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August 2

I Am Not This Body  

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Everything is Consciousness. If this is so, then everything is one thing. Everything is Consciousness. There is only one thing. I must be that one thing as you must be that one thing. This is the Vedic world view.

We look at the above statements then we look at our lives, and perhaps it doesn't make sense. If we're the same thing, why do I experience myself over here and you over there? If there's only one thing, why do I know that I'm a man and that you're a woman? Or another man, but still, over there?

Consciousness identifies with what it sees. We are the Self. As the Self, we look out through these eyes, we feel through these senses, we think with this mind, we argue for these opinions. In a word, we behave as if we are the sum total of these things: our body, our mind, our opinions, our ego. That taken all together, these things make up an individual, and that individual is Me. And this is what I identify with. This is what I identify as. 

Now consider this:

The human body is made up of cells. The cells are replaced in all parts of the body at differing rates. The skin is replaced every three weeks or so. The stomach lining about every two weeks. The stomach itself about every two years. Even the bones and teeth are replaced about every seven or eight years. So in effect, this body I have is at most eight years old. And yet I can remember myself from ten years ago, and 20, and yes, even 50. 'I' can remember being four and five. So am I then this body? The Veda would say no. Yet without a way to experience myself as something beyond this body, I will be constrained to thinking of myself as just that: a man of a certain age, a certain weight, a certain color, height, shape, size. And right there at the beginning of that list, thinking of myself as 'a man,' I have identified something along with man that I am not, i.e. 'woman.' The oneness of Self has bifurcated, and with this identification, what I will tend to see in you is how we are different, rather than how we are the same.

This then becomes our work. We have our practice of meditation which allows us each day to feel ourselves, experience ourselves as something other than the body; and then we read things like this 'thought for the day' that will remind us that our habitual way of seeing the world may not be giving us the complete picture, so that perhaps today we may see something we didn't see yesterday, we may see a bit more than we saw yesterday.

Today I will try to see in you, at the depth of what you are, the same thing that I believe is in me, at the depth of what I am.

Shells on Walkway, Cape Lookout, N. Carolina