You know what they say, right? You’ve heard this line lots of times
Your body is a temple.
Like everyone else I thought I knew what it meant. But one evening while swimming with the sun low in the sky setting over a Dubai skyline it struck me that I’d been parsing the sentence all wrong. Like you I too believed that the statement means that you should keep the body clean and take care of it and exercise and not feed it crap and so on. But that evening a realisation dawned. There’s no other word for it. This wasn’t the work of logic or calculation, it was a shift in perspective that happened immediately and irrevocably.
You see the statement isn’t that the body is like a temple and so should be treated like a temple. It says that the body is a fucking temple i.e. an actual God lives there. And who is that God? Ah — now that’s a question. But let’s just say that we understood that the sun in the sky, it was a mere object in the scheme of things of the diety that inhabited this temple. The whole world, the whole Universe even, was just impressions on this consciousness. When this consciousness is turned off — as in deep sleep or perhaps death — then there is no experience of anything. No Dubai, no skyline, no sun, no stars, nothing. Void.
The two statements might seem very similar but in truth they are worlds apart. When you understand this you will know. And to understand it you have to understand that the light of consciousness is a very, very powerful thing. And the fact that it animates your body and senses at this moment is a tremendous gift. When you start to feel the truth of this then you will start to feel the body as a sacred thing. As a temple. Not like a temple.
And then everything will happen automatically — keeping it clean, respecting it, understanding the sacredness of this corporeal vessel for consciousness — all this will just happen automatically.