Beyond Good And Evil?

Hey! Long time yeah, but I see! I really do! :-D You know better than to think not all words I spill shine in their own right, don't you? ;D

Everything really does go together, and strangest of all, it does so all at once! Thankfully we don't have to experience it! lol Test the truth of this in the relative crucible of your own experience Moon! I can assure you that anything you find that doesn't go together ain't everything!

Ha! It's not my belief that is stopping me seeing religion as mind-expanding! lol

Hmmm... Between Ajay's proffering the absolute, and you touting absolution, I almost feel I have to choose! For fun, I'll take the latter, the lesser of two needles. lol

Vater does it mutter?

 

LOL.......That is wonderful and cheered me up. I can always count on the fact that you do see things very clearly, and that is very comforting to me, always......

 

The terms ‘warrior’ and ‘brave’ are English words. Lakota, for example, has no word for a soldier. I’ve been told that this is true for other Native American languages as well. Today there are warrior societies among tribes, but here too, warrior is an English word. There is identification with one’s tribe, but this identification isn’t quite the same as it is for a modern civilized person. For example, Lakota means people who love the earth (the same is true for Dakota and Nakota in their respective dialects). Many tribes around the world call their tribe, and themselves, a word that simply means person or human.

Consider the Sundance, a very difficult and grueling ceremony that is performed by many of the Plains Indians (including the Lakota and other Sioux Tribes). They say that it is done so that, “the people may live.” You might assume that the ceremony is done so that their tribe may be protected, sustained, and provided for. But the people are Mitakuye Oyase—my relations (a word that is used extensively throughout many ceremonies). Mitakuye Oyase include one’s close family, extended family, one’s tribe, and also all 2-legged people (all humans), also all 4-legged people (4-legged animals), all crawling people (snakes, insects, and the like), all flying people (birds and bats), all swimming people (fish and other swimming creatures), all standing people (trees, plants, and grasses), grandfathers (rocks and stones), water, grandmother earth, the sun and the moon, stars, and everything else----all of creation. They are all related to us----and the dance is so we all may live.

Or consider the most common color scheme to the medicine wheel---the dominant spiritual and tribal symbol: black, white, red, yellow. A very old teaching says that these colors represent the colors of the human race, and that what happens to one color, or one side, affects what happens to all the others, because it is all interconnected as a circle with a criss-cross through its center. How many civilized Nations carry something that represents all humans in their national symbol?

But why must we go along a path of unconsciousness? This is very reductionist and objectivistic to decide that this is the best and only proper path. This is one of the main problems I have with organized religion—this reductionist and overly objectivistic dualism. Everyone who follows an unconscious path is on a superior path (good), while everyone else is on an inferior path (evil).

But what makes an unconscious path so superior? Why should we be so detached from life?

Consider for a moment a tribal group that moves into a region (a planter culture tribal group). There is an indigenous peaceful population in this region and this tribal group recognizes that this group has it together, and there are qualities that you, as a member of this invading tribe, see as superior to your own. But you have plenty of horses, and plenty of iron, so you have superior military might. After taking over these people and assimilating part of their culture as your own, your problem is now how to control them, and stay on top. The first thing you do is introduce a caste system that keeps you on top, and the darker skinned indigenous people on the bottom. This isn’t hard to do, because you come from a culture that maintains a caste system. Now the problem is how to validate the caste system. To do this you use their own beliefs against them, adding the concepts that if they are good citizens and seek an unconscious life, meditating and maintaining dharma, where they shall remain unattached, and serve their lords and higher caste members with a sense of religious duty, then upon death they shall move to a higher caste. Finally, after so many lifetimes they will attain the highest caste whereupon they will be able to seek Nirvana and escape the karmic chains and the misery of their lives. This is an incredibly effective means of control. The later Buddhism may have been a reaction to the poverty and pain this system generated, but it was built off a Hindu precedent, and provided the same means of social control based on detachment and dharma.

Living a conscious life doesn’t mean that one has to reach the violent and dualistic conclusions that you say they do. Indigenous people, for example do not lead an unconscious life, and their ecstatic experiences do not include a repression of the ego.

