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I Will Rebuild All The Materials That Make You
I work on my life like other people work on crossword puzzles. I lay in bed Sunday mornings with a cup of coffee and a pair of bifocals and try to rearrange the letters to make it all fit together. It never does really, but it seems important that I at least keep trying. People play games because they are fun, after all, right? What about when they stop being fun?
Chess taught me something the other day. My dad, I think, was in the Chess Club in high school. I would play with him periodically growing up, but I never “got” the game. I was always looking at it wrong. I think I used to try to hold on too hard to how the pieces used to be on the board. Fact is, it couldn’t matter less how they were once arranged. Past configurations are irrelevant and focusing on them will defeat you sooner than any opponent. Your only option is to let go of what was, accept the current configuration and analyze forward for what options now present themselves to you. And you have to do this at every moment: intentional amnesia. Make it a habit. Forget what you were. Go with what you came back as. There’s no possibility in the past.
I just listened to the Dirty Three album “What You Love, You Are.” I am now listening to the first disc of the Prince greatest hits compilation. There is a chess board sitting next to me, poised to play. Every time I ask someone at the house if they want to play, they say, “Not right now.” I understand.
I am letting go of drinking, I think. I once needed it, or once believed that I did. I no longer do, or I no longer believe it. And more importantly it’s a game which is no longer fun. Last night proved that to me. Not that I needed any further proof than these past few months. I should have known after that bottle of whiskey. Actually, I should have known before that. Actually, I did. But I’m just a jerk and like to have things forcibly proven to me beyond the shadow of a doubt. I could say that it’s a Capricorn attribute, but I’m trying not to lean on thinking like that so much anymore. It’s helpful for what it is, but it’s also very much not helpful.
Speaking of which, I’m also trying to give up on looking for “signs.” Or that’s not quite true. Signs are fine. It’s just that making decisions according to how your interpret signs. That’s where you run into problems. Signs and synchronicities, their purpose is to show you that things do not work the way you think they do. That things are much better and more interesting than you could ever force them to be. Signs are like stop signs. They say, Here! Look at this! Or maybe they are more like yellow yield signs. They say: yield to a higher power, to the higher order. You will not fall. For there’s nowhere to fall.
I am trying my damndest to stay on the straight and narrow. It’s the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to do: to live only according to what you know is true, no matter if noone else can see it or appreciate it. But it’s not about following pointless rules like stopping at red lights even when there are no other cars around for miles. It’s not morality for the sake of morality. It’s about being perfectly clear, consistent and honest in an effort to become whole, complete unto yourself, and of one mind and heart. No more distractions. No more games. No more signs. Just life. Just moving forward with each new configuration of pieces and letting what has come and gone stay gone. And if all your pieces get captured, just start over. When you forgive someone, it doesn’t mean necessarily that they did anything wrong. It means that you are letting go of your belief that they did because it is not worth holding onto now that the pieces on the board have changed and that it wasn’t worth holding onto back when things were different either.
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July 31st, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Is it possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons?
July 31st, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Happens all the time. Just ask Gollum.
July 31st, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I’m not sure if I buy that
July 31st, 2007 at 9:30 pm
If you can do the wrong thing for the right reasons why can’t you do the right thing for the wrong reasons? Sometimes you have to be tricked into doing the right thing because the right thing is usually illogical and emotional and you would talk yourself out of doing it.
July 31st, 2007 at 9:52 pm
That’s like saying: If X, then not X.
Seems like inherent in this question is how do you identify what the criteria are which make a reason behind some particular action “right.”
This seems to keep happening to me in my life, which is why I came to this question in the first place.
The other criteria we are missing here is: how can we tell when some action is, in fact, the “right thing” to do. Do we base it on emotional satisfaction with the outcome? If so: on an immediate, short term or long term basis?
July 31st, 2007 at 10:01 pm
“Doing the RIGHT thing” just sounds like morality.
You can be moral for the wrong reasons I think. According to Nietzsche all the reasons for being moral are wrong.
I feel a lot more fulfilled in life when I have some kind of spirituality, though.
Hedonism alone doesn’t do it for me.
As far as sexual morality goes, I’ve always seen the logic in it. And people really like to castigate Chriatians for it. But no one ever disuaded me from the logic behind it. Moslems and Hindus have the same morality as Fundamentalist Christians more or less, so basically 2/3 rds of the globe think fucking around outside of marriage is wrong.
