The Pied Piper

The compartments we create to shield us from what we fear, ignore,and exclude exact their toll later in life.  Ya gotta pay the piper.  In fact, ya gotta pay the pied piper.  Apparently not just any ordinary piper.  I, personally, have never paid any pipers anything.  

As usual I distracted myself.  The piper in question (pied is an word dating from the Middle Ages meaning multicolored) promised to lead a plague of rats that were enamored of his piping out of the town of Hamelin, Germany during the Black Death when fleas that infested the rats carried the virus that caused the devastating Black Death were responsible for countless deaths in the town.  The piper did his work but the town reneged on his payment.  The piper took his revenge by piping a shit-ton of the town's children out into the wilderness where they were never heard from again.  Funny how a lot of these old children's stories are really quite grim when you dive into them.

Where was I?  My point is that without knowing it my spiritual practice can easily continue a pattern of fragmentation in my life if I set up artificial divisions defining what is sacred and what is not.  If I call certain practices, prayers, and religions "spiritual" and exclude everything else.  I try to remember always that there is a great interconnectedness in life.  Between the hearts and minds of people but also with all living things, animal or vegetal.  I mean trees talk to each other through their roots or through the air.  How is that not spiritual?      

A Tibetan teacher with the really simple name of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche put it this way: "Spiritual materialism is how we can imitate the outer forms of spiritual practice, its costumes, beliefs, culture, and meditations to hide from the world or bolster our own egos.  The wholeness and interconnection with all life is the mark of a mature spiritual being."