Tuesday, June 13, 2017

You are a house with...

Four Rooms

There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room, every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.”
Rumer Godden

If you were to do a survey of your ten best friends, and you asked them which of the four rooms they live in most of the time, ninety percent would say the mental. Since we modern humans are deeply identified with speech, we are most comfortable in the safety of our words and thoughts. In fact, we forget our physical bodies all together unless they hurt. We tend to neglect our emotions because they are inconvenient, and sometimes messy and painful. Who has time for that?

In the religious dimension, we are nowadays wandering forty years in the wilderness. Eighty percent of Americans identify as Christian, but only twenty percent of them attend church on any given Sunday, and most of those have gray hair. The share of Jews who consider themselves “observant” has declined by almost half. Some say the church is in transition, and some say it is dying. Between four thousand, and seven thousand churches close their doors every year. You can do the numbers.

So what is happening to our physical/mental/emotional/spiritual house? Is this void in the spiritual dimension in any way related to the current addiction rates, especially the burgeoning opioid crisis? Are people looking for the missing rooms in all the wrong places? The abandonment of the physical room—is that in any way related to the obesity and diabetes epidemics? Has our love affair with words and our living from the neck up washed away all our sorrows, and alleviated our emotional wounds? Perhaps not. We may want to begin airing out all four of our rooms so we can work toward becoming whole.

                                                            In the Spirit,

                                                               Jane

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Very interesting!
I thought we live in a material world because the emphasis on material possession the society is emphasizing. I also acknowledge the informational revolution we are going through but I don't think we are getting smarter or more knowledgeable just because of the technology is there.
I'm also looking at the explosion of emotional issues, anxiety, stress, depression humanity is facing.
It is a fascinating subject, to say the least.
Thank you for the post it did what it was supposed to do:
It got me thinking!
Namaste!
BoH