The Human Body is a Mansion

[Guest guest]

One little point needs to be stressed here. The body is like a mansion. No

matter how wonderful a mansion may be, even if it be made of marble and set

with jewels, no one will be able to live in that mansion unless it has a

kitchen and a bathroom and a toilet. Because, whatever man takes in, part of

its goes to form his mind, part of it goes to form his body, and the

remaining waste has to be eliminated. And waste is always foul-smelling. The

impurities of the body are always foul-smelling. In the outer mansion they

have to have a toilet, they have to have a kitchen. If there be no kitchen,

no one can live there. You may construct any type of palace, but if there is

no food, no lunch, no breakfast, no afternoon tea-even for a day-no one will

live there. But then, when a kitchen is there, you have to provide drainage

also. Kitchen means garbage, left-over food, vegetable cuttings, fruit peels

and all that. If all this is kept, it will begin to rot and so you have to

have a garbage disposal arrangement. You have to have drainage and sewerage.

In the absence of all these arrangements, it will not be possible to live in

that mansion. Likewise, in the human body, in this mansion of nine gates, in

this Navadvara Kuti, where you have an entrance way and windows for light

and air and knowledge, for the sake of drainage and garbage disposal, God

has provided two holes. Their real importance is that of drainage. They are

only drains. This is the only right understanding of the matter. No doubt,

the occasional function of reproduction is there, but to over-exaggerate

that aspect is foolish. It betrays a lack of knowledge. Because, from birth

until death, day after day, thirty days in a month, and three hundred and

sixty-five days in the year, the constant function that these exit gates

have to fulfil is drainage. And the occasional function that they have to

fulfil is in cooperating with Brahma, but that is only some rare occasional

function, and that also, only in a very short period of one's life. In the

first Ashrama of Brahmacharya, it has no place; in the third Ashrama of

Vanaprastha, it has no place; and in the fourth Ashrama of Sannyasa, it has

no place. Out of the whole life, it is only in one Ashrama that that

particular function of it is exercised. Otherwise, the main function of

these outlets is only drainage of impurities.

 

Sivananda