Lesson 13
In this discussion we will discuss WHAT IS A SPIRITUAL BODY. In our last week’s discussion we talked about and referred to a spiritual body. A spiritual body is the frame of reference through which one experiences. Now the awareness has a frame of reference; sometimes this could be called memory or it could be called experiencing. It's probably much better, if the spiritual body is sound, that it's based on experiencing. If it is unsound it is based on concepts. What ones sees as true, as we have said, is what is.
So let’s take a sheet of paper and we will draw a horizontal line that says, What is or, What is true as I see it. Then let’s draw a vertical line on the same sheet of paper, but not intersecting, which says, What I see as valuable, good, worthwhile. Now if these two lines do not intersect there is no action because X brings about all action. If one’s frame of reference, one’s spiritual body, is concerned with “what ought to be,” these two lines do not intersect in many, many areas. In certain areas, obviously, one sees what is; the temperature in the room is cold, it would be good for it to be warm, or valuable, so one turns up the thermostat. So the two lines intersected, what is and what is valuable, good, worthwhile, has now intersected and at the point of intersection is the word Action.
So suppose on another sheet of paper we put two lines intersecting in the form of a cross: What is true and What I see as worthwhile, valuable or as we would ordinarily say, Good. These two lines intersect and where they intersect Action by X takes place. Now a spiritual body, which is one’s frame of reference, wears clothes. If the spiritual body is only concerned with what is then it is considered to be clothed in leather or in animal skins or in some other coarse material. So suppose we draw an oblong figure, something like an egg shape, and we put over it What is, and around the outside of it we put some kind of clothing; some wavy lines will represent its clothing. It’s clothed in the actual literal fact of what is but it does not have a department in it that has valuing. This is only the factual, the intellectual level of seeing what is. It sees some things as true and some things as false. If someone comes up and tells you there’s a lion outside your door you would probably say it is false. If some one told you there was a dog outside the door, you might accept that is true. But in either case there is only what is.
In another similar shaped figure we will put, What ought to be or Values. In this one come all the what-ought-to-be and the other one is What is true and they are separate. Nothing really begins to take place because X does not operate on it. The awareness is clothed in facts and the other egg-shaped circle is clothed in ideas or concepts of what ought to be, and much of the clothing of what is, is clothed in the idea of what is. We have many ideas that so-and-so exists without being aware of it, without having experienced it, without having really experimented with it. We accept many concepts as being fact. To build a healthy spiritual body we will take the cross we made where it has Action, the two intersections, and we will draw an egg-shaped form around it. This is to be a new spiritual body. Some of the things within this have already been experienced. As we said, we see the room is chilly to the temperature for the comfort of the body, for the well being, and we see it as what is and we would see that it would be well to turn up the heat; so this is accepted.
In all the ordinary everyday affairs of the workaday world, the business world, the earning of a living, there are many what is and many things seen as good. So we can function fairly well in these areas. It is in the areas of interpersonal relationships that this begins to breakdown. This is where one has all one’s difficulties, in the world of inter and intra-personal relationships. Let’s begin to put into this one, with the cross inside of it, the things that we see as both What is and as Good or valuable, worthwhile. We’ll just use the term “good.” I see what is and see what’s good about it. These are all the things that one has learned and have become an aspect of the personality which has to do with earning a living, keeping the house, keeping things clean, keeping things decorated, keeping the lawn mowed, keeping the surroundings neat and clean. We’ll find that all of these are worthwhile. It knows how to drive a car carefully. It knows how to type, we’ll say. It knows how to play a musical instrument. All of these things that the personality has learned which will be worthwhile, so obviously they will be added into the new spiritual body. If we wanted too we could see these two elements that were not together, the two egg-shaped parts that had no cross in them. One of what is, as we see it and which is fine and it’s the only way we can see it, and on the other one as what we see as good which is mostly concerned with ideals of “what ought to be” in interpersonal relationships. So we have possibly one fragmented spiritual body and one that is workable in the everyday world but not in the spiritual world of the interpersonal relationships and intra-relationships which are the things that go on within one.
