I was in a bookstore the other day with my kids. I need more books, myself, like I need more holes in my head. I already have one through which stability and intention leak with dismal regularity
And I saw a book: How to eliminate fear in 7 easy steps. I thought: “How marvelous!!! Just 7 EASY steps. They are not even asking work from me.”
Well, in that spirit I will offer easy morality to you. And you don’t even need to pay the price of a book. All I ask is that you stop thinking for five minutes, then pretend I did what I said I was going to do. Deal?
OK, I’m not bitter, but I do find myself unable to resist a little sarcasm. You know, here and there, even though it is the lowest form of wit. Particularly when I’m drinking egg nog much too early and smoking a good cigar. My marathon is done. All but the shouting. Until the next one, which may come soon, and be followed quickly by another.
I’m at port, though. No storms will get me today.
So anyway, before one part of me interrupted another part of me, this is what I wanted to say: the words Right and Wrong hold no interest for me. Such words, in our current climate, are much too slippery to hold most people’s attention, or do anything useful in any part of our society, which in far to many cases has decided insipidity is the dominant virtue; and having no firm opinions about anything as an individual more or less the de facto equivalent of “right”, and being different in any way for any length of time the only real “wrong”.
Here is my proposed alternative, which may have longer legs: healthy and unhealthy.
How to define healthy? Working in aggregate towards the Four Greats, Compassion, Love, Joy and Tranquility.
Unhealthy? Working in aggregate to thick emotional skins, disconnection, solitude, misery and continual aggravation and disquiet.
Morality, then–itself a word which meant a lot in some places for many centuries in the Western world, and in many ways in all societies for most of conscious human history, even if, say, the Plains Indians never felt the need for a Socrates–becomes a question of emotional health. Of psychology. Of SCIENCE, in some ways, even if we admit first, at the philosophical level, that consciousness precedes experience and that ontologically we have no firm way of claiming that reality is real, that Berkeley was wrong, or that Elon Musk is completely wrong, even if socially inappropriate, in wondering aloud if we are not all in a giant multisensory Virtual Reality, while experiencing said reality as, at that moment, soaking in his hot tub, with people who seem to be listening, or seeming to ignore him as he goes at it again.
I seem to exist. That is a reasonable first supposition. And I need to make decisions to continue to exist. That is a reasonable second supposition. Given these two presuppositions, the logical question is how to organize my mind and action so as to lead to what seem to be the four attainable and worthwhile ideal states.
If we posit “As Above, so Below”, then what is practical in this world, is also desirable everywhere else.
I’ll leave it there for now. I will need a nap soon. I’m slowly undoing several months worth of semi-exhaustion. That work, that physical work, though, was most useful.
Since I rarely shut up when I say I will, I will also comment as a general principle, that it is truly hard to say what is really good for us, and what bad, and that much of what becomes good only becomes so because we choose to USE it that way.
Experience, on this reading, is simply a tool the Cosmos hands us, to build what we like, or tear down what we like. There is a beauty in this freedom. There is a beauty in all freedom, even if this means that some people fuck it up completely, at least over the time horizons we can perceive.
If the movement of the universe is extension and then return–as I vaguely recall the Tao Te Ching teaching–then all the lost souls are scooped up in the end, and brought back to where they belong. The Game completes, and then begins again.
For all I know, I have written this exact post an infinite number of times.
In life, it seems to me, it is good to both strong and loose. The combination creates possibilities, and possibilities are good.
Perhaps I could add a 5th Infinite: the capacity for balance and duration.