Moral incontinence

That phrase popped in my head this morning, listening to a thunderstorm, and pondering the frequent points at which my rhetoric and reality part company. “When all is said and done, more is said than done” certainly applies to me. It’s not that I am base in any fundamental way, so much that I don’t always keep my word when I commit myself to things, and that contravenes my principle of never quitting. It is hypocrisy, in a sense, and only a relatively clear conscience enables me to put it that bluntly.

I mentioned several posts ago that we are clearly capable of splitting our awareness into parts. Each part remains aware, but of only a small part of reality. You cannot simultaneously be split and whole, which is obvious, but still worth stating.

Goodness, then, consists in no small measure of the pursuit of psychological wholeness. If you never fear anything, or avoid anything, within your mind–if you never contravene your own first principles, and if those principles are basically decent ones–then you never “split”.

In this regards, the myth of the Horcruxes from Joanne Rowling’s books is interesting. Voldemort splits himself into seven pieces, each through murder. It is a fundamental belief of mine that we all want the same things–connection, light, love–but that some of us retreat from the light. This can at first be an unwillingness to see parts of ourselves that are less than pleasant, and become, finally, an active rejection of everything that is good and wholesom (note that word), and a rage towards life and order, coupled with a desire to tear down and set fire to all that is.

We understand that. Love, conversely, is the desire to build up and strengthen what is worthwhile in this world. That is all. It is an equally activei energy, and one which goes on forever.