But, what Robert Anton Wilson/Leary refers to as the fourth circuit is designed to create parents. And face it, having kids out of wedlock and stringing together all these half siblings and dragging them along through serial monogamy, is not ideal child rearing.
Its seems like even with birth control widely available, many people would do well to be a bit more sexually repressed, or more responsible or somthing.
So there is a reason for morality, other types too, not related to sex. There is a brutality at the core of it though. All morality starts with brutal authoritarian regimes.
Most of the stuff not related to sex comes from getting people to pay their debts.
And people imposing morality on themselves, are inwardly brutal. But I’d like to think there is a positive type of overflowing spirituality that results in “fruits of the Spirit” that results in “moral” behavior, but from a different modus operandi.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:09 pm
You probably know those verses. You know Love fulfills the law and so forth. Fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace etc. If you love, you won’t steal or if you are scared of getting your hand chopped off you won’t either, but its a different locus of control operating.
I have changed a lot in the last week or so. I was trying to motivate myself through achieving power, but its unfulfilling. I had a highly moral Christian phase, and interim phase where I rejected Chrtistianity, explored other faiths, rejected them and headed into nihlism, but now I feel like I am entering a third phase.
Really reading “Cosmogony and Cosmology” by PKD was a big turn around.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Well how do you tell if something is a moral decision or not?
A totally unsupportable statement
I think I see what you mean possibly. If people are doing things *for the sake of being moral* then they are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Brutality simply becomes the conflict between intention and action. That is, “If it wasn’t for it being morally wrong, I would do such and such.”
There were signs on the highway in Michigan which read something like: “$7500 fine and 10 years jail for killing a highway worker.” Is this sign really required in today’s society? Are people really that unclear about what is moral? Are people only not killing each other because they would get fined for it?
Why do they think that? Is it all strictly pragmatic?
July 31st, 2007 at 10:19 pm
I guess you can say there is a morality of this world and a morality not of this world.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:22 pm
That’s what I’m trying to outline here, essentially.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
You could say that but would it really be useful to? That doesn’t allow us to drill down to the roots of where morality springs from within human behavior, expectations and honesty
July 31st, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Well, There are people alive today, living in the stone age. Not many but some.
Like on Sentinel island. They don’t know where baby’s come from. They are unaware that sex cases babies. The Austraial aborigines were like this, too. It takes animal husbandry to learn that. But they are communists and don’t have a concept of private property so it works out fine within the tribe. They all raise the kids.
I am not one of these foot note blog commenters. I say all kinds of unsupportable shit. If I gave you 50 links, from other people agreeing with me does that make it supportable?
These are just my ideas. But from what I have read the origin of morality is brutal. I mean just read the Old testamant and count all the capital offenses. Things have changed, but we are reaping the benefits of a lot of the early brutality.
But anyway, one thing that led me aeway from primitivism is the Pre/trans fallacy inherent in it.
I don’t think all wild hunter gatherers were really advanced, its more like they were innocent, but without agriculture, hierarchy, advanced symbolic culture, they didn’t have a lot of the problems we have.
But I think we need to transcend this stuff. Transcending it we will be in some ways going back to out roots.
But mainly morality is talking eccentric people and making them concentric in order to fit geometrically into society. Make pegs round to fit them in the whole.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Morality is a sollution to the limits of living in fleshly bodies in space time. The spirit infinite.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:40 pm
I’d highly recommend “geneology of morals” by Nietzsche.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:43 pm
In mideival times people were drawn and quartered, burned, flayed alive. It was all to make people moral. It was to make them remember.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Sexual morality is a bridge between biology and culture. It connects sexuality into the frame work of the culture. So yes its toally pragmatic. But its also unconscious. I mean people have these inihibitions without consciously always knowing why.
Personally i don’t think its simply programming its intuition too. I mean for example, you have a biological urge to get laid, you aren’t thinking, “Gee I wish I could be a Dad.” But then part of you might say “I feel guilty about having a one night stand with that girl’
The guilt is cognitive dissonance. You need a bigger framework to put the sex in. animals don’t. So the institution of marriage, chastity, connects your sexuality with the culture. It makes you into a parent. Society needs to reproduce. Having an urge to fuck isn’t inherently connected with child rearing. not for humans with extended development time.
But it in a way its still brutal because peoples sexual imprinting doesn’t always match what the society has chosen to be best.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:34 pm
This sounds like a cop out but I don’t we are capable of knowing the full extent of the consequences of our actions. It’s the Butterfly Effect and it may be impossible to predict the outcome of any action. All we can do is stumble like blind men in a forest. I don’t know why but for some reason this doesn’t bother me. When we act we are gambling just as much as if we went to a casino (or investing). The emotional consequences are revealed to us later. Until then we act on our fantasy of how we would like things to turn out.
