A Moral By Any Other Name Would Stench as Foul
A Moral By Any Other Name Would Stench as Foul
Morality is Reason’s Schismogenetic Superstitious Raison d’Etre
“The question is not about the act, it is about the consciousness from which that act arises.”§
§Discourse: Tao the Golden Gate Vol 1, Ch 8 ‘No Hell No Heaven’ - Osho, slightly edited.
Who here has heard the following from a sincere friend or trusted member of your community or family: ‘I’m not judging you’? And when you heard that phrase spoken in your direction what was your gut reaction to it? And what was the mind reaction, what do you think that they actually meant, most likely, by that sincerely and gently expressed phrase? (My answer concludes this exploration.)
I encountered recently these words from a friend after I suggested to him a possible course of financial-money relief during his somewhat extended time of relatively tight finances. I offered him an uncertain possibility after first confirming that it was okay with him for me to make that suggestion — with a twist. My initial request was first to get the okay to ask him if he was open to me asking him something. And that I would keep undefined what the something was until after he okayed me to ask. If he answered ‘No’ I would remain mum thereafter. (For some reason this brought to mind a sort of reversal of the retro restaurant Jack Rabbit Slim’s ‘I don’t want to offend you’ scene portrayed by Thurman and Travolta in Tarantino’s movie Pulp Fiction.) And I extended a simplification option to the request-process by suggesting to him, as I have frequently done with him about various ‘things’ in the past, to remove the mind’s needy-grippy-controlly-thinky processes from interfering with the decision. Specifically I asked my friend to engage the question with his body instead of with the whirring whirling habit wheel we call our rational-logical-thinking-control-freaking mind.
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And That’s a PS-RAP™ in a Koan-Like Mindlessness Non-Exercise in Now-Living
I use this method every day. For example, before proceeding with my offer to my friend on that day I had earlier asked my own body to give a ‘shall I ask or shall I not’ query in order to receive from my body its direction or guidance. Today the official name I have given it is PS-RAP™ (Psyche-Somatic Resonance Awareness Process). Informally I call it ‘muscle-testing’ in the way it had been introduced to me ten years ago by my excellent and delightfully eccentric reiki/theta energy healer. Since then my experience with it has refined it a lot, and so I distinguish that difference with the formal name. And this odd name helps my process from being misunderstood by people who have previously experienced one or more of the various forms of muscle-testing extant in the world.
This method of asking is to receive a mind-blinding or baffling or by-passing, clear, body-gut-intuitive decision or direction. PS-RAP™ significantly by-passes the limitations, waffling and multi-faceted weaknesses of mind-based or mind-centric decision making. Our minds are looking for pre-defined or controlled outcomes and/or of being ‘grounded’ in the mind’s need that ‘proper’ answer-options are to have the familiarity of rootedness in bound and bonded stale mind-pattern and psychological systems. That is, having the answers delimited by natural, addictive or even compulsive mind-thought habits aka samskaras.
New Age Ego as an Undeserving and Great Scapegoat Candidate to Save Humanity from Being Human
My friend and I have had many long and interesting discussions about mind-limits, spirituality, deep state of the world issues, etc. associated with the challenge of the now of living life well. (We have been discussing the possibility of casting them into pods or tubes in the near future — maybe once we are free enough of our mind-patterned limits, of course!) He has made references to various important turning-point ‘gurus’ and teachers in his life who have addressed this pesky ‘ego-mind’ problem. One of them that he has frequently referenced is Osho. Until my friend’s references last year Osho is someone to whom I’ve remained almost completely oblivious. Likely that was in large part because of the success of the media’s (lying and/or exaggerated crazy) presentations of him. Or perhaps, and likely more importantly, it was simply that his wisdom waited for me to reach a place where I could appreciate it.
After I began writing this ‘thing’ about my friend’s comment there seemed to arise a spark of Osho synchronistic hieros-gamas encounters that combined my considerations with past Osho references he has made. From that I initiated a tiny bit of research into Osho that, after getting yet another prompt from another friend who was an actual disciple who had lived with Osho in Oregon, the Osho synchronicities kind of went through the roof. And so it seems that it is come time for me to say ‘Hello Osho. Who are you? I am looking forward to exploring you as I meet up with you in your discourses.’
As I pondered ‘not being judged’ while doing my best to not think too much, it came to me with unprecedented clarity that ‘the’ problems of mind have been, perhaps with good intentions — although I no longer think so — scapegoated onto the ego in a New Age style of ‘good-thinking’. By that I mean the idea that good thinking by itself is sufficient to create good and more delusionally, the ultimate good. Therefore, logically, it is a ‘good’ thing when we find something morally good that we think we can use to offload onto that good thing our blame-complain negativity. That exact logical and moralistic mind-behaviour is standard operating procedure because it continues to unreflectively express the mind-centric samskara of goodifying blame-complain in a way that allows for the creation of a morally appropriate undeserving scapegoat — the ego in this case. And once we have created that form of moral good it can be, and is, used to rationalise and justify, and even morally advocate for, cancelling, shunning killing that good scapegoat for the greater good. I.e. to spiritually by-pass our shadows. (Reminiscences of the woke and the convid, anyone?)
I was inculcated in my childhood with ‘kill the ego,’ for example. My parents were fully steeped New Age social liberals who strongly advocated the moral supremacy of the so-called eastern philosophy that called for the death of the ego as the singular most important act that would save humanity from their own humanity. It turns out that that was yet another New Age (MK-ULTRA-like) style and ultimately hurtful misrepresentation of eastern philosophy. Of course!
And when I re-look at that expression of New Age ideology I see again that the idea of killing the person to save the person was presented as sound logic, as a moral good! (Witch killings or the Albigensian crusades come to mind.) Surely that is a clue or even evidence about the weakness of the mind and its almost unfailing ability to create and proselytise moral truths out of anything no matter how antithetical to compassion, empathy, life and love. Seth, in his books, especially The Nature of Personal Reality: Specific, Practical Techniques for Solving Everyday Problems and Enriching the Life You Know mediated by Jane Roberts, took great exception to that ego-killing ideology. Perhaps my early teen-age exposure to his arguments that contradicted those I saw being hypocritically expressed in my parents and the New Age communities that surrounded me provided me with a sufficient measure of ameliorating debunking and prophylaxis of the ego-bad narrative to give me space enough in morallessness to question ‘truths’ in the ways I have, such as in this essay or when the convid was initiated and then became a logically moral imperative much more so than a tangibly physical health good.
