You Are Not Your Body and You Are Not Your Mind.
Unfortunately and Fortunately.
How do you define “The Self”?
If I ask you what can be the most emotionally painful thing that a human can experience?
Please take your time to answer it truthfully.
How would you feel to find out that your parents die?
How would you feel to find out that your spouse just recently cheated on you with your best friend?
How would you feel to find out that your best friend of seven years just passed away on a car accident?
How would you feel to find out that your wife of 30 years has now just forgotten about you? She is still there, laid down in her king size bed that you used to sleep with her for decades, just until now that it seems that she has begun to forgot about you, her marriage, and even her name.
And now I ask you this, What happens when someone you love forgets you? Not because they chose to, but rather, because they are unable to remember you. There are no “choosing” in this, it sort of “just happened.” You find yourself standing in disbelief and trying to make her recall who she were and who you are in her life but she just seem to be unable to remember. After hours of explaining, she seems to remember but only some of it, she looks like she’s trying to puzzle the pieces together but after quite some time, she delivers the same exact question she asked before, “Who are you?”
What now?
You most definitely didn’t chose this, but is this really as absurd as losing someone to a car crash?
THE SELF
What is the self exactly? Is it me, is it you, or is it the mind experiencing you. How is “the self” maintained? How is “the self” is destructed? How is it the case that I have a great sense of what is myself but why can’t she? How is it the case, only now, that things are so different?
“It’s dementia.” He says.
“Her brain is no longer capable to do any self referential thinking, in other words, she is unable to point where she is in time, let alone have a good landscape of what is yesterday, five years ago, the day of your marriage, and even tomorrow, every sense of time has collapsed within herself, there is only now, and now is all she knows and will ever know…
From this point forward.” The doctor says.
“Well that sounds like a really cruel joke doesn’t it?”
“Except it isn’t… I know this must be a really tough news for you, we are all still trying our best to cure of this disease, but so far we have made very little progress to understand this, let alone cure it.”
“Are there any medicines… To make her go back to normal?”
“I must speak in a very matter of fact manner—the only thing that we have is medicines to decrease the symptom’s progression, I’ll prescribe it to you the lists and when she should take it, that’s all I can help you for now.”
Who is she… Without her memories…
Who am I… Without my memories…
Everything is so fragile…
Everything is like the gust of wind, it flows but it never stays, physically incapable of being rendered into memory, everything just sort of flows without a clear distinction of any point in time.
It’s like walking on a fragile slab, where every step one’s took, the previous slab falls, and all one can do is keep walking. One’s life is a biological obligation, where tomorrow is as dark as yesterday, and moments in the now feels very alien, surrounded with faces one’s do not recognize.
Without her memory, her sense of time collapses.
Without time, her sense of identity becomes un-anchored.
Yet, she is still alive. Does she not know that she is not well?
The whole is really greater than the sum of its parts.
Yet all of this, it feels all so meaningless.
30 years for this.
A terrible cruel joke.
You are not your body
They said it began with a flash — a blue one.
Not metaphorically. Not some poetic epiphany.
A literal burst of light. A piercing, blinding shimmer that emerged from a bucket filled with uranium in a quiet facility in Tokaimura, Japan. Three men were working that day. Only one stood the closest. His name is Hisashi Ouchi.
What happened to him was not quick. It was not clean. It was not merciful. It was, instead, the physical unraveling of a human being in real time — not in soul, not in emotion, but in biological function.
Hisashi Ouchi was exposed to 17 sieverts of radiation.
When Your Cells Cannot Remember You
We often define ourselves by what we can do — speak, think, feel. But underneath all of it is a quiet miracle: our cells remember who we are, and they keep remaking us.
Skin regenerates.
Blood replenishes.
Wounds heal.
But radiation doesn't just cause burns. It shatters chromosomes. It breaks memory at the molecular level. It’s not unlike dementia, but instead of breaking down the brain's map of self, it destroys the body’s blueprint to maintain the self.
