What is Morality?

I read an article by Michael Valpy in today's "Globe and Mail" that got me thinking about what people mean when they say the word "morality". Specifically, the article makes the assertion that "conservatives are more likely to embrace a world view that seeks certainty and abhors ambiguity, and hold the belief that morality is more important than knowledge". This statement really grabbed me by the lapels and shook me up. Why is there a contradiction between "morality" and "ambiguity"? Even more to the point, why is there a contradiction between "morality" and "knowledge"?

When I think about "morality", it seems to me that there are several underlying issues that are intrinsically involved in being a moral person. One of which is being "truthful". And by this, I don't mean in the sense of being honour-bound to never tell a lie---such as in the old, moronic "situational ethic" argument about whether it would be right to lie to the Gestapo about whether or not you know where the Jewish family is hidden. What I mean instead, is that a "moral" person should be willing to follow the "truth" where it leads---no matter how much difficulty that might cause the individual in question.

An example in point comes from a documentary movie I once saw about the abolition of slavery. Early on in that struggle a person brought a suit to an English court about whether or not it was legal to have slaves in England. (A fellow from the colonies had brought along a personal slave servant, and he decided to "jump ship" in England.) I recall the judge made reference to a legal maxim of "Fiat justitia ruat caelum" ("Let justice be done though the heaven's fall".) The idea was that even though there would be a great deal of anger from slave owners about their loss of "property", the law said that there should be no slavery in England. (As I recall, the reasoning was based on a medieval case against slavery where the judge had written that "the air England is too sweet to allow a slave to breath it".)

How would it have been "moral" for the judge to not follow the case law and agree that the person arguing against slavery was right? It would have been a lot easier to simply agree with the other side and not alienate the wealthy and powerful. But would it have been moral?

If we agree that intellectual honesty is part of the foundation underpinning morality, then surely "knowledge" is not only not existing in opposition to morality, it would seem to be an essential element of its composition. Moreover, if knowledge is important, then it seems that ambiguity should also be an intrinsic element of morality. It is a truism that "the more we know, the less we think we know". But if this is the case, then surely ambiguity follows on the tail of knowledge. And if morality consists of following the truth wherever it leads us, then the moral path must also lead us into the valley of ambiguity more than once in a while.

This is a very practical issue because it strikes me that the conservative people I meet are people who are anything but moral in their behaviour and outlook. Indeed, I would argue that they are often the most immoral people I have ever met. I say that because they seem to almost invariably refuse to believe that "truth" has any sort of intrinsic merit. Instead, their morality is based on submission to some sort of authority----governmental, scriptural, ecclesiastic, etc. The "Bible tells me so", "my country right or wrong", etc is good enough for them. Lay out a reasoned argument that shows that they shouldn't be following their particular chosen authority, and they invariably derail the discussion in one way or another.

I had an experience of this a few years back when I was involved in an email discussion with a Jesuit priest. He said he honestly couldn't understand why people would be opposed to children being given a Catholic education. I wrote back that with all due respect the image that many people have of the Catholic church is pedophilia, homophobia, misogyny and intellectual dishonesty. For these people, giving children a Catholic education is a form of child abuse. The priest didn't respond, he simply cut off the conversation. We have met since then, but he never, ever makes any reference to the conversation---it's as if it never took place.

I would suggest that this is not only a cowardly thing to do, it is also profoundly immoral.

Another incident teased out a further complexity for me.

Years ago the mayor of my city got caught cold copying a large amounts of an official speech. Lots of my friends were very angry about this, but her supporters seemed to honestly not understand what all the fuss was about. It strikes me that the reason why people with a university education made such a fuss was because it is probably the absolute worse crime (short of fudging research) which an educated person can commit. Lots of students fool around sexually, take drugs, etc, but what will get you booted from school no ifs or buts, is plagiarism. I can remember in grad school that the professors were absolutely ruthless about this and would expel undergrads without any mercy for copying. And, if you think about it, this makes sense. All scholarship is based on a degree of trust. No authority could possibly fact check every single piece of research that gets done. Universities simply have to be able to trust their scholars and scientists.

This raises one last point. Is morality authoritative or consensual?

Conservatives would argue that all morality comes from some sort of authority: the Bible, the constitution, the Pope, etc. But scientific truth seems to be based on the development of a consensus. A person puts forward a theory and performs an experiment, then writes it up in a paper. The paper then goes in front of a jury of experts in the field who decide whether or not it is worth publishing. Then it gets published and enters the discussion that constantly goes on between members of the field. People try to recreate the experiment, design others to disprove it. Eventually, a majority of people in the field decide to either discard it as a failed model, or accept it and then try to build further on it.