Religion is an institution and therefore is a socializing structure. Up until Modern times, it was the source of a culture’s unifying truth. From mid to post-planter times on it has validated and perpetuated the values that developed in planter culture communities---dualism, a group ethic, objectivism, and so forth. The religious structure is built around a core of spirituality, and I would argue that spirituality represents a dilution of duality and an increase in harmony, but not the religion itself.

For example, Christianity teaches a duality of Good and Evil, which are manifested through the two great forces, far more powerful than man: God and the Devil. Christianity developed more recently and therefore the focus on harmony is not as evident as what you have with older traditions that still maintained an indigenous sense of harmony. Hinduism is structured around the duality of male and female, with the female representing earth, mortality, and karmic existence and the male representing the heavens, immortality and Nirvana. The Aryan tribes brought in this duality and tried to enforce it upon the indigenous Dravidians and their tantric goddess traditions. Hinduism has an early history of trying to repress tantrism and even putting to death followers who engaged in it. At some point they wised up and assimilated and incorporated the tradition into Hinduism and this allowed for a stronger sense of the sacred feminism. But women are still on the bottom of the caste structure in India today. Buddhism inherited that duality. For example, go into just about any temple in Japan or China and try to find a female priest that has passed on to become a Buddha. Women were the ones who had the power to summon the Gods in Shintoism, in other words, it was a shamaness based tradition, until Buddhism came to Japan, and the male priest became dominant as the Japanese modeled Shinto into a pseudo-religion along the lines of the Buddhist religion. (I treat indigenous belief systems as spirituality rather than religion, as they lack such institutional structures as hierarchy, and other structures. As they gain these structures they kind of go into a pseudo-religious stage before developing into organized or formal religion.)

…or hide behind the label of true self or self knowledge. Again, this is a dualistic division---those who have self-knowledge, and then everyone else. What does it mean to have true self knowledge? In the Eastern sense it means to see oneself as nothing more than part of that cosmic self. This was stressed as a means of social control with the ideology that karmic existence is one of misery. Therefore there is this strong focus to merge back into the cosmic self. But why should that be the only way? (And why should life be miserable?)

My fingers are all a part of me. But I certainly need each one. If suddenly my thumb and forefinger on my left hand became ‘enlightened’ and merged back into me, that would do me no good, especially since I am left handed. The same with humans---our purpose here is to experience life.

What about the individuated true self that goes through reincarnation and is the source of our true power as an individual? That is a higher dimensional self and is where we have true existential freedom (free will) and the ability to do amazing things, it is the authentic self as described in existentialism. What is the cosmic mind, but the universe itself.

No, that is not quite it—you are speaking from the perspective of a civilized person (and I am not using the term civilized as a label of superiority, but rather as a member of such an institutional led social structure). The Lakota, like all indigenous people, see the world in multiplistic terms. The problem was not becoming more dualistic, rather it was falling out of harmony. To a native, everything is alive, and sacred. Even as a human, you are never outside of, or separated from spirit; from the Great Mystery. But you can be out of harmony with it, and then you have troubles, you bring pain to others, and so forth. Let me correct another misconception about indigenous battles---violence was always limited. For example, it was less honorable to kill a man, than to risk one’s life in order to knock him off a horse. That’s how you made points---risking your life against arrows and spears to knock an opponent off his horse with a coup stick---what we refer in English to counting coup. Also, no tribe ever dominated another tribe. There was no genocide, nor did any tribe wipe out another tribe. The Natives had no concept of such terrible warfare until the white man started doing this to them, and they had to fight back in kind. Such things as scalping was introduced by the white man. Even up to the last days of the Indian Wars, many tribes were still saying that settlers can move through their lands as long as they leave them alone and stay away from the sacred areas.

Which is an ironic statement, because it is dualistic in itself and is a label of division.

Yes----this is all very true for an overly objectivistic and dualistic people---basically all civilized people who have carried these post-planter ethics from the dawn of civilization into the Modern Age. When we apply these labels in a dualistic context we are simply objectifying the individual. And even the idea of the individual is divisive because in the dualistic context of, individual VS group, self VS other, and the enlightened individual who knows true self VS the unenlightened humanity, it separates the individual from the objectivistic group (and in the last case the objective group is the universal mind as opposed to those who are separating themselves from it.)

