I have proposed as a potential moral heuristic–which really is to say a life heuristic, since even if you don’t have a conscious morality you have an habitual morality, because we all make decisions based on what makes sense to us, and conforms to our assumptions about what is possible and appropriate–that we seek to approach, to move towards, the Four Greats: Peace, Joy, Love and Compassion.
Thinking about my cathartic experience yesterday, it occurs to me that part of growing in peace is destroying all fixed emotional structures which contain indignation, regret, outrage, horror, and really ANY conditioned, spontaneous, uncontrollable reaction to anything that might happen outside that we cannot control.
To feel infinite peace, on a certain level you would need to be able to watch a baby being murdered and feel nothing. And I think, of course, that it helps knowing there is a heaven, and for that matter a hell.
But you would need to feel peace knowing there IS a hell. Previous generations, and for that matter many tens of millions of people living today, were and are seemingly perfectly content knowing that souls will be tortured forever. This is odd, don’t you think, in a religion founded on Love?
Maybe our universal system of divine law is perfectly just. Maybe everyone there made the same awful decisions over and over and over and over. Maybe they were given a thousand lifetimes and fucked every single one of them up, with cruelty, malice, violence and sadism.
But in a sense even they are still God’s children, are they not? And does any decent human being really want to see even people who deserve it to suffer?
I wrote perhaps ten years ago about an experience of hell I had, and I would not wish that on anyone. Not Adolph Hitler. Not Tamerlane. Not Anthony Fauci. (you may think I’m being tongue in cheek there, but I’m really not; this is a mass murder event. He knows what the fuck he’s doing, and has since the start).
So on some level, to some degree, the spiritual aspirant has to accept the fact of infinite crimes. He can feel love and compassion and seek to alleviate that pain, but to feel peace he needs to ACCEPT them, and not be bothered by them.
In a deep sense, I think this was a core message of the Bhagavad Gita, which was inserted into the Mahabharata, and which used its characters, but which simply used those names and situations to speak a specific message, one of the main elements of which was that you need to accept in principle violating every one of your most deeply held principles, and accepting in advance and at the time that others inevitably will as well.
As happens often, there is a certain parallelism between high and low here, between the highest, most noble spiritual aspirations, and between that group of practices we might lump under Satanism, such as actual Satanism, and the Thuggee cult in India. There are those who aim up, and those who aim down.
But in both cases, crimes must be accepted. Perhaps in their dim way they feel that. Certainly people like Aleister Crowley preach of “liberation” and freedom. But he died a broken down heroin addict, didn’t he? I looked up his biography just now. That may be a slight exaggeration, but it certainly did not seem like a happy death, or that he was mourned by many.
Liberation is liberation from fear. It is not liberation, particularly, from regret, although yes I am arguing that too.
People who are pushed into dark things are not free. Anything compulsive, or which seeks to release latent tensions and hostilities, cannot in the end be moving towards freedom. It is living in a jail, and merely opening the window occasionally, and calling that “freedom”. It’s not. It’s delusion. Delusion can feel like freedom, but you cannot drive an imaginary car very far.
To put this succinctly: if you think about it, how could you ever know peace, knowing there is suffering everywhere, and that you cannot fix it easily or quickly, or most likely at ALL–since it serves some purpose in the Grand Scheme–if you don’t have the ability to accept it? You don’t have to accept it all the time fully, but you need to accept it SOME of the time fully, and the movement to infinite peace is accepting ALL of it ALL the time fully.
And ideas help with this. For example, the idea that nothing is an accident AND that the universe is benign help. This is the essence of what Krishna taught Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, as he was about to kill people he would have loved in any other context and at any other time.