Colossians 2:18 Meaning Let No One Rob You

Attakilamathānuyoga: Devotion to self-torment This is the road of punishing the body to buy holiness. Self-abasement of the kind being pushed at Colossae has an audience: the fasting, the abstaining, the low posture are all done where they can be counted, and the one counting ends up standing over you as judge. Going hungry can leave the ego fatter than it started, which is why this road gets set aside for a middle one.

Sīlabbata-parāmāsa: Clinging to rites and observances The grip that mistakes an observance for the path. Venerating angels supplies plenty to do: names to invoke, days to keep, ranks to honor, and each one is a rung on a ladder leaning against the wrong wall. Rites can steady a life without carrying anyone anywhere, and treating them as the arrival is the fetter that has to snap first.

Papañca: Mental proliferation The mind's habit of spinning one thought into a whole world. Nothing was seen, and still there are tiers of angels, protocols for approaching them, warnings about which are offended by what: a thicket grown from a seed nobody planted. Elaboration feels like knowledge because it is detailed, and detail comes cheap when no one has to check it.

Māna: Conceit The reflex that measures oneself against others as better, equal, or worse. The fleshly mind doing the puffing is not appetite, it is self-measurement, and it inflates on austerity as readily as on indulgence. He can only rob you of the prize by appointing himself umpire, and the visions and the strict diet exist to put him in that chair.

Sandiṭṭhika: Visible here and now A teaching you can check in your own experience instead of taking on report. Against a man dwelling in what he has not seen, the test is plain: people passing along a vision none of them witnessed make a line of blind men, each holding the shoulder of the one ahead. The prize stays yours as long as you keep asking what you have seen for yourself, and nobody can hand you that.