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Natural Spirituality and Consciousness 2

Submitted by Ken Watts on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 14:30

SO WHAT DOES the pain in my leg have to do with knowledge and experience generally, and with the whole idea of spirituality?

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Back to those phantom limbs, for a moment.

Almost always, when someone has lost an arm or a leg, they will continue to feel it, often painfully, for some time as though it is really still there. (If you're interested in this strange phenomenon, you can read more about it, and a great many other fascinating things in Phantoms in the Brain.)

All of these feelings, the pain, the sense of the arm's position and motion, sometimes even a sense of touch, are completely in the brain, since there is no arm or leg present.

It can take some time for these sensations to fade, and sometimes they don't.

When the phantom causes too much discomfort, it can often be helped by the use of mirror therapy.

The patient is seated before a box which is divided into two halves by a mirror. The box has no top or front.

When the patient puts his or her remaining hand into one side of the box, the mirror creates the illusion that the phantom hand can be seen in the other side.

By moving the phantom hand in sync with the real hand, the patient can experience the phantom hand as real, and can, for example, unclench it, if it was previously clenched.

It's clear in these cases that the "arm" or "leg" exists only in the patient's brain.

But a moment's thought makes it clear that the difference between the phantom hand and the real hand is only that there isn't a physical hand out there in the case of the phantom.

The patient experiences the real hand using the same brain, and the same processes that he or she uses to experience the phantom hand.

In other words, the hand the patient experiences, and the hands that you and I experience, are also in our brains.

In our case, of course, they correspond to hands in the physical world—not perfectly, of course, but more than close enough.

But the pain I feel in my elbow is not in my physical elbow, it's in my experienced elbow in my brain.

And, of course, this applies to my entire body. The body I experience is, in a sense, an illusion—a product of my brain.

It's closely related to my physical body, of course: connected by all those neurons.

But it is quite possible for me to feel pain, or an itch, or a toothache, when there is nothing happening in the body part the pain or itch is in, just as it is possible for me to not feel a pinprick when, in fact, my leg has been pricked.

And the reason for this is that the body I feel is not the body out there, but the one in my head.

All of us live in virtual bodies.

To be continued...