When people are on a spiritual path, they sometimes become unreal in their communications with others. There is actually a term for this: “juking.” Juking usually applies to Christians “over spiritualizing” every conversation but it happens across the board with extremely sincere devotees of any religious inclination or discipline such as yoga. They just turn everything they say into a spiritual principle, direction, or cliche.
In my family culture we were not to consider the body to be real or any illness to be true. So if I banged my knee as a child, I might say to my mother, “To the material senses, it seems that I banged my so-called knee.” Then my mother would juke me back with, “Know the Truth about yourself. To the mortal senses it seems that you are in pain but this is an illusion. The Lord shall bear thee up in his hands, lest thou dash thy foot against the stone (quoting the 91st psalm).”
Meanwhile, I was a little kid that probably just needed a hug and some sympathy. A bandaid wouldn’t have been bad either.
People can show a great deal of ego when they over spiritualize. It is a game of spiritual one-upmanship. They can be so much holier than thou because they don’t let any “erroneous” expressions pass their lips. For example, a person just discovered that time is relative (and of course, we know that this is true but we don’t need to bash someone over the head with it). Someone asks them, “What time is it?” They reply, “Time, what is time? Do you mean earthly time, celestial time, atomic time? Do you know that time isn’t even real in the World of the Spirit?”
Meanwhile, the person would have been happy with, “It’s 9 o’clock.”
Overly-zealous religious people use over spiritualization as a way of proving how spiritual they are to the outside world and to themselves. But often, it can have the opposite effect. Answering every question with a cliche, such as, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” shows insensitivity rather than sympathy. They have replaced the feelings of their heart with ready-made formulas that they think will make them look very accomplished but shows them to be pompous and robotic.
In my family culture we were not to consider the body to be real or any illness to be true. So if I banged my knee as a child, I might say to my mother, “To the material senses, it seems that I banged my so-called knee.” Then my mother would juke me back with, “Know the Truth about yourself. To the mortal senses it seems that you are in pain but this is an illusion. The Lord shall bear thee up in his hands, lest thou dash thy foot against the stone (quoting the 91st psalm).”
Meanwhile, I was a little kid that probably just needed a hug and some sympathy. A bandaid wouldn’t have been bad either.
People can show a great deal of ego when they over spiritualize. It is a game of spiritual one-upmanship. They can be so much holier than thou because they don’t let any “erroneous” expressions pass their lips. For example, a person just discovered that time is relative (and of course, we know that this is true but we don’t need to bash someone over the head with it). Someone asks them, “What time is it?” They reply, “Time, what is time? Do you mean earthly time, celestial time, atomic time? Do you know that time isn’t even real in the World of the Spirit?”
Meanwhile, the person would have been happy with, “It’s 9 o’clock.”
Overly-zealous religious people use over spiritualization as a way of proving how spiritual they are to the outside world and to themselves. But often, it can have the opposite effect. Answering every question with a cliche, such as, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” shows insensitivity rather than sympathy. They have replaced the feelings of their heart with ready-made formulas that they think will make them look very accomplished but shows them to be pompous and robotic.
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