NEW BROOM

Did you ever see that episode of "Only Fools and Horses" when Trigger was given a long-service award for his job as a road sweeper? He told everyone that after 20 years he was still using the same broom - he'd just had 96 different heads and 54 new handles!

When is a new broom not a new broom?

I was reminded of this today whilst reading "You'll See it When You Believe it", by Wayne Dyer. He talks of man as being "a soul within a body" and says we are "not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

This led me to wonder where our soul starts and stops. What part, if any of our physical body is actually the real us - aka the soul? When I was a medical student, I saw a very sad case. A lady on the ward had a rare blood disorder meaning that her blood clotted too easily and led to her having first one leg amputated, then the other. Tragically this was followed by the loss of both arms and one hind quarter also. This left her as just a head, neck and trunk in the bed, a shadow of her former self. How much of a person's body can be lost without affecting the soul, if indeed it resides in the body at all?

Dyer talks about the body as our form. His book explores how by thinking about the world in terms of our form, we are limited. In contrast, our thoughts are without limit. There are no boundaries to what you can imagine when you allow yourself to transcend the boundaries of form.

Dyer later goes on to say "thought, thinking, your essential self, never dies". Rather like Trigger's broom I suppose....