There was some talk in a recent thread about physical purification and enlightenment. Perhaps related, here's a discussion of physical cleanliness and moral behavior.
http://tinyurl.com/yhchgp >From Sunday's New York Times: "Virtually every culture and religion draws a link between moral and bodily purification. " THE LADY MACBETH EFFECT By Clay Risen Published: December 10, 2006 Virtually every culture and religion draws a link between moral and bodily purification. "Out, damned spot!" Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth famously says, racked with guilt over her complicity in murder, wringing her hands to remove a hallucinated bloodstain. Now two researchers Chen-Bo Zhong, a behavioral researcher at the University of Toronto, and Katie Liljenquist, a graduate student at Northwestern have published a paper in the journal Science arguing that the connection is more than metaphorical. In one set of tests, the researchers asked participants to recall an ethical or unethical act, and then asked them to fill in the missing letters in a series of incomplete words, like W_ _H and SH_ _ER. Those subjects who had recalled unethical acts mostly returned WASH and SHOWER, while the others returned a variety of words, like WISH and SHAKER. Another test offered a choice of object: a pencil or an antiseptic wipe. Three-quarters of those who had recalled an unethical act chose the wipes. Only about one-third of those who recalled an ethical act did so. Zhong and Liljenquist then tested whether physical cleansing had any effect on feelings of guilt. After asking all the participants to recall an unethical act and type a description of it into a computer, they gave half the subjects the opportunity to wash their hands (telling them the keyboards were dirty). The researchers then asked all the test subjects if they would help out a desperate researcher who needed unpaid subjects for a study. Those who had washed their hands were about 50 percent less likely to volunteer suggesting that, newly cleansed, they felt less guilty and thus had less need to absolve themselves. http://tinyurl.com/yhchgp
