Planet Soul
Personal Style Is a Spiritual Practice
Your outer self shouldn’t be an afterthought
Much of today’s spiritual culture asks us to embrace principles of nonattachment and nonidentification. We typically hear that the material world is an illusion or samsara, which the seeker should learn to disregard, and that what matters most is what we cannot see.
I don’t believe that gets at the real story of our lives. I don’t think it encompasses the nature of our existence. I believe the principle of nonattachment places an unnatural demand on the seeker. It’s like a carrot forever dangled in front of them; we feel like we’re running toward it without getting any closer.
Tradition or habit?
All religions attempt to codify and structure our relations with the ineffable. Every religion emerges from its own locality and time period, reflecting the civic, legal, and social needs of a particular population. All the great religions offer universal lessons, but they also bear traits of the cultural prejudices, attitudes, and circumstances from which they arose. Hinduism and Buddhism give us many of our modern ideas about nonidentification and nonattachment but grew from times and places where individuals were almost certain to live and die within the social caste they were…
