Who Owns the Body?

ancient_paztriot · February 10, 2004

Hridyananda…

If you say you can control the body, that’s an easy one. What if someone just pulls a gun and says, “Hey, guess what? Now I control your body.” Or what if someone physically overpowers you. Now if control is the criterion – if someone can overpower someone else – they own the body. You know a caveman comes up and hits this lady over the head with a club and just takes her back to his cave. That’s also control. So why not do that? You see? On what grounds do we actually establish the body belongs to us rather than merely asserting it?

Ultimately, no one controls the body because it grows old and dies and no one can stop that. Not the U.S. government, not Russia, not the scientists. No one can stop your body from rotting, growing old, becoming diseased and dropping dead. No one can control that. So that is just an example of how people now make mindless assertions like, “well it’s my body, I can do what I want with it.” We can’t do what we want with it. We want to keep the body young, we can’t do that with it. If you want to avoid disease, you can’t do that with it.

And if you want to prevent your body from dying, you can’t do that either. And while the body is alive, if someone can control the body, why not say it belongs to them? In what sense–defacto–does it belong to them? If someone physically overpowers you and controls your body, possession is 9/10th of the law. You may say “It’s a moral outrage, it’s indecent”. You may say whatever you want. But the facts are, they’ve got it.

If you say “My body is mine”, it must be a metaphysical claim. Because physically, it doesn’t belong to you anymore; someone overpowered you. So you can’t physically claim it’s your body because empirically you have no control over it anymore. So what’s left to you? The only resource you have left is metaphysics. “No, according to the laws of piety and decency and morality and everything else, Desist and take your hands off me because it’s my body.” But what is the basis of that metaphysical claim? It’s not a physical claim, it’s a metaphysical claim. What is the basis of it?

Since we are not suppose to bring in religious issues, how do we justify a metaphysical claim? Of course, this is a perennial problem of people who want the kingdom of God without God. They want morality and ethics and all that without God and philosophically it just never quite adds up. But anyway, in the Vedic conception everything belongs to God. So people don’t make stupid statements like, “Well, this is my body, I can do whatever I want with it.” So you have the material energy which belongs to God. We are souls, we are also God’s energy, just like sun rays coming from the sun. Now we are entangled in God’s inferior energy. That’s the whole problem. We ourselves are superior energy of God, but we are entangled in the inferior energy. Therefore, we have downgraded our existence. We have created an inferior life for ourselves because we become entangled in God’s inferior energy called matter. If we become involved in God’s superior energy again, that is called spiritual life. It is a simple thing.