Sixth commandment

"Why is the Sixth Commandment odious to literacy and alphabetization? Every part of our body is a wonderful creation. Yet when we become self-conscious, we obey less and less the separate wills and desires of our bodies. We are less and less at one with our bodies. Our spiritual instincts become increasingly separate from our physical instincts. The stages of spiritual development would be pictured as a moving away from the flesh. We would see the child (and the uncivilized people living on the line of childish underdevelopment) not feeling any difference in the parts of their body: they always do what their body makes them do. We would see the youth who has already mastered the instincts of his body in many ways, but the instinct of species preservation still leads him easily on a leash. We could see the man who is already jerking the leash and trying to tear it away. We shall eventually see him on the higher steps of spiritual development, mastering the force and like Hercules trampling the serpent under foot. Here we have already learned that we are souls chained to animals. Standing on these steps, we look with contempt, both in real life and in imagination (in anecdotes, readings, pictures), on the man who has not yet developed from animalism, his thoughts and actions, which are still in homage to the animal part of our double earthly being."