Rectitude. Many gauge their spiritual growth by what degree their actions conform to a doctrine or belief system. Others gauge their progress to what degree their practice of various principles or life style elements shows refinement or “maturity”. To the degree that you can accept these models as actual guidelines for progress and have a sense of the end or objective behind these teachings, you can adhere to spiritual “correctness”.

There are many models for rectitude, some more impersonal than others. I would ask, of what value is a model that strives to be impersonal?

When we feel our own judgement is compromised somehow? Can we rectify our conduct and perception to an inhuman model? Is humanity not inherently and inescapably personal?

Isn’t someone else’s “personal” different from mine, however? Yes, innately so, but also no, as nature reproduces characteristics in a broad sense across the species. But isn’t the notion of “impersonal authority” automatically a fallacy?

You’re referring to the impersonal as beyond all persons then? Yes. Does that exist? I guess some claim it does… a higher ideal? The effort to adopt sanctimonious privilege on the argument that the preferred authority is possessed of some impersonal truth. We like to imagine things that seem alive or have a mind of its own. Cars for instance.

Aye, because as humans we like to personify things. Writers do that. Yes. Humanity personifies the divine, as it must, then dehumanize it in the name of claiming divine clarity.

I never thought of it as divine before. If you didn’t see it in the divine context, that’s because it is so naturally presumed as to be unthinkable that it be otherwise. It’s a meme as they call them, a mental virus, with species wide archetypical roots. It is immured in our collective unconscious. God automatically has to have a face, but then we go and deface God in the name of claiming infallibility for the divine. Divine as an institution seems set up to break, unintended but inevitable obsolescence.

Humanities ego is self defeating, but at the same time self renewing, because we feel “wrong” to the degree we feel we have wronged that “personal” God. And we all have a personified God, even the atheist. Their personified God is the “rational human”, and yet we deny we do this. You have a personal God and it’s either you yourself or your personal demon.

Can you give an example for how we deface God? We take our personal God everywhere we go, but we deny that our desires have any wisdom or truth to them. God cannot want a new dress or new shoes so we lose our connection with God when we want these things. We judge our desires to be shallow or imperfect so we deny any connection of the personal God to self.

I see. So the God is divine, so I am divine, but I’m messed up. Hypocrisy? Yes, exactly. Even the atheists personal God can be defaced whenever they do something just because they felt threatened, and they do that all the time, which is what makes them attack religion in the first place.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~