Twelve Zodiacal Qualities of Spiritual Living

3. INTELLECTUAL HONESTY (GEMINI)

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Many people might not see at first how the words ‘intellectual’ and ‘honesty’ can be linked, and even less what role they can play in a spiritual life. The reason for this is twofold: We mainly relate honesty to personal behavior and primarily to the handling of money or of matters of social value; and we have been repeatedly told that spirituality has nothing to do with the intellect, that it belongs to a different level of existence entirely.

Spirit nevertheless can and does operate at any level of human existence. It can pervade and transfigure all mental processes. It can transmute all emotional expressions. The word honesty, likewise defines a quality of being which should be demonstrated at all levels. There is such a thing as ‘emotional honesty’, and beyond it stands what I call here intellectual honesty – a quality which may be significantly related to the zodiacal sign Gemini.

The opposite of honesty is deceit. An individual can deceive others, either unwillingly or deliberately. This can happen in terms of feelings, and even more perhaps in connection with mental processes. One of the great dangers in any endeavor to live a spiritual life is self-deception. On one hand, one can deceive oneself concerning the motives of these endeavors. On another, one can avoid critically and objectively investigating the life and claims of whoever one accepts as one’s ‘teachers’ or exemplars, because an objective and unglamorized approach could be energy-consuming and even painful.

The sign Gemini has much to do with the intellect, that is, with the ability to relate various experiences and concepts to one another, then to interpret, generalize and classify them. These intellectual operations are normally performed by the mind according to certain cultural norms or rational standards. Yet they are not inevitably so performed. People often come to believe intellectually what they emotionally ‘want’ to believe. The Gemini mind is tricky and illusive. It tends to run hither and thither, swayed by non-mental states of feelings, desires or moods. Thus self-deceit is a constant danger.

To be intellectually honest is to refuse to allow factors which are not intellectually sound, and even more which are the results of emotional wants, to interfere with one’s thinking. It is to recognize for what they are and what they produce the factors of pride, fear and of the immature longing for props to support one’s dim understanding of transcendent facts and values. Without intellectual honesty the finest endeavors may miscarry. Glamour is the enemy – even if it is most often needed at the beginning of the spiritual quest to ‘fascinate’ us into taking steps which arouse otherwise paralyzing instinctual or emotional fears. Needed as they may be at first, glamour and deceit must be overcome as soon as possible, or else spirituality turns into ‘psychism’.

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