Lindsay has challenged me to get my thoughts more clear on morality so this is a feeble attempt to do so.

Lindsay mentioned an interest in “Modern Moral Theory”.  I’d never heard of it so did a quick Google search which turned up Modern Moral Philosophy.  Not sure if this is what Lindsay is referring to or not, but I was interested in it’s three theses:

1. “It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.”

2. “Concepts of obligation, and duty — moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say — and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.”

3. “The differences between the well‑known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.”

I find Number 2 especially interesting because this is what I’ve been trying to get at - ethical understanding based on rules and principles are no longer beneficial - they have become harmful.

When I was in 6th or 7th grade, I began reading through the Bible sequentially, based on a study book I had gotten somewhere.   When you grow up Protestant, you generally don’t read the Old Testament and I remember being blown away by Genesis.  Two thoughts, likely presented by the study book, gripped me and never let me go.

The first was the idea that there are no “ifs” in God’s world (which is the “real” world).   You don’t get to play the “if only” game because what is, is.  Once you perform an action, it can’t be recalled.  It’s there and you have to work with it as it is - not how you wish it would be.  This fascinated me because adults were forever telling kids that they “shouldn’t” have done whatever it is they did.  If it’s already been done, what’s the purpose of telling kids they shouldn’t have done what it is they did?  It’s an exercise in futility with negative results.   All of this shoulding teaches us to be ashamed of ourselves and so what we end up doing is denying the more ugly side of our natures rather than taking full responsibility for what it is we have put out into the world.    The “shoulds” and “should nots” imply that we should be perfect, but we’re not.  We do stupid, hurtful, things that can’t be taken back.  This doesn’t make us worthless or unlovable.  It simply makes us human.  It  serves no one to beat yourself up over it.   Get over yourself.  There are no “ifs” in God’s world.   You have to act from where it is you are, not from wherever it is you wish you were.

The other thing that fascinated me from the study book was the idea that you are born with an innate ability to know the next appropriate next step.  We all have an internal sense of “right” and “wrong”.   I’d been taught that I couldn’t be trusted and that I had to rely on the authority of parents and other adults to know the difference between right and wrong which was based on their very long list of “shoulds and shouldn’ts.”    But sometimes, it seemed I had a stronger sense of “right and wrong” than the adults in my life.  The idea that I could consult an inner governor rather than be forced to rely on what I was told was right and wrong was a huge relief because I was told that I was “worthless” at home, but at church, I was told that God loved me unconditionally.   That makes perfect sense - if there are no ifs in God’s world, what is there to judge?  What is, is.   Act from where it is you are at, not from wherever it is you wish you were.  You are not there, you are here.  And wherever you go, there you are.

Fast forward several decades. I’m married with kids and am both consciously and unconsciously imposing my own “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” upon my poor darlings.  I know better, but certain situations make me panic.  Growing up, I was constantly called “worthless” and “worthless idiot”.  I have never once said anything even remotely like this to my children.  But every so often, my son feels like he is both.  It seems I passed on a pattern I desperately did not want to pass on!  That’s the problem with focusing on what it is you don’t want for your kids rather than what it is you do want!   What it is you don’t want is based on how you think things should have been.  But things are what they are, not how you wish they were!

I sought out a therapist which helped a ton and it seems my daughter has been spared from the dreaded pattern and my son claims things are much better now.  But he’s already been scarred by that stupid panic based on all of those ridiculous shoulds!  You don’t ever get over that sort of stuff.  The best you can do is transcend it through awareness.

Anyway, while living in California, we attended the LA Diocese’ Religious Education Congress 3 years in a row.  It was absolutely phenomenal.  We met so many amazing people there.  Richard Rohr was especially interesting to me because of his work based on Contemplative Action.  Contemplative Action makes a lot of sense to me.  If we are all endowed with an internal compass, then it makes sense that the only way we can access this compass is through stillness.  It’s one of those wonderful paradoxes - it’s not activity that creates compassionate service, compassionate service is created in stillness.

I think Contemplative Action is a desirable alternative to ethics and morality which have historically been based on “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”.

I’m going to stop there for tonight.  More later…

I’ve been clearing out my e-mails today and came across a question a friend asked me about 2012.  Thought I’d post my response…

I don’t know exactly what you mean by 2012.  Doomsday, the Great Cycle, the Mayan Calendar?

These are my thoughts on the little I know about it.  I’m not into prophecy or providence and think any attempt to say “this is what it means” is a lower form of consciousness and not a higher form.  It’s based on the old patriarchal model.  Like what Christians did to the Jews by turning Jesus into the fulfilment of Old Testament Prophecy - it implies that the meaning existed prior to our interpretation of it.  We are moving beyond that sort of understanding to the realization that we create all the meaning everything has.

I think it’s reasonable that societies have tapped into cosmic & geological patterns.  Plato clearly had some sort of understanding from having read the ancients of his time period that there was a “Great Cycle”.  But he’s our only source for that wisdom so any speculation is just that - speculation.

