What is a Body?
Every day you have isolated feelings that are like single cells; put them all together and you have your emotional body. Your emotional body is, first of all, a living history of all the things you like and dislike, as well as your fears, hopes, desires, and so on.There are other bodies, also invisible, that add to your uniqueness. There is the body of knowledge that has been growing with you since birthcall this your mental body. Knowledge is subtler than emotions, since it is made up of abstract concepts.
Even subtler are all the reasons you have for living, your deep beliefs about existence and the nature of lifeall stored within your causal body, that part of you that allows you to understand existence. Here reside the deepest seeds of memory and desire.
Identityyour feeling of being Iflows from your awareness of these bodies. The I that you identify with is created first by your beliefs and reason for living (causal body), which gave rise to ideas (mental body) and feelings (emotional body).
Only at the end of the sequence does the physical body receive the impulse of life. Mortals believe that they are physical machines that learned to think. Actually, they are thoughts that learned to create a physical machine.
Adapted from The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 1995).