In Hisashi’s case, his DNA was obliterated. The very instructions that told his skin how to grow, his blood how to form, and his organs how to function — they were gone.
He could no longer create new skin. It began to fall off in patches.
His bone marrow, the birthplace of immunity, had become a silent grave.
He couldn’t fight infection. Couldn’t heal. Couldn’t clot.
A Soul Held Hostage
There were times when Hisashi Ouchi regained consciousness. He spoke. He screamed. He cried for them to let him die.
He was not gone. He was there.
Because this was not a dead man kept on life support.
This was a living mind, trapped in a dying shell, unable to do anything but feel himself slowly become less human every day.
The machines fought for his life.
Transfusions
In the weeks he spent on the hospital, Hisashi Ouchi received over 16 gallons of blood transfusions.
Sixteen gallons. That’s more than five times the amount of blood in a human body.
His veins became rivers of borrowed life, sustained not by the body's own will to live, but by external intervention. Red blood cells that were never born inside him. Platelets from strangers. White blood cells engineered in labs. Plasma that had no memory of his heart, his thoughts, or his soul — just data and hope and sterile procedure.
Because his body could no longer make blood. The bone marrow was gone, scorched beyond function. Without new cells, every drop of life inside him had to be replaced again and again, like pouring water into a shattered vessel that refused to hold.
Malnutrition
As days stretched into weeks, the doctors noticed something else — something even more devastating than the sloughing skin or the vanishing blood cells.
Hisashi Ouchi’s body could no longer absorb food.
His intestinal lining — the barrier that allows nutrients to enter the bloodstream — had collapsed.
Radiation doesn’t stop at the skin. It ravages the body from the inside out. And the cells lining the digestive tract, much like skin and bone marrow, rely on constant renewal to function. These cells were among the fastest dividing in the body — which made them the most vulnerable to radiation.
In Hisashi’s case, they were gone.
The mucosal barrier that protects and absorbs had been obliterated. His gut became a leaking wound. Food no longer nourished. Instead, it passed through him, unused, rejected.
He was fed through tubes, given IV drips, nutrient bags, glucose solutions. All of it in vain.
Because no matter how many calories were delivered, there was nothing left inside him to receive them.
He was starving.
You are really not your body.
And maybe this was the final truth.
That the body can be kept breathing with machines.
The heart can be restarted.
The blood can be replaced.
The skin can be bandaged.
The nutrients can be delivered.
But without the blueprint of life — without DNA, without division, without the most basic cellular memory of how to be human — none of it means anything.
Hisashi Ouchi’s body was a house with no blueprint, where walls collapsed faster than they could be rebuilt, and eventually, there was nothing left to hold the soul inside.
He could not eat.
He could not breathe on his own.
He could not heal.
He cries tears of blood.
Because the body had forgotten.
And the body, as we now understand — was never really him nor his to claim.
What is the Body?
What is the body, really?
A miracle of tissue and time?
A brief union of skin and story?
Or simply the stage on which we pretend to be ourselves, until the day the lights dim and the roles dissolve?
Hisashi Ouchi’s story is not just one of scientific horror. It is a meditation on the fragility of identity.
Because once the body forgets how to be you, what are you then?
A soul held hostage.
A mind watching itself dissolve.
A whisper of what used to be a man.
We don’t mourn the body—We mourn what is lost.
You are the amalgamation of things.
Things so small that you barely recognize or think that is worthy of attention.
Until it declares its importance and demands attention.
“The whole is really greater than sum of its parts.”
The Story of “Emergence”
There are trillions of cells within a body.
Each with no eyes, no voice, no sense of self.
Some divide to replace the skin that keeps the world out.
Some absorb nutrients, tucked quietly in the lining of the gut.
Some form the heart muscle, contracting in rhythm without ever resting.
Some live in the marrow, tirelessly crafting blood — red to carry oxygen, white to defend, platelets to repair.
