Today's
Meditation:
It's
so easy to identify with these bodies. After all, we
feel through them-- much of our pleasure and pain comes to
us through our bodies. We have five senses that help
us to make sense of the world, and those senses are
integral parts of these bodies. So it makes sense
that we come to identify ourselves with our bodies, and we
start to feel that the inevitable mortality that has to be
a part of the body also is a part of us. This isn't
true, though.
"We"
are not our bodies. While it is very important to
take care of these bodies if we want them to be good to us
while we're on this planet, we shouldn't get too strongly
identified with them. After all, as Cicero says,
"the spirit is the true self." The part of
me that feels love and compassion is who I really am, and
that's not my body. Sometimes we get very strongly
identified with our brains because that's where the
thinking seems to come from, but our lives aren't just
about thinking.
So
while we develop exercises to take care of our bodies and
we search out intellectual stimuli for our brains, what do
we do to develop our spirits? How do we help them to
grow and develop? Or do we take them for granted and
just ignore them? Or, even worse, do we completely
forget that we do have spirits, the integral parts of
ourselves that will continue on once this life here is
finished?
Remembering
that we are spiritual beings is an important first step to
take if we're to develop ourselves into more than what we
currently are. We should never neglect our physical
selves, of course, for that would be a terrible
squandering of wonderful gifts. But as it stands,
most people squander the gift of their spirituality
because they simply get caught up in the physical world
and lose sight of the rest of the world.
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