Article August 20, 1979 Issue

You're very special

GERALDINE KARP

Late one night I watched a television talk show on "the pros and cons of being beautiful, average, and below-average looking." A panel of six beautiful, average, and below-average looking people talked about their experiences. During the first commercial I began my own self-evaluation. I was sure my mother (like most mothers) would put me in the "beautiful" category; my friends would probably consider me "average"; and my sister, who always manages to see room for my improvement, would be likely to consider me "below average." As the television show continued, all I could think about was how great it would be to look like the model chosen to represent beautiful people. "If only I were as thin as she," I thought. "If only I hadn't cut my hair. If only . . . ." The list went on and on. By the time the show was over, I was thoroughly depressed. So in order to get myself out of it, I began to reason from a spiritual standpoint.

"God created you to express perfect form—spiritual. You're not made of flesh and bones, with tons of extra flesh sitting on your hips." Now, there's a tremendous difference between making a statement and actually understanding it to be true. That was my problem. I was stating these metaphysical truths without believing one single word of them. And I remained swinging on this mental pendulum between Spirit and matter until this thought came soaring into consciousness: "God knows the truth of your spiritual perfection. He doesn't have to believe it. He knows it." All of a sudden, I stopped swinging back and forth between metaphysical truths and mental images. I held to the fact that because God is Mind and He knows all, I could only be conscious of what He knows. God sees man as spiritual, because He is Spirit. And He sees man as beautiful, because basic to Spirit, Soul, is beauty, and all true identity is created in Soul's image. At that moment I no longer wanted to look like that model. I began to understand what a privilege it was to know myself as spiritual.

So many of us either long to be like someone else or long to associate with those we want to be like. We choose our model, our ideal person, and are then held in the frustrating bondage of daydreams and fantasies.

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The "very good" of me
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