Seems perfectly plausible to me, too, that  human consciousness and awareness ebbs and flows, like everything else.  If we just look at ourselves as microcosms of the process, we can recognize a similar cycle.  You get to a new level of understanding that won’t allow you to go back to your old understanding.  But once at that new level, it’s like starting all over again.  We come out of the dark into the light, but once we get comfy in the light we cycle back into the dark again.  We never actually arrive in a permanent state of being because no such state exists (because time doesn’t exist).  We are on a constant journey of becoming.  It’s a continual process of overcoming habitual patterns which are always based on fear of the unknown.  We get comfy with our present understanding of ourselves so have to be disoriented from time to time in order to be part of the creation process.

I first learned of the Great Cycle through C.S. Lewis because he uses a lot of Great Cycle mythology in the Narnia series.  So does Tolkien in Lord of the Rings.   Contemporary humanity is, for the most part, primed for the Great Cycle myth thanks to modern day myth makers who were experts on ancient mythology.

I’ve been somewhat involved in Integral Spirituality which makes use of the spiral dynamic model.  Remember Carol Gilligan’s hierarchical model from Psych 101? It’s very similar. Clearly, humanity is about to make a big leap in consciousness levels because so many people are currently functioning at the Second Tier Meme and the number is growing rapidly.  A critical mass could occur any time and we’ll leave the patriarchal First Tier model for something entirely new.  That’s not New Age magic, just plain old psychology.
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Could be the Mayan Calendar predicted this shift.  People make the link because the Mayan calendar starts over again in 2012.  They had a very accurate calendar so it was likely based on some observed pattern.   But to say what that pattern was with absolute certainty would be patriarchal First Tier Model thinking so is problematic.  (The Doomsday model that says something has created meaning for us and we are at its’ mercy rather than the understanding that everything is benign and it is we who give it all the meaning it has.)

There does seem to be some geological support for the Mayan calendar.   I saw a show on NOVA a while back about the flipping of the magnetic poles.  The scientists said it was possible that the Mayans had calculated that pattern.  But it’s been 700,000 years since the last magnetic flip and it doesn’t seem to be something any society has been around long enough to predict with 100% accuracy.  We’re probably going through the flip now (it takes thousands of years to accomplish).  But most don’t think it will be doomsday.  Experiments with birds show that they reorient themselves within days.  Plus, there are lots of species who have survived several of these flips - like sea turtles.

If the calendar does accurately predict some pattern, 2012 will still only mean whatever it is we decide it means.  The meaing does not exist outside our interpretation of it.

My husband came home from Philadelphia tonight. I’m so glad he’s home. He was supposed to be off to Chile tomorrow, but luckily the trip was postponed so we get to have him a little bit longer before he’s off again.  I can’t complain about his travel schedule because he has a job and that’s extremely important these days!

I am really stressed out about the economy. I keep trying to calm myself down but it’s not working. My husband is in IT where layoffs have always been common.   We were warned by a financial consultant that we should take the layoff rate among IT executives into consideration when creating a budget.  IT Execs make good money but their jobs don’t always last that long.   For the entirety of our marriage, I’ve worried about my husband coming home and telling me he’s been laid off. It’s happened 4 times in the course of our marriage, the first time just 4 months into it, and it’s excruciating every time - and usually very ugly.   (The first time was a huge 17,000 person layoff - his whole division was let go; the second time was a sudden bankruptcy - all employees but a skeleton crew were let go; the third time thanks to corruption in the upper ranks; the fourth because a new CFO was hired and he brought with him his good ol’ boys and let go those in the way.)   Somehow, we’ve always managed to land on our feet with our credit unscathed and our marriage intact. But I never, ever feel financially secure.   We were very frugal about the home we purchased, it was way below our qualifying rate and is far more modest than the homes of most of the people who work for my husband.  But even so, I worry about being forced to move out due to financial difficulties.

The silver lining, perhaps, is that it saved us from falling into the American consumerism trap.  Well, we’ve fallen into it, but we are far more frugal than most of our peers and neighbors and have learned to be OK with doing without.  Our kids are OK without a lot, too.

I am 100% certain that I likely would have fallen into the trap big time had we not had been through so many financial struggles. I’m a product of Plano, Texas - one of the most materialistic, cosmopolitan suburbs in the U.S.   According to the U.S. Census, it’s the richest city in the U.S.  I was way more spoiled than my kids are, but far less spoiled than most of my friends were because my parents were older - they were of the generation just before the Baby Boomer generation and were far more likely to save their money than spend it.

So even when I was in high school, Plano’s materialism seriously disturbed me.   I craved something deeper so turned to the church.   In the end, it didn’t work for me. But it took me a long time to realize it wasn’t working and I think it is completely reasonable for wealthy Americans to seek out conservative Christianity for “depth”.   It promises our egoes a Panacea because it promises security.  Authentic depth can only promise the unknown.