No single cell understood Hisashi Ouchi.
No cell knew the man.
But together, they were the man.
This is emergence.
The phenomenon by which something greater arises from smaller things working together — something no single part can do on its own.
When the part breaks
Now imagine what happens when that harmony breaks.
When radiation shattered his chromosomes, his cells lost their memory. The blueprint that told them how to cooperate was gone.
The skin cells no longer renewed — they peeled away like ash.
The intestines stopped absorbing — food became meaningless.
The blood could no longer clot — wounds became eternal openings.
And in the marrow, the birthplace of immunity and regeneration, silence.
The orchestra didn’t just go quiet.
The instruments broke.
The sheet music burned.
And the conductor — if there ever was one — had long disappeared.
What remained was not a man losing parts of himself.
What remained was the collapse of a system that could no longer remember how to be whole.
Chronic Organ Failure Is the Leading Cause of Death
Hisashi Ouchi is not an isolated case where the body as a part of a person forgets its role, but rather its a grim example to show that you are not your body.
There’ll come a time in anyone’s life that
the body begins to forget.
Not suddenly.
Not dramatically.
But slowly — with quiet betrayals.
Your kidneys, once efficient chemists, begin to fumble the equation.
Your liver forgets how to cleanse.
Your heart stumbles on its own rhythm.
Your lungs, fatigued, forget to breathe deep.
And your bones, once sturdy, now whisper under weight.
This is chronic organ failure.
Not an attack. Not an accident.
But a progressive silence — the systems no longer speaking to one another.
Because the body doesn’t die all at once.
It dies in layers.
First, it forgets.
Then, it fails.
And finally, it lets go.
And yet even then, with the body still present, warm, held together by medication and machines —
the self has already started to slip away.
But this is not just true for the body.
Because if there exists a conductor for the flesh,
Then there must also be a conductor for the mind.
Realness of Things
So I am not my body, but surely I at least have “the self”.
You see, reality isn’t something you simply see.
It’s something you feel.
The colors you see, the faces you recognize, the way the sky feels heavier when you’re sad — these are not objective truths.
They are neurochemical interpretations.
At the center of this symphony is serotonin.
It doesn’t make things real.
It makes you feel that they are real.
You Are Not Your Mind
They said it began with whispers — quiet ones.
Not metaphorical. Not poetic.
Actual voices.
Faint at first, then louder, more persistent. They weren’t her thoughts, and yet… they came from inside.
Her name is Elyn Saks.
What happened to her was not explosive.
It was not dramatic.
It was a dissolution — of identity, of logic, of self — from the inside out.
She was a promising student. A mind sharpened by law and philosophy. A Yale scholar. An Oxford graduate.
But beneath the surface, her mind had started to turn against itself.
Below are quotes attached from her book “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.”
“The voice said I was evil. That I was worthless. That I should die.”
These voices weren’t metaphorical.
They weren’t stress or guilt.
They were the auditory hallucinations resulting from dopaminergic hyperactivity, especially in the temporal lobes, where auditory processing occurs.
Normally, your brain filters internal thought from external sound.
The brain fails to label internal speech as "self-generated."
And so it feels like the thoughts are not yours.
They arrive as voices. As commands. As judgement.
As intrusions into the sanctuary of your mind.
“I was convinced I had killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts.”
This is not imagination.
This is delusional thinking, rooted in abnormal dopamine transmission in the striatum, where the brain assigns "salience" — importance — to stimuli.
The result?
Random thoughts feel urgent.
Coincidences feel orchestrated.
A passing comment becomes a message.
The brain becomes a conspiracy theorist against itself.
And the sense of agency — the belief that I am the one thinking my thoughts — disappears.
“Sometimes, I’d sit completely still for hours. Frozen in place. Afraid that any movement would destroy the world.”
Catatonia is a state of motor immobility driven by extreme psychological tension.