Long story but at the retirement party of a coworker it was revealed to me that I had been assigned the role of servant to this woman. I knew that I was playing a small part in helping her keep her job/insurance/dignity etc. longer than she would normally be able to (by doing some of her work) but when I wrestled with why I still worked at this job she never came up. I was so clueless but then it became so clear.
I was mugged once. I had three bags of garbage and the thief used that to pick me instead of a sidewalk full of other people. He followed me to the alley, threw me to the ground and stole my purse. Before I left my apartment I knew I felt rushed but it didn’t seem like anything out of normal. Looking back I see I was being set in motion like a figure on a moveable clock. When I left I walked passed a pregnant woman with one child walking besides her and one in a stroller, my neighbor getting out of her car with her two children on the busy side of the street and an older woman who had trouble moving. If I had left a minute later and seen one of these vurlnerable people harmed I probably would have taken stock of the situation and said to myself ‘I could’ve taken the hit, why them?’ Easier said than done.
I was never able to fully grasp the points you made when you talked about time going backwards, not forwards like we think. I’m pretty sure that if you reviewed your studies in this area you would get some answers.
I can pretend to know the answers but that’s just a trick to get me to move a certain way. But, I suspect the answer is pure metaphysics.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:56 pm
You are more a product of your memes then you will ever know. Morality implies that
a) you have say more then 50% of a conscious choice in these matters
AND
b) that there is an arbitrary scorekeeper (god / karma) that determines if an action is moral.
I can tell you that there is no scorekeeper. Bad people get away with doing bad things, good people get away with doing bad things. Its all what your own programming allows you to get away with and not conflict with the other programs that make up the parralel processing unit that is your consciousness…
There, i’ve said it….
August 1st, 2007 at 2:01 am
Hi, been a while.
I guess you don’t need reason to be able to do the right thing… reason can cloud the judgement. Tacitus (I think): ‘Reason and judgement are the qualities of a leader’, implying /reason and judgement are different things/.
What you ’should do’ and what’s the ‘right thing’ are not quite the same…
August 1st, 2007 at 10:38 am
Doing something because you believe it’s the right thing for you to do is the best, highest morality–and if that seems too self-centered, there’s the old illustration of the flight instructions on board a plane: If the cabin depressurizes, put your own mask on first before you try to help anyone else. Helping yourself is the first step toward helping anyone else.
I’ll likewise paraphrase Hemingway as my best definition of morality: If you do something and feel bad about doing it, it’s immoral. You’re your own gauge of morality, the only one that counts, and being true to yourself is much harder (and much more rewarding) than following anyone else’s constructs.
I gave up drinking 16 months ago after 15 years of very serious boozing. But while I spent 15 years thinking about quitting, it only took me one bad night–a night like a million before it, but different, too–to wake up the next day and know I was done. I’ve not even sipped since then, even hanging out with friends while they do. O’Douls: the hardest thing about drinking it is getting up the nerve to order one.
I wish you all the luck in finding your morality and then finding contentment there.
PS–Quitting drinking hasn’t solved all my problems, not by a long damn shot. But it has made all of my problems solvable.
Thanks for your post.
August 1st, 2007 at 11:01 am
You will buy whatever you sell yourself. How you invest your belief is another matter entirely.
August 1st, 2007 at 3:32 pm
psychopathic runaway train of thought.
August 1st, 2007 at 4:09 pm
It takes a tremendous amount of blood, sweat and tears to arrive at the zone where you know which part of you is feeling bad or good about something and whether or not that part of you is authentic. Hemingway’s quote is simplistic drivel.
August 1st, 2007 at 4:19 pm
So what? Even if that’s true, it’s inherently meaningless since we’ll never know. Even if I’m totally wrong for doing so, I’d rather live as though I were responsible not only for my own actions, but for my own emotional states.
I don’t think morality implies that at all. It’s the same rationale as the $7500 fine for killing a highway worker. Morality implies that you are responsible for not only your actions, but their consequences - both for you and for others they impact. God and karma needn’t have anything to do with that.
I should have used the word “intentions” instead of “reasons.” I was being less precise than I could have been.
I like that but it’s only too easy to lie to yourself about when and why you feel bad. Too many potential rationalizations and justifications are opened by that.
