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:
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
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