In retrospect this different attitude explains the way my friend the Jesuit responded to my honest attempt to engage him about the public view of Catholic education. I tried to engage him in the consensus-building dialectic of intellectual discussion. Instead, all he saw was an attack on the authority that he had built his life around.

I've had friends say that this is the problem with religion, that it is authority based instead of being experientially or consensus-based. I agree, it seems to me right now that this is the key problem with regard to existing dominant religions. But I don't think that they need to be. I recall reading somewhere that the Buddha said that the religion he was founding was bound to die out and be replaced as it got old, became corrupted and ceased to serve society. I also have read a quote that said that he felt no one should follow his teachings on authority---instead, he counselled people to be a "lamp onto themselves". I like to think that Daoism is similarly based on personal experience and consensus between free individuals instead of slavishly following some authoritative text or teacher. (I know that Buddhism and other non-authoritarian religions often fall far short of this idea and that there are non-authoritarian streams in Western spirituality, but I am only making generalizations to illustrate different tendencies.)

Excuses and Apologies

I haven't been making many posts lately. Primarily, this is for two reasons.

About a year ago, one of you readers reached out and contacted me. A fellow Daoist, she started reading my blog and found a kindred spirit that she never knew existed. We struck up a conversation, which led to a visit, which led to a proposal. Now we are engaged----even though we live in different countries. As you might imagine, this relationship eats up a little of my time.

Secondly, I've hired a company to gut and rebuild the kitchen of my home. This too is taking up a lot of my time. It has also made writing a very difficult activity, as I usually write on my kitchen table. Also, it is very hard to write when a group of strange men are making loud noises and creating clouds of dust all around you.

Hopefully I will be able to get back into my "groove" soon. Writing is a spiritual practice for me and I deeply feel its loss.

Life and Death, Autonomy and the Dao

I recently went to hear a lecture by Gwynne Dyer about climate change. Basically, his message came down to the idea that it is technically and economically feasible for the human race to take the measures necessary to prevent runaway global warming, but it is beyond our political institutions. As a result, we will not be able to prevent CO2 levels from reaching the point where we start getting feedback effects that will result in more warming, which will trigger more feedback effects, which will trigger more warming, and so on.

The end point as Dyer sees it, would be a total human population in the millions clustered around the Arctic Ocean. Everyone else will be dead either by famine or war or disease within one or two hundred years.

Dyer doesn't think that this is inevitable, however, because he thinks that there are "on the shelf" geo-engineering solutions that will allow the human race the "breathing room" necessary to develop solutions to the greenhouse problem. These include things like spraying the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide, creating fleets of wind-powered robot ships that spray water into the air, building giant space mirrors to shade earth, etc. The idea is that these techno-fixes would reflect enough sunlight that they would keep the planet from heating up to a dangerous level.

What I'm interested about with regard to all of this is my personal reaction to Gwynne's dire predictions. I have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy in the battle to prevent global climate change. Primarily, this was based on a real terror of what could happen. As it happens around me, I've had to think deeply about the nature of that fear.

Oddly enough, I've come to the conclusion that it is fundamentally misplaced.

It seems horrible to consider the vast majority of the human race dying off in some sort of environmental cataclysm. But the fact of the matter is that every single person who has been born has died in one way or another. And most of the ways that people do die are pretty bad. Ultimately, what real difference is there between starving to death in just another run-of-the-mill famine or the "mother of all famines" caused by climate change? Or dying in an ordinary war caused by sheer stupidity instead of one caused by societies that are on the verge of collapse due to environmental catastrophe? Again, what is the difference between dying of cholera because your society hasn't really figured out how to give working people clean water versus getting something bad because your society has collapsed? Either way, in all of these cases, you end up dead. And I suspect that if you look at mortuary statistics the overwhelming majority of people in any age have died due to hunger, violence or disease.

So what would be all that new in Dyer's scenario?

Not much, really. There is the death of nature, but I don't think that I'd be being really honest if I said that that was the source of my extreme emotions. Instead, I think that a larger fraction of my concern is my own fear of personal extinction. Indeed, in a real sense the entire world "ends" when every one of expires---at least for the individual in question. Perhaps contemplating the death of nature (or, to me more precise, its radical change) forces me to direct my gaze in ways that I prefer not.

