SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES v MORAL PRINCIPLES

Which ones I have learned to follow to feel happy and fulfil my full potential?

I am Italian and I bet there is not a more Catholic country than Italy in the world - apart from Ireland [and Nigeria, South America, etc, etc, etc...]. In Italy you are either Catholic or Agnostic or, even worse, an Atheist.

I was born in the North of Italy, a small town called Trieste, a town which was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for over 450 years. A very catholic Empire indeed.

My mother, my father and their parents were Atheist. Me, I was placed in a Catholic kindergarten (only because it was closer to home); as you see you do not need to be from a Catholic country to be a hypocrite (even if it helps) you just need to be a human being. [Apologies for the generalisations, which I do not like, the two above are necessary only because they help with the jokes :)]

Going back to the kindergarten, which was obviously run by Catholic nuns who, generally (another generalisation, again!) are considered quite strict (at least in Italy) [this is why they were a costume similar to Batman, I think, by the way]. The nuns one day, locked me in a closet because I refused to eat the soup (it must have been onion soup, I am sure even if I have removed this memory, I only remember the face of my mother when they opened the door of the closet and I was there).

When my mother came to pick me up, the nuns forgot where I was, so they could not find me, then - thanks God - ;) someone remembered I was still in the closet.

No need to say I was never taken back there (and had to suffer 10 years of Freudian Therapy, which costed me my mother's Estate and did not work :) and my mother, if she had a doubt about the Catholic Church and their people, changed her mind completely, and forever.

Her decision partly influenced my grandmother who, when she was on her deathbed and the priest came to give her the extreme unction (as they do in Italy) she told him to disappear (well not really she told him to FO - in a polite way - but I think he got the sense of it, because, for what I know, he then left the Catholic church immediately and joined a kind of Hare Krishna affiliation since, a decade later, I spotted him serving food in the Govinda restaurant near Soho Square in London -).

So, going back to the title of this post, when I grew up, and I started to look at the world with my own eyes, I desperately tried to find a separation between moral and spiritual principles.

I felt that the 10 Commandments were based on moral principles whose purpose is to lift up people to an artificial standard of behaviour based on mental, fixed and limited behaviours to which all have to conform.

I applied them and at the beginning it felt great, I was feeling good about myself and sometimes better than others - as you see I did not need God, I was taking his place.

In this way, though, true humbleness was gone and self righteousness became the normality.

When a person loses his humbleness he loses his humanity.

At the same time I refused to think about the significance of spiritual principles because the word ‘spiritual’ sounded a lot / too much like a Catholic word.

I wasn’t moving forward and my life became small. Following morality I judged every action I was taking between good and bad because morality takes what is relative and it makes absolute / universal. [Not even the Law does this, and, when it does because it does not provide justice because of its universality, there are mechanisms in place to help the judiciary to get out of the narrow neck called injustice, we call it Equity Law, jurisdiction of the Chancery Courts].

I could say that the application of Spiritual Principles are the basis of Natural Law, which in a word, represents our unalienable rights derived or inherent to us from our human nature and, as such, belonging intrinsically and universally to every human being regardless of race, gender, economic condition, etc...

So before collapsing into Dante’s Hell by strictly applying limited, rigid and sometimes, therefore, unloving moral principles I turned to spiritual principles: honesty (from which we have knowledge of the self), hope, faith, courage, integrity, acceptance, humility, willingness and service.

I've found freedom, abundance and happiness.

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