For most of my life I believed I was a physical being who “had” a soul the way I had a house or a car or some other possession. The thing is, I never saw it and never consciously felt it.
Frankly, if I thought about it at all, I resented it. I’d been taught that if I was “good,” then when I died my soul would “go to heaven.” That irked me. If I was good, I should be the one to go to heaven.
See? I thought my physical body was me. I felt no kinship at all with my soul. Those who supposedly knew about these things said I had a soul so I believed it but I didn’t particularly like it.
Now, are you ready for this?
I don’t have a soul.
I am a soul. A God-spark, a spiritual entity, engaging in physical experience by having a body. I had it all backwards. That is, as a soul, I have a body, that body lives in me, but I am not that body, or at least not only that body.
The physical person I always believed was me can’t define herself by what she does or doesn’t do, or who reared her, or what may have been done to her or not done for her, or to whom she’s married, or how much education or money she may or may not have. Career and personal relationships and status no longer tell the world – or myself – who I am.
The “I” I thought I was is not the “I” I’m turning out to be.
Yes, and yes and yes, Sam.
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It’s an awesome realization, isn’t it, Mary Ann?
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I once heard a Buddhist monk from Korea say that if you were to become enlightened, you would feel the enlightenment in your body.
I thought his statement felt like the opposite of Western understandings. Not only do we separate the spirit and the physical, we separate the physical into different ‘systems’ that we consider in isolation from the others.
That’s all I got.
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I don’t know about feeling enlightenment in the body, Joy. I could sure use some “lightenment” *G* but it probably won’t happen any time soon. But you’re right about Western thought separating things into smaller and smaller parts. We’re pretty good at analyzing, do less well at synthesis. Both methods have their advantages but at some point they have to be integrated, I think.
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