Those few of you who have seen me online know that I have many “available” messages including “Heretic”, “Portable Pagan” (my other computer had me as simply “Pagan”), “Sacralicious”, “2nd person of the Divine Trinity”, and the above, among others less incendiary. I had this particular one up and a friend of mine, who is particularly fond of verbal tennis as a way of starting conversations, asked me in disbelief if I really was (his SN is Pantheist, so the lines appeared to be clearly drawn). We had a brief conversation about the matter before he had to go. But his questions rarely end there, in my mind, and I was left with a debate against myself: what do I believe?
I recently saw the Dark Crystal again, a movie I remember watching daily when I was a kid, a movie which I can now barely make my way through. And looking back on it, my parents would perhaps have done better to let me watch something else (the other movie I begged to watch again and again was Return of the Jedi, not much better as we shall see below).
Both of these have a fundamentally dualist world-view. And I don’t recall ever really thinking of them as anything but metaphors. The Skeksis were not evil, they simply were; and the Mystics were not perfect. There had to be a Darth Vader for every Luke Skywalker. A fine rat, as Heinlein says, deserves a fine cat. And Jen (to continue mixing my literary & cinematic metaphors) had the best of both worlds. He was neither Skeksis nor Mystic. He walked the razor edge between them. And as such, was the most complete (with or without Kira); the most perfect.
Years later I learned Aristotelian Ethics. These were not the first Ethics I was formally taught (right and wrong at my parent’s knees don’t count here), but they were the first Ethics that made sense to me on a fundamental level. The gist of them is: no act carries any moral weight without taking into account the actor, the manner, the situation, and every other conceivable variable. “Eating” is a morally neutral act; starvation (having already a moral tint to it, it should be rightly called eating-too-little) is immoral; gluttony (similarly, eating-too-much) is also immoral. Therefore, the person contemplating the act of eating should take into account how much to eat, when the person last ate, when the person will eat again, &c. to be sure to act morally. (This concept gets stickier when you get into more emotional morally neutral acts like “killing” and “sexual congress” but we’ll leave it in the elementary stages for our purposes.) Once again, this duality “clicked” in my head. The moral person is the one who walks the razor between one moral extreme and another. Aristotle was teaching that we should all be Jen.
And so I believe that I have a body and I have a soul. And the particular combination of body and soul that I know as “me” is unique and somewhere between angel (for want of a better word) and animal. When I learned the physical concept of energy never being created or destroyed, it suddenly made sense on a metaphysical level. The molecules in my body have been all over this world (universe?) before becoming incorporated (lit. “en-bodied”) into my person. Most recently, the water and minerals in that orange I just ate are no longer orange; they are now brain and fingers and hair follicles. Why not the same for my soul? It made absolutely no sense to me that everyone should have a unique soul that gets used only for them (what a waste! I guess I’ve always been a Green…). And the image of what I will call the all-soul came to my mind. It’s like an ocean made up of soul; and for each person who needs a soul, a cup is taken from the ocean; for each person who dies, the cup is emptied back in. No cup is ever the same but it certainly contains water that was used in a cup previously.
Aside: Which is when I discovered that I believed in reincarnation. But again, not that I’ve been Cleopatra in a prior life, but Cleopatra’s soul may very well be a part of the soul that is currently in my custody.
I believe that I am a unique combination of body and soul; such that never was nor ever will be again. I further believe that there are certain activities that neither body nor soul can fully appreciate on their own. Each is fundamentally dependent on the other for experiences in this world. And so, when I die, and my soul goes back into that “ocean in the sky”, it will know more than when it came down in the first place. And, my body will be worm food. And the consciousness that I recognize as “me” will never be again.
What this means for my day-to-day operations is that I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe that I’ll be judged by anyone other than my conscience (and, you know, friends’ and family’s guilt). I don’t believe that my soul will stop the cycle if I reach enlightenment (but it may help the all-soul in the long run), but that my soul will certainly learn a lot if I do. I don’t believe that there is anything I can do in this life that will keep my body from decaying. But I do believe that we’re all in this together. I do believe that you are my brother, you are my sister, in the fundamental way that beings who share so much, both physically and metaphysically, are related. But I also believe that this earth we live on should be protected. This is as much heaven as the all-soul is; this is where we’re going when we die. And we’re not ever going away. We may be incinerated when our sun goes nova in a few billion years; but we won’t ever really disappear. And so I believe that I owe just as much to this world: the people in it now, the people who will be in it some day, and the people who used to be in it; as anyone can believe that they owe to a deity.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Jonathan // Dec 14, 2006 at 6:49 am
This is great stuff Miko - Morality, eternal destiny, wow.
