Close your eyes and hold your hand out. How do you know where it is?
Proprioception provides us with that information. It is the body’s sensing of its own 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. You feel your hand moving from left to right while also perceiving it in the mind’s eye.
Proprioception is driven by signals originating from muscles, tendons, and joints. The skin contributes as well, maintaining a steady hum of information about the body’s outermost layer. We experience this as a faint tingling on the skin’s surface. So constant and familiar, this sensation easily goes unnoticed until attention is turned toward it.
From this baseline sensory noise, the brain constructs an ongoing representation of the body’s three-dimensional form, a felt image of the body that persists as a stable background feature of experience.
The experiential qualities of representations are subtle, which is why they’re easy to overlook. We navigate daily life with our eyes open, flooding the brain with visual information that tends to overshadow less vivid sensory experiences. Closing the eyes helps isolate the qualities.
The hand is represented in front of us as a dim, 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. 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 your 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 an approximate field of locations and directions. Within this map, representations appear larger as they approach the head and smaller as they recede, reflecting the brain’s ongoing estimation of how far things are.
The sensation of the hand hasn’t changed, yet it now appears to your right. Since the sensation remained the same, the shift in directional appearance comes from the spatial map rather than from the sensation itself. 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 sensory input. Objects in the environment are represented with less precision: their locations are inferred from vision and memory rather than a constant stream of live signals.
The body representation stands out from everything else in the spatial map, and it is precisely this prominence that makes it the felt location of the self. When it stands out clearly, we find ourselves here, and the world appears out there.
The body is unique among the elements of the spatial map. It is both the point from which experience is spatially organized and the only element whose movements are registered as coming from within rather than from the external world. We don’t merely perceive the hand as an object in space, we perceive it as the subject 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 contraction, read against the background of the threat state, sharpen the representational boundaries of the body. The self-other distinction crystallizes at exactly the moment it is most needed.
Not all muscle tensing has this effect. Exercising increases proprioceptive signals without activating the threat-response system. What heightens the body representation is not muscle tensing alone but defensive bracing in the context of the brain’s threat state, a pattern we might call self-contraction.
Self-contraction 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 also to psychological triggers—the tension of an uncomfortable social situation, the fear of being judged, or the pain that accompanies unwanted thoughts. The body responds to perceived threat regardless of whether that threat is physical.
Self-contraction is further reinforced through development. From early childhood, we learn to brace against disapproval and suppress spontaneous expression, accumulating layers of defensive tensing that gradually solidify into habit. We also absorb the self-contraction patterns of those around us. The patterns are socially transmitted as much as individually acquired, modeled by parents, peers, and the culture at large. By adulthood, self-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.
Self-contraction recurs frequently enough throughout the day that it comes to feel like the natural resting state of the body. It is invisible 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 heightened prominence. With this comes a persistent sense of physical presence, of being a bounded, enclosed self in a world of potential threats—a condition so pervasive in modern human experience that it largely escapes examination.
The accumulated tension produces a characteristic felt quality: a knot in the chest and stomach, a pressure in the solar plexus. This feeling becomes inseparable from the sense of being a self under threat.
Self-contraction sustains itself through a reinforcing cycle. The heightened body representation generated by self-contraction sharpens the felt sense of being a discrete, isolated self. The clearer the line between self and world, the more vivid the sense of something vulnerable contained within it. Defense doesn’t resolve the vulnerability. It deepens it.
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.
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?
As defensive bracing subsides and proprioceptive signaling returns toward baseline, the body representation begins to gradually reduce in prominence. The hand, which previously stood out against the surrounding space, recedes 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 us and objects in the 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. When the body representation stands out in the spatial map, it establishes the here from which everything else appears there. The gap is simply that distance made felt.
The sense of space is not dependent on vision, though it is easier to notice with eyes open. A sharp visual object makes the empty space before it stand out more clearly. The gap is a feature of the spatial map, not a visual phenomenon.
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.
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 indistinguishable in experience.
If your entire body 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 a here, 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 because proprioceptive signaling never truly goes to zero. The body representation persists, but reduced to a level of prominence comparable to that of other objects.
In this state, neither body nor world dominates awareness, neither registers as more salient than the other. The felt sense of being located here dissolves not because the body disappears from experience but because it no longer stands apart from anything else.
The sense of space has reduced to a minimum. Objects are seen clearly and accurately with vivid colors and sharp details, but without the felt gulf that normally positions them as distant. Perception feels immediate, as though nothing stands between us and what we see.
This does not impair accurate interaction with objects because the brain retains full access to distance cues. Binocular disparity, relative size, and depth of field all operate independently of the body representation, allowing us to navigate and engage with the world as precisely as before.
Contemplative traditions across cultures have described states that closely resemble what this mechanism predicts. In Advaita Vedānta, liberation is understood as the recognition that one’s true nature was never separate to begin with. Buddhist traditions teach that what we call the self is a constructed process, and that freedom comes through seeing this directly. Sufi mystics describe fanā, the annihilation of the individual ego in the divine.
This framework offers a mechanistic account of how such states arise. The felt sense of being a separate individual is not a metaphysical given but a physiological variable, modulated by the degree of self-contraction and its effect on body representation prominence. What contemplative traditions have approached through inquiry and practice, this framework locates in a specific and testable somatic mechanism.
If the claim holds, the implications extend beyond the understanding of the sense of 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 millennia of first-person inquiry in a mechanistic framework accessible to empirical investigation.
While the relationship between muscle tension and proprioceptive signaling is well established, the specific claim that self-contraction measurably correlates with body representation prominence awaits direct empirical verification. The phenomenological changes are directly observable in first-person experience, though capturing them through third-person measures remains an open question. How minimal body representation prominence relates to the states reported in contemplative literature has yet to be rigorously investigated.
But the starting point is there—in the skin’s sensory noise, in the spatial map, and in the directly observable experience that anyone can verify by closing their eyes and holding out their hand.