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 a