And yeah! I know! You don’t enter into authentic depth by being afraid of the economy. I get it. At least intellectually.   I’m a long way from enlightenment.  I am constantly playing out the scene where my husband comes home and tells me he has lost his job - again. But this time, it will be way worse because so many people are losing their jobs that there will be no jobs to be had.

My fear is driven, in large part, by the horror stories I grew up with about my mother being born during the Great Depression - about how they had to search for milk money in the sofas for the babies; how they lived entirely on pinto beans for months on end (the Depression lasted about 10 years!).  A cup of sugar was a major luxury.    And there are far worse stories from others. Some people had to give their children up to people who could afford to take care of them. Could you imagine? Others lost their children to starvation, malnutrition and lack of decent health care. Hoards of displaced people were moved into Hoovervilles. And - there is the Grapes of Wrath story - a woman who can’t keep her baby alive but manages to save the life of a starving elderly man by nursing him with her baby’s milk. I cry just thinking about that story! So many of the stories are excruciating and have haunted me all my life.

My grandparents lived in the Dust Bowl so lived in the most dramatically hit area of the Great Depression (the area Steinbeck wrote about in Grapes of Wrath). They must have done far better than most because they didn’t have to move to find work. They somehow managed to maintain their business, even if they had to do it by eating pinto beans.

But then again, you hear alternative stories. I just heard one the other day from an older UU minister. She said her family came together during the Great Depression because lots of family members moved into one home and in addition, they took on boarders. They became a close knit community and her parents claimed life was richer for it than when they had had more money.

Perhaps my fear is simply a perpetuation of my mother’s fear based on that of my grandparents? And I’m probably subconsciously passing it on to my kids, too.

I started blogging in 2005, about a month after Bush was re-elected.  A huge divide had been created in the country after 9/11.  The divide became wider after we went to war with Iraq and even wider after Bush’s re-election.   I knew our country had been through these sorts of divides before, but I had never personally experienced it.

I think I felt the divide especially strong because I live in an extremely Red state and my little neighborhood was likewise extremely Red.   77% of the citizens considered themselves Conservative Christian Republicans.  After 9/11, anyone who didn’t agree with Bush was both “ungodly” and “unpatriotic”.

I started blogging not so much to work through politics, but to work through my religion that had become so heavily tied to American politics.    You don’t question God or country in these parts and I was questioning both which was starting to make me feel a bit cray!   Thank God for the blogging community!!

Things have obviously changed a lot over the years.   It’s such relief to know that the majority of Americans wanted Obama for President.  I can’t even begin to say what a relief that is.  I didn’t realize how nervous I had been about this election until he was voted into office.  I cried, and cried, and cried.

I don’t think he is a providential President, nor do I think he thinks of himself in that way.  (I no longer think there is any such thing.)  I also don’t think he’s going to walk in and work miracles.  We’ve got a mess and it’s going to take a lot of patience to work it all out.   But I do think his election to the Presidency is a sign that America is becoming more balanced again.

Of course, I still live in an extremely red state.    McCain won here by over 1 million votes (popular vote).   Thankfully, I live just outside of a little dot of blue in a sea of red; and a lot of those people who used to live in that dot of blue have been moving into our area which is making it somewhat purple. 

My son said that students were yelling “Obama” up and down the halls at school, yesterday.   We had a long talk last night.  For half of their lives, Bush has been President.  He says that a lot of kids have a very strong sense of hoplessness.   They worry about living in a violent society.  They worry about people dying unnecessarily and worry that they may one day be asked to die for their country unnecessarily.  They worry about the environment in the hands of people who don’t seem to care about it’s future.  They worry about life having meaning for them.  Obama has given them hope that life can be meaningful.

Obama’s election has renewed my faith in America!

One of my biggest pet peaves is utopianism. Fundamentalist Christianity is utopianistic. Fundamentalist Islam is untopianistic. And there are plenty of fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalist ACIMers, too, whose focus is about creating a sort of utopia.

Utopianists believe that the world should meet with their particular vision, which of course they hold to be visionary. If they can just get everyone to conform to this vision, then the world will finally be worthwhile, a nice place to live, peaceful, loving, etc. (”If everyone would just listen to me, the world could be perfect…”)

The secular economic idea of onward and upward is based on this sort of utopianistic vision and has been at the expense of many. It’s greedy. Perhaps there is a connection between utopianism and narcissism?

Studies show that children of overly narcissistic parents (typically those who have been abandoned, neglected, or overly-protected) tend to be very empathic. From early infancy, they learned to please their parents by becoming adept at reading their parent’s motivation. (Parent looks unpleased, child adapts immediately in order to be pleasing and even becomes adept at anticipating the behavior of the parent.) These kids likewise become extremely perceptive in terms of the motivation of others which is a potential benefit of their upbringing if used appropriately. But many form an inappropriate attachment to these perceptions. Just as their parents had expected them to conform to their desires, they expect others to conform to theirs. They are often very influential because they place so much faith in their perceptions that they easily convince others who lack this confidence to place their faith in those perceptions, too.

