Daily Meditation: Thursday, September 22, 2005

Physical body - a vehicle for the spirit

09/22/2005

Observe yourself and notice that you always tend to identify with your physical body: you act as though its needs, its satisfactions and dissatisfactions were your needs, satisfactions and dissatisfactions. Your physical body is nothing more than your vehicle. Because human beings confuse themselves with what they are not, they have such difficulty finding themselves, and they put themselves in jeopardy. The physical body is perishable, and, if you identify with it, you perish with it. Whereas, if you identify with your immortal spirit, you become a spark, a flame; you free yourself from your earthly weight and succeed in overcoming all difficulties. Human beings do themselves a great deal of harm by identifying with matter, which is corruptible and ephemeral, instead of identifying with the spirit, which is unchanging and eternal. The physical body is only an instrument which has been given to us so we can live on earth, while our spirit, which leaves the body at the moment of death, continues its journey in the infinite.