Deserving and Undeserving as one of the Truly Great Tools for the Sweet Sound of Enlightenment’s Genocidal Scores
For some reason, outside of reason’s ability to even marginally perceive, I was gifted with a being that is curious enough and open enough to receive that kind of introduction by Seth to a strong questioning of my parents’ and our society’s unstated and even stated truths and moral assumptions. With that openness from an early age I have also been ‘blessed’ with a seemingly endless continuum of synchronistic encounters. Of which my friend here is one of them. We have a common enough set of experiences and spiritual sensibility to deeply explore what it means for us individually and interdependently to be emerging fully from societal brutality into life as our Selves as embodied spiritual creatures.
We are wrestling out from beneath the dross residue and slag put there in us as part of having been traumatically enlightened by family and society. Those remnants are rising up as we continue to refine out the emotional, psychological and physical gunk that was intentionally put into us and that have been impeding our experience of full freedoms of mind and body health. Our conversations have been engaging, diverse, and have helped each of us to move forward with that shadowy shadow work that most everyone would prefer to spiritual by-pass into convenient and proximal projection and/or denial. Note: I do not consider our level of brutalisation to be particularly special. In fact it is likely middle of the road at worst. Our reality is that we who are born into the ‘enlightened’ west have all been subjected to an absolutely horrific and well organised multi-faceted broad spectrum social system of terror and violence against the individual as body, mind and spirit. Things like MK-ULTRA, 9/11, the FDA’s toxic food pyramids, allopathy and convid aren’t accidents of human failure: they express the reasoned ethical consequences of living with the enlightened expression of a deserving and an undeserving morality governed from above. (For more on my idea of the manner and pernicious nature of our having embraced a deserving/undeserving social moral ethic, see my series ‘Obedience to Authority:
An Exploration: On Mass Formation, Woke and Corporatist News’.
The Big Answers Weren’t 42
His initial body-response gave me the go ahead to proffer to him the second, to be specified, question. The ‘real’ question, that of the option for a possibility of financial relief. And so I asked it. He stepped quickly in with his mind’s need to know, for it to be controlled by his mind’s perception and I found myself blocked from being able to ask the second question to his body.
And with that, and with his well reasoned and seasoned second answer, were set the seeds and the water given that created a very big aha moment within me that opened up later that night. And, as it happens, it was to begin my look into Osho and to synchronistically continue my exploration into our society’s hard sell of reason-or-be-damned as a damming superstition. That exploration I began here:
And With That I Delightfully Discover a Pair of Nonsense Word Stand-Ins For Cancellation Language
So what happened? Why wasn’t the #42 sufficient? After I gave him vague details of the unreasonable ‘plan’, my friend quickly mindfully rationalised himself away from his body. Effectively and metaphorically his body had been disappeared from our conversation. Note: my offer isn’t anything illegal or hurtful to anyone and, with a humour that only the giant capital ‘L’ Life-energy can create — as I have observed with synchronicities for thirty-five years — this offer uses pattern recognition behaviours of certain financial minutiae to anticipate a rewarding behaviour. This was offered to me by another friend a few months ago. Without attending closely to the particular details that that friend shared with me, I stood up and asked my body ‘Is this appropriate eccentric action for me, at this time?’ No rationalising or moralising or fretting or controlling. My body responded with a clear and, at the time very surprising to my mind-full-ness Self, ‘Yes’. And so I proceeded with participating in my friend’s deeply researched opportunity at a level that was also directed by my body. The level of participation was such that my mind was very uncomfortable because, ostensibly and reasonably, what I was being asked to do by my body was completely irrational and pinched my mind’s logical view of my financial situation in the moment. I repeatedly asked and with great patience, and perhaps even a quiet sense of humour, my body didn’t waffle, equivocate, rationalise, or fret. Proceed, it said calmly, after each somatic inquiry. And so I did. With the calmness that I felt my body express.
As of this writing the denouement of the process is still being energised as it is following the predicted pattern. I am not fearful of it crashing nor am I excited about it working out. Perhaps, in its very clever way my body, as it has done in the past, is guiding my spiritual freedom by bringing into my face, into my awareness, my mindful fears and hopes that I wouldn’t otherwise see even as it is asking me to be comfortably present only in this moment as it is. The exercise I am enjoined may not even be, most importantly, about ‘money’ even though money was what got it going and isn’t at all trivial. If it was trivial the exercise would not have value. What my body has asked me to do may be mostly about the psyche-somatic energy of money in me as an artificial and unnecessarily constricted spiritual energetic expression. And, even more importantly, it may be continuing a deeply challenging aparigraha: in this case the letting go of the final motes of the money-evil morality narrative with which I had been totally infused since pre-infancy by my post-enlightenment progressive liberal humanistic family, schooling, and society. And with that irrational morality of money as the total expression of all that is the immoral social powerhouse that creates ‘evil’, perhaps it is easy to see that, logically, I have a deep and equally irrational fear of poverty and penury in old age. The three years of the convid as a spiritual awakening process have been providing me with more and more deeply freeing aparigraha opportunities and processes, such as this one. (For a yoga meditative introduction to the principle of aparigraha in action, see ‘Aparigraha – Letting Go: Yoga Philosophy in Practice’ with Courtney Seiberling.)
What Did He Answer, if it Wasn’t ‘What is 6x7’? Aha! Got It!
He easily and with the grace of long-lived familiarity conceded his decision to his mind’s argument on how much more important is his moral integrity in handling money than is his current somewhat extended monetary discomfort. I asked him some questions. In his answers he reiterated, paraphrased, that he is more happy with the integrity of his moral behaviour around money than he is unhappy with pinching pennies on a fixed income. And he explained that he is happy to continue his efforts to implement into the world his financial business that is a pragmatic leadership and money-raising skills course built on and that builds in others a spiritual foundation. ‘What value has a few thousands to me at this time balanced against my integrity and my monetary skills?’ he asked, paraphrased.
