Close your eyes and hold your hand out. Where is it?
Proprioception provides us with that information. It’s the body’s internal sensing of shape and position, enabling you to reach for a cup or bring your fingertips together without looking. Much of it operates below conscious awareness, but some surfaces into direct experience.
Waving your hand makes proprioception most evident, appearing as the sense of movement. Not only do you feel your hand moving from left to right but you also perceive it in the mind’s eye.
Proprioception is driven by signals originating from muscles, tendons, and joints. The skin contributes as well. Its sensory receptors are constantly active even in the absence of stimulation, generating a continuous hum of information about the body’s outermost layer. The experience is as a subtle tingling or pressure at the skin’s surface. So constant and familiar, this background sensation easily goes unnoticed until attention is deliberately turned toward it.
From this baseline sensory noise, the brain constructs an ongoing representation of the body’s three-dimensional form. It is this representation that appears in experience as the moving hand.
The experiential qualities of representations are subtle, which is why they’re easy to overlook. We tend to navigate daily life with our eyes open, flooding the brain with visual information that tends to overshadow less vivid sensory experiences. Taking vision out of the equation helps in isolating the qualities.
The hand is represented in front of us as a faint, cloudy outline. It might be barely distinguishable from the surrounding darkness. For some, there might be colors. For others, there are only shades of black. The experience hovers somewhere between feeling and seeing.
Rest your hand down and imagine holding it out. Then physically hold your hand out and compare the two experiences. The representation of your hand shares qualities with the mental image you conjured. Both are appearances without a directly perceived external object, but mental images are more fleeting and unstable. The representation of your hand, by contrast, is continuously refreshed by live proprioceptive signals, grounding it in a way that mental imagery cannot match.
Place an object in front of you and rest your hand next to it. As you turn your head to the left, both your hand and the object now appear to your right. The brain represents the body and its environment within the same head-centric spatial map, organizing both into a coherent field of locations and directions.
The sensation of the hand hasn’t changed, yet it now appears to your right. Since the sensation itself remained the same, the shift in directional appearance comes from the spatial map rather than from the sensation directly. It is the map that tells you where things are, not the feeling alone.
The body sits at the center of this spatial map, continuously anchored by live sensory input. Objects in the environment are represented too, but with less precision. Their locations are inferred from vision and memory rather than the constant stream of signals that grounds the body representation. It is the body representation’s prominence that gives rise to the felt sense of being located within it. When it stands out clearly from the surrounding spatial map, we find ourselves here, and the world appears out there.
The body is unique in the spatial map not only as the point from which experience is spatially organized, but as the only element whose movements are registered as coming from within rather than occurring in the external world. We don’t merely perceive the hand as an object in space, we perceive it as something that moves from the inside.
Throughout evolutionary history, a sharp self-other distinction has been critical to survival. When facing a physical threat, an organism must know precisely where its body ends and the environment begins. That boundary determines whether escape or defense is possible.
The mechanism nature settled on is contraction: when the threat-response system is activated, muscles tense and the body braces. The increased proprioceptive signals generated by that tension, read against the background of the threat state, sharpen the brain’s representation of the body’s boundaries. The self-other distinction crystallizes at exactly the moment it is most needed.
Not all muscle tension has this effect. Exercising increases proprioceptive signals without activating the threat-response system. What heightens the body representation is not muscle tension alone but defensive bracing in the context of the brain’s threat state.
This mechanism is visible in our own experience. Under stress, the body tends to tighten in the postural muscles most involved in defensive readiness: the jaw, shoulders, and core. This happens not only in response to physical danger but to purely psychological triggers—the tension of an uncomfortable social situation, the discomfort of feeling judged, or the pain that accompanies unwanted thoughts. The body responds to perceived threat regardless of whether that threat is physically present.
This pattern is further reinforced through development. From early childhood, we learn to brace against disapproval and suppress spontaneous expression, accumulating layers of defensive tension that gradually solidify into habit. We also absorb the contraction patterns of those around us—self-contraction is socially transmitted as much as individually acquired, modeled by parents, peers, and the culture at large. By adulthood, the contraction has become so familiar it passes for normal.
Where a physical threat could be resolved through action—fight, flight, or the relief of safety—modern stressors tend to be abstract and ongoing. Difficult life circumstances cannot be resolved with a single decisive response, and the threat-response system has no clear signal to stand down. The bracing persists long after it has served any useful purpose, keeping the body representation chronically elevated.
It is this stress-induced muscle tension that we might call self-contraction. So frequently does it recur throughout the day that it comes to feel like the natural resting state of the body, invisible precisely because it is rarely absent for long. Sleep offers genuine respite, but the patterns often reassert themselves with waking.
Over time, the cumulative effect is a body representation maintained at a chronically elevated level of prominence. With this comes a persistently heightened sense of physical presence, of being a bounded, located self in a world of potential threats—a condition so pervasive in modern human experience that it goes entirely unexamined.