When the spiritual body is in these two separate elements, it is referred to in the material that is written on The Science of Man, on the long, long years of study, it is referred to as a blind person. In other words it doesn’t see clearly. It may see what is, it may feel what is, sense what is, but it cannot see that it is good regardless of what happens, that it has value. So it is considered to be blind. It obviously produces inadequate function or reports inadequate things to X or nothing at all so it is considered to be crippled. It is paralyzed; it can’t function. It can see what is but never gets up to do anything about it because it doesn’t see the value of it. It only sits and complains because things are not what they ought to be. This works in interpersonal relationships and in many people it works in their everyday workday world. They’ll talk about wanting to do something but they never get around to it. They are going to do it tomorrow, some other time, but tomorrow it doesn’t look any more worthwhile than it did today and so nothing is done. It is referred to as being naked; it doesn’t have sufficient ideas with which to work with. It has no real concepts. It only has rags and tatters of various and sundry secondhand, passed-down ideas as to what is and what is of value and it doesn’t have anything of its own. It has not experimented, has not discovered for I what really is workable, what is valuable, it hasn’t seen what is good, so it is considered to be naked. If it is beginning to really want to have something to work with, it is considered to be hungry and, of course, the idea is to feed the hunger.
Now this is what we are working at, is it not, to feed a hungry spiritual body so that it may have strength and it may grow. We are trying to clothe it, are we not, and we’re not clothing it with secondhand things, something the speaker says. We’re clothing it with experimentation, something we can see for I. I’ve looked, I’ve experimented with it and I see for self. We’re healing a crippled spiritual body. How are we healing it? By giving it truth and light. We are restoring the blind because one is beginning to possibly work at seeing what is and what is the value of what is, then one is no longer blind, one is no longer crippled or paralyzed or naked. It is beginning to have ideas to experiment with which makes wonderful clothing. It is beginning to have understanding, so then it has shoes. Shoes, meaning in the various symbology, that which one understands. You know the feet seem to be the foundation of the earth, the earth being the human body. So there is beginning to be an establishment of a firm foundation, a clothing, and something to experiment and work with. Every time one experiments one has made oneself an article of clothing. We read of one article of clothing that was woven in one piece without seams. In other words it wasn’t patched together with bits and pieces, it was all from experimentation and discovery for self.
There are many that are satisfied with their split-apart physical body. They’re satisfied with it because they have managed to paint themselves a very lovely picture that really doesn’t exist, an imaginary one. So they gaze upon this imaginary picture and say, “That is I,” when nothing in reality is anywhere near that imagination. It is as though a very unbalanced-featured person found a beautiful portrait and hung it up and said, “That is I,” and that would not quite be. So one with vanity is quite pleased with the present state; obviously one will not look to develop a spiritual body. One doesn’t even experience the physical body; they’re so carried away observing the physical body and the imaginary picture that is painted up of the self. So vanity interferes in one building a spiritual body because before one sets out to heal the blindness, heal the crippled or distorted or paralyzed, to get clothing for a naked body or to get shoes for the barefoot condition or to feed the hungry, one must realize that these conditions do exist. Vanity always says they really do not exist. “I already am in pretty good shape. I’m a pretty wonderful person. I know what’s good and I know what’s bad. I know what’s right and I know what’s wrong and I know what ought to be and I can see what really is and I know what ought to be done. If everybody would just straighten out and see things my way then everything would be wonderful in this world.” That is vanity. Vanity is the great obstruction to one building a spiritual body because one is entranced or enthralled with the imaginary spiritual body, the imaginary qualities, the imaginary truth that one is aware of. One imagines that truth is any number of things, whether it is even an ideology that one has gathered up and identified with and says that ideology is the truth, the whole truth and that’s it. And I would prefer the ideology rather than to look at I and to see what kind of state one really is in.
Now for a number of weeks we have been observing the self. We have seen it’s divided. We have seen it is paralyzed. We have seen that its ideas are from here and there, and bits and pieces, that it is really clothed in rags, clothing meaning the ideas with which it works, many of them in complete opposition, many of which are trying to put a new patch in an old garment. It has every conceivable thing. It is in a state of poverty. It is in a state of disease, meaning not at ease. It’s in a state of conflict. But in spite of all this, one can build such protection of that false picture that one is in a constant state of defense, of defending this old spiritual body that is crippled, blind, clothed in tatters and barefoot, it has no understanding. And in this one is not hungry, and if one is not hungry one cannot be filled. All the food in the world could be available but if one says, “I won’t eat that because I’m already well fed,” and one may be fed on pseudo food. One may be feeding self with Coca-Cola, candy bars, potato chips or some other junk food and there is plenty of junk around. One may say, “I already know what is truth and I know what ought to be.” Then one is in a state of vanity and then one begins to defend that by trying to prove that their ideas are correct, and they will quote books and they will quote authorities but they cannot quote actual experiences. They may quote some emotional upheaval they’ve had at one time or other and they have interpreted it, always, to put themselves in a very good light. They really didn’t understand the picture.