Another element of this issue came home to me today when I was at church. My local Unitarian congregation has an energetic group of members who have talked the church into installing solar voltaic energy panels on the roof. One member's also hot to create a more ecologically-focused congregation. I sat in on a question-and-answer session after the service to hear what people had in mind. I was appalled because it was the same old middle-class feeble attempt to deal with an absolutely existential problem with tiny "baby-step" solutions. I didn't hear any evidence that these people had even begun to wrap their heads around either the severity of the problem or the type of substantive change that would be necessary to prevent catastrophe. (I suspect that Dyer would say that this is what underlies the inability of our political system to actually come to terms with climate change.)

This highlights another key element underlying my frantic emotions about climate change.

I've always had some sort of faith in the human race. That is, I'd always felt that people's basic sense of "fair play" and "common sense" could be counted on in the long run. I suppose the best way to sum this up is to quote Abraham Lincoln "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." But looking around the room I came to the conclusion that while Lincoln might have been right within a very limited set of social circumstances, but with regard to existential issues, the overwhelming majority of people live their entire lives swimming in a sea of delusion.

One particular delusion that I have laboured under has been the idea that individual human beings can have much impact on the direction of human history. Dyer mentioned this fact at the end of his talk, when he said that it only makes sense that if an intelligent species of animal creates a technological society it is inevitably going to have to come to terms with the limits that its environment imposes on it. That is the situation that the human race faces. Our economy and society moves forward through the operation of impersonal cultural laws. And it will either be able to develop new ways of preserving the environment through these individual, inhuman laws or it will not. The efforts of all the environmentalists are only, at best, one tiny part of the way those laws operate.

In effect, I have to not only accept the fact that I---and all I hold dear to me---is mortal and doomed to die; but also that for that brief life I live, I am not much more than a chip of wood floating on the ocean current that is the Dao. The chip has no responsibility about where it goes, all it can do is just float. In the same way, individual human beings---even educated Daoists like me---have zero influence over whether we are going to suffer runaway climate change or no. This is a very hard lesson to learn intellectually.

I wonder if I will ever be able to know this truth in my bones?

Realization---Moment by Moment

I've been reading a lot lately about "crazy wisdom" teachers. Primarily, I read The Buddha from Brooklyn by Martha Sherrill, Holy Madness by Georg Feuerstein and Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey D. Falk. I'm interested in this subject, at least in part, because I've often wondered if the fellow who introduced me to Daoism, Moy Lin Shin, was some sort of "crazy wise" teacher. If he was, perhaps his behaviour wasn't simply weird and dysfunctional, but instead a tremendous opportunity to learn that I passed up when I left his organization.

For those readers who haven't heard of "crazy wisdom" before, the idea is that some religious teachers choose to teach their students by stressing them to the breaking point in the hope that this will force them reassess their basic assumptions about what it is to be a human being. The stress can take many forms, but primarily, it consists of expecting far, far too much from the student, either in the form of simple effort or in the form of breaking very important social taboos. Religious literature abounds with this sort of thing---Zen masters who beat their students, Lamas that force students to do heroic tasks of labour, Taiji Chuan masters who work their students so hard that they attempt suicide, and so on. In a more modern context, it involves gurus deliberately ignoring the boundaries that usually exist between a religious teacher and a student---such as forcing them to engage in abusive or embarrassing sex acts.

How could this possibly be justified?

The best illustration that I've ever seen comes from the delightfully complex movie "I Heart Huckabees". (If you have or haven't seen the movie, I'd recommend this essay on it.) The scene involves two men sitting at a picnic table bouncing a beach ball off each other's face. The idea is that the minor pain that results distracts them away from whatever thoughts are filling their minds and gives them a chance to experience "pure consciousness". (I suspect that this experience might have at one time been behind the Zen "keisaku" stick.) The two men are so enamored with the experience that they ignore their teacher's warning that this taste of empty consciousness can only be nothing more than just a fleeting event that invariably becomes overwhelmed by the complexities of life.

In order to force them to listen to her, she illustrates her point by caressing the crotch of one of the men with her foot, which immediately focuses his mind on her. As they walk off into the bushes to have wild, crazy sex, the other man is overwhelmed with jealousy. This, of course, completely makes the teacher's point that no matter how hard people try to take refuge in the "suchness" of life, they will invariably become distracted by the world around them. As such, their teacher is breaking social convention in order to teach them an important truth---i.e. in a "crazy-wise" way.

