Your Body is Plugged into God
All of us have heard about the seven wonders of the world, some of of us have visited a few of them, but most of us have missed or bypassed the prime wonder — our body. Your legs that took you near those wonders, your eyes that beheld them, your mind and heart that were overwhelmed and overflowed with emotions, were attached to your body.
Since our body is with us all the time, we take it for granted. Most of our attention is focused on how it looks rather than how it functions.
Meditating on just one of the many miracles happening within, can fill us with divine experience.
Let us just focus on a single process, happening in our wonder-full body:
Digestion begins in the mouth when the food is swallowed as a bolus down the esophagus to the stomach. At the junction of the esophagus and the stomach is a lid called the epiglottis, which closes when we swallow to protect the lungs from food passing into them. If that epiglottis does not open and close properly, we will aspirate and die.
When it reaches the stomach, the food is broken down into a semi-liquid mass called chyme. The chyme will not pass into the duodenum, the first foot of the small intestine, until the particles are one millimeter or less. Enzymes from the pancreas, and bile from the liver enter the duodenum via the bile duct. The food now goes into the jejunum which is the first nine feet of the small intestine, and the absorption of fats, proteins and carbohydrates are done there. Vitamin B12 is absorbed in the ileum which is the next twelve feet of the small intestine.
The chyme then enters the large intestine or colon, about five feet long. The colon absorbs water, electrolytes, and bile salts. The last five inches of the colon make up the rectum.
If you stretch your esophagus, small intestine, and large intestine, it will be twenty-five feet long, which is more than four times your height. It is so nicely folded and tucked inside, yet it doesn’t get mangled, or tangled whether you are sitting, standing, lying down, running, or standing on your head!
In addition, now imagine a nine-pound baby in the womb of a pregnant woman. The entire digestive system and all the internal organs adjust in such a way as to accommodate the needs and comfort of that baby too!
What I described is a summary of the digestive process. Go ahead and Google digestive system and you can read all the marvelous details of this miraculous process.
For example, one of the unsolved puzzles of the digestive system is why the acid juice of the stomach, which is so toxic and powerful enough to disintegrate the food, does not dissolve and destroy the tissues of the stomach itself?
If you drink that stomach acid, you will die; but in the stomach, it doesn’t kill you! Go figure the irony of that!
We should place our faith in the mysterious and miraculous workings of our body and experience God in the processes of our body.
God is the guardian of our epiglottis, the manager of our esophagus, the producer of the enzymes, the protector of our intestines, and the ultimate director of the divine drama of our digestion — while also making sure that the liver, lungs, pancreas, heart, kidneys, and all other organs are also operating well.
It is a mind-boggling mystical dance only a divine choreographer can orchestrate impeccably and perfectly. It is a miracle that happens within us all the time.
You can think about all this with your analytical mind and dismiss it as a purely biological process or use your spiritual mind and see it as a divine dance — initiated and directed by the Great Mystery we call God.
Deepak Chopra says that “Your body is a computer that plugs into the cosmic computer or universe and monitors everything that is happening around you. When you listen to your body, you eavesdrop on the mind of the Universe also known as God.”
(from Cosmic Kindergarten: Earthly Lessons for a Heavenly Life)
