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How did we become identified with a body instead of consciousness?
How to realize your true nature and end suffering
Everyone has problems, but have you ever considered that our problems — including the inability to completely clarify the mind — exist because we identify with, or as, a body? This is even true for those who intellectually understand, or believe, that there is more to us than a body and its life in this reality. We call it “my body,” and this implies that some mysterious “I” possesses it. Who is this I?
We take the body almost everywhere. The business of the body is our greatest distraction and preoccupation as we feed, pamper, care, and worry about it incessantly. Some people work it to death, and others sculpt, train, alter, adorn, and adore it. Others ignore the welfare of the body, abuse it, injure it, and allow it to fall into disuse and illness and then suffer the consequences of attending to it even more vehemently.
Is there more to us than just a body and thoughts? Have you ever thought about this? How can you find out the degree to which the body affects the sense of a “me” without using the “me” to do the investigation?
When you awaken spiritually, do your problems vanish?
A common goal among spiritual seekers is to awaken in the hopes of casting off the heavy cloak of the self and saying goodbye to all their problems. All will be well if they can just break free of the illusions that keep them in a perpetual loop of pleasure and suffering. Is this a realistic dream or just wishful thinking predicated on some idea of enlightenment? And who holds this idea other than the self?
Who is it that has such high hopes other than the self that seeks to be abandoned in favor of spiritual awakening? But can the self really dismiss itself?
Where does this idea that we are a body begin, and how does it continue to grow so that we are led to consider it such an immutable fact that we rarely question it? Using your own power of observation, it is possible to enquire about the formation and tendencies of your own thoughts that lead to a strong attachment to the body.
The “I am” becomes “I am this or that.”
Awareness is the only way we know that we are alive…
