Rubber Hand Illusions Shed New Light on Our Bodily Sense of Self

So we all know that the hard boundary we place between ourselves and the world is somewhat artificial. Sure, on one level you are a separate being, different from any other. You can move your own arm, you probably can’t move my arm. On the other hand, your life is a product of an incredibly complex enmeshment of influences that can be traced back l

Consciousness was not some substance in the brain but rather emerged from the complex relationships between the subject and the world. It was part alchemy, part illusion, a collaborative effort that obliterated our standard delineations between self and other. As Brooks put it, “Intelligence is in the eye of the observer.” —

The self is no ordinary piece of information, however. In fact, it contains everything else that has passed through consciousness: all the memories, actions, desires, pleasures, and pains are included in it. And more than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years. The self of the pol

there is a class of conscious experiences that come with a degree of lucidity uncommon in normal life. By and large, their mere existence was denied by science until the last century, and their study was consigned to the intellectual hinterlands of psychology, at the intersection of spiritualism, the paranormal, and the esoteric. But they are nothi

We are not the isolated, conscious minds often assumed in our folk psychology. Rather, we are fundamentally embodied. Any spirituality that ignores how the body influences what we think and do will not be usefully transformative.