You Can Be Present to the Mind and Body, But You Can't Be a Present Mind or Body.

Every moment your experience of life is only happening inside your head. Your sensory organs are sending signals to your brain, and in turn your brain creates the mirror of your experience. The experience of life happening in your head can never be fully present, there will always be a gap in the time it takes for the signal to travel from your sensory organ to your brain. For the majority of people, mind, body and emotions are the whole of their experience and what people call as me. If one only knows the experience of life that happens in their head, then there is no possibility of being fully present.
The entire spiritual process is the path of seeking that which is beyond mind and body. The first step is realizing that you are not your mind and body, they are yours. The reason why most people's experience of life is limited to mind and body is purely because the believe that they are the mind and body. When a thought passes through the mind, they believe this is me, I am thinking. A spiritual seeker looks deeper and sees, there is something that noticed the thought.
The age old spiritual question, from Ramana Maharshi, is, “Who am I?” It is said that if you ask yourself this question with enough focus and intensity, you will awaken. No one can answer this question for you, but you can see just by sitting quietly enough, that something exists beyond this mind and body; a pure, silent, still, formless awareness. The mind and the body have clear boundaries, they exist separate from everything else, but the awareness can reach out in all directions endlessly. It is connected to everything around it and is ever-present.
The path to self awareness is to root yourself in your own silent,watchful,detached awareness. This can be a lifetime or multiple lifetime process if you do not have the necessary intensity and commitment it takes to go beyond your identifications. The reason why it is necessary for us to move past these limitations is because suffering only happens in mind, emotions, and body. If you can create the necessary space between you, and your mind, body and emotions; whatever happens will just be another great experience in the ride of life.
All the sages for thousands of years, have talked about Maya, or illusion. That what we call our reality, our thoughts feelings, bodily sensations: what we hear, smell, taste, touch and see, are all transient, fleeting and illusory. Even Einstein said, "reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." The problem that arises in one's perception, is only that they identify these illusory things as myself.
The analogy that I can give, is as if you were in a dream. Imagine you are in a dream and you believe the experiences you are having are real, you believe that when the dream ends, you will die and there there will be no more you. Then you wake up in this reality and remember it was just a dream. So in this world you believe this is real and when I die, it's all over.
Just like you can awaken within a dream into a lucid dream, and be aware of the illusion, so too can you awaken within this reality and realize yourself beyond these transient things.
If you are interested in techniques which can take you into this deeper into yourself and create separation between you and your mind, please visit www.innerengineering.com and sign up for the online classes,and enter discount code: 61505002, for $15 off. Or go to: http://www.ishausa.org/ishakriya/ for a free Kriya Yoga meditation.