Climb to Superior Health Or Fall “Gracefully” Into Disease

I drove a 1972 Ford Pinto to high school. I kept it clean and waxed but I thought I was too busy to check the oil. I let it run low, and caused some serious damage to the engine and found myself with a car that would not run at all. I bought a repair book, went to the junkyard and took the a head from a wrecked Pinto and then rebuilt the engine on my car.

During the three days and most of a night that it took for me to repair that engine, I could not drive it at all.

After I rebuilt that engine, and understood more about how it worked, then I used an old-fashioned timing light and other tools to keep it running at optimum speed. I set up a maintenance schedule and stuck with it most of the time. I checked the oil with almost every fill-up, checked the air in the tires weekly, washed it weekly, and waxed it once a month. The car gave me great service and looked sharp until I finally traded it for another car. Odd that with the body-temple (which people cannot trade for another on this planet) people will not usually set up a maintenance schedule that will keep the body well-and then stick with that schedule.

There is a time for use and a time to maintain.

The body-temple is a tool that you animate. You are not your body, but you are so closely dependent on your body, and its health can so much control what you are able to do physically and mentally that some think of themselves as the body. Ironically, you be more exacting with your body and you will take better care of it if you think of it as something separate from who you are. You will not pay as much attention to hunger, or fatigue, or the discomforts of exercise if you think of your body as something you are caring for so that you can enjoy and produce more here on the planet.

Keeping your body functional will become keeping your main tool operational. Keeping your body beautiful will become the gift that you give to your lover. Keeping your body pure becomes the sacrifice that you offer to the heaven you find on earth.

If you think of yourself as your body, you will find it more difficult to judge what your body needs and does not need. You consider more personal and threatening the discomforts that lead to better health and will avoid the pains of the maintenance of health and fall into the pains of disease. For example, temporary hunger will feel like a threat to healthtipsae rather than something your body must tolerate because you think it best. You become almost like the supervising guardian of your body.

The physical and the spiritual and mental giants of all time have taken time to see to the maintenance of the body-temple on some sort of schedule. Since the spiritual leaders have often found refuge and inspiration in the mountains, I call this maintenance time “Climbing.” This contrasts with the “Falling” into disease and despair that comes with ignoring health maintenance. Climbing could literally mean climbing a mountain to seek a place to pray. More commonly, it will mean figuratively climbing to better health going for a walk