Are we this body?

as infant grows to a small child, he starts identifying himself. Since the mind finds that it’s commands are being followed by his body, his mind starts making a perception that this body is HE. Over the time this perception becomes stronger and remains so for almost whole life for most of us. We also saw that, as a person identifies with his Body, he wants to get what is in interest of this body and thus becomes selfish. So it can be said that the basic reason of dishonesty is our identification with our body.

Spirituality questions this fundamental belief of all of us, i.e ‘I AM THIS BODY’. Let us do some investigation here as to, if we really this body?

Our body consists of various organs, bones, hands, arms, legs, veins, arteries etc. Each part does a function as per the instruction it receives from brain. Let us take our hand. It does various activities by movement of fingers and wrist. The movement takes place by contraction of various motor muscles in our hand. The contraction is initiated by an electrical signal, which is sent by our brain. Thus hand itself cannot do anything unless it gets signals by brain. So we can say that our hand is just a electrico-chemico-mechanical device created to perform some specific functions. Though this device is a highly sophisticated and wonderfully designed, can we call it having life of it’s own? Clear answer is NO. Thus we can say that our hand is not ‘I’. So is true for all our body parts.

If try to search where is our ‘I’, in this body, we will find only lifeless matter in whole body. Even our brain, which consists of billions of neurons, is like a computer with various ICs. Individually, each neuron performs some logical functions as it was designed to do. Thus no neuron can be called ‘I’. In this way we will not find ‘I’ in whole of our brain also.

Thus we find that our concept of ‘I’ as this body is like a superstition. In fact the word ‘I’ itself is a superstition, which all of us have.Great scientist Einstein has also expressed his similar finding in these words -

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few people nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”