Are we Spirit or are we our body or are we an amalgamation of both? Most people for obvious reasons strongly identify with their body, but our body, which we assume is the same each and every day, is in fact, constantly changing itself, because millions of our cells out of the 50-odd trillion that we have that makeup our body are dying and regenerating themselves each and every day. Additionally, although on a day-to-day basis it is difficult for us to recognize any cognizant changes to our body and our look, over time, clearly our body and our look do change.
Most people, even people that are very spiritual in nature, closely identify with their body. The reason that we know this intuitively is that if we were to one day wake up, and look at a mirror and see that the face and body that is reflected back to us is not our face and body, that clearly we were indeed looking at someone that physically appeared not to be us, most people would find it difficult, to maintain equilibrium under such conditions because we truly believe that our physical presence is ourselves, when in fact, our true essence is not our finite body, but our ethereal nature and our spirit.
This then leads us back to the question, as to who we really are. If we trap ourselves into believing that we are only our physical presence, we have encased ourselves into a finite existence that can only have one possible ending. However, if we recognize that the truth is that our physical body merely encases our soul, than we will perhaps spend less of our time in things of the material plane and more of it engaged on things that are more eternal in nature. In Romans 8:6 we read: “For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”
This means that the change that we are looking for is at the very core of our being. That is to say most of the time, money, and energy that is spent on our physical self, will, in the end, profit us little, although there is good profit in taking good and proper care of our physical self, but far less in making it fundamentally the master of our lives as many of us are prone and have the tendency to do.
Those that wrap too much of their identification into their physical presence, will spend an inordinate amount of time and effort in holding back the sands of time, an effort that will at some point end in defeat, as there is only so many fingers that can cover up the holes in the dike. If, in fact, we lived in a world in which our physical presence was far more transitory, and far more ephemeral, we would concentrate far less on our physical form and far more on our spiritual, because we would recognize the illusion of the physical form.
Remember this well that should there come a time when you look at the mirror and the picture that reflects back is not you, your reaction to such, will be the very definition of who you really are.