
Subtitle: On the Other Side of Everything: A Glimpse at Opposites
In
Exciting Announcements last week I promised to begin posting some tools for inquiry I have discovered over the years. This is the first in the "Tools" series of blog posts.
For a very long time I have employed a personal technique in ethical development. Over time the theory behind it has expanded to include much more than the ascertainment of morality. Still, I think it's best to bring you through the process in the same organic way that I discovered it, so let's start with the age old discussion of right and wrong.
Most moral choices are relatively obvious. The problem with this is that they become habitual. You cease to do the right thing
because it is the right thing. It becomes a thoughtless gesture, void of intentionality. The cure for this condition is to occasionally perturb one's own sense of morality. The 'tiny rebellion' is actually against oneself. The anecdote I have always used talking to people regards littering. I believe littering is wrong, so I don't do it. It is a moral choice, but it is vulnerable to the corruption of habit. So, every once in a while, I find myself with a crumpled receipt in my hand, or an empty beverage container, or a severed human thumb, and rather than finding a proper receptacle for disposal I toss it to the earth.
My stomach sinks and my shoulders stiffen. It feels bad to litter. I focus on the sensation, amplify it, roll it around my amygdala (generally considered to be the seat of emotion) such that I can view it from as many angles as possible. Once the feeling has been fully consumed and digested I put it in a neat little box to deposit in my mind's storeroom, clearly labeled and organized alongside similar boxes. My shoulders relax and my breath steadies. I have reminded myself of why I made the moral choice in the first place. I tested it for tractability in the World and affirmed that the choice had always been the correct one. The moral choice returns, strengthened by deliberate intention.
In a greater cultural sense, and to put the psychological effect of this in historical perspective, festivals such as Carnevale exist for precisely this reason. It is a pressure-release valve where base desires can be fulfilled, but it is also a reminder of why the rules existed in the first place. The sobering morning after, civilization's return to 'normalcy' is far more solid, real, and mutually approved than it had been a few days prior on what had been just another drab, habitual morning.
So that's great. I recommend it. But we're only in the foyer of the rabbit hole. Take a moment to appreciate the bunny's sense of composition and color in the interior design. Rabbit rocks the feng shui too. It feels good here. Gathered it all in? Let's tour the rest of the abode.
As this blog frequently contends, all things exist by comparison to their opposites. All things are defined by
everything they are not. (This is one of the fundamental assumptions, the upcoming list of which was also promised in "Exciting Announcements".) What we've actually done with our moral sense is take a look at its opposite such that the definition of the moral itself can come to greater resolution.
We are in no way limited to morals (we are not quarantined to the foyer).
Whenever there is something that you do not know the alternative of, the thing itself becomes invisible. This occurs because without a counter-example for comparison, there is no effective definition. Our culture has forgotten that there is even such a thing as 'other ways to live'. Under this circumstance, participation becomes implicit. You cannot 'opt out' of society. There's nowhere else to go. Our educational system has excluded 'other ways to think and learn'. Gnosis and intuition and meditation and psychedelic drug use are not just absurd, they do not exist, or rather they take no part in 'learning'. There are countless more specific examples, but you get the gist. There are many things about humanity and its culture and the things we live with and the ways we live that are so uniform that the inverses have been lost. Civilization exists by its exclusions. The detritus, the dirt, has become invisible. We generally forget that there even were alternatives. We forget that it is even a thing worthy of a name, it is just the way things are.
One must have the courage to become one's own opposite. If you do not experience your inverse, you will never know the perimeter of your being, which is to say you will not know any part of it because it lacks definition. The only way to approach the edges of things is from both sides.
Likewise, we need, as a collective, to teach humanity to rebel against itself in the same way. This is how we save the world.