The Wisdom of the Body: Reflecting on Dharma, Sensation, and Causality

It’s All Happening Here

“If you are unable to find truth here and now, where else will you find it?” — Dogen

The only access we have to the external world is through our nervous system. The stable and static outer reality that we so often take for granted is not inherently existent, but a dependently arisen phenomena. We learn about its existence through repeated stimulations of our nervous system, and through rules that Helmholtz called ‘unconscious inferences’. It is through these inferences that we learn to orient ourselves and navigate in our environment. We learn to map sensation on our retina to spatial coordinates in a cognitively constructed three dimensional realm. In addition to this process, all of our perceptions are generated through a collaboration between our unconscious, and external stimulations from a reality whose ‘true’ form is beyond the scope of the intellect to even speculate on, as it is by definition existing in a realm of phenomena that we do not have access to. These unconscious inference patterns are ways our body-mind system attempt to discern the structure of external reality through sense impressions. Thus, it is not external circumstances that ever cause us to behave in a certain way, as the…