There is an old story about a man who wanted to see the Christ. He hoped to be able to do it in his present state of conditioned being. So the self wanted to see the Christ. So after long and diligent effort he finally had a vision, a vision of the Christ completely surrounded by flames. Of course, his frame of reference was seeing the Christ in hell because his frame of reference says hell was a place of flames, and he saw the Christ in it in his vision. Of course, he was quite disturbed by this vision. So he went from supposed authority to supposed authority to question as to what his vision meant and, of course, all were at a loss to explain his vision, telling him that it must have been a false vision. But to him it was the most real experience of his life, because when one has some sort of an emotional vision one has nothing else to distract from it. If one is in a room and looks at a table, there are many other things in the peripheral vision. But in a vision or a state of one form or another, which is fairly easy to get oneself into, there’s only one thing in sight and therefore it feels to be the most real of all things because there is no distraction.
This man continued his search. Finally he was sitting in a park, very dejected and very miserable. This vision was ever fresh in his mind of the Christ surrounded by flames. He was evidently in hell. What could this possibly mean? Was it possible that the Christ had been a false teacher? Was it possible that the whole thing was an illusion and that Christ was as his crucifiers said he was: “A man possessed with a demon and an injury to the whole people?” Were all Teachings of the Christ in vain? He was sitting, really doubting and struggling and beginning to somewhat doubt his vision. He was really hungry. Whenever a person is truly hungry to be aware, not to have their preconceived opinions verified, but to be truly hungry, to truly want to know, something always appears to clarify. A man walked up who seemed to be no more than another person who sits on park benches and the man told him of his agony, of what he had seen. The man who had come and sat down said, “Look mister, a vision is not the thing, a vision may be a Teaching but it’s not the thing. You did not see the Christ and you did not see the flames. You saw a vision and all visions must have a meaning. And the meaning is that those flames are what you have to go through to burn up your many misconceptions, to be cleansed before you can even approach where the Christ is.”
You see, we all think that we can approach the Christ consciousness in the state we are in just by improving the self. We don’t realize we’re blind spiritually, that the spiritual body is blind, crippled, paralyzed, naked, clothed in ragged tatters and that it is barefoot, so we are never really hungry. When one is truly hungry one can begin to find. Help comes from many areas. Teaching appears everywhere. So the Teaching is always available. The food is available when one is truly hungry, spiritually, and then the spiritual body can begin to grow. But vanity says my spiritual body is in a very great shape and pride defends it, “If we could just have more of the things of mammon, everything would be wonderful.” This is to have a sick spiritual body. So the command is, HEAL THE SICK, OPEN THE EYES OF THE BLIND, RAISE UP THE CRIPPLED, CLOTHE THE NAKED, AND FEED THE HUNGRY. And when there is a hungry one, the food is available. There is someone to open the eyes.
Now that command is first for the man’s own spiritual body. One always starts where one is. There is a story that a man had a beam in his eye, a big block of wood, and he was trying to tell another man about the little speck in his eye, and to tell him that he should get it out. You see the first one we heal of blindness, the first one we feed, the first one we clothe, the first one we raise up from paralysis or from being crippled is the spiritual body within self. This spiritual body has been distorted by conditioning. It has been mistreated. It has been paralyzed. It’s been rendered in conflict, a palsied or a spastic. It tries to go one way and another one says no. So we are clothed in bits and tatters and we have not experimented.
So starting now we will begin to experiment. We have somewhat of a picture of the spiritual body, the one with a cross in it and the egg around it is the one that the great Teacher said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” The cross meaning what I see as true and what I see as value of that which I see is true. As one follows the Teaching one will see many values that one did not see before. And the cross becomes more real, more symmetrical, more perfect and more completed. You see that most of the time what one sees as true is a horizontal bar and what one sees as good or valuable or worthwhile is a vertical bar, but they do not cross. So one does not have a cross then. Everyone must have a cross or there is no central theme of the body. You see a cross is the symbol of the human body and the human being on the inside, the symbol of the spiritual body, and everything else must be attached to that spiritual body, the cross. The vertical arm, that which is good, valuable, worthwhile, what I see as a treasure, and that which crosses it as what I see as true. One of the things one starts with is to review all the Teaching and see how much of it one sees as True, as describing what is. One will see that much of what it describes is really what is, if we have done the work. If we have done the work we will also see that it is extremely worthwhile, valuable and it is really the good, the light that throws light on all things, that removes the darkness, because the light is now shining in that area which was dark, the spiritual body that was blind.
We will continue to observe these things all this week. We will see how many things we see as just being WHAT IS or FACT. And then we will see how many other ways we don’t see that it is GOOD, we don’t see the good in that which we see as being fact or as true. Only when we have united that FACT and the GOOD of that fact is there action and that is called TRUTH.
Copyright © 1973 by Rhondell. All rights reserved. This material is for an individual student’s personal use; it is not to be duplicated or loaned to another.