The problem with this style of teaching, unfortunately, is that the knife cuts both ways. Just as the two guys in the movie were quickly distracted from their beach-ball illumination, so can even the most enlightened master who gains a similar awareness from years of meditation. It isn't just the student who gets distracted when he gets "boinked" by the teacher, but the teacher too! The sad truth is that people with some significant insight can find their store of wisdom exhausted by the grind of attempting to help other people. I happen to believe that this is the reason why people who appear to have genuine insight at one point in their life can end up becoming abusive tyrants later on. Moreover, I think that this problem can become magnified within organizations as people who once had genuine insight but then lose it go on to make decisions about the abilities of other people, who then get promoted to positions of authority that they may either never have been capable of filling adequately, or, once did but since lost their ability to do so.

Underlying this issue is the fallacious assumption that "enlightenment" is an "all or nothing" or "once you've got it, it can't be taken away" sort of thing. If you believe that this is the case, then once someone "gets it", then they can never ever be wrong again---"backsliding" is simply impossible.

Well, IMHO, things just aren't that simple. In fact, I think that every moment of everyone's life we are in the same situation that confronted Neo when he first met Morpheus in "The Matrix". That is, we have a significant test of our courage and integrity. Do we take the "blue pill" and wake up safe and secure in the bed of comfortable illusions that sustain us in our present existence? Or do we take the "red pill" that may expose us to an uncomfortable truth that may shatter those illusions even though it might give us significant new insight? Those pills aren't just offered as a test for introduction to the spiritual life---they come along all the time. The failures we find in spiritual authority figures come up to their having decided to choose the blue pill.

So what does this mean for the serious student of the Dao (or Christ within, Buddha mind, etc)? Well, I'm not about to give up on the entire enterprise of spiritual practice. I think that there still is value. (I hope that by making this decision, I'm not just grabbing at a blue pill myself.) But it does get me thinking about a couple practical issues. First of all, I think that people should change the emphasis on enlightenment, realization, etc, away from the individual to the experience. Men (and women) cannot become "enlightened" or "realized". Instead, they can experience moments of realization. Obviously, some more than others. But the emphasis in teaching needs to be the contents of the vessel, not the vessel itself.

Secondly, I think that we should accept that if no one is "enlightened", then no one, ultimately can take on the mantle of "Mastery". This means that people have to accept that while there are people out there with insights who can offer us suggestions in our search for wisdom, we are always going to end up sitting in that chair having to decide on the red or blue pills all by ourselves. And if we decide to live in institutions, we are going to have to give up on any illusion about there being someone to tell us what to do. Instead, we are going to have to accept that any sort of authentic collective religious life is ultimately going to have to involve the "give and take" of people trying to figure out the right thing to do through the messy activity of consensus building and democracy.

Some people might complain that I've robbed the spiritual path of any goal. What is the point of it if no one ever becomes enlightened? Agreed, this is a big change. Without the ideal of the enlightened Master, the goal ceases to be personal and instead becomes collective. We go through our life attempting to gain insight through our glimpses of realization and try to hand them on to future generations---by personal interaction with others, through writings (like this blog), works of art, and, the institutions we create as collections of people. If some people think that this is not enough, I would suggest that it is all that sustains people who devote their lives to art, science, public service, etc.

Why should religion be any different?

The Beginings of a Theory of Qi

I've never been very comfortable with the idea of "qi", nor with the "qi-gong". Primarily, this is because the concept is associated with a lot of vague, "New Age speak". For example, take a look at this definition that I just found at this site just by doing a Google search.

Central to Taoist world-view and practice is qi (chi). Qi is life-force -- that which animates the forms of the world. It is the vibratory nature of phenomena -- the flow and tremoring that is happening continuously at molecular, atomic and sub-atomic levels. In Japan it is called “ki,” and in India, “prana” or “shakti.” The ancient Egyptians referred to it as “ka,” and the ancient Greeks as “pneuma.” For Native Americans it is the “Great Spirit” and for Christians, the “Holy Spirit.” In Africa it’s known as “ashe” and in Hawaii as “ha” or “mana.”

I hope I don't hurt many reader's feelings, but this definition is so bad that, to quote Wolfgang Pali, "it isn't even wrong".

The reason why it is so bad is that if you look at the words this definition uses, they don't really mean much of anything.  For example, what exactly is "life force"?  "Force" is a term from physics that can be defined as "mass times acceleration".  In this context, I can't really figure out what it could mean.  As I see it, the fundamental problem in this definition is that it is attempting to see life as a concrete entity in itself (i.e. a "life force" that "animates" matter.)  Modern thinking is that life is not a substance but rather an activity.  It is what is known as a "homeostatic process", or, a complex process or series of processes with feedback loops that preserve the process over a given period of time.  A simple example of a homestasis is the flame on a candle---the heat of the flame melts wax, which allows the liquid to flow up the wick, where it vaporizes and catches fire, which in turn heats more wax to feed the flame.  