So where does this leave diversity? It is objectified away. It is better to be a soulless unconscious peasant working the fields for the group, because as a member of the group one has a sense of belonging and happiness---bliss is found in the group that works together to plant and harvest for the abundance everyone can have if everyone works together in the proper goodness that results from dharma. In a material sense, isn’t nirvana simply a metaphor for the feasts after the harvest, when all that hard work has paid off? (Meanwhile the upper caste landowner looks over the peasants toiling in his fields, and then spends the afternoon feasting and lovemaking with his wives and concubines.)

ON THE OTHER HAND---if we embrace the subjective in the context of multiplicity, giving meaning to each subjective point in the universe, each individual, then there is value in being Indian, being Muslim, being German, whatever label defines the individual, and it is not divisive. I am not talking about, what I refer to as, Industrial Age individualism, which is really a variation of an elitist group ethic. I am talking about individualism as it is understood in tribal societies, where the individual is like a family member in a family that values uniqueness. Such an individual is not objectively typecast, or determined to be a certain person by someone else. This is why in many tribal societies the individual’s name can change over his lifetime, defined by who he is at a specific time.

In a multiplistic context, it is recognized and respected that there are many paths to the divine, and each is on their own. For some that might be a path of unconsciousness that leads to experience of the cosmic self, for others that might be the conscious experience of spirit manifested in this world, for others it may be a focus on the purely physical as God or the Absolute has no meaning to them. We old hippies understand, the beauty was in the expression of the individual…

Well------it has its own truths…

 

It is expansion of consciousness, leading to no-mind. Not expanding of mind. Mind is the impressions, thoughts and emotions on top of the naked cognizing presence, and they come and go. The mind is dualistic and being stuck in the mind and its psychological creations, generates misery due to its unnatural state.

And it's not just religion, but there are many other factors that lead to no-mind.
Others being adventure sports with an element of danger, watching nature such as beautiful sunsets, exertion beyond the limits of fatigue and exhaustion, precise logical or critical thinking, emotional contentment and so on.

 

I'm fairly sure there is a wolf in the middle of this track, but I could be wrong! :-D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgliP6f8OpY

No-mind! I love mocking the concept! It's part of my divinity (to mock it that is!) The mind is consciousness. Not the "unnatural" cherry on top of your naked cognizing cupcake. I shall have no mind only if I die, master. You too, and everyone else as well.

 

A great post there Wolf.

Just a very general point I'd make is that to me anyway it appears that tribal people like the one's you talk about are happy to live in the world, and a lot of their 'religion' and even 'magic' is about living better in this world. Tribal shamans may allegedly travel on other planes and so on, but a lot of it is about bringing healing or other positive benefits to the people to help in their lives here and now.

Hinduism and Buddhism on the other hand are more concerned with getting out of the world, ending the cycle of reincarnation and either meging in the divine (non-dualism) or going to a higher world where they'll exist close to the divine (dualism, qualified non-dualism). Some schools such as Vaishnavism (worship of Vishnu, usually in the form of Krishna) want to spiriualize the world, but only really as an aid to geting out of it. Sri Aurobindo is about the only Indian teacher I've come across who believed that this world has some purpose, and is capable of being transformed, along with us, into something better. For most Hindu schools of thought, cosmic existence itself is seen as a mistake or an illusion.

Christianity is, or was meant to be before it got twisted up, about both - achieving salvation, but also trying to improve things here through love. Love of course implies duality, one who loves and an object of love.

I know this is a slightly simpllistic analysis, but I'm only trying to indicate the different directions these differing paths take in very general terms.

The idea if a 'true self', a more essential part of what we are, is definitely something I'd go along with. Many different paths have such a concept in one form or another. Even the Indian dualists or qualified non-dualists have something like this.

 

No-mind is awareness or the witnessing dimension, which is non-conceptual.

As per Dogzchen, Awareness or no-mind is the great non-conceptual perfection.

So there is really no concept to mock . Whatever concept there is is just a mental creation , which comes and goes.

‘American’ , ‘atheist’ , ‘republican’, ‘Britisher’ , ‘theist’ , Aryan , Jew , Muslim are just concepts which come and go, though people are ready to die or kill defending these mental creations, or hold tenuously on to it till their death, tragically missing life or reality as it is.

