Saturday, July 14, 2007

After All This Time

Madame Blavatsky makes the statement: "You are not your body." For some reason, this simple sentence, heard in various forms many times before, set off a new line of thinking for me.

It occurred to me that vanity, attachment to one's physical traits, is discouraged in most religious traditions because it literally attaches one to the physical form, impeding spiritual development. Thus, Biblical commandments might be pure statements about direct spiritual peril.

My, oh my. I have spent my life hearing things about being a nice person, having good character, and not having vanity as, ho hum, moral statements about being a 'good person.' Never occurred to me that this rather political surface layer could be stripped away to find a fresh, direct and vital spiritual heart.

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