In other words, what we call "life" isn't a "thing" so much as an "activity" that comes about through a very complex series of processes.  Talking about it as a "thing" called "qi" is what philosophers call a "category mistake", or the mistake of describing something as being something that it simply is not and then attributing to qualities from that category that it doesn't manifest.  The philosopher Gilbert Ryle gives the following example of a category mistake:  "The Prime Minister is in London, and the Foreign Secretary is in Paris, and the Home Secretary is in Bristol, but where is the Government?"  The mistake lies in thinking that the "government" is something alongside its individual members.

So the way people talk about "qi" puts me off, because the language of almost everyone I hear talking about it is so flawed that it suggests to me that they haven't thought too much about it and clearly don't know what they are talking about. 

Even worse, people who talk about "qi" often talk about the "evidence" that they have for its existence from the demonstrations of "Qi Masters". When I see these demonstrations, what I see looks like nothing much more than simple stage magic. Lest people call me a "narrow-minded skeptic", take a look at this video that explains a similar sort of thing from the Indian Yogic tradition (think "prana", not "qi".)  I'm posting on a Daoist blog because it is that rare thing from television---short, and to the point.

I also managed to find a clip from a similar sort of program in China---with a translation---that exposes a similar sort of "qi fraud".  Unfortunately, Chinese television seems to suffer from the same "issues" as North American---a need to create false tension and pad a simple story in order to sell soap.  As a result, this clip drags on considerably, but it is worth seeing if you have the time.

So if I'm so critical of how people talk about "qi" and the way charlatans milk people's credibility, do I just dismiss "qi" out of hand? No, because I think that there is a real phenomena going on here. I have experienced the flow of "qi" and I think that it is a really important part of human health.

Most people have experienced "qi" when they do taijiquan.  In my case, I've felt my hands warm up, strange pulsing in the roots of my teeth and the crown of my head, etc.  Please note, however, that feeling something is not the same thing as knowing what it is or even being able to define it.  

If you pursue Daoist meditation, you will also eventually come across what's called the "microcosmic orbit".   I believe that this was once an esoteric teaching, but a fellow by the name of Mantak Chia has been selling books and giving workshops on it for quite a while.  (I've heard anecdotes to the effect that Western "seekers" have gone to Daoist temples and Masters offered them "hidden, esoteric knowledge" that turned out to simply be what the Westerner learned at a quickie workshop in his home town.) 

Briefly stated, the "microcosmic orbit" consists of sitting comfortably, concentrating on your breaths, doing Daoist "reverse breathing", and guiding your qi up your spine to the top of the head and down the front of the body to the Dantian. 

There are a lot of claims about this process, but one that seems to work for me comes from the realm of psycho-therapy.  It seems to work with my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  My therapist, who is a Yoga instructor as well as holding a Master's degree in some school of therapy, says that the feelings we have in our body are directly related to our psychological well-being.

This makes perfect sense to me, as the reason why I decided to go to therapy in the first place was because of the wild physical feelings I was having as a result of the PTSD.  The worst of these were the flash backs, which involved heart palpatations plus being drenched with sweat.    When we are in therapy, she has shown me the way my bodily sensations are related to my mental state.  (At one time I laughed at her because it became clear to me that she was physically manipulating me "like a puppet" by asking me to bring up specific memories, which in turn triggered emotional states, which in turn triggered specific bodily feelings.  She was able to monitor my mental state by watching my posture.  She said that what she was doing was a form of "desensitization therapy" for me, so my memories would no longer be so hard on me.)

You do not have to have a dramatic psychological problem like PTSD to be familiar with the way our mind interact with our bodies.  For example, just about everyone has experienced the dramatic physiological effects that love has on our body.  For example, several times I've had the experience of being in love with a woman only to find out that not only was she not similarly attracted to me, but that she was in love with someone else.  The comedy cartoon "The Simpsons" does an admirable job of illustrating this feeling in one of its episodes where Bart falls for an older girl.  

So what exactly is happening when we experience these sorts of feelings?  There are two possibilities that come to my mind.  