It’s reasonable enough. Because they were unhappy with their childhood, they seek to create in their adulthood something better. They often have very little tolerance for what they perceive to be flaws in others because these flaws contradict their ideology. They see it as their job to point out these flaws so that they can be corrected. If you choose not to follow their advice, they establish a “holier than thou” attitude and are likely to make belittling comments.

This isn’t just a fundamentalist Christian thing. It shows up all over the place! The problem isn’t religion, it’s utopian idealism. Utopianists have total faith in their utopianistic vision and no faith whatsoever in humanity beyond getting humanity to conform to their utopianistic vision.

In terms of Christianity, Jesus was proclaiming the good news, not a utopia. Jesus never said that we could create a perfect world. His good news was that Heaven is here now. There is nothing we need do but realize it.

I keep playing with this because it’s so subtle.

To try to create a perfect world is important. But this is entirely different than saying we should create a perfect world. Ideas of perfection vary from person to person and culture to culture so whose should is the right should? When we choose one should, we have to reject another and it becomes important to convert people to our should. Utopianism does not realize Heaven is here now. It thinks that there is a perfection to be realized “out there” at some future date when everyone finally “gets it”. But gets what, exactly? Which should is it that we should get?

The following is primarily a personal musing and attempt to pull together a bunch of what I’ve been thinking about the past year. It’s both messy and sketchy…

Tribal man didn’t seek meaning. He thought the transcendent existed in nature so the focus was on unity with nature. There was no outer focus so no need for meaning. The focus was on the experience of being alive. So how is it modern man has come to ask questions about the value of life? Why are there so many suicides and so many depressed individuals. What are the stories we have told ourselves that have taken us from the desire to be alive to wondering if life has any worth at all?

When tribal lifestyles gave way to civilized cities, ethics became necessary. It’s not that tribal people weren’t moral, they just didn’t need ethical systems to handle their issues because the issues were handled according to tribal traditions. But when the cities were developed, there were all kinds of different tribes of people living and working closely together who had drastically different ways of dealing with moral issues. It was logical transition that supreme beings/high gods became important for the same reason kingships developed. There had to be a way to coordinate all of the disparate tribes and their tribal laws. So you end up with Brahma, Zeus, Re. In early Judaism, even God (El/Yahweh) had tribal gods under Him. (According to many scholars, it wasn’t until 500 BCE that the Jewish God said that there were to be no other gods besides God.)

If you read Genesis, you will notice two creation stories. The first is in Genesis 1 where the creator God is called Elohim/El so we know this is a very early creation story. It basically says God created everything, all of nature and man and woman and it was good. The second story is in Genesis 2 and the creator God is called Yahweh Elohim and says man was formed from the dust of the earth and that Eve was formed from Adams Rib. This story likewise contains the story of the Garden of Eden.

El/Elohim was the ancient high god of the Canannites (Abraham’s God and that of the Northern Tribes). Yahweh (also known as Jehovah) was the warrior God of the Southern Tribes. These two Gods were combined to make the creator God of the second Genesis Story in the 4th Century BCE when the Jewish priests had returned home from Babylonian exile. They discovered that their fellow Jews had given up their religion in the absence of the priests and were practicing Babylonian polytheism. The Jewish priests knew a reform was necessary if they were to save Judaism so came up with the Omnipotent, Omniscient God that says “You shall have no other Gods before me.” They merge the God of the northern tribes with that of the southern tribes and call it Yahweh-Elohim. This is the only theistic god in all of the major world mythologies that claims to have dominance over everything in the universe and gave the Semitics the right to say their God was superior to that of all others. It is likely that if the Jews had not done this, Judaism would have been wiped out. So it was successful although there have been some horrible repercussions that have gone along with this idea! And it is this God that creates Eden and sends Adam and Eve away from Eden for eating the apple.

The idea of the One Forbidden Act is a common mythological theme that shows up all over the world and it typically involves a snake as initiator of the eating a forbidden fruit. The god knows man will take a bite of the fruit and when the fruit is eaten, man becomes the initiator of his own life. The snake, which has the ability to shed his skin, is used as initiator because this represents being able to throw off the past and move on. The snake is typically viewed as positive, not negative.

The Babylonians had a similar myth of the One Forbidden Act in the Enuma Elish. The Babylonian myth was fairly optimistic. The world was created perfect although it became less perfect over time. Ningishzida is a serpant-god and friend of mankind who helps a human called Adapa search for his immortality.