That’s totally awesome. Thank you for it! Really helps consolidate something for me. It’s not that drinking is my problem, but that drinking is used to pave over my problems and numb myself from having to deal with them directly.
I’m beginning to lean towards the “agreements” model with regard to the basis of right action.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Don_Miguel_Ruiz
I also think that the whole “right action” as opposed to morality distinction is an important one in allowing people to get over modern moral conceptions which are completely cloudy.
The Buddha had it down without resorting to an external scorekeeper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_action
The first four elements of the Noble Eightfold Path:
1. Right view
2. Right intention
3. Right speech
4. Right action
Right action, it seems, can’t come from wrong intention. It is both a logical and physical impossibility. I have found this to be borne out in the laboratory of my everyday life. Truth must be the basis of all things:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/07/01/cause-effect-truth-exchange/
Which I know people are going to whine and bitch about because noone believes in objective Truth anymore. But I have seen it and I know it or at least knew it once and I struggle to maintain and further deepen my relationship with it.
August 1st, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Yes, it does. How can people get to that “zone”? Practical suggestions will of course be the most helpful here.
August 1st, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Not wanting to put my words in the Buddhas mouth so to speak, but I think that you are onto something here Tim.
What is Morality ? It is just a set of programs instilled in you by others to get you to do what they want, OR as an altruistic gesture by other (parents, friends) in order to get you to do things that they know are good for you.
The Buddha saw through all of this, broke all of his existing programing (enlightenment) and told people what really mattered. I would suggest that Buddhism in its pure form, without all of the quasi pagan/catholic/folk religion stuff that has been lumped with it by other cultures, is a science of breaking pre conditioned programming and memetic structures.
The external scorekeeper is just a representation of these conflicting programs inside your mental space.
You just have to ask yourself, how much of what you think “the right thing to do” is actually the right thing for others. And how much is actually the right thing for yourself?
Shit that is confusing….
August 1st, 2007 at 6:38 pm
No, it’s really not. The purpose of morality, from what I am beginning to see, is: inner and outer peace by harmonizing intentions with action.
Gospel of Thomas is all about this, as is Jesus in general. Seems to me to be the core of all religions:
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html
When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.
… Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.
… Don’t lie, and don’t do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven.
… When you go into any region and walk about in the countryside, when people take you in, eat what they serve you and heal the sick among them.
… Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].”
etc etc
Bob Marley has a better response to this than I could craft:
http://www.lyricsondemand.com/b/bobmarleylyrics/passitonlyrics.html
I think Douglas Rushkoff says almost the same thing somewhere else: that the path to eternal life is to *completely* identify with other people
25. Jesus said, “Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.”
August 1st, 2007 at 6:56 pm
I do somewhat agree with you. The path to happiness is to identify and devote yourself to a cause other then yourself.
Its a core of religions because it is an innate human need. I think that we are hardwired as social creatures to not be able to alone make ourselves happy (by only focusing on ourselves). We need to have our happiness reflected back at us from others to really feel it.
Myself in the past, and others recently have shown that intense focus on the self and the self only is the quick path to crazy land (the bad crazy, not the good one)
August 1st, 2007 at 7:04 pm
I’m not talking about happiness. I’m talking about harmony. Happiness is a temporary emotional state. When you exist in harmony with yourself and others happiness and sadness may be equally beautiful.
August 1st, 2007 at 7:21 pm
So are we talking about harmony as in..
The place that you fit in with others that works best.
OR
Working and knowing of the plan that includes yourself and others dictated by an external source.
Like the Taoist notion of being one with the flow of the universe.
OR
Your definition is…
August 1st, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Those are the same thing:
WHAT WORKS BEST
BEST POSSIBLE
That’s not *my* definition though, that’s why it’s in red…
August 1st, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Yeah, I think those two lines in red nail it.
August 1st, 2007 at 8:51 pm
….cuase, there a countless things you can do but….what would work best and what would be the best possible?
August 1st, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Hey Tim,
Here is a gift from God I felt compelled to share with you. Its funny, I just confirmed that I have diabetes, Zac is detoxing from sugar, you are giving up alcahol….
So here is this guy, want morality? This guy is trying to make everyone in the world healthy for free!
He went on this quest and became the healthiest man alive, and then his brain started functioning exponentially better.
It really seems connected to “What works best, What is the best possible”
It seems like this Guys motto. Eating healthy prevents disease, frees up money for better things, for society.
Check him out:
Mike Adams
August 1st, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Ok I screwed up that link. Here it is:
Health Ranger