First, I've heard that modern scientific research seems to suggest that the brain and body interact in subtle and complex ways to make decisions and manage consciousness.  We have tended to think that we just think with the brain and digest food with the liver, for example.  But it may very well be that the liver releases complex hormones that have a dramatic impact on the decisions we make and what we believe.  Certainly, our gonads seem to have some impact on our sex life, which in turn is directly related to many of our conscious decisions.   

Secondly, it may be that while we are feeling something in our body what is really happening is something like "phantom limb syndrome".  That is, since every experience we have is mediated by the brain, there is no reason to believe that any bodily feeling we have could not be a "trick" that the brain is playing on us---just as it tells many people with amputated legs that the leg is still there.  

I suspect, actually, that both of these things are happening when we experience "qi".  

My therapist goes on to make a further leap, one that makes sense to me.  That is, she believes that the experience of bodily awareness that is common to all esoteric meditation traditions---including Daoism---is a process whereby we can consciously change and repair the physiology of our brains (or, perhaps our brains and that element of our bodies that we have up until now assumed was part of the brain.)    The circulation of "qi" in the body when we are doing taijiquan or the "microcosmic orbit", therefore, is a process whereby we are repairing damage to our brains.  In my case, that is the trauma from a horrific childhood.  

No wild cosmic powers.  No lightning bolts out of the hands.  But a damned important thing none-the-less!  

I was once told by a Zen priest that harsh experiences are the "entry ticket" to the contemplative life.  (I believe he got into Zen as a result of being a soldier in the Korean war.)   People forget about how brutal and harsh life can be, and often was for even the elite in ancient China.  I suspect that Neidan and other types of meditation practice based upon qi came about as a way of dealing with the problems that many Daoists had to have had.   I suspect that it can also bring about new ways of looking at the world and unlock hidden potential too.  But I haven't had much experience with that yet, so I will leave that subject to others or perhaps a future post.

Oral and Written Traditions

I've been thinking a bit about the difference between oral and written traditions lately. I've started reading Ellen Chen's wonderful translation with commentary of the Laozi, and she argues that, contrary to the more common opinion among modern scholars, that it is the creation of one person and that it was originally written down. This has shaken my previous belief that the Laozi is a collection of sayings from an oral tradition that was written down over time. Not having the ability to read ancient Chinese, I pretty much have to accept the authority of the scholars who do, which leaves me pretty much in the dark about what to think about the origins of the DDJ. If nothing else, it is an important lesson to learn that what we know we see "through a glass, darkly", to quote St. Paul.

Having said that, it doesn't undermine a pet theory of mine about the way oral and written traditions influence society. People have a modern belief that oral traditions involve bards and story-tellers memorizing their epics the way actors memorize the lines of a play. But in actual fact, I've read that ancient epics likes the Iliad, Odyssey, etc, were more improvisational than that. Bard and story tellers would know the basic outlines of the story---having heard it many times themselves when they were the apprentice running around with a bowl collecting money from listeners---and improvise their language as they recited. After years of practice, they were able to create rhythmn schemes in the same way that accomplished jazz musicians can follow chord progressions and key changes while noodling around with a theme or rhythmn.

What's interesting about this sort of "improvisational literature" is that it is fluid. That is to say that when a bard said something that really resonated well with the people listening, there was a tendency to include it or something like it in all future performances. Similarly, if someting didn't go over well, it tended to get discarded. And these changes tended to get passed onto the apprentices too, who would then make similar sorts of changes before their works were passed on to the next generation of bards. What was happening was a form of natural selection. Over generations and generations, I suspect that this process would be able to change just about anything into a great work of literature.

As an aside, this makes me wonder if maybe we should rethink the whole idea of "genius". Perhaps "Homer" wrote down a very, very old oral tradition that had been refined by generations of very good bards. Perhaps the bards took an "OK", but not great, poem by a fellow named "Homer" and refined it slowly into something amazing. Either way, it looks like there may not have been an enormously gifted blind poet who deserves most of the prase.

Even works that were written down instead of orally transmitted can go through this sort of process. In some cultures, at some times, all books were written by hand. If the books were copied by literate slaves, then probably the most one would get would be simply mistakes. But if people reading and enjoying texts were making copies for themselves or friends, then there had to be a tendency to change, add and remove bits as a form of "friendly editing". There is evidence of this in books from this stage of social evolution. For example, take a look at this discussion of the different elements that scholars have found in the book of Job in the Old Testament. That is, if we find copies of books that were created before the "standard edition" was created, we often find some significant differences between different versions. So some change can happen even at this stage, although I suspect hand-written books rarely evolve as much as oral traditions.