Instead of this myth being retold in the Jewish texts as the Babylonians told it, the story got turned on it’s head as a rejection of the Babylonian myth to show the might of Yahweh-Elohim. In the Jewish text, the serpent is not a friend of man helping him find immortality but a trickster who talks Eve into eating the forbidden apple. For this trick, Yahweh-Elohim punishes the serpent to crawl on his belly and eat dust all the days of his life and puts enmity between the woman and her offspring and the serpent. He punishes Eve with pain in childbirth and subjects her to the rule of her husband. He punishes Adam to a life of toil until death. (You have to admit, it was a pretty ingenious political move.)

Although the Jewish myth has turned the optimistic Babylonian myth into a far more pessimistic one (which is no wonder, the Jews had been conquered by the Babylonians), nature (which includes man) is not yet viewed as evil, bad, or fallen. Meaning is not yet experienced as some sort of ultimate truth that exists “out there”. But that thinking is on it’s way and takes a firm hold about 800 years later when the myth is reinterpreted in terms of Greek rationalism by Augustine.

Christianity was hugely diverse in it’s beginnings and was spreading like wildfire. By the mid 300s CE, Constantine had managed to gain control of the entire Roman Empire and he did not tolerate diversity. In order to rule effectively, he insisted that there be only one Empire, one Emperor, One Religion, One Church, and One Teaching within that Church. He made use of a group that had been successfully organizing according to the Roman governmental hierarchy structure since the 100s. This was the beginnings of Catholicism, before it split into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox. It was another quite ingenious political move.

A few decades later, a philosopher named Augustine who lived in present day Algiers, had converted to Christianity and was re-interpreting the the Bible in terms of Platonism. He formulates the concepts of the Original Sin which takes the story of Adam and Eve and turns the serpent (who had been a friend of man in Babylonian mythology and a trickster in Jewish mythology) into an evil seducer. This is where we see the first major attempt to negate the affirmation of life for life’s sake. Man is born into sin and condemned to the natural world which is corrupt and has to be corrected. He is punished to a life of toil and in order to rise above this futility, must enter into the spiritual City of God which is the Catholic Church. (The City of God is distinguished from the Material City of Man.) This is the first time there was any suggestion that the material and the spiritual are not interconnected. What is material is viewed as evil and can only be given value through obedience to what is spiritual (the Church). The experience of being alive is no longer valued. What is valued is doing the right things in order to achieve a spiritual life which is understood as separate from material life. Augustine thought that even babies who had never done anything to be sinful were born sinful. Prior to this idea, Christians weren’t baptised until they were on their death bed.

Augustine’s idea of Original Sin became extremely popular after Rome’s fall when Christian faith was badly shaken. And it marked the the beginning of the the Medieval World View which managed to turn multilingual, multicultural, multi-religious peoples of Europe into a single people by teaching that every natural impulse is sinful unless you have been baptized into the Church. And parents, you have to get those babies baptised into the church, too. Everyone, no matter how small or seemingly innocent, must be baptised into the Church lest they burn in Hell. Creating a common religion for everyone and a common language (Latin) was the glue that allowed European people to think of themselves as a single culture that could be defined against other cultures. You have to admit, it’s another ingenious political move.

By the 17th Century, Protestantism got a hold of the idea of Original Sin and added to it the idea of total depravity. We are totally alienated from God by our nature and can only be saved by divine Grace.

Around the same time, Descartes created a metaphysics that is largely based on a secularization of Augustinian ideas and this introduced the Enlightenment. He came up with the view that the body is nothing more than a machine that is operated by the mind. As with Original Sin, the body and it’s sensual desires are viewed as trivial and that which is non-physical (the mind) all important. He contemplates why a baby would be born into Original Sin and decides it is because when a baby is born, he doesn’t have rational abilities and is completely driven by passions. Rationalism is everything and the passions and desires of the body are nothing but distractions. To seek the experience of being alive would be a distraction to our ability to seek knowledge and justification through reason.

The Existentialists, of course, were anti-Descartes turning taking his “I think therefore I am” and showing how it isn’t tenable - instead existence precedes essence. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky all thought the Enlightenment (which began with Descartes) was coming to and end and when it did, it would be cataclysmic. According to Nietzsche, we had become meaning junkies and our addiction would eventually lead us to nihilism. He said the time was on it’s way that man would no longer tolerate being a master or slave, even to reason. Those not yet strong enough to realize that it is man that creates meaning would create nihilistic meaning. Camus asks the question in 1940: in a meaningless world, should we commit suicide and he says this is the most urgent of philosophical questions. While he goes back to an early tribal mindset to show how we can make our lives meaningful in a meaningless world, Nietzsche suggests we quit focusing upon finding meaning and place our focus instead on constant overcoming which requires the realization that we are always redefining ourselves so will always have definitions to overcome.

In 2008, Camus’ question remains urgent and nihilism seems to be the name of the game which is ironic since the Existentialists, Buddhists, and others who had similar ideas were labeled nihilistic because their ideas were misunderstood. (Meaning junkies do not want to give up their precious meaning!!)