Self-contraction perpetuates itself through a self-reinforcing cycle. The heightened body representation that contraction produces intensifies the sense of being a bounded, vulnerable self—and that intensified sense of vulnerability provokes further defensive bracing. The very act of defending the self reinforces the sense of a self that needs defending.
This accumulated tension produces a characteristic felt quality—a knot in the chest or stomach, a pressure in the solar plexus, that becomes inseparable from the sense of being a self under threat.
Over time, the loop becomes self-sustaining, independent of the external stressors that originally triggered it. This is why self-contraction tends to persist even in objectively safe circumstances, and why reducing external stress alone is rarely sufficient to dissolve it.
Self-contraction is not, however, an inevitable feature of human experience. It naturally loses its grip when we recognize its obsolescence. The challenge is not the releasing itself but unlearning the deeply ingrained instinct that makes contraction feel necessary in the first place.
What happens when self-contraction patterns are released?
In the absence of excess proprioceptive feedback, the body representation gradually reduces in prominence. The hand, which previously stood out against the surrounding space, begins to recede toward it. The figure-ground contrast between body and environment softens, and as this happens, something equally significant happens to how far they appear from each other.
The spatial map does not only represent objects—it represents the space between them. The gap between the body and the objects in its environment is itself a feature of the map, appearing in experience as distance. The heightened body representation and the experienced gap are two sides of the same phenomenon: the body’s prominence establishes the ‘here’ from which everything else appears ‘out there.’ The gap is simply that distance made felt.
As the body representation reduces in prominence, so does felt distance. Objects appear less and less out there from our perspective, as though gradually drawing closer—or we toward them. Perception becomes more intimate, and the world itself feels less remote.
While the experience of space diminishes, the brain retains full access to distance cues. Binocular disparity, motion parallax, and relative size all operate independently of the body representation’s prominence, allowing us to accurately reach for a cup or navigate a room.
Imagine your hand representation fading to the point that it resembles the empty space beside it. As the figure-ground contrast dissolves, hand and surrounding space become nearly indistinguishable in experience.
If all your body parts were to reach that point, where would you be located?
Sensations would still exist, but they wouldn’t be represented anywhere in space. Thoughts and beliefs would still arise, but the body they refer to wouldn’t be experienced as having location. Without a body representation to anchor the ‘here’ from which everything else appears ‘there,’ where would you find yourself? What would remain of your sense of being a bounded individual?
The spatial map is what underlies the felt distinction between subject and object. The body representation within that map is the scaffolding of our individuality—the foundation upon which higher-order conceptions of self are built, but which itself requires no conception at all. Without this scaffolding, experience has no center.
This is not a state of complete selflessness or functional dissolution. Proprioceptive signaling never goes to zero—the body representation persists, but reduced to a level of prominence comparable to that of external objects. Neither body nor world dominates awareness; neither stands out as more present than the other. The felt sense of being located here rather than there dissolves not because the body disappears from experience, but because it no longer stands apart from everything else.
Contemplative traditions across cultures have described states that closely resemble what this mechanism predicts. In the Hindu Advaita tradition, the dissolution of the sense of a separate self is considered the recognition of one’s true nature. Buddhist teachings point to the constructed nature of selfhood and the peace that follows its dissolution. Sufi mystics describe a state of fana, the annihilation of the separate self in union with the whole.
What these traditions share is the observation that the dissolution of felt separation is not experienced as loss but as relief—not as dysfunction but as a return to something more fundamental. Practitioners describe states of profound peace, clarity, and wholeness that persist alongside full functional engagement with the world.
This framework offers a mechanistic account of how such states arise. The dissolution of felt separation is not a metaphysical event or a spiritual achievement but the natural consequence of a physiological shift—the release of chronic muscle tension and the corresponding reduction in body representation prominence. What contemplative traditions have approached through practice and inquiry, this framework locates in a specific and testable somatic mechanism.
The framework presented here makes a specific and testable claim: that the felt sense of being a separate individual is not a metaphysical given but a physiological variable, modulated by the degree of chronic muscle tension and its effect on body representation prominence.
If the claim holds, the implications extend beyond the understanding of felt separation and its dissolution. It would suggest that a significant dimension of human suffering—the persistent sense of being a bounded, vulnerable self—has a specific somatic substrate that can be directly addressed. It would also offer a bridge between contemplative traditions and cognitive neuroscience, grounding centuries of first-person inquiry in a mechanistic framework accessible to empirical investigation.
Much remains to be examined. While the relationship between muscle tension and proprioceptive signaling is well established, the specific claim that chronic stress-induced tension measurably heightens body representation prominence awaits direct empirical verification. The phenomenological changes are directly observable in first-person experience, but translating that observability into rigorous third-person measures suitable for empirical research remains an open methodological challenge. The relationship between reduced prominence and the states reported in contemplative literature remains to be systematically examined.
But the foundation is there—in the spatial map, in the skin’s baseline signals, and in the directly observable experience that anyone can verify by closing their eyes and holding out their hand.