I think that this phenomenon is tremendously important to religions. That is because religious scriptures are tremendously important to the way the traditions develop. And I believe that in order for these traditions to stay relevant and true to the original spirit of the faith, they need to constantly adapt and evolve to the social and physical conditions that people find themselves in. As long as the unifying story and teachings of the faith are oral in nature, they can adapt to the needs of the people. But once they get written down, and especially when they get mechanically reproduced, the religion ceases to adapt to the needs of its followers and instead, the followers are forced to adapt to the words of the scripture.

This is a very bad thing. In fact, I recall hearing a teaching story about a Zen master who had inherited a mass of scriptures when he took over a Temple. He had the monks pile up these scriptures and burn them. When asked about why it was he was doing this, his answer was that he had to burn them in order to preserve them. I would suggest that this action and answer makes sense if you understand the way oral teachings can adapt to changing circumstances whereas written ones cannot. Let me repeat this in order to emphasize the point, to save the spirit of a teaching, you sometimes have to destroy its outward manifestation which is confining and perverting it.

I wonder if perhaps the reason why the Black form of American Christianity sometimes seems so much more dynamic and progressive is because historically it has been a church composed of many illiterate people. (Think about it, who is the exemplar of Black Christianity: Martin Luther King Jr.? Who is of comparable stature in white Christianity? Jerry Falwell? Billy Graham?) At first, the slaves were forbidden to learn how to read or write. After emancipation, the rules of Jim Crow made if very hard for most blacks to get any sort of education. What this meant was that people were able to adapt and improvise their understanding and form of Christianity without having to bend and twist themselves to fit the confines of 2,000 years of church history.

I've thought a lot about this issue because of a sometimes angry debate in the scholarly community about the value of certain "versions" of the DDJ that have been written by people who have no understanding of ancient Chinese---and often no Chinese language at all. I probably find myself in the worst situation of all in that I have sympathy for both positions. On the one hand, I agree that it sounds preposterous that someone would write a version of the DDJ without knowing the original language. But on the other hand, I think that we are now entering into a new age where religious texts need to be freed up and become fluid again---like they were in oral traditions. It is a great thing that so many different takes on the DDJ have been published. Many, if not most of them are probably dreadful and will not survive the process of natural selection. But some of them will perhaps bring some new point of view, and new, more relevant spirit to the living tradition of Daoism.

I wish something similar could happen with all religious texts. Moreover, I wish people felt the courage to write new texts based upon their understanding of the divine. And I wish that people could enter into a form of collaboration---just like those ancient bards did with their audiences.

The funny thing is that modern technology actually makes this not only possible, but trivially easy. To that end, I've set up a wiki that is designed to facilitate the creation of collaborative religious scriptures. You can access it here. Feel free to upload new stuff, create new threads, change stuff I and other people have posted. And by all means invite other people to the site and put links to it for others. Change the artwork---go nuts! If someone wants to support the thing and move over to a better site or pay Wetpaint for a different type of wiki, contact me.

The site is a gift from me, the Cloudwalking Owl, to the entire human race. Use it and make something wonderful.

The Dao and Compassion

Someone asked me about Daoism and compassion a while back and I didn't have any answer to her about the concept. I suspected that it was important, but for some reason I totally drew a blank. I mentioned this to a dear friend and fellow Daoist, and she pointed out chapter 67 of the Laozi and his mention of the "three treasures":

I have always possessed three treasures that I guard and cherish.
The first is compassion,
The second is frugality,
The third is not daring to be ahead of all under heaven.

Now,

Because I am compassionate, I can be brave;
Because I am frugal, I can be magnanimous;
Because I do not dare to be ahead of all under heaven, I can be a leader in the completion of affairs.

If, today, I were to

Be courageous while forsaking compassion,
Be magnanimous while forsaking frugality,
Get ahead while forsaking the hindmost,
That would be death!

For compassion,

In war brings victory,
In defense brings invulnerability.

Whomsoever heaven would establish,
I surrounds with a bulwark of compassion.

(trans. Victor H. Mair)

According to our friends at Wikipedia, the actual literal word that Mair is translating as "compassion" is actually "ci" which can be translated as "compassion, tenderness, love, mercy, kindness, gentleness, benevolence". The thought image that the old Chinese word evokes would be that of a mother caring for her child.

So what exactly is compassion? And how does one become a compassionate person?

I think the first thing to consider is that compassion is a form of love.