And he repeated an interesting monetary reference that he received from one of his most important spiritual guides. Paraphrased: ‘When the spirit is true money appears without effort. There is no need to do anything for money.’ This does remind me of something that the founder of the (spiritual) 1960s Findhorn Foundation, Peter Caddy, expressed that was described in The Magic of Findhorn by Paul Hawken. Paraphrased, ‘When something in the community is required we ask God and it comes.’ Caddy was questioned, ‘Yes, that’s fine, and all that. And what happens if it doesn’t come?’ Caddy replied ‘What do you mean? You don’t understand. There is no ‘if’!’ And I wonder now, did my friend’s guru discount clear intentioned asking (prayer?) as an activity? And I wonder of what is nothing comprised in physical life?
At the time I replied with a smile, and a bit of a laugh to this swami’s spiritual surety that money will come when the spirit is open and that absolutely nothing needs to done. And I said ‘Well, I’m not an enlightened swami!’ And now I wonder how far away from or close to doing nothing is questioning my body, listening to its answers and then acting on those body-directed actions? What distinguishes the difference between a mind-empty action, a mind-full one and doing absolutely nothing, if the latter is even technically possible in the physical universe? Is the body as spiritual mover in life the taoist principle of wu-wei (无为), the doing of nothing action that with effortless magic leaves nothing undone or incomplete?
And what my friend didn’t know was that I had received, that had become with him a synchronicity, a delightful contradictory discourse from the Art of Living’s guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar that my friend in Vancouver had received and relayed to me a few weeks before. Paraphrased: ’It isn’t enough simply to pray for the ‘miracle’ with good intentions and then sit on your asses. [Appropriate eccentric] action is the spark that ignites the miracle.’
Small synchronicity event addendum: I took a break from writing to eat and resumed a video discourse I had started about six weeks ago called ‘Clear Money Wounds, Poverty Curses, Spells & Implants’ by Xi - Earthstar Academy. Xi provides some mantras we can use to help align our integrity:
~30:55‘… we’ve experienced tyranny, people abusing their power. … I’m going to create a structure in my life so that I’m actually living in integrity to that. And when I live in that integrity I can trust my Self. And I don’t think that [it’s necessarily appropriate to] automatically trust our Selves. I think that we [are to express in our words and actions] who we say we want to be.’ … ~37:32 ‘I was guided to never stay in my mind but to actually move into my body with it. Because we can literally have analysis paralysis and think ‘oh my god, I’ve got all this stuff, like i’ve gotta start finding the land, finding the people and finding the money. And when we move into our body, that is actually when we begin to initiate our root chakra intelligence’ (‘Clear Money Wounds, Poverty Curses, Spells & Implants’ by Xi - Earthstar Academy; my emphasis and slight edits).
Now to Stop Prating and Ask the Obvious: WTF is ‘Moral’, ‘Morality’? And, With That Query Consider that Our…
... understanding is not an exclusively intellectual process for, as experience shows, a man may be influenced, and indeed convinced in the most effective way, by innumerable things of which he has no intellectual understanding (p30-1 C.G. Jung "General Aspects of Dream Psychology," CW. 8, par.468; cited in Dreams. New York: MJF Books, Two Lincoln Square 60 West 66th Street New York, NY 10023, my emphasis).
So, already deep into this morass, (or more-ass) moral essay, here is the intellectually flat list of ‘Just the moral facts, ma’am’: definitions.
moral (adj.)
mid-14c., "associated with or characterised by right behaviour," also "associated with or concerning conduct or moral principles" (good or bad), from Old French moral (14c.) and directly from Latin moralis "proper behaviour of a person in society," literally "pertaining to manners," coined by Cicero ("De Fato," II.i) to translate Greek ethikos (see ethics) from Latin mos (genitive moris) "one's disposition," in plural, "mores, customs, manners, morals," a word of uncertain origin. Perhaps sharing a PIE root with English mood (n.1). — online etymology dictionary
morality (noun)
recognition of the distinction between good and evil or between right and wrong; respect for and obedience to the rules of right conduct; the mental disposition or characteristic of behaving in a manner intended to produce morally good results.
a set of social rules, customs, traditions, beliefs, or practices which specify proper, acceptable forms of conduct.
a set of personal guiding principles for conduct or a general notion of how to behave, whether respectable or not.
a lesson or pronouncement which contains advice about proper behaviour (archaic).
a morality play.
moral philosophy, the branch of philosophy which studies the grounds and nature of rightness, wrongness, good, and evil (rare).
a particular theory concerning the grounds and nature of rightness, wrongness, good, and evil (rare). — wiktionary
moral (noun)
the ethical significance or practical lesson (of a narrative).
eg: the moral of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is that if you repeatedly lie, people won't believe you when you tell the truth.
moral practices or teachings: modes of conduct.
a morality play (obsolete).
a moral certainty (slang, dated).
an exact counterpart (slang, dated). — wiktionary
morals (noun)
[societal or religious] standards for good or bad character and behavior. — Cambridge
morality (noun)
a set of personal or social standards for good or bad behaviour and character.
the quality of being right, honest, or acceptable. — Cambridge
moral (noun)
of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behaviour: ethical.
expressing or teaching a conception of right behaviour.
conforming to a standard of right behaviour.
sanctioned by or operative on one's conscience or ethical judgment. [who/what is the sanctioning operative?! My emphasis.]
capable of right and wrong action.
probable though not proved : virtual.
perceptual or psychological rather than tangible or practical in nature or effect. — Merriam-Webster
morality (noun)
a moral discourse, statement, or lesson.
a literary or other imaginative work teaching a moral lesson.
a doctrine or system of moral conduct.
particular moral principles or rules of conduct.
we were all brought up on one of these moralities.
conformity to ideals of right human conduct.
moral conduct: virtue. — Merriam-Webster
And thus from this flat list it is easy to see that morality is some kind of received truth that has been designed to appeal to the mind and intellect as mind-guide to someone else’s definitions of ‘truth’. Hmmm. Historically various people have taken it upon themselves to create a sugar-coated mind-candy and wave it front of the mind’s eye in order to abet our addictive tendency to reason as a moral act that allows for the rationalised moral goods such as wars and the various genocides rife in human history for millennia. (The protracted genocide of the Palestinians by the Zionists/Jews since the last century is a moral action, for example, of which questioning it has become an immoral action that is morally punishable with criminalisation, fines, censure, cancellation and possible imprisonment, depending on jurisdiction.)
