ONE thing you have to say about those Heaven's Gate cult members, they made good-looking corpses. Excuse me. I mean, previously used organic vessels. Your body is a vessel--
treat it like oneEven the cult member who didn't get in on the poisoned pudding party looked pretty good. I mean, his vessel looked pretty good. A "vessel" is what we non-enlightened lower beings would call our "body." It's just a mass of flesh and bone our spirit uses to get around while locked in our gravity-influenced environment.
Look at it this way: our bodies actually are nothing more than cans that hold Spam. Spam being the soul and spirit, along with pork loin and ham. Wait. I'm getting confused. Our bodies are really just vessels, like the Titanic. We float around on this plane of existence until we hit a cosmic iceberg (i.e. have a heart attack, fall off a cliff, etc.). Our fragile, wrecked vessel sinks, leaving us (i.e., soul, spirit, us-ness) to bob gently until another vessel comes along to pick us up, like the Coast Guard.
Well, it's kind of hard to explain to meat eaters. But you get the idea. The real "we" in "we" is just an invisible entity that can only be communicated with by ESP or on the Internet.
Actually, the Internet is probably responsible for making a lot of people feel like their bodies are only vessels. When you start chatting with people all over the world via the Internet, you have no idea what they look like. Hell, you don't even know if they are girls or boys. And it doesn't matter. Because, you are just dealing with pure thought. Sure, usually it's pure stupid thought, but it's got nothing to do with bodies. (Unless you are having on-line sex. But that's another different cult.)
I read a news story about a guy who has been on the Internet so long that he divides people into two categories, cyber-friends and friends in 3-D, or people he's seen in person. This just heightens the feeling that our minds and personalities are somehow not connected to our bodies.
This isn't necessarily bad. As I said, those Heaven's Gate cult members made pretty nice-looking corpses. Damn, I did it again. I mean vessels. In other words, they were all skinny and apparently physically fit.
This has to be because they considered their bodies from a mechanical point of view. Food was fuel. Bowels made up the vessel's waste-treatment facility. They weren't interested in having kids so the men, uh, downsized their reproduction departments.
From a health point of view, there's something to be said for this outlook (other than losing reproductive equipment.) If you ignore all the rest of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo and consider your body as a "vessel" or "organic mechanism," you'd probably take better care of it.
If my body was a vessel, it would be the USS Enterprise. Forget about meeting the mother ship. I AM the mother ship.
And that's the problem. I don't think of my body as a vessel. I think of it as the creature from Little Shop of Horrors, always crying "feed me!"
If you think of your body as a machine, you'd take better care of it. Do you stuff your car with gas it doesn't need? No. You feed it when it needs the energy. You go to Jiffy Lube or Lex Brodie when it needs it. You even give it the occasional bath.
That's how you should take care of your body. Get new tennis shoes (tires), get a lube job (trip to the doctor), run it through the McKinley Car Wash (run naked through McKinley Car Wash), fill up on primo gas (drink only good beer) and don't let the engine overheat (don't watch the Playboy channel.)
Then when you die, which you eventually will, people will gather at your service and say, "You know, he was a real weirdo alive, but, man, was he in shape."