Recently in London in the UK we have had an incident where a group of men from the financial City part of London, and from the media and world of politics had a charity fund raising dinner arranged by an organisation called the Presidents Club. Women were hired to be hostesses. When they arrived for the job they were given skimpy outfits which were very exposing and short. Some of the men were touching and groping the women and treating them as bodies for them to look at and touch. They didn’t treat the women as people. The women were sexualised.

This sexualising and focusing on women (and some cases men) as bodies,  and as commodities to play with happens a lot in what I call the 3-D world. You see it in newspapers and magazines and in the media, where the focus of attention is on what is considered to be a physically beautiful woman’s body. The concept of auras and chakras doesn’t exist in this context.

I’ve joined some Facebook pages about spirituality, “awakening”, and meditation recently. One thing I have been struck by is how many photographs and how much artwork there is of young, slim waisted, curvy, women there are, with beautiful faces, and windswept hair, often wearing Native American Indian type adornments, and so on. There’s a suitable attractive background and some words that convey a suitably spiritual sounding message. There is a lot of glamour, which in a spiritual sense means an energy around it that looks flashy but actually has nothing to do with spirituality, and which side-tracks some people.

I find myself thinking that this is like the rest of life, and where are the real people, with real un-Photoshopped bodies? I know full well that a beautiful physical form that some people have bears no relationship to quality of spirituality, or quality of the chakras and aura, or of the spirit or the personality of the person.

What came to mind very quickly is a picture of a truly spiritual woman, who to me is far more interesting than any svelte figure. I have included the picture. It is an old picture of a woman called Hazrat Babajan who came from a Muslim background and who became a Perfect Master. Now here is a picture of a spiritual woman, with a truly awesome energy system. Take a look if you can, or feel he energy. (What she was like is worth discovering, and there is some information about her on the Internet and some old books.)

This focus on the physical body rather than the energy and spirituality is not all just confined to the female form. When I was younger I felt I had a physical body that looked admirable and attractive. Very recently, while taking my shirt off to get changed, my young daughter looked and called out, “you look like a gorilla without hair!” “Well”, I thought, “At least I got sparkly chakras on the inside.” (Such vanity!) Nothing like children and teenagers to keep parents from getting any fancy ideas.