The Moment You Follow Someone Else's Morality You Are Lost
A just now small synchronicity arose with another friend, who in early 2023 was my first client here at ‘Hello Human Yoga and Meditation for Life’. At that time he shared how Osho’s meditations had helped him and how I may not be ready for Osho. He is also writing on substack. His last essay was announced in my email yesterday (May 2nd) with a synchronistic subject line/title: ‘The Moment You Follow Someone Else's Path You Are Lost: The Time for Cult Leaders Is Over.’ `He describes his turning away from cult-like behaviours.
Now that I’ve explored ‘reason’ and its enabler, ‘morality’, I see clearly that to become moral, regardless the form it takes and/or how it is presented, is simply the action of giving one’s Self and path, one’s personal autonomy and authority, power and agency, over to another person’s reasoned superstition. Even if it is an ostensibly ‘good’ one. To be moral is literally to remove our Self from our path in order to be an adherent to someone else’s morality, someone else’s reasonable superstition. And in that it is exactly equivalent to the oft castigated behaviours projected onto cults: gaslighting and narcissistic reality-manipulations in order to successfully imprint into the minds of the moralistic followers and their targets the particular, arbitrary and passing sets of moralising credos de jour. (I made an early form of this argument in my examination of the mechanisms and methodologies that the founders of the Christian-based Catholic Church used to create their standards of so-called Christian morality. If interested:
The Gospel of Thomas and Blinking Awake From My Personal Dogmatism's Daimon
And
When Gautama Woke Up Was His First Thought ‘OMG, Where Am I Now?’ Or ‘Who Are You, Really?
I’m not saying anything new, of course. There isn’t really anything new that can be said! The buddhist cautionary advice to kill the buddha you meet on the road is the same caution: do not give up your autonomy and responsibility even to the buddhas you meet! (Osho discourse: ‘Kill the Buddha.’ Another angle here: ‘[Osho says] if you meet me on the way, kill me’.)
We will often gleefully, or with condescending moralistic disdain, condemn the likes of Jim Jones. And out of the other side of our moral compass we joyfully or maybe reluctantly send uncountable numbers of weapons and billions of dollars to genocide those people who advocate moralist doctrines we have been told are despicable. The them over there have been deemed moralistically undeserving if, for example, they moralistically wear clothes for a religious rationale that we superior moralists demand be changed in order that they join our group’s obviously superior moralistic systems. What is the difference between Jim Jones and the moral majority that condemns him? Both have created an acceptable morality that creates an appropriate scapegoatable undeserving and both deny that ‘morality’ is simply the grandiose spiritual by-passing that is the manifestation of our dark shadow. (That also sounds a lot like what happened with the roll out of the convid, for example: moralistic condemnation and relegation of the undeserving into a real or virtual camp of untouchables.)
Thief Tales! Where’s the Moral? More Importantly Where Aren’t the Morality Majority When You Don’t Need Them? (The Body Knows that They Aren’t Really Necessary)
My friend has been the most persistent and key person to direct me towards various Osho stories/discourses. Even though I have enjoyed very much his versions of the tales of Osho that he has shared I hadn’t found myself drawn to look them up or to research Osho. For some reason my being gently not judged changed that. What came clearly to mind, spontaneously that night, was an Osho thief story that my friend took particular pleasure in telling and frequently references. And it is one that I really loved, too.
And so that initiated my query into Osho, despite all the bad press and my sharp sister’s caution against him and after having watched, with her and her husband during a rare visit to their house in Canada in 2017(?), a documentary of Osho as car and gun crazy in Oregon. The thief story seems to be embracing an amorality that is the correct living expression of spirit, or perhaps correct living with the guidance of the energy of Life, whatever that is. I wanted to check that Osho story out to see if I had understood that part correctly from my friend’s retelling of the aging master thief and his son. When I began this morality write I went to find a transcript of that story and, in the process, I found delightfully a second Osho thief tale! That second one is as awesome and amazing as the first and somehow, the two together are a kind of one-two more than double the impact spiritual extirpation of morality as a good without once making the stories morals.
The Senescent Master Thief and His Son — A Zen Story Retold by Osho (edited for brevity by me §)
§ I recommend the full version to better sense the breadth of Osho’s wisdom and the depth of his humour. I’ve shortened it here to shorten, at least a little bit, this already long essay while keeping his humour as best as I could.
The agèd master thief was respected even by the king because never in his life had he been caught. He had never been caught even though everybody knew that he was the master thief. In fact, it became a mark of happy superiority whenever a prominent family could claim “Last night our rich treasures were stolen by the master thief!”
Shortly after his eightieth birthday his son said to him, "Now you are old and soon you will die. Teach me your art!"
"I was also thinking about it. But it is not a teachable art. It is a knack that I cannot teach you. It can only be caught. If you can catch it, I am ready to help you. It is such a great skill that, like real poets, real thieves are born not made. Come along with me tonight."
The young man, healthy and strong, met with his old man, now becoming frail, at the designated rich house. The thief broke through the wall. He removed the bricks - but the way he did it! The young man just watched. He was trembling in the cold night and sweating with fear.
He thought "And what kind of man is my father? He is doing everything so silently, so gracefully, so effortlessly as if this is our own house and the wall is our door! No hurry, no worry."
The father did not look around even once. He entered the dark house and gestured to the son to follow. The son followed trembling, his body bathed in a perspiration that was flowing like water even on this cold winter night. And the old man was moving in the house, in the darkness, as if he had always lived there without stumbling or hesitating.
Quickly they reached the innermost room and he opened a closet and quietly directed his son to enter it. As soon as he had entered it his father quickly locked the closet door and shouted loudly, "Thief! Thief!" and then escaped from the house.
The whole household woke and rushed here and there to find the thief. And all the while the son thought "This is the end. I am finished! My father is mad. Why did I ask him to teach me to become a thief? This is not for me! He was right to say that thieves are born not made. But is this a way to teach? If I stay alive I will kill this old man. I will go home and cut his head off immediately!"
