Am I This Physical Body?

When you wear your Sunday suit, it moves and behaves just as the wearer. When the same suit is off the back of the wearer and is hanging on its hanger, it has no movement. The suit is dead when its master, the wearer, is not within its folds, vitalising, directing, and determining its movement. Similar is the case with the physical body. As long as the wearer, the Lord, is within, the limbs move and the outer and inner organ's function. To give this moving physical body an identity and a name and to arrogate to it an independent existence is in no way wiser than to claim a personality for the Sunday suit!The physical body, with its organs of action and organs of perception, its physiological equipment and its psychological and intellectual processes, is the particular suit of the day that the Self has chosen to wear. The mortal jīva is he who in his delusion has mistaken his suit to be himself!Body is but a skeleton of the graveyard, clothed with a perspiring skin, rounded off with filth, blood and urine. Its greatness is only because of the presence of God. When once He departs, the skin and filth return back to the five elements from which they had come. The skeleton gives its meaningless wisdom smile at the fool who thought himself to be eternally great, wise, loving and so on. When we identify with the body, the dream giant ego manifests itself – often lust filled, ever passionate, and constantly torn between a thousand contrary feelings, desires, and hopes. The ego alone suffers pain, limitations and finally death. In identifying with the Self, the phantom ego disappears, and in its place, we recognise the divine Godhood, peaceful and contented, with nothing to desire or to wish for—our true nature..The attempts to dissociate ourselves from our identification with the body and the consistent practice of seeking our real identity in the Self, constitute the divine life. It can be pursued through any one of the four paths: jñāna-yoga (path of knowledge), rāja-yoga (asceticism), bhakti-yoga (path of devotion) or karma-yoga (path of selfless action).The present is not the tyrannical dispensation of a power-mad, superhuman dictator, God. It was made by each of us, for ourselves, in our past hours, days and lives. Our self-effort in the past is our destiny in the present. So, then the puruṣārtha (self-effort) of the present will be the destiny of the future. Make your tomorrow peaceful by living today in right understanding, divine thought, and selfless action.You are not the body; you are the essence, the Self, the divine entity within. Identify yourself with the finite body and you are a mortal; identify yourself with the Self, and you are an immortal.