Joseph Campbell asks: What’s the meaning of a flower? Nothing. It’s just there. That’s it. Your own meaning is that you are there. We are so engaged in doing things to achieve outer value that we forget the inner value – the rapture. What we seek isn’t meaning. What we really seek is the experience of being alive.

I am writing this as a post because I had written a response to BookCrazy which got posted before I had a chance to review it. When I tried to edit it and add an additional comment the edits and the additional comment failed to go through. So I’ll see if it works as a post…

I’ll state the additional comment first - Even eight years ago, I would very likely have been a staunch defender of Camus’ philosophy. So if you read through my posts on Camus, you will notice a lot of conflicted ideas. Try to be compassionate about my conflicted comments because it is only recently that I have started to see things otherwise.

And the main comment - Does it seem I have an aversion to the question of suicide? I’ll have to think about that. I think of suicide as simply another possibility and a necessary possibility to entertain if on the “spiritual quest”.

I toyed with suicide heavily from the time I was about 15 (when one of my dearest friends committed suicide) until my mid-twenties.

I still recognize it as a valid possibility - one of many. But at the time my friend killed himself at 15, I felt that he had committed some sort of triumph - that he had more courage than the rest of us who were all completely stupid for not committing suicide. I think it was just part of the collective mindset at the time. Or at least part of the collective mindset of my wealthy suburban high school - at least those of us who were not fundamentalist Christians. (Solomon pointed out that the only people who have time to contemplate the philosophical value of suicide are those who have the luxury to do so.)

The only possible response to that mindset is exactly what Camus came up with. You have to believe in your being as “center” and that you are somehow victimized by your “fate” and that you have the ability to thumb your nose at it.

I don’t have a problem with Camus asking the question or thinking it was the most important philosophical question of his time. Perhaps it was. I think society grows up just like individuals grow up and this was the adolescent stage of imperial Western development. It was extremely important at the time. But I don’t agree that suicide is the most important philosophical question unless you are still stuck within that mindset. If you are, then it is extremely important. Stay with it until you are able to move on. Based on Camus’ later writings, had he been allowed to live longer, I earnestly think he would have moved on. He was in his 20s when he wrote the Myth of Sisyphus. That’s when most of us are entertaining ideas of suicide. (From BookCrazy’s blog entries, I have no sense that BookCrazy is stuck in that mindset or else I wouldn’t even be having this conversation. I deal with issues of suicide much differently with my 16 year old son where I think it would make much more sense to offer Camus’ understanding than my own.)

We experience ourselves at the center of our universe, but a whole lot of us have had the experience of our unity with it which upsets that center. What if we aren’t at the center and have no fate? What if we are collectively creating our so-called “fate” by influencing our evolution moment to moment and perceived reality is just that - perceived?

Then the question is silly. Sure you could kill yourself. But what, exactly, is it that you are killing if you fully understand that there is no “self”? All you are killing is an ego, a set of patterns which don’t exist to be killed. The only way suicide is a potential solution is if we understand ourselves as “being” at the center of the universe. So the only way it could possibly be “the most important philosophical question” is if we believe ourselves to be at the center. For those who believe themselves to be at the center - then yes. It is the most important philosophical question that could possibly be asked. But hopefully once the question is asked, it helps take us to a new level of consciousness and doesn’t just leave us stuck in our self-centeredness thumbing our nose at our so-called fate.

As for the theological discussion - I’d really have to know your understanding of Christianity to know how to approach this. There is an entire study called Christology. The idea of Christ is not cut and dry. If you say, “Christ suffered for humanity”, this means something entirely different to one Christian than to another. How BookCrazy (a non-Christian) understands it would be something altogether different and probably isn’t at all how Lindsay understands it. How Lindsay understands it is very closely related to how I understand it, but not quite the same.

Christ, for me, is humanity’s potential, not a single individual who once lived named Jesus. If one human being suffers (in Christ), then that potential suffers. Therefore Christ suffers for (and with) humanity. (Jesus’ suffering is low Christology, Christ’s suffering is high Christology. But even how Christ is understood within High Christology can be extremely varied. Roman Catholic High Christology refers to Jesus’ divinity. I can understand Christ in that way with some major mental gymnastics, but I don’t think it has to be understood in that way because I don’t think Jesus even had to have physically existed to understand High Christology.)

Whatever the understanding of Christ, the focus of Christianity is not on pain and suffering. It is on redemption and resurrection. We die to one way of being so that we can enter into new ways of being. We die to the “self”. The only way to do this is “through” suffering. But the point isn’t suffering - it’s resurrection. (And by resurrection - I mean resurrection in this life - not the conservative Christian idea that we are resurrected after death into a place called heaven. I mean resurrection in the here and now.) What dies is our understanding of ourselves as a “self” that exists at the center of the universe.