He was angry, enraged. And yet in that moment there was no value in anger. Anger would not help him to survive, that something else was to be done if he was to escape. And he could not think of anything to be done. His mind had gone blank. His mind had simply stopped.
That's what meditation is: the mind simply stops. It cannot figure out what it is all about, what to do because all that it knows is useless. It has never been in such a situation before, and the mind can only move again and again in the world of its known, what we call habits of reaction and morality. Whenever anything unknown is encountered, the mind stops with fear and looks to stop us. In fact, the mind is a kind of machine because if you have not fed it the right information before, it cannot work at all, it cannot function. And if you have fed it the wrong information, its functioning will create destruction automatically, like a broken machine. Rules of control and morality are wrong information.
In this new situation the mind of the young man could not conceive what to do. There was nothing to do. And then a woman servant came with a candle in her hand, looking around for the thief. Surely a thief had entered because all the doors had been opened, including this one to the innermost room. Was he hiding somewhere?
When the servant entered the room the son could see the lessening of the darkness and heard her footsteps. To escape required the doors to be opened. How? What to do? Out of nowhere, intuitively - this is not out of intellect but out of intuition - he started scratching like a rat and the door was opened. The woman, having heard the scratching, wondered if it was a rat and looked inside with her candle to confirm it.
As soon as the candle approached him he moved spontaneously, intuitively, thoughtlessly more quickly than he thought possible and in a moment had blown out the candle, pushed the woman aside and had sped away.
Following the servants cries the other people quickly joined the chase, with torches and lamps. For some reason his body did not take him to the entrance and when it seemed certain that he would be caught he came across a well. Without thought he stopped to throw a large rock into it then stepped a little way from it to stand perfectly still within the shadow of a large tree.
He saw the people surround the well to discuss that it was obvious that the thief had jumped in it to escape. "If he is alive in the morning we will put him in jail. If he is dead he is punished already." Then they went back to the house. He easily and safely returned to his father.
His father was fast asleep. The son pulled his blanket aside and yelled, "Are you mad or something?"
The father looked at him, smiled and said, "So you are back - that's enough! No need to tell the whole story. You are a born thief! From tomorrow you start on your own. You have caught the life spirit of it, you are the spirit of a thief. I am not mad - I gambled. Rather, I trusted that either you would be finished or you would come out of it proving that you have life’s intuitive insight that naturally makes a master thief” (‘Tao the Golden Gate Vol 1; From Ch 8 No Hell No Heaven an Osho discourse, my edit and emphasis).
What is Osho saying here with his telling of the old man thief old Zen story? That the mind is what traps us in closets or keeps us there? That life is amoral by supporting the art of master thieves? That it is when we stop the mind that the solutions to our troubles can be made manifest? Is it that mindless action is the no-action of wu-wei, the no-action directive of my friend’s swami? That teachings, without them being experienced, is what creates the morality of following another’s path of truth? That the experiences expressed intuitively by the body, without the mind, are ‘true’ liberation?
Now for the second thief story. I love that the second thief story includes Nagarjuna. That might qualify as a small synchronicity for me with my having only recently discovered Nagarjuna and his truly extraordinary wisdom and delightful expression of it through Stephen Batchelor. I introduced Nagarjuna in my substack essay:
“I’m drowning here, and you’re describing the water!”
Here’s the story of:
Nagarjuna and the Master Thief – A Zen Buddhist Spiritual Story as told by Osho (edit by me for brevity §)
§ I recommend the full version to better sense the breadth of Osho’s wisdom and the depth of his humour. I’ve shortened it here to shorten, at least a little bit, this already long essay while keeping his humour as best as I could.
A rich and powerful queen had experienced the extraordinary energy of Nagarjuna’s wisdom. To honour that she had made an exquisite begging bowl of gold and the finest gem stones and jewels. She anticipated that Nagarjuna would refuse such a rich gift because it would violate his moral precept of poverty. So she was surprised when Nagarjuna accepted it casually, as if it was a poor man’s begging bowl made of simple wood.
Without knowing who Nagarjuna was the master thief had learned of this great gift as it was being made and when it was to be given to Nagarjuna. On that day the thief followed Nagarjuna to his home, a ruined temple without doors, windows or even a roof. It was far from the city. And the thief thought “I have seen many beautiful things in my life but never such a thing, and how did this naked man living in destitution receive it from the queen? And how is he going to protect it? Anybody will be able to take it away from him, so why not me?”
Nagarjuna had heard the footsteps of the thief behind him and, after going into his home, the ruined temple, he sat comfortably on the bare floor. Then he tossed the rich bowl out the window. It landed at the feet of the master thief. The thief could not believe his eyes and was deeply shocked. He picked the bowl up and the touch of it hurt him when he thought to walk away with it. He stopped because, even with being a thief, his being a master thief had given him dignity and respect. So he took the bowl back into the ruined temple to return it to Nagarjuna.
“Sir, I want to show my gratitude. And deep surprise because clearly you are a rare man — throwing out such a precious thing as if it was nothing. I feel that you are extraordinary and that perhaps you can tell me how you were able to so casually toss away such a valuable jewel?”
Nagarjuna said, “Welcome, welcome. Please sit here with me. In fact I threw the bowl out so that you would come in.”
The thief could not understand what he heard and found himself without words to speak. Nagarjuna remained quiet and the thief experienced silence, peace, and bliss that quickly overwhelmed him. After an unknown length of time he said to Nagarjuna, “I feel jealous of you. I have never come across a man like you. Compared to you, all others are flat, as if in deep sleep or simple drawings or paintings with only the look of life. How integrated you are! How fully in the world and beyond it at the same time! Is there any possibility for me too to one day attain such integration, such individuality, such compassion and such non-attachment to things? I feel now, for the first time, that these are the things of ultimate respect and intimacy with what is now.”
Nagarjuna said, “It is possible. It is everybody’s potential.”
“Wait! First let me tell you one thing. I have been in my life many times to many holy people seeking the truth and they all know me and they say, ‘First stop stealing. Only then can you grow spiritually.’ So please don’t make that condition because that I cannot do. I have tried and I have failed many times. It seems that, following in the path of my father, also a master thief, that it is my nature and destiny — I have to go on stealing so do not make it a condition.”
