Physical body Quotes

“Having a body, we have seen, does not entail knowing a body. Whereas a cow automatically eats whatever grasses supply needed nutrients, people must determine for themselves what to put into their bodies, with the result that there is room to make mistakes. Mistakes arise, in part, from ignorance. Yet ignorance is not the only problem produced by this arrangement. The fact that we are not compelled by our bodies' precise needs—understood as particular kinds of food and drink, rather than food and drink tout court—allows the formation of desires that have little or nothing to do with the needs on which bodily health depends.”

“Having a body, we have seen, does not entail knowing a body. Whereas a cow automatically eats whatever grasses supply needed nutrients, people must determine for themselves what to put into their bodies, with the result that there is room to make mistakes. Mistakes arise, in part, from ignorance. Yet ignorance is not the only problem produced by this arrangement. The fact that we are not compelled by our bodies' precise needs—understood as particular kinds of food and drink, rather than food and drink tout court—allows the formation of desires that have little or nothing to do with the needs on which bodily health depends.”

“Death. I wish the word could be removed from the vocabulary and from the dictionary. It simply does not exist, except in the human mind that was taught that it does exist. People think they are a body and they come to believe that when the body dies, everything they are will die too. It’s not true. The soul lives on. The soul of consciousness exists not only in the body but outside of the body too. We are all souls that cannot be contained or limited by time or space or the physical body. For souls there is no death.”

“The multiplicity of human identity is not just a spiritual principle, it’s a biological fact—a basic ecological reality. ... only 10% of the cells in your body belong to you. The rest are the cells of bacteria and microorganisms that call your body home, and without these symbionts living on and within your physical self, you would be unable to digest and process the nutrients necessary to keep you alive. Your physical body is teeming with a microscopic diversity of life that rivals a rainforest. The insight of the Gaia Theory—that “the Earth system behaves as a single self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components”—is as much a statement about our own physical bodies as it is about the planet. If we imagine the Earth as the body of a goddess, we can also imagine our own bodies as a sacred home to an ecologically complex and diverse array of microscopic life." -- Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective”

“The sensation that you experience in the body, is your spirit, but it’s so attached, that it’s hard to imagine, that the sensation can ever be separated from the physical body. In long hours of meditation, you can separate your sensation from the physical body.”

“Xenophon tells us that Socrates never neglected the body and did not praise those who did. We can imagine that it was because the physical body—volatile, unseen, and implicated in an automatized natural world—could seem so daemonic that entrusting life, both biological life and ethical life, to its dynamics could seem like ceding control of the human.”

“Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.”

“As long as there is worldly life, one is going to attain physical body, and as long as there is a body, there will be worldly miseries and troubles.”

“The mind and the spirit can be detached from the physical body in deep meditation. Once the mind and spirit get detached from the physical body, the inner process of life becomes clear to you.”

“Life probably does not hand us any more visceral experience of how we mistakenly define ourselves than by means of our physical body. From the day we were born, the message we received from the world was that we are our body. This was the first great lie we were given by means of the collective consciousness of humankind, which has always valued itself from the outside in.”

“I have been here before as a spirit - this is just my physical body, it is just an overcoat. And at death, you will take the overcoat off.”