Hello Steeemians and welcome to part 4 of defining the mind! The series that will leave you with more questions then answers. Defining the mind may be an impossible task, but that should be no barrier for science and philosophy.
Today we ask, where is our consciousness located? Some of you may quickly shout "the brain obviously" but is that really the case? Maybe it is, our inner thoughts do seem to reside in our heads, but do they have to?
For this question, I feel that we should first examine not our thoughts, but our senses. Sight Smell Touch Taste Hearing, all of these are used to navigate the world, and yet they are merely illusions. Before these things become our senses, they are electrical signals resulting from reality stimuating various nerves in various ways. They are then recreated inside of our brains where they become our senses. (Unrelated to the topic this means it is impossible for us to ever experience the present)
Yet our senses don't don't seem to take place inside our heads, they appear to come from the same places the nerves were originally stimulated from. This is most noticeable with the sensation of touch. I imagine it happens because our minds find it advantageous, but if our senses can appear from places where they were not put together why not our thoughts?
Would it be possible to move our minds into our torso, our feet, what about outside of our bodies? I would like to propose 2 exercises for those of you into meditation that I hope will supply the answer. I will be incorporating these into my own practices from now on.
The first would be to attempt a basic level of moving your mind about. The goal is to spin it around 180°, I have attempted this before with varying levels of success but never achieved more then around 45° of rotation. I imagine it would be best to attempt this with as few senses being simulated as possible.
The other is a known type of meditation, called body scan meditation. Where you spend time examining every peace of your body and then the body as a whole. Everything you experience down to the subtleist of touches. How does the air around your heel feel compared to the air around your toes? Our conciousness may only reside in our head because it is the location of most of our senses. And among our senses touch is one of the most neglected, we tend to not think about it unless there's a problem. Unlike sight and hearing which make up the majority amount of our attention. If so, then a profecency in body scan meditation could balance things out. And awaken the parts of our conciousness that was rarely in use.
All images from pixabay