Expanded Awareness And The “Car Body” Phenomenon

Our minds and bodies are intimately connected. Everything in our minds is dependent on what we perceive through our bodies, and specifically – our senses and perceptual systems.

Our biological bodies have been evolutionarily designed to experience the environment in a distinct and adaptive way. Every sense (sight, hearing, taste smell, touch) has developed because it’s helped us to better understand our world and navigate it successfully.

Humans have an incredibly complex perceptual system compared to most animals; our sensory modalities include sight, hearing, taste, smell, balance, temperature, kinesthetic (awareness of our 3D-orientation in space), pain, and a variety of other internal body sensations.

Senses are the building block to our experiences and “map of reality” If we did not sense our environment, where would our experiences come from?

Although our senses are where our experiences begin, it is often not where our experiences end. Instead, the mind chooses to cognize and conceptualize what it perceives. It takes in information through the senses, thinks about it and analyzes it, then creates useful concepts, meaning, and “mental content.”

Let’s explore the nature of body awareness and how it influences our perceptions of reality. In particular, I want to focus on something I call “expanded awareness” and the “car body phenomenon,” which is when our self-awareness expands to include things outside of ourselves, such as when we drive a car.

Let me explain.

Your Body Sensations and Expanded Awareness

The goal of mindfulness meditation is to not judge our senses or observations; but to accept them as is.

We can start cultivating this awareness by shifting our focus to our bodies. For example, we can tune into the sensations of our breathing – how air feels coming in through our mouth and out through our nostrils, the feeling of our chest rising and falling with each breath.

Then we can expand our awareness further – perhaps we begin scanning our bodies and see what we find. An itch on your foot, or ache in your back, or feeling tension in your joints. You observe your awareness expanding and contrasting. At times you zoom in to something as little as the pain of a small splinter on your toe. Other times, you are aware of your whole body at once like during a huge gush of wind.

Our awareness is our window into experience. It is always being shaped and reshaped, shifting and moving through time and space from moment to moment depending on what we choose to focus on.

If you pay attention, you begin to notice your awareness even extends outside of your body at times. This can happen if you remain still for a long enough period of time, especially when your eyes are closed and you are in a silent environment – like falling asleep and entering into a dream. Or simple daydreaming during a boring class or business meeting. Our awareness “leaves” our bodies.

When one becomes skilled enough at mindfulness, one begins to become aware of the “mental boundaries” of the body.

It begins with the sensation of awareness on the brink of your body – the outermost edge. And as you continually pay attention to this border, you notice it begins to drift off of your skin, maybe only an inch or two away from your body. More and more, we begin to notice our preconceptions of the body aren’t as rigid as we first thought.*

(*This isn’t meant to be “supernatural” or “mystical,” it’s just an actual experience one can have if they pay attention to it. One could just think of it as a “perceptual illusion.”)

Expanded Awareness and the “Car Body” Phenomena

One doesn’t need to be a disciplined student of meditation or in a dream state to experience a real-life example of “expanded awareness” outside the body. It happens all of the time.

One of the best examples I have noticed throughout my daily experience is what I would call the “Car Body” phenomena.

After years of experience as a passenger in a car, when you first take up the role of the “driver” the experience is very different. Up until this point, you may have only had experience with mobilizing your natural body but this is one of the first times you step into the position of being the mind for a new and ultimately different body.

You are now in the position to choose where the car goes – the direction of is completely dependent on your will. The car can also be said to have different “physiological” states: it may be at rest, or parked, moving forward or in reverse, accelerating or decelerating.

You are the mind of the car, and thus all the mental states of the car are contained within you and your perception as well. You have awareness about where the car is leaving from, how it will get to its destination, and where it will ultimately end up.

By now you may be starting to see the similarities between driving your “car body” and driving your “natural body.” The interesting phenomena I wish to illustrate however is the mind’s awareness to inhabit the car body in the same way we can become aware of our natural bodies during meditation.

Once one gets comfortable with driving it becomes second nature. We no longer need to consciously think out every action. This is evident in a phenomenon known as highway hypnosis – the experience of driving from point A to point B but having no recollection of having done so.

This is especially true when we drive long distances, or even when we carry out commonplace daily actions such as driving to work everyday (especially when in a half-sleepy state after waking up). Almost all drivers have had some sort of experience with highway hypnosis.

If one remains mindful while driving you may come to the some of the same conclusions that I have regarding the car body. What I have discovered is that my mind seems to – at a subconscious level – inhabit the body of the car in the same way it inhabits my natural shell. To do this, my mind seems to extend its awareness to the edges of the car so that my awareness encompasses the full body of the car while I am navigating on the road.

Specifically, one may intensify this experience when trying to fit into a tight parking spot or change lanes with the presence of many cars. When doing this, I do not believe that we just use our visual senses and then make a computational judgment on how close we are to other objects, but instead, we have a kinesthetic feeling of our orientation in space as if we are the body of the car.

Try to recall a memory when you drove a friend or family member’s car that is significantly different in shape or size to what you are typically used to driving. It takes time to familiarize yourself with not only the mechanics of the car, and how rigid or smooth it operates, but also it’s specific orientation in space.

You will notice when driving a bigger car that you may overcompensate for avoiding objects because you are so unfamiliar with the feeling or presence of the car on the street. It takes time for awareness to adjust to our new “car body” until eventually it too becomes second nature.

Our Mind Takes the Shape of the Things We Interact With

After I experienced and conceptualized this “car body” phenomenon, I came across some research that seems to support these beliefs.

One fascinating study published in Current Biology discovered that our brains represents tools that we use as temporary body parts.

“In other words, the tool becomes a part of what is known in psychology as our body schema..It’s a phenomenon each of us unconsciously experiences every day…The reason you were able to brush your teeth this morning without necessarily looking at your mouth or arm is because your toothbrush was integrated into your brain’s representation of your arm.”

The leading researcher of the study, Patrick Haggard, tells BBC News:

“Neuroscientists have known for a long time that the brain’s map of the body is not static: in fact, the brain needs to adjust to the changes in our body that occur with growth, ageing, and traumas such as amputation or injury. But this paper shows how rapid these adjustments are.”

Our minds seem to take the shape of what we interact with.

When it comes to using a hammer, or playing musical instrument, or driving a car, our bodies seem to take the object and integrate it into our concept of “body” and “self.”

The great philosopher Alan Watts has described this phenomenon as an essential insight toward becoming a more enlightened person. We often believe we are separate from our environment, but consciousness and the material world are tightly interconnected.

So the next time you are using a tool or object, think about your relationship with it – and how it seems to become an intrinsic part of you.

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