Nagarjuna said, “That simply shows you have never seen anyone truly holy before! Those you have met are themselves thieves, otherwise why would they be worried about your stealing? Go on stealing and do everything as skilfully as possible. It is certainly a good thing in life to be a master of any art. Mastery of anything confers dignity and a significant level of integrity.”
The thief was shocked and thought “What kind of holy man is this?” Then said, with a feeling of inexplicable panic, “What do you suggest? What is right, what is wrong?”
Nagarjuna replied, “I don’t say anything is right or anything is wrong. Do one thing: since it is your nature to steal, steal. With this small difference: begin to steal consciously. Go tonight, enter into the house very alert, open the doors, the locks, with total conscious awareness. Be fully awake. And only then, when you are fully conscious, that is when you steal. And remain awake throughout. And report to me after seven days.”
The thief was stunned and at the same time very happy to be able to continue as before.
After seven days the thief came to Nagarjuna. He bowed down and said, “Now initiate me into sannyas” [complete awareness of being alive in this moment].
Nagarjuna said, “Why? What about your stealing?”
He said, “You are a cunning fellow! I did my best to be totally aware with full focus and intention. When I am conscious, I cannot steal; when I steal I am unconscious. I can steal only when I am unconscious. When I am conscious the whole thing seems so stupid, so meaningless. What am I doing? For what? Tomorrow I may die. And why do I go on accumulating wealth? I have more than I need; even for generations it is enough. It looks so meaningless that I stopped completely after seven days. For seven days I entered into houses and came out empty-handed. And I am shocked to learn that to be conscious is so beautiful. I have tasted it for the first time, and it is just a small taste — now I can conceive how much you are enjoying, how much you are celebrating. Now I know that you are the real king — naked in a ruined castle but you are the real king. Now I know that you have real gold and that we are playing with the fool’s gold” (The Dhammapada – The Way of the Buddha as told by Osho and adapted by me).
Without morality and effort the master thief changed, and what he thought was his destiny fell away like leaves from an autumn tree in wind.
And with these two stories, back-to-back, there is this beautiful embracing of the totality of the exuberance of Life: the thief is welcomed and supported by the energy of Life in defiance of ‘good’ morality; Nagarjuna equates that imposed ‘good’ morality by holy people with the theft of an authentically lived Life of the Self. And the reformation of Nagarjuna’s thief demonstrates that Life also includes the intangible and discernible power of change, which arises from an expanded awareness of Life in its totality of neither good nor bad. And that that expanded awareness is that which like magic effortlessly creates sufficient space for compassion and the reduction of suffering without the need for authority controls of morality from an outside other. Awareness is a choice: the thief, respecting something in Nagarjuna beyond words and thinking and morals, chose to experience awareness. And then accepted that his life of ostensible destined habitual thievery had ended, died naturally as all things do, without effort, with wu-wei, the effortless effort. Death comprises the flow of life into Death and back into Life. (And that too, was a synchronicity yesterday (May 5th) with the Sunday koan meditation that spent some time talking about trusting the body enough to know that dying is not something to be stressing about: the body already knows, and so all that is sufficient and to trust its sufficiency.)
Did Jung Get Morality Wrong? And the End Game of the Schismogenic Moral Life as We Know It?
My years with Jung included the fascinating book The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann, with foreward by C.G. Jung. He argues that consciousness is in a continuous psychological transition from a mostly unconscious state into one of greater consciousness. Jung made a similar argument in his fascinating look at the Bible’s Book of Job in his Answer to Job, where he argues that Job’s suffering assisted God by developing in God a conscious awareness of suffering that didn’t exist in God before Job’s experiences of it. (Answer to Job audiobook.)
And with these thoughts, along with the initiatory elements of the shamanic journey that often included the shaman’s descent into darkness and near or actual death experiences, I wonder if it is possible that a part of the experience of human consciousness that includes the millennia of schismogenic practices has been to experience separation at the most profound level? That that separation and isolation are the paired and necessary opposites of total intimacy and connection and is what gives the deepest possible experience of the conscious awareness of what connection and intimacy is? Without the dark, the light is not known and so the ostensible dualities are pragmatically complementary and inseparably one experience. To know consciousness, be unconscious for a time and then emerge from it. This reminds me of the ‘problem’ of giving someone independence and individuation: it isn’t possible. These are the experiences of actions or acts of awareness that the person, to experience them, cannot actual receive from another.
And as I worked through this I thought of an old favourite quotation from C.G. Jung that I’ve cited frequently in my life. And now I see that it is, likely, fundamentally incorrect by about 180°. This is what I used to know was true:
The Western superciliousness in the face of these [ancient] Indian insights [into man's shadow] is a mask of our barbarian nature, which has not the remotest inkling of their extraordinary depth and astonishing psychological accuracy. We are still so uneducated that we actually need laws from without, and a task-master or Father above, to show us what is good and the right thing to do. And because we are still such barbarians, any trust in the laws of human nature seems to us dangerous and unethical naturalism. Why is this? Because under the barbarian's thin veneer of culture the wild beast lurks in readiness, amply justifying his fear. But the beast is not tamed by locking it in a cage. There is no morality without freedom. When the barbarian lets loose the beast within, that is not freedom, but bondage. Barbarism [is first to] be vanquished before freedom can be won. This happens, in principle, when the basic root and driving force of morality are felt by the individual as constituents of his own nature and not as external restrictions [in the form of someone else’s laws or moral lists] (C.G. Jung, Psychological Types. Princeton: Princeton University Press, par 357, slightly edited).
Now I know that what Jung described here as “… the wild beast [that] lurks in readiness, amply justifying [people’s] fear [of what is within]” is ambiguously stated and infers, by this context, that the core of the human heart-soul-spirit justifiably cannot be trusted without rules or moral conduct. He also states that those moral rules create bondage not freedom. And that within us is the beast to which we are also necessarily enslaved. Until what happens? To until when? To some kind of consummation into enlightened consciousness, aka, individuation (ie the freedom of being completely the Self)? (For a video on ‘individuation’ watch ‘How Carl Jung achieved Individuation Through Discovering His Personal Myth’.)
This short extract does not point to a solution to the problem of our ostensible enslavement to either bestiality or morality, even though I know that the end game of Jungian psychological practice is individuation, ie the total freedom of absolute trust in being within and of the process of Life.