 

The witnessing mind may certainly command the steadfast creative mind . This is whole mind at the ready for action , and
this action will be ethical and trustworthy . Yet literally perfect obedience to that witnessing mind is not expected . No one who
is good will dictate reality ... not to self or others . Anyway , the wilderness of mind-space has protection .

 

You mean Dzogchen. It's funny how thought always comes from and returns to a feeling, as opposed to a misconceived 'universal consciousness' :-D

Or it's not funny. Depends on how you're feeling. Bliss is perfection in my book, and out of it too! To bliss belongs no maintenance...

I've not found the wilderness of the mind to be protected! It's wild! Madness is definitely a possibility. For anyone.

 

Bears are the protectors , and there-in love Sasquatch . And you , too ?

 

call anything naughty and someone will obsess on it. yet harm is still harm.

what is insane, is expecting gratuitous conventionality, to prevent the harm that is caused by hating logic.

 

...or the harm that is caused by loving logic.

 

The aware determine for themselves their own course of action and not what relative good and evil dictates. Hence it is the aware who is the true individualist.


As Krishna states in the Uddhava Gita, “ Evil is seeing relative good and evil and good is going beyond both. “

And as the Sufi sage Jallaluddin Rumi stated, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. “

When actions are judged as right or wrong it's very likely that deeper beliefs are hiding behind the facade of doing the 'right' thing. – Jac o Keeffe

The insight of these sages shows that the dualistic nature of mind cannot perceive truth or reality as it is, and is bound to falsehood and incorrect perception.
And herein lies the answer to the topic of this thread. It is through non-conceptual awareness that one goes beyond the realm of conceptual or relative good and evil.

Nonconceptual awareness is self-knowledge. The wilderness of mind-space has protection, and one can travel to the extreme limits of imagination, as in a pleasant dream, as long as one is anchored on one’s essential nature or natural state of non-conceptual awareness.

However, if there is no anchoring and ignorance of self-knowledge abides, the same dream can become a nightmare one becomes desperate to wake out of.

The relief is similar to that when one wakes up out of a nightmare with a fast beating heart, only to notice that it is just an imaginary dream revolving around one’s psychological or relative likes or dislikes, with the dislike part predominating.

Pleasant dreams or nightmares similarly just illustrates our conceptual and personalised notions of good and evil, likes and dislikes. Nightmares about being eaten by a tiger or leopard is bad news for the psychological person, but a fact of life in the real world. Even tigers and leopards have to hunt and eat food to survive or else they and their children will perish and die. No one is interested in their perspective and personal account of the matter.

 

To be eaten by a dream beast does not hurt a bit . It is likely by the kindness of existence that this also
may be true of reality . Once eaten , a knowledge may proceed and may be shared through-out one's
life whether spoken of or not . A language of wilderness will suffice .

 

We have no choice but to judge as to right and wrong. We live in world where many bad things happen. Take child rape as an example - no amount of philosophical wrangling will ever make it anything but evil. You may reply that such actions wouldn't be carried out by a person in some kind of non dual state - but they might see it happen,it might come to their attention,someone might ask them if it was bad or good, and they'd be forced to judge. To refuse to do so on the grounds that to judge is to harbour 'deeper beliefs' would make their state less than that of one who clearly saw the wrong and did judge.

 

If the mind was inherently dualistic, then indigenous people would see the world in the same blatantly dualistic terms that civilized man does. Or even consider the fact that Judaism and Islam do not have the blatantly dualistic motif of God and Devil that Christianity does--the term, devil, in these other two Abrahamic religions can refer to even a person who stands in the way, but even as a spirit, it does not take on the sinister and powerful persona of the Christian devil. In both cases, these religions emerged in man who was closer to his indigenous roots than the Christian. Hinduism as well, is very old and bears obvious remnants of various indigenous precedents, and so it too is multiplistic in many respects.

I therefore argue that dualism is culturally programmed. We couldn't expect the writers of the Upanishads and other Hindu Scriptures, even the older Rig Veda, to understand this as they themselves were well entrenched into a planter culture that had already centuries earlier developed the instutions of government, religion, and so forth. In other words, the dualism they spoke of had already been programmed into the people. The same is true for any subsequent sages.

