Suppose I ask myself the question “how many toes do I have?“. Without looking, or poking, or wiggling my toes, I would have a difficult time saying for sure how many toes exactly I have. Big toe is easy, “index toe” is likely, small toe too because I can feel a bit of pressure there. But anything else? If from one moment to the next I forgot everything I had learned so far, just based on skin sensation, pressure, interoception I would not be able to tell for sure1.
Maybe this is a peculiarity of my body and this is easy for everyone else. But I’m sure other examples can be found. Can you feel your ears? Your teeth? Your liver?
I like this inquiry because it is analogous to what you often hear in meditation instructions. It will be about “realising who we really are, in this moment”, or “I am not my occupation, I am not my thoughts, I am not my ego, …“. The purpose of this is (as far as I understand it) to shift our mental mode2 from the dreaming/counter-factual towards conscious present-moment experience. The unfortunate thing, however, is that these exercises are often already about something abstract or difficult to grasp, such as “thoughts” or “ego” or whatever. The toe question, on the other hand, is concerned with something very concrete3.
The toe question shows me how the deeply ingrained “truth” that I have exactly five toes on each foot, which I have fully accepted and embraced as an irrefutable core aspect of reality4 is in fact something quite volatile. The mundanity of the matter makes this much more illustrating for me. It’s much easier to say “yeah okay for sure thoughts are transient and the ego is an illusion, everybody can sort of see that”. It’s not a big matter with toes, but actually how deeply are you ready to accept that core elements of your reality are literally only as such because you remember or think of them to be so — but if you actually tried to check, right now, you would be at a loss5.
If you really would not know otherwise — if, just for a few minutes, you suspended everything you ever learned and believed — what would you say about yourself?
Footnotes
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… and I have spent a fair amount of time trying. ↩
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Previously, I would have said “to shift our attention”, but I’m beginning to think this is not very precise anymore. With mental mode I mean a mode of operation of “the mind” (or the brain, if you will). It is fairly evident that there are different modes: Sleeping, awake, intoxicated, excited, in flow state, nervous, etc. It (currently) feels to me like much of this meditation business is to teach yourself via feedback to shift towards a specific mode. This mode is characterised (but not necessarily fully defined by) a certain kind of commited-ness to the now. More precisely, you are fully “immersed” in the current moment (in the sense that you are consciously experiencing everything), but at the same time you are “free” in it (in the sense that awareness of being conscious is more or less maintained and you do not react without knowing). On the other hand, the things which are not part of the current moment — hypotheticals, stories, imaginations, thoughts — are not really occurring. In my understanding, we do not “produce” a thought but, for the duration of thinking, we are the thought. Have you ever tried to think two thoughts at the same time? Do you notice that, the more you go into thought, the less “capacity” there is for present-moment experience? Similarly, for the duration of consciously sensing, we are the sensation. I think (huehue) of the mind as a complex pattern of ripples, waves upon waves. Thoughts, sensations, whatever, are just different patterns of waves, arising and fading into one another. ↩
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At least it appeared to be very concrete until I started looking into it ;) ↩
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Probably after a few scientific experiments of putting them in my mouth as a baby or something. ↩
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Now you might say “but quite obviously, I do exist in some sense”. My point is not contradictory because I am rather trying to distinguish two categories which are often mushed together. Present-moment experience is just that. “Person-hood”, “identity”, “ego”, “number of toes I remember having” are something different and not directly comparable. These are emergent properties, stories. A story cannot exist in an instant, it is defined by spanning across a substrate. ↩