I’ve struggled greatly with the concept of morality, and I’ve come to some interesting (tentative) conclusions not too far away from where you’ve landed. What makes a morally neutral act immoral or moral? Take eating for example? Overeating is bad, under-eating is bad, and I guess normal eating is moral good (not sure)? After tossing around a ton of these scenarios, housed in different situations, I began to see a pattern - a common denominator - that the motivation behind actions it what makes them good or bad. In many cases behind bad moral actions, the motivation appeared to be selfishness. But then I realized that selfishness in some cases is good - which I eventually called self-care motivations, such as combing your hair, brushing your teeth, eating, etc. So in looking further into it, it appeared to me that this motivation towards bad moral behavior had its roots in something far darker - a destructive nature(either self-destructive or externally destructive). I further determined that this nature is not me, but an influence on my every action, and to further complicate matters, it is learned - you learn more and more selfish/self-destructive motivations as you grow older. The worse news is that this nature is my default. If I don’t actively seek to do good, I will default to my selfish side without thinking. If I stop thinking at all, it will be the sole influence (rather than my conscious) for action in a mentally “entropic” state. I have already written extensively on this so I can understand it better, but recently I’ve been thinking of drawing a diagram of the different forces within a person’s inner self. I’m a visual designer, I guess I just can’t help it!
Our inner nature, or our ’spirit’ is a complex thing.
I could comment more about the eternal life thing, but I’m tired and just getting over surgery… maybe tomorrow.
2 Miko // Dec 14, 2006 at 8:45 am
Well, heal well. Drink lots of nettle infusion (tastes like vomit but is good for blood/healing/veins).
For Aristotle, motivation is one of many factors taken into account when deciding what the morally right thing to do is. One of the scenarios we frequently went back to in our class was a fight breaking out on a train (we were in Europe, so this was an event that we could conceivably find ourselves caught up in). Do you step in to break it up? Do you take one side or the other? Do you run and get help? Do you sneak out to make sure they don’t see you and run as far as possible? All of these actions could be the right choice, depending on the person involved. If the person involved were me, one of the three first ones might be the correct action. If the person involved had never had any kind of self-defense training, the final two might be the best course.
I am interested in your thoughts about eternal life, tho. When you feel up to it.
3 John // Dec 14, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Jonathan, I wish you a speedy recovery as well!
Miko, point of clarification: was Aristotle saying that we should navigate between Darth Vader (pretty evil) and Luke Skywalker (generally noble), or simply avoid extremes (sort of like what the Buddha taught about moderation)?
Another Buddhist idea: all things are interconnected, and any person’s action in a given circumstance may be the result of an endless web/chain of influences. To take an example that many might instantly brand as evil, that 17-year-old Palestinian boy might not have blown himself up on a bus full of non-combatants if he hadn’t been born in Palestine (what if mom and dad had emigrated to Jordan?), watched his family’s home get bulldozed, encountered a Hamas recruiter, etc., etc. What sort of decisions might we take if we were born a male Palestinian youth? I don’t say this to justify his actions, but to reduce the distance and to question the total immorality that might be inscribed on his act. I read recently that Thich Nhat Hanh thought about Jesus’ forgiveness of the centurions nailing him to the cross in these terms.
4 Kirk // Dec 14, 2006 at 10:42 pm
I am rusty on my philosophy but I think of Aristotle as a very black and whi8te kind of guy. And not in the fun yin yang way. All the greek thinkers put such an emphasis on truth and reason. I think Jen from the dark crystal is much more eastern. And the skikskes look like the olsen twins.
I was raised with a very “to every decision there is a right choice” stance. I think moral relativism gets a bad rap because it is so often used an excuse for bad behavior. But wouldn’t the most senstive morality be the one that adheres only to itself?
I hope you are right about the after life. Yours sounds nice.
5 Miko // Dec 15, 2006 at 8:48 am
John–Aristotle said to walk the “middle road” (very eastern, that) between extremes. The skekis vs. mystics was a better analogy than Vader vs. Skywalker, sorry :-p
Kirk–I found Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to be very grey. As in, there is black and there is white and rarely is either the correct choice. It was all a bunch of sliders, like on a video game. His reason why people are (or should be) ethical is where I had difficulties. Eudaimonia sounds too much like heaven and I don’t think people should be good for that selfish of a reason.
I agree, tho, with your assessment of moral relativism. Moral relativism does not teach that any act is morally right, simply that every act, when being analyzed for moral right-ness, should be seen in the context it was made.
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