If it is programmed, then clearly there is more than one way to break through this dualism. Nietzsche was a part of that process for the West. Rerlativism and Nihilism were also a part of that process as I have already pointed out in this thread. Relativism represents a break down of dualism. For example, truths that were once believed to be universal, became relative.

 

Relative perspectives of good and evil are usually projections of belief systems in the regions where they dominate. What is ‘wrong’ in a certain culture is condoned in other cultures and same goes for the 'right' . And what is right in certain circumstances becomes wrong in others and vice versa. There are many such examples throughout the world running across cultures and nations.

An American may show his thumb for hitching a ride along the roadside in the west, but if he did the same in other cultures, he may get assaulted.

Killing a human being is generally seen as wrong, but when a police man kills an armed robber on the verge of killing someone, he would be doing his duty.

Krishna used a transgender archer called Shikhandi tactically for vanquishing the adversary general Bheesma in battle, while Trump is preparing to ban transgenders in the military in the twentyfirst century.

An Iranian was recently handed the death penalty in Iran recently for holding ‘half-naked’ parties but he would have been left alone in the west.

The Catholics forbid birth control measures in spite of world overpopulation issues that is straining its resources.

The romans used to crucify criminals and those perceived as ‘criminals’ , but these methods would be seen as barbaric now.

The Hindus were conditioned under a belief system that projected a birth-based caste system as superior to that based on merit.

In Ireland abortion is banned due to religious conditioning even if it potentially endangers the life of a mother.

On Bloody Sunday/Bogside massacre, around 28 unarmed Irish civilians were shot dead by british soldiers during a peaceful protest march, some while fleeing and some even when trying to help the wounded, on grounds of dissent and not adhering to the ‘British’ belief system.


German nobel prize winners for physics like Max Planck and Philipp Leonard, Johannes Stark staunchly opposed Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity on the ground that they were ‘Jewish physics’ , which was inferior to ‘Aryan physics’, and hence false.

The famous and acclaimed German philosopher Martin Heidegger enthusiastically backed Hitler and his superficial ideologies, as the conditioning of his nationalist and racial belief systems overrode his capacity for critical thinking and logical deduction of the facts or reality as it is.

Brutal experiments were conducted by highly qualified Nazi scientists on Jewish, Slav and gypsy children on the grounds of conceptual belief systems that they were sub-human and not worthy of consideration as human beings. Nearly 1.5 million of the victims of the holocaust in Europe were children.


Even the relative perspective of good and evil evolves and changes with time under intelligent and rational scrutiny, which is the outcome of a impartial judgement without the influence of belief systems.

It is the belief systems that prevent the proper perception of facts and reality as it is, leading to erroneous perceptions of relative good and evil.

Believing and knowing are two different things altogether, just as beliefs and knowledge/facts are. It is when you don’t know that you succumb to the influence of belief systems, and let them direct your thinking and actions.

 

Of course! And I them. But they don't protect me. Or eat me. They sun themselves! Just like that time when the sun rose after all, bringing me back to myself one desperate dawn... Very helpful that sun! But still, If I fall from the cliffs it's always me that has to catch onto something and drag myself back up! :-D

Oh I'm sure that unless you're dead, being eaten by reality's beasts hurts a bit, notwithstanding the kindness of existence. :-D

Ah, the pleasant dream of protection! But Master, what if something goes wrong with the brain? And that poor old psychological person with the encumbrance of not having no mind! What curse of relativity is preventing them anchoring themselves to the nonconceptual?! lol

No it isn't. The self is not without conception.

 

In set-theory . the mind-space is the totality of all possible awareness . Is this concept useful to your philosophy ? A
philosophy may exclude portions of mind-space just as a belief system might . I like the wilderness of mind-space .
Once upon an Lsd trip I got to see a guardian of it - looked a lot like Thor and who was the only human-shape there .
Crazy , as like the beginning of awareness .

 

In no-mind or non-conceptual awareness, the psychological person disappears as it is but a mental or conceptual creation with associated emotions invested in it.

Labels such as 'Britisher', 'Muslim', 'White', 'Black', 'communist' , 'feminist', 'chauvinist', 'westerner', 'Jew' does not have any independent basis in existence. These are concepts that come and go.

Identification with the mind-body complex and its conceptual associations of nationality, race, religion, ideology, gender, status and so on.

Your right. Poor choice of words on my part.