The Transparency of Matter

In the ordinary view, the body feels solid and personal — a container that holds me and my memories. Every sensation, reflex, and emotion seems to confirm that solidity. Yet both contemplative insight and physics agree: nothing we call “matter” is actually solid. At the atomic and subatomic levels, there is only movement — energy, probability, vibration, light.

In non-dual understanding, this energy is not other than Awareness; it is Awareness vibrating as experience. The body, then, is not a container of consciousness but a pattern within it — a field of sensations appearing in and as Awareness. The belief that this pattern is fixed or owned gives rise to the illusion of a separate self.

Memory plays a subtle role. What we call “memory” is the mind’s echo of past sensations, replayed through the nervous system as if they still exist. These echoes shape the body’s reactions, its tensions, its fears. The body remembers what the mind has believed. But when Awareness is recognized as primary, the echo fades; memory loses its power to dictate identity.

To deconstruct the solidity of matter is not to deny the body, but to see through it — to feel it as transparency. The true body of Awareness has no edges, no past, no inside or outside. It is fluid, radiant, weightless. When the illusion of solidity softens, what remains is freedom, movement, and a deep peace that nothing can contain or confine.