Bonzer Words!: My Body As My Spiritual Teacher
Patrick Thomas declares that his interaction with his body provides unlimited opportunities for him to re-learn his essential God-essence.
Patrick writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
The whole thrust of my spiritual life is to enable me to establish my very best relationship with God.
Bill considers that he best does this by standing on his head when he meditates. Mary's approach is to belong to an established church. Charlie belongs to a small sect. Helen's way is to lead a good life helping wherever she can. Bravo for Bill, Mary, Charlie and Helen. All four are working individually towards their goal. Mankind is such a varied tribe that it stands to reason that individuals will try out the ways they have concluded are right for them.
I, too, am an individual. The essential parties in my spiritual life are God, Soul (me) and body. Each is of vital importance.
The body has a bad 'press' in much spiritual literature. It is blamed for stopping Soul from relating to God.
Yet, it is my interaction with my body which provides unlimited opportunities for me to re-learn my essential God-essence.
The fact is that my body can be a good servant but it also can be a bad master. Given its way, my body would have me live a materialistic life in which my bodily desires, emotional crises, memories of the past and mental preoccupations completely dominate every waking moment. In other words, my body would live in what it terms reality but which is, because material life is impermanent, unreality or illusion.
Living with my body obliges me to determine for myself what is reality and what is not. In the knowledge that my body will one day die, it would seem that it would be an easy decision for me to make. However, my body has a trump card which it resorts to, time and again. That trump is the immediacy and urgency of "the now". Hunger demands my immediate attention. and so often do the emotions, and so do thoughts, worries, hopes, passions and memories. 'The now' takes on all the appearances of reality. There seems to be no time for me to think through the nature of reality.
What a challenge for me!
Yet this is the challenge which must be met if I am to reclaim my essential relationship with my Maker.
I also have a trump card. the unsatisfactory nature of trying to meet all the demands of the now. The demands are so never-ending as to become tiresome, and even when they are met, there is no lasting level of satisfaction. I say to myself, 'Surely life has to hold something more than this?'
One response to this question is for my body to seek to retake the initiative and direct me into a pseudo-satisfaction, greed, attachment, vanity, drugs, sexual adventure, alcohol, money making, workaholism, laziness. Time and again, I succumb. Yet, in time, the futility of such a diversion always rears its head.
Illnesses, accidents, romantic tragedies, death continually and dramatically remind me of the existence of a greater reality. A kind act, an example of a selfless life, a chance encounter, a question from out of the blue, any one of a number of possible scenarios, trigger for me thoughts of me as Soul.
And so I ask questions, and the answers give rise to yet more questions. Eventually, answers have come which have been more satisfying and have provided a framework for me to reclaim my relationship with my Creator.
Along the way, I have observed that it is easy for me to waste much time and energy in attending to the evils and sins and guilts of life on Planet Earth—all to little avail. I have become aware that a fundamental law of human life is that whatever I place my attention on, I energise. When I place attention on the negatives in my life, I energize those negatives.
For me, the most energising approach of all is to assume that I unconsciously attract to myself all that is needed for my growth as a human being, i.e. for my growth as Soul. By regarding everything but everything which occurs as a learning experience, I, Soul, am slowly learning to distinguish between what is real and what is not real.
With my body in the role of being my spiritual teacher, and being deadly serious about it all, attempting to lead a spiritual life is for me a truly life-long challenge, but what a challenge, and what a potential reward!
© Patrick Thomas
