn child, grieve someone we Love, dance badly, break a bone, make Love, smell rain coming and watch the sun disappear behind the mountains.

These experiences are so ordinary that we rarely recognize how extraordinary they actually are.

If consciousness exists beyond the physical body, perhaps incarnation isn't consciousness becoming trapped inside matter. Perhaps it is consciousness being given access to an astonishing sensory experience.

For a little while, the Infinite experiences being finite. As the singer Jewel so aptly wrote; “We are God’s eyes, We are God’s hands…” Not just our little drop of the ocean experiencing, But the whole of consciousness in the universe experiencing itself through us.

And perhaps even the limitations are part of the experience.

Choice becomes meaningful partly because we don't know what happens next. Courage exists because fear exists. Faith has meaning because certainty isn't always available. Forgiveness becomes possible because we can be wounded.

Compassion emerges because suffering, in this form, is real.

Maybe consciousness doesn't come here simply to understand these things.

Maybe it comes here to experience them.

There is a profound difference between understanding Love and risking your heart. Between understanding grief and losing someone you Love. Between understanding courage and standing in front of something terrifying while every part of your body is telling you to run.

Perhaps limitation isn't the flaw in the human experience. Maybe limitation is what makes the experience possible.

What if the interface occasionally lets something else through?

Maybe these experiences are entirely products of the brain. Maybe some involve subtle information gathered by the body before our conscious mind recognizes it. Maybe there are aspects of consciousness we haven't learned how to measure. We don't know.

I have become increasingly comfortable with those three words.

I don't know.

There is tremendous freedom in them because they leave room for discovery.

Eventually this idea brings us to the question humans have wrestled with since we first became aware that our lives end.

What happens when the interface stops working?

If consciousness is entirely produced by the brain, then when brain function permanently ends, consciousness ends with it. The lights go out because there is nothing beyond the biological system generating the experience.

But if consciousness is somehow more fundamental than the body, another possibility appears.

Perhaps death is not the destruction of consciousness. Perhaps it is just the loss of the interface.

The radio goes silent. That does not prove the broadcast continues somewhere else, but neither does the silence of the radio tell us everything about the signal.

And if consciousness is embodied throughout the organism rather than confined to a single location in the brain, perhaps death is not one switch being turned off.

Perhaps it is the dissolution of an entire living network through which consciousness has been experiencing this particular existence.

The eyes no longer translate light. The ears no longer translate vibration. The

nervous system no longer carries sensation. The cells eventually stop communicating and the biological network that made this particular human experience possible, comes apart.

What happens to consciousness then?

Science cannot currently give us a definitive answer beyond what can be observed in the functioning and failing brain.

The rest remains one of humanity's oldest questions.

There is something about this idea that changes the way I look at ordinary life.

Even getting older takes on a different meaning.

These hands are temporary. These eyes are temporary. This heartbeat is temporary. These trillions of cells are constantly living, communicating, changing and eventually dying. This particular collection of memories, scars, relationships and experiences is temporary.

But temporary does not mean meaningless.

Perhaps impermanence is precisely what makes the experience precious.

Maybe Spiritual awakening isn't about escaping the human experience.

Maybe it is about finally entering it completely.

Living in this body. Listening to it. Caring for it. Feeling what moves through it. Recognizing that consciousness, whatever it ultimately proves to be, is having this experience through flesh, blood, nerves, chemistry and trillions of living cells working together in a collaboration so intricate that we barely notice the miracle occurring beneath our skin.

Maybe we didn't come here to transcend being human. Maybe we came here specifically to be human.

For however long we get.

Because whether consciousness originates entirely within the brain, emerges from the combined activity of the living body, moves through us from somewhere beyond it, or represents something we haven't yet imagined, one astonishing fact remains.