It often involves dysfunction in GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) and dopamine circuits in the basal ganglia — areas that control movement and initiation.
The body doesn’t forget how to move.
It just doesn’t know why anymore.
It’s the nervous system pressing pause — as if stillness might be the only safe choice when the world becomes too loud.
You Are Not Your Mind?!
Her story is not just one of struggle.
It is a quiet revelation:
That your sense of self, your ability to narrate your life, your grip on reality —
are all incredibly fragile.
That the “you” reading these words is not just a soul…
But an emergent function of neurochemistry.
Of serotonin. Of dopamine. Of logic and memory and social feedback.
And when the system begins to misfire —
The result is not a new story.
The result is no story at all.
So what are you, really?
How do you define “The Self”?
Your name?
Your history?
The voices inside your head?
You are not your thoughts.
You are the coordination of your thoughts.
And once the mind forgets how to coordinate, once the conductor loses the score…
You are not your mind.
You are the ghost it leaves behind.
Everything makes sense until you become a witness to your own disintegration.
The body and the mind is nothing but a fragile illusion, self composed by parts not bigger than the whole.
What’s the meaning of it all?
Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide.
But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.
Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble."
Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of which is habit.
Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus
Meaning… Just like any other emotions are too emergent properties.
Meaning does not exist on its own.
It is not floating in the air.
It is not found buried deep in a sentence, or tucked between the lines of a sacred text.
It is emergent.
Like happiness.
Like grief.
Like longing.
It arises when the parts of your mind — memory, attention, language, emotion — work in harmony to interpret the world through a lens of context.
It is not the event itself that gives rise to meaning.
It is your ability to remember what came before,
to understand what is happening now,
and to imagine what could come next.
The Architect of Meaning
The hippocampus remembers the past.
The prefrontal cortex projects the future.
The default mode network stitches both into a coherent sense of self in time — the feeling that I am the same person who once was, and who will be again.
Meanwhile, the limbic system overlays emotion — flavoring the moment with meaning. This moment is joyful, because of what it reminds you of.
This goodbye hurts, because of what you thought it could become.
Every emotion you feel is contextual.
Grief only hurts because you remember love.
Shame only burns because you remember who you wanted to be.
Hope only exists because you imagine a different tomorrow.
Even the sentence you’re reading now makes no sense without remembering the one that came before.
Even this emotion you feel right now — curiosity, sadness, awe —
requires that your brain has retained enough context to know why you feel it.
This is what gives meaning its depth.
This is what gives suffering its story.
This is what makes happiness something more than just a chemical spike.
Meaning emerges from the chorus, not the note.
Epilogue
This article is written to argue that:
You are not the body.
You are not the mind.
You are actually just what you are able to make out of—influenced and sustained by 1 and 2.
This is not a tragedy.
It is an honest reflection of the architecture of being — of how fragile it is, how complex, and how beautiful. It’s an existential acceptance that meaning has no preordained structure — it emerges only when we are present enough to perceive it, remember enough to understand it, and conscious enough to care.
It’s a call to cherish.
To love things while you are still able to love. To care for others while you are still able to care — with a working mind, and an able body.
Because neither will last forever.
And this, rather than causing despair, should be the very thing that makes life urgent, profound, and worth living.
The answer is not to shut ourselves away or see fragility as failure. The answer is not to hide from sadness or erect walls to guard against empathy.
Because when we do that — when we reject vulnerability — we invite something far worse: We begin to see others only as useful so long as they make us happy. We begin to reduce people to transactions.
We lose our conscience. We lose our ability to mourn. We lose the mirror of our own humanity.
To fear sadness is human. To avoid sadness entirely is inhuman.
To live is to risk falling apart. To love is to welcome the possibility of grief.
Because meaning is not a monument we build to avoid collapse. Meaning is the thing we build during collapse.
You are not your body. You are not your mind.
You are what emerges — as long as both remember how to carry you.