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but it is beautiful only when you know that you are not it. If you become identified with it, it becomes ugly; it becomes an imprisonment rather than a temple.
If you know that 'I am not the body but only a guest and the body is the host,' then the body is a temple; and a temple has a beauty, a serenity, a sacredness. If you forget this you start thinking 'I am the body,' as millions of people think -- ninety-nine point nine percent of all people think that they are body. Even the so-called spiritualists who talk about spirit and god, etcetera -- if you look deep down in them you will find they are identified with their body. And all that they go on saying is mere jargon, it has no content in it, empty words. But words have their own fascination, words have their own hypnotic power.
There are words which can become obsessions, which can dominate your whole life. But reality is a totally different phenomenon.
People live identified with the body; that's how the body becomes an imprisonment. Rather than helping you to grow towards the infinite, your identification with the body makes you very finite, very small. And that is one of the fundamental causes of misery; the body will get old, then you will feel afraid, scared -- you are getting old; the body will be ill and then you will be in tremendous fear -- and sooner or later the body is going to die. You may not think about it, but it is there. You see people dying -- you cannot deny it; you may overlook it but you cannot deny it. You may no look at it, you may bypass it, but still it is there and deep down you know that you have to die. That creates a trembling, that creates a sadness inside that soon this life will be taken away from you -- and nothing is fulfilled yet, no flower has bloomed yet.
Identification with the body becomes identification with death, old age, sickness. The moment you are not identified with the body, when you know 'I am separate, I am consciousness,' you are immediately freed from illness, old age, death. They will happen to the body but you are just a witness to it all, just an onlooker; it has nothing to do with you.
And the experience that whatsoever
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