As I wrestle with this now I see that this passage, which was written quite early in Jung’s career, is structured on the Hobbesian idea of the brutality resting in the core of the human being. As I’ve worked through my own shadows, filled with the brutal truth of my self and my expression of significant immorality on occasion, I now see that that immorality and brutality are at a layer or two above the core, the heart, of who I am. In his book The Inner Tradition of Yoga: A Guide to Yoga Philosophy for the Contemporary Practitioner Michael Stone provides a lovely example of that in his description of Pattabhi Jois’s explanation of why meditation is much harder than it looks and is often quickly dropped or even intuitively avoided: with stillness and our initial inward look into our heart-soul the first things we encounter are all the encrustations of darkness we have been fed and accepted and do not consciously see. And that can be very dark. Yoga, like Jung’s shadow work, is to be courageous enough to see our shadows and with that initiate the removal of those dark elements that have constricted and impeded our lives and squeezed into near non-experience the core of joy and love waiting to be re-discovered that are hidden beneath them.
I suspect that in later years Jung’s perception of the darkness of the human core shifted to that of more light, if not pure light, from that of the bleak darkness he described in Psychological Types. His time with dreams, active imagination, intuitive creativity, spiritual visions and/or experiences, synchronicities all point to, and guide, the truth seeker’s liberation from the psychological shadows of socialised trauma and schismogenetic practices.
With my more experienced eyes what I see to be missing is the body as spirit or soul grounded in the now. Did Jung write that? I don’t know. He certainly wrote about the soul a lot! Soul as body? At the time I read Jung I was so disconnected from my body, even spanning thirty years, that if he made that argument it is very unlikely that it would have stuck. And now I get to question yet more truths: what did I read in those thirty years of Jungian study? Or, more specifically, what did I look at and fail to read? A part of me would like to think that I didn’t miss too much because a key resonance with Seth was his attention to the body. And also, I quit my study of Buddhism in the early 1980s because the books I had been reading at the time dismissed and dishonoured the body in a very similar way, in my opinion, to the extreme denigration the body received under Christian ethical and moral imperatives.
Was I in some part, large or small, a man looking for the truth in words I was reading and not experiencing?
When the Zen master recites the sutra, he already knows the truth, hence he finds the truth in the sutra he’s reading. A man who does not know the truth will be simply wasting time by reading them. He will not find any truth in the sutra. Perhaps he will become knowledgeable, but he will not become enlightened and will instead start imitating. You can imitate a buddha, you can have the same clothes, you can walk the same way, you can eat the same kind of food. You can follow all the moral principles, read all the sutras and yet until you have experienced the knowledge you will still be an actor, you will not be a buddha. And as an actor you are simply a moralist, lost in a play that often includes demands from the mind for the others’ to conform to your version of the play’s script (Osho, Christianity the Deadliest Poison, Discourses #1 and #4 and adapted by me.)
Wow! Was that a Reasoned Logical Argument Debunking Moral Integrity as Superstitious Reason?
And finally closing in on the close. When I reflected back it seems that much of the above, my own writing and that of Osho and Jung, are examples of using logic and reason to debunk morals as the drug of choice for someone addicted to reason. Addict: a person who has recognised that a particular behaviour of thought and/or action is harmful in some way and continues to engage in that thought and/or action. (Paraphrase of Tommy Rosen’s definition from his group Recovery 2.0.) I laugh at this, of course, because are these examples of verbal aikido or simple hypocrisy? That will depend on you.
The initial and perhaps most difficult challenge of any addiction is for the addict to recognise, to see properly, the truth that the behaviour has become hurtful. For example: Gautama Buddha’s first noble truth is proper seeing, and is often translated as ‘right view’, seeing true what is there; and it is the first, and the creator of the last four, of Patañjali’s five kleshas, or root causes of suffering: avidya is frequently translated as ignorance and yet it is the Sanskrit root of our word ‘video’ and in its description avidya will be described as the seer mistaking what s/he sees as permanent when it isn’t, and seeing the ephemeral as permanent when it isn’t.
And for reasonable people, people addicted to reason, it can be that some kind of cognitive dissonance of reason being tumbled onto its ass has a chance of dislodging some element of being unreasonably stuck in reasons creation of a distressed improperly seen life and society. To the powerful, for example, tyranny and eugenics are reasonable things. Trudeau’s use of tyrannical reason to praise the CPP’s power to lock down their country as if that is reasonable.
This has been a tough write for me. A powerful verbal meditation that looked into the darkness of reason poisoning and distressing my experience of life. I have, like the best spiritually by-passing addict, looked out into the world and frequently descried reason as the structure or method that can take any inspiration or idea and dance it to witch burnings, Spanish Inquisitions, crusades, pogroms, genocides, all of which proceeded from a logical argument that attached itself to some kind of irrationally inseminated idea. Reason does not, cannot exist without an antecedent, and every antecedent begins outside the realm of reason, be it spirit, god, intuition, synchronicity, etc. And yet. And yet it would seem that a shadowy part of me was still addictively clinging to some elements of reason. This write, along with ‘I Was Described as Doing Superstition: And With That I Delightfully Discover a Pair of Nonsense Word Stand-Ins For Cancellation Language’ have been amongst the hardest on me physically to write. And have taken two to three times longer to do so than almost all other of my essays. And they have been long.
I went down into some deep sewer or cave within me somewhere that I wasn’t even seeing. And yet my body knew: compulsive nose picking returned, extreme pain in my right hip would appear and disappear without clear perceivable reasons, and lots of sleep with many early nights that went for over ten hours, the longest being fourteen, without waking even to pee. Today (May 6th) my hip and shoulders are light and almost totally pain free and my nasal passages are not being threatened with those compulsive fingers looking to clear something out of them that is, regardless of the relative paucity of snot, mindfully impeding my ability to breathe freely.
And, without doing the snoopy dance of premature elation, I’ll see what the next few weeks brings to my body-soul experience. Did I have some success with these writes in removing the abscess of reason as a core truth from my spirit? Have I been able to return reason to its place as a dance partner who respectfully follows my non-rational lead and rests comfortably when it isn’t on my dance card?
