I am not my body

Ever thought about that?
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You are not your body.
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Yes, you use the body you have in this life.
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Yes, it is yours in the sense that you inhabit and use it.
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The essential you though is not your body.
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The real you is your consciousness.
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And just what is your consciousness?
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Every night you are unconscious, about one third of your life is spent sleeping unconscious.
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Meaning that about two thirds of your life is conscious, but that does not answer what consciousness is.
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It is this undefined consciousness that is the real you. 
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Undefined because many can say what it is not, but they cannot say what it is.

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So, our bodies might die.

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In fact they most certainly will.

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But I am not my body.

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Yes I have and use this body.

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But I am not my body.

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I am the consciousness that inhabits and uses it.
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And that consciousness is the real me.
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The mind and brain are really separate, the brain doing what it is instructed to do by the mind.
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The mind determining what the brain should process.
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A simple statement and one open to challenge, but it is just making a point.
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So going further the higher element in all this is the soul.
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Where our consciousness comes from.
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Man is a soul in other words.
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OK so many might argue otherwise and that's fine I am just provoking a thought. 
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Who or what are you?
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The who is the sum total of all your many lives.
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Lives that brought you to where you are today.
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To what you are today.
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The what is tougher to answer in a sense because it demands that we get to know ourselves in a more honest and complete way.
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Start by asking others how they find you.
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What are your good and bad attributes.
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Note what you think life is about for you.
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Then maybe you can approach the what more clearly once you know more about yourself.
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Think about it.
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Oh and another aspect is the reality that we are all interdependent.
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We are also dependent on each other for many things.
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For example our birth is dependent on the parents who bring us into life.
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Those who educate, feed, look after us.
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Gets more and more complex as we start to delve into what appear to be quite simple questions.
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And knowing yourself better for what you are and are not is quite useful.
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It allows you to be more at ease with yourself, and that has its uses in most situations.
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Should you have great patience and stamina then what you are can be explored much further.
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And the further you go the more you realise that some of those who went before us were pretty smart.
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They left enough clues about what we are and what we are not.
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We were too arrogant or busy to understand them.
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Come to think of it we still are.
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Shame really
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Because to know what we truly are allows us to understand ourselves and our world so much better.
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Allows us to participate in a more profoundly conscious way too.