Dukkha perhaps means “this is sad, dude”, but surely that is it’s most shallow connotation. Absurd also means, “that’s ridiculous, dude”. (I can visualize both statements being expressed with a shaking of the head and the exclamation of Way! at the end with the meaning being the same.)

The reason we bear pain “for others” is because “others” are in actuality ourselves. There is no-”self”. The self is an illusion. It’s just an ego, a set of patterns. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have “being”. It’s an identity/center from which we experience our being. But the “self” is not the center of existence and it is not our being.

I’d have to go back and read the Gita again. I read several versions of it about 7 years ago in a study of Ancient texts with a group of atheistic UUers (quite fascinating!) The main thing I remember getting from it at the time was that there are no answers and that it is important to act from where it is you are at because trying to see all of reality is too overwhelming. I can definitely see where it would have some similarities to Camus, but the Gita still points to the “no-self” and the “no-I” which I think is way beyond what Camus is dealing with.

The feel good mentality to me is always based on creating religions, beliefs, etc. about ourselves that allow us to see ourselves as “good” and others as “bad”. Many new age beliefs, fundamentalist Christianity, some mainstream Christianity, much of American Buddhism etc., I think, are an attempt to do this. But if you get into the heart of Christianity or Buddhism, both require that we “suffer with others” because both recognize that there is no “self” that is other. What is “bad” in others exists within us, too and we have to be willing to look at this dark side of ourselves in order to “bear the pain of others”. That is not about feeling good. That is about being willing to see “the other” as a mirror so we can get at the reality of ourselves. If the “other” is suffering, it is we who suffer! To think otherwise is a denial of suffering. That is what I think was so fantastic about the quote that this conversation is in response to…

“Your Holiness,” someone asked, “your Buddhist tradition has so wonderful a way of overcoming suffering. What do you have to say to the Christian tradition that seems to be preoccupied with pain?” With his compassionate smile the Dalai Lama gave an answer that went straight to the common ground of the two traditions: “Suffering,” he said, “is not overcome by leaving pain behind. Suffering is overcome by bearing pain for the sake of others.” (Christ and Bodhisattva embraced at that moment. Across seven hundred years of history I could hear Meister Eckhart laughing with joy. Or was it God’s eternal laughter?) Brother David Steindl-Rast, 1995, in the Forward to Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Nothing

I’m still working my way through my ragged copy of John Finley’s Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God through Awareness of the True Self.

I don’t remember what it is I’ve said about this book, if anything. When I was in RCIA intending to become Catholic, I had a male sponsor who had converted from Buddhism to Catholicism. That I even had a male sponsor was completely bizarre - I was the first female in the history of the church to be sponsored by a male. That he had been a Buddhist was even more bizarre. He had owned a Vegetarian restaurant in Berkeley before he met his Catholic wife, became a lawyer and moved to Dallas. And then he ended up my sponsor. Little did he know the effect he’d have on my spirituality. I’d love to get in touch with him now and see what he’s up to. But I can’t seem to locate him.

He had given me a research paper he had written on Job and a book called Merton’s Palace of Nowhere by James Finley. It’s likely that I returned his research paper on Job without having looked at it. But I studied Merton’s Palace of Nowhere with ferocity. My copy is so incredibly ragged the pages are falling out!

I hadn’t read it in years but got interested in Merton after a friend mentioned she was going to see a film on him. I decided to re-read a few works and am just a few pages shy of being finished with James Finley’s book. It really is amazing. I see ACIM in it all over the place! But at the same time, I realized toward the end of the book, my mind was saying “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Not because it doesn’t say anything or isn’t spiritually deep. Symbolically, it is incredibly deep. But I realize it simply doesn’t fit my experience.

My son came home from school today telling me that one of his 15 year old friends confided to him that she is pregnant. Males always talk about solitude - and Merton claimed you could only discover God “in solitude”. But is this a reality for females? A male can get a female pregnant and continue to experience himself as a solitary entity. But if a woman has ever carried a child, even if she has voluntarily aborted that child, it’s extremely difficult for her to think of herself as a solitary entity. That’s a male thing, not a female thing. We are constructed to bear children. We do not experience “solitary” in the same way men do.

Buddha left his wife and child behind to seek out enlightenment. St. Augustine got a woman pregnant and then left them both behind to join a monastery, only later to demand that the child live with him at the monastery. Can you imagine how horrible that must have been for the woman? She was forced to give her child away to the monastery. The reason men have historically been able to lead solitary lives is because women are the backbone of society. Our experience of and orientation to the world is far different than that of a male’s.

I am beginning to feel very strongly that the female spiritual experience is entirely different than that of the male spiritual experience. Maybe that is what has felt so “off” to me.

I read almost everything I had intended to read as far as the French Existentialists go. The only books I have left on my list are Sartre, A Life by Annie Cohen-Solal and The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir. It is very unlikely I’ll get around to reading Sartre, A Life. I was a little iffy about purchasing the book in the first place but got it for only $4.00 so it seemed worth the risk. I do still plan to read The Ethics of Ambiguity.