My Answer to Close as An Afterword Thought And Point Of Speculative Discussion; Comments Welcome
I opened this essay questioning the effect that the phrase ‘I’m not judging you’ had on me. And I included you. After all my words you can see that that short conversation had a profound effect on me.
For me, at first, it sure looks like the people speaking those words are in fact judging their recipients of them. Well, that was my first pinch, albeit a small one: I had gently felt that it was in fact a judgement of me. And others I’ve since asked about it have reacted in the same feeling way.
However, after I felt that pinch I took full responsibility for the feeling and saw that it had provided me with a clear and open opportunity for curiosity to bloom and explore ‘judgment’. Thus it came to pass: I took action in response to my reaction to reflect on moral judgment and its place inside of me and my own life. And once I had opened my heart-mind to that exploration, the synchronicities abounded. And it wasn’t until shortly after I started to explore this that I realised that the most amazing synchronicity of all was that I heard that I wasn’t being judged very soon after I had finished writing ‘I Was Described as Doing Superstition’, which is my debunking of reason as a spurious, distracting and hurtful superstition.
The above anti-moral essay is the result. It was unexpectedly difficult for me to write because it turns out that what Osho calls the Christian spirit-poison, which in my experience has been augmented by the poison of Newton’s and DesCartes’ singular visions of mind-centric rationality, was still hooked and festering deeply in aspects of my core-foundational truth-belief systems. Core-beliefs are those that hide behind the absolute truths I have that are so true I don’t see them as true. They are the invisible (false) foundations of my experience because they are so profoundly true within my unconscious they they are invisible to my mind except when I encounter them with enough awareness in the interactive experiential world of strangers, co-workers, friends, family, synchronicity and psyche-somatic health.
What you read was the evolution of that process in me that my friend initiated. And for which I am profoundly thankful. And it, like the last anti-reason essay, made its difficulty known with the recurrence of compulsive nose-picking and unexpected tiredness. Although both were much much less this time. And maybe, just maybe, this act of svadhiyaya allowed an aparagraha, a sauca of the unconscious that will see that compulsion fall away completely without my going to a behavioural psychologist or taking drugs before my nose implodes.
And now, after having opened in my Self the time and space to take responsibility for my initial reaction to ‘I’m not judging you’ and with that to reflect deeply on it, it has come to me that it is much more likely that people uttering it are in fact judging themselves. This is speculation because of course I don’t know if that is the case with my friend.
And yet at its core ‘I’m not judging you’ is expressing comparison in some way that has found fault somewhere. The ‘fault’ pushes up for expression and the mind wants to hide its source and direction and so creates a moral judgment that is not supposed to land anywhere because it is, truthfully, ‘not judging the other’. My feeling of being judged is in fact incorrect and I appropriately took responsibility for it. The moral judgment-feeling that came up to the asking person strongly enough to be expressed as a non-negative, I suspect, is from having felt themselves judged and/or of having judged themselves internally. It seems to me that maybe orally expressing this not judging is a kind of moral palliative whose projection diffuses the amoral internal feeling of that unacknowledged judgment. In my particular instance, as I explored, the rationalisations I heard for not listening to the body allowed the mind to rest comfortably within its comfort zone moralism and ideology, aka, the non-accusatory judgment that nonetheless creates separation.
What Next? Are you Pulling My Morality Leg? Are There Any More Morals Left To Weed? Yes, and Lessons to Be (re)Learned fom 11th Century Chan.
To be continued in humour and play because, as I was writing this, I had the koan meditation synchronicity above that was actually a double synchronicity because somehow it managed to include real adults, serious Chinese Chan (Zen) Buddhist practitioners and thinkers of the Song dynasty (960-1279) who loved to joyfully, teasingly, forcefully, play rough-words with each other as they explored as deeply as they could the meanings of life and death. This play and joy with ideas being expressed through words is completely absent and, more amazingly, often illegal in our age of the blaming religions of adolescent hypersensitivity and scientism™ with their expansive and ubiquitous restrictions about what can only be morally allowed to be spoken as true. That has been expanding for decades and, perhaps, it has nearly come to a head in the time of the convid.
By your reading of this you have changed our world. We have become more intimate and less isolated. All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.
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🙏 All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
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Music-Poem of the Essay
Today I’ll close with a poem and a song, and I recommend to read the poem out loud, slowly, with the music playing quietly.
A Ritual We Read to Each Other by William Stafford accompanied by your reading and the music of Japurá River by Phillip Glass.
A Ritual We Read to Each Other. If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognise the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we are to consider our words— lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in their morals. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give – yes or no, or maybe— Are to be clear: the darkness around us is deep. “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems © Graywolf Press (slightly edited).
"Our reality is that we who are born into the ‘enlightened’ west have all been subjected to an absolutely horrific and well organised multi-faceted broad spectrum social system of terror and violence against the individual as body, mind and spirit. Things like MK-ULTRA, 9/11, the FDA’s toxic food pyramids, allopathy and convid aren’t accidents of human failure: they express the reasoned ethical consequences of living with the enlightened expression of a deserving and an undeserving morality governed from above."
You nailed it, and I bet Desmet, for one, would agree. As for myself there are at least two other toxic notions that we in the "west" seem to cling to. The first is that we exist here to be happy and two, if we're not happy then some messiah will come to "save" us. I could expound on both points but it all boils down to, "it ain't gonna happen."
A good exploration Guy. I first noticed myself doing the thing where I'd announce my intention by saying the opposite first. My expression was "No disrespect but..." and then I would say something deliberately disrespectful. "I'm not judging you..." is a clear voice that announces the person WILL now be judging. Once I noticed myself do this I was able to see my own disrespect/judgement. "Don't take this the wrong way...." means "I am saying something deliberately unnecessary or cruel and I am absolving myself of the responsibility of how this might affect you". The point I suppose is, that it does not matter how anyone judges or not. The decision we make is whether we wish to engage with their judgement. Once we see that they are wriggling out of their responsibility to themselves then their moral compass means nothing to us either way. I guess that our own work is then catching ourselves in the act of doing the same thing, what moral compass has been so conditioned into us that we are unable to see it clearly until we are 'doing it' to someone else? I like how you have explored all of this and more, it's a good essay, thanks.