We are not our bodies...

We are not our body.... We are that which possesses a body and that which stands outside the body.... (We) exist quite apart and independent of it.
                                                                   ~  N. Walsch

Thank goodness, we are not our bodies. The essence of who we are is larger than this earth plane, larger than my chest, stomach, or any other part of me -- larger than these bunch of particles called a body.  As I have written numerous times, the physicists tell us there is no matter, we are not a solid anything.  That I am concrete is definitely a case of mistaken identity or as modern science leaves it, an old fashion idea.

An acquaintance has just had her hands, feet and other parts of her body, removed. These body parts are not the alive woman I hear about, loving her young son, her husband. I also learned that fact one sunny day on the other side of the Tucson mountains. I regained consciousness on the road to see a twisted arm, supposedly mine, a wrist that was at a weird angle, also supposedly mine. Then I saw the smashed mirror and only the handlebars left of the motorcycle laying next to legs that looked like crooked stovepipes and both of them, supposedly mine.

Thank God, we are not our bodies. Our larger selves cannot get sick as they are not us.  My Ex is no more his Alzheimer's than I am a duck. His eyes and spirit tell me that all the time. In fact, my body hovered for quite awhile on the edge of living but I always felt very much alive and in some weird way, untouched. The accident didn't seem to happen to me, to my essence me-ness, to this that laughs, loves, cries and dances in spirit with rod-spiked legs. My essence didn't seem to be involved.

 Sometimes we just have to survive skin, bone, and organ but know we are not them.  I look down right now at a body, dissolving. Face wrinkled, hands wrinkled, and quite frankly there is not much that isn't. And before long dust or cinders await this physicality.

However, our wonderful bodies, while we have them, truly and merely are like the butterfly cocoon, a vehicle to expand our larger selves until we burst its skin. No, I am not my feet, hands, legs, heart, liver, brain -- which all begs the question, Who and what am I then?

Maybe, like Teilhard de Chardin, the great philosopher and paleontologist pointed out, "We are not human beings in search of a spiritual experience. We are spiritual  beings in search of a human experience."