After having read the early existentialists (Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) whom I found to be extremely inspiring, I have to say the French existentialists did not seem to “measure up”. They were writing in more difficult times, but then again, Dostoevsky’s life was definitely no picnic! Working through what bothered me about Sisyphus has left me with an understanding that is just bubbling under the surface but I can’t quite put it into words yet. The problem is the idea that humanity is born into guilt - we westerners don’t even realize we carry that thinking with us. My struggles with Camus’s absurd hero helped me have a better appreciating for the Buddhist concept of “Nothingness” but I’ll have to work through this a little more before I can fully verbalize it. (I’m looking forward to Novak’s book on Nietzsche and Buddhism.)

Solomon said that Camus’s idea of The Myth of Sisyphus was humanity at it’s low ebb and I can’t help but agree. If the best we can do is find happiness in our revolt, then does that mean we never get to grow up beyond the adolescent rebellious stage? That we never get to think of ourselves as “at home in the world”? What if we were to let go of that stubborn idea that man doesn’t belong in the world (which came about with the fallen man theory - the Christian God was meant to save us from our fallen state by promising us a world beyond this one) and at last decide that we can be at home in this world? (But more on that at a later date when I can better verbalize it.)

Sartre was a little less depressing than Camus, but it still felt that he didn’t fully believe in what he was proposing. You’d read one book and he’d say one thing. Read another and he would have decided that idea had to be tweaked and sometimes fully rejected. Fair enough - we get older and what seemed important when we were young is no longer important when we are older. And granted, both Camus and Sartre were trying to come to terms with some heavy issues that hadn’t been fully addressed in the west prior to their attempts to do so. They did manage to capture the attitude of their age and Camus claimed that was all he was ever trying to do - that he wasn’t trying to provide an answer to the attitude. Sartre, perhaps, wanted to provide an answer, but his answers kept changing. (Or maybe they were just ambiguous?)

I think mostly what these men were able to do was to put into words what it was everyone was feeling but were having a very difficult time acknowledging. They helped a generation come to terms with their sense of alienation from God and from humanity. And also, according to Solomon, Sartre provided a path to an entirely different way of understanding the emotions even though he didn’t take the path near as far as it needed to go. But he did at least get it started which helped steer the normal discussion of emotions in a different direction.

I’m still very interested in reading a book by a female French existentialist so will read Simone de Beauvoir. But I can’t help it. I’m very glad to close this chapter of my French Existentialist studies. I found it to be far more depressing than inspiring no matter how much Sartre and Camus claimed they loved life. Their love of life just seemed far too forced to me. After all, how difficult is it to love and be loved? Perhaps it is true that “hell is other people”. But then it must be equally true that heaven is other people. It all depends on how we want to look at it.

I have been thinking about changing the tone of this blog to something a little more personal and less academic for quite a while but have found it difficult to do. I’ve tried creating a separate blog (Vox, Blogger, Typepad), but keeping up with two blogs is not something I have the time to do - one is enough!  And if I have to choose between one, then Typepad and Wordpress.com are the only two ready made blogs I think worth considering. Vox seems more like a sophisticated MySpace or LiveJournal. And Blogger is extremely cumbersome, even with all of the new changes they’ve made.

It’s a total toss up between Typepad and Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com is free, Typepad isn’t. Typepad offers more templates, widget flexibility and allows javascript which provides for a lot of flexibility. WordPress.com doesn’t allow javascript but has much better Spam control than Typepad, far better Blog Stat reporting, much better template navigation and archive retrieval, and it also has a simple search bar that doesn’t require you go off site when searching on a WordPress blog. (Blogger has that, too. Why doesn’t Typepad or Vox???)

To be honest, I think it might be the search bar feature that is the decision breaker for me, silly as that sounds. I’m constantly searching my archives and don’t want to have to do so on Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Rollyo or elsewhere!   I like having the search results being a part of my site.  I also like that Wordpress.com condenses the searches to excerpts rather than posting the entire post. The navigational abilities on Wordpress.com are far better than those on Typepad.   And I also like the ability to have subcategories under my categories and subcategories under my subcategories - although I don’t think I’ve actually taken it that far.   The ability to have sub-pages under the pages is also cool.  As far as I know, Typepad doesn’t offer all of this sub-category, sub-page ability.   I could easily live without all of the sub-category, sub-page capabilities.  They wouldn’t be a deal breaker for me.  But I do make use of them on WordPress.

I wish WordPress.com had more template options and could make it easy to post book covers with links on the side bars. Maybe movies and music, too? (Just being able to make use of the LibraryThing widget would solve the basic issue for me!)

Anyway, I’m still here at WordPress even though I said I’d be elsewhere. I imported all of the posts I had made at Typepad in the hopes that would be enough to help me make the shift toward a more personal blog.

Not sure if I’ll actually be able to make the shift or not, but I certainly appreciate your patience!