It was as I was thinking about taking my car in for its periodic oil change and tune-up that it occurred to me. I am not my body. I inhabit my body, to be sure, but I have no more control over it than I do over my car. It isn’t me; it is something I am in. Epiphanies arrive in the oddest of places.
This knowledge came as both somewhat of a relief, and also a bit of a frustration. On the one hand, I don’t have to stress about my body as much as I might otherwise. You see, there is a tendency to equate us with our bodies, for obvious visual reasons, but that is not really us. Is it? I mean, do you believe in heaven? And if you do, what do you think we will look like there? Like our bodies? Which bodies? Our young selves? Our old selves? The exact way our bodies look when we die? What if we have lost limbs along the way? Do we get them back in heaven? Irrelevant. You no more lose a piece of your self when you lose a limb than you lose your self as you age. You are you. You are not your body. My soul cannot be convinced that it is not 18 anymore. My body is 38. My self is both much younger, and much older.
It’s been said that, perhaps, we are our brains, but our brains are also just the casing for something else. Without the electrical impulses that control it, our brains are dead tissue. What we are is energy. We are souls. We are created in God’s own image, but God does not look like a human body. God is not male or female. God does not have armpits and eyebrows. God is the universe. God is energy, life, light, in everything, everywhere, all at once. And while we are here on this planet, we live in these bodies, but they are not us. We are the universe. We are more than any physical construct can contain. We are we.
Of course this can all be very annoying. You see I know I am not my body, because my body doesn’t actually do what I tell it to do. Oh sure, it moves in a kind of gears and levers kind of way. I can drive it forward and back and all around, like I do my car. But I cannot tell my taste buds to enjoy kale. I have tried. I cannot adjust my body so that it runs smoothly all the time. It does not always do what I say. There are hacks, yes. We can adjust certain things, habits, issues, and we can have other people fix us up as well. But we cannot change our bodies like we can change our minds. I wish we could. But we cannot. Because we are not our bodies.
I would be very happy to wake up early in the morning, if only my body didn’t make it so difficult for me. Body! Behave yourself! Enjoys mornings! But my body does not listen to me. We have conversations, try to come up with solutions, but it is hard to think outside the box, when you are trapped inside the box that does the thinking. My soul gets it. My soul wants change very much. The spirit and the flesh are two entirely separate entities.
I am glad to realize this though. You may or may not believe in life after death, but I don’t think there is such a thing as death. There is the wearing out and breaking down of human machines, and then there is the rejoining of energy in a place where these earthly problems don’t matter anymore. And maybe we get a second chance down here, or a third chance, or maybe we don’t. But I know that wherever I’m going next, I won’t be taking this body with me. It’s just a tool that I have to use right now. I hope I use it wisely. I know that I don’t always. But honestly, I’m still trying to figure out the controls, trial and error style. And today my prayer is that I manage to get through the best I can, without doing too much damage to my soul, thanks to this body that is not me. And I will try my hardest not to damage your soul in any way, especially due to the body you were given, which is not, never was, and will never be, you.