We are most happy when we leave our bodies.

Have you ever had a dream that seemed more real than your real life and that you didn't want to end? Have you ever been in love? Have you ever read a novel that you got into so much that you didn't want to put it down to attend to your real life duties and obligations? Have you ever been high on drugs? Every been tipsy (not quite drunk)? Daydreamed to the point that you didn't hear someone call you the first time?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you've been, at one time or other, living the life of the mind. We don't know what the mind is, but we can be fairly certain it's located in the brain. Certainly not in the muscles and tissues and veins and organs of the body. Those are the machinery. They do the work, and they give us pleasure -- but that pleasure, like almost every other thing about us as humans, registers in the brain.

In the course of evolution, something dramatic seems to have happened between us and our simian brothers and sisters: consciousness. A product wholly of the brain. Nothing to do with the body. I mean, think about it: any lion on a savanna in Africa can outdo our best athlete. And can eat him/her afterward.

We humans get our pleasures, even if they start in the body, through our brains. Our thoughts and emotions -- hallmarks of being us -- come from our brains. Memories, ambitions, dreams: all from that little squiggly mass of whatever that contains more nerve endings than we can begin to imagine. Such a small scale: such a huge result. And utterly mysterious.

As creatures of consciousness, it's only reasonable to think that our happiest moments come when we forget our bodies -- maybe well-maintained but more likely overweight or puny or even sickly -- and relax into the life of the mind. A good conversation with an old friend, a drink with a buddy, a particularly satisfying dream, lying on the beach and feeling the sunshine, or just sipping iced tea on the front porch and watching how the blossomed trees in early spring sway in the breeze: all belong in the realm of the brain. The mind. The psyche, even. The non-body.

This, I think, is where religion comes from: the idea that we, you and I, can exist without our bodies. That the richest parts of our lives come from times when we're remembering or just thinking, or when we're lost in love (which is a mental thing as much as a physical one), or when we're looking at a work of art or at nature, speechless. It's only a short leap to imagine existing as non-body (soul?), but, as usual, the devil is in the details. Still . . .