With my own eyes,
I have seen those known as kings and lords reduced to dust.
O’ Nanak, when one departs from the world,
all one’s false attachments are broken.

Siri Guru Granth - Ang 16
(Translated by Daljit Singh Jawa)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ve been going back and forth with someone on the “I am not the body” philosophy, popular in yogic practices and (I believe) traced back to the Bhagavad Gita.

The belief is that “you” are eternal, and therefore not attached to this material form. Of course, this requires a belief in the immortal soul, but I like to keep a grip on the fact that our life here and now is all we know for sure.

Maybe this is just a temporary meat vehicle, but I’ll never truly be able accept we are not the body because we are so inevitably tied to the body. We are an accumulation of all the physical and psychological stimuli that have happened to us since birth.

If a baby is mistreated in infancy, the body remembers what the conscious mind won’t, and so your being becomes a sum of the subconscious reactions and stories shaped by traumas and experiences, even the ones before you remember. These can remain stored in the body as physical tensions, chronic pains, and poor postures that influence who we are. All of these shape the personality that is “you.”

There are various means to heal these things (like meditation, acupuncture, therapy, psychedelics) or make them worse (with drugs, alcohol, self-inflicted wounds), but they are both means of influencing or manipulating the body itself.

In the end, what is “you” if not the personality created by every experience you’ve ever had? Some cookie cutter “soul” that comes from a spiritual dough to which it returns after death? I suppose that plays into the “all are one” and “from the source” ideas, but that view detracts from any purpose in the individual experience now.

I think my view boils down to not knowing what (if anything) comes after this life, and so I’m more concerned with making the here and now fulfilling. That starts with keeping the body as healthy as possible, because it’s directly tied to the mind, and therefore (if such a thing exists) the soul.

Any kind of healing we can perform during the “you” experience now can only carry over to a spiritual or karmic afterlife, if anything like that exists.