Of course, there are different types of love and people seem to have different aptitudes for experiencing it. A lot of people have a hard time understanding the difference between sexual desire and love. In addition, many people's experience of love is exclusively familial in nature---the love of a parent that is exclusively directed towards her children. Is this compassion? Probably not if it just extends to a person's immediate family and no one else. I read once about a mobster who had a child killed by a driver who hit him when the boy darted out between two parked cars. The driver was considered totally without fault by the law, yet he disappeared never to be seen again. That mobster may have loved his son, but I don't think his actions were those of a "compassionate" person. History also presents us with many examples of horrid despots who seem to have genuinely "loved" their children yet treated their subjects brutally.

Take a look at this TED lecture by Karen Armstrong. It's about twenty minutes long,
but well worth the time. She talks about a lot of things, but what I want to emphasize is her idea that the core of religion is not belief but rather action. Moreover, the specific action at the core of all religions is that of living a life of compassion. And the way to act out our compassion is by following the so-called "golden rule". That is to say, don't do anything to anyone else that you wouldn't want done to yourself.

According to many religious teachers, such as Karen Armstrong, this is not just one of the key principles of religion, it is the core principle. Moreover, many believe that it is not just core to some religions, it is core to all religions.

The Scarboro Missions have put out a poster that has quotes from the largest religions of the world that supports this point of view. (I have a copy on the wall of my living room. It was given to me by the Scarboro brothers for giving a talk on Daoism for one of their retreats.) (Incidentally, the Daoist quote is: "Regard your neighbour's gain as your own gain and your neighbour's loss as your own loss." Lao Tzu, T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien, 213-218. I believe that this is one the popular Daoist scriptures that circulated amongst the literate lower classes.)

I don't think, however, that compassion should be as if it is a moral imperative, or, something that we should do. I think that this is because to feel compassion is a mixture both of feeling and desire for action. And if someone simply doesn't experience a sense of real compassion, he simply cannot force himself to have it. In contrast, I don't think it is possible to really feel compassion without being driven to actually manifest that feeling directly into action.

And what exactly is that feeling? I think that at its best it is a sense of complete empathy with the "Other". It is a sense of putting that person's value on par with your own. It is a case of directly feeling that the other person is just as important in the grand scheme of things as you are. A corollary is an honest attempt to try and understand the world from her point of view---"feeling in your bones" the completely different life story that she has lived through.

This is not a common way for people to think and feel about others.

Sometimes we see them not as subjects within their own rights, but simply as means to an end. Mostly people understand that this as a bad thing, but even the best of us fall prey to it once in a while. Unfortunately, a great many elements of our society foster, encourage and reward this type of thinking. For example, business people ultimately have to think about how to make money off the work of their employees if they want to be really successful. While sometimes business models are so very innovative or productive that an owner can pay his staff really well and still make a tidy profit, this rarely happens. And when it does, competition usually conspires to drive down profits to the point where labour invariably becomes part of the equation. Finally, even if it were possible to pay workers exceptionally well, this leads to the issue of how much the owners are thinking of the well-being of their customers.

Unfortunately, many business leaders seem to be of the opinion that life is inevitably a "war" of all against all, and that this gives them the "right" to squeeze as much as they possibly can from their employees no matter how profitable their business is. (I had a friend who worked for a big accounting firm which allowed her to have a priviledged insight into the interal finances of some local businesses. She said that there didn't seem to be any correlation at all between how profitable a business is and how it paid its employees. Some made a huge profit and payed the minimum wage---others were barely afloat and paid their people well.)

Most people who do not have economics degrees would agree that greed is a vice. But a lot more people believe in the concept of "justice", which I would suggest is just as damaging to the ideal of compassion.

Justice seems to be based upon two different elements that seem to me to be totally antithetical to the idea of compassion.



First of all, Justice is supposed to be totally the same for everyone. This is symbolized on the statues of "Justice" by portraying the woman as being blindfolded. At first blush, this seems like a good idea. We don't want rich and powerful people allowed to get off simply because they are rich and powerful. This ideal is also sometimes described in terms that "justice should fit the crime and not the person". The problem with this is that when this principle is pushed to extremes, it can forbid the justice system from trying to understand the psychology of the individual criminal. And once we really do try to understand people, it becomes a lot less easy to harshly judge some of them.

This came home to me in an article I read in the "New York Times Magazine" about a lawyer who specialized in sentencing hearings. The reporter mentioned a specific case where an armed robber had stolen some money from the cashier, was walking out the door, turned and totally gratuitously fired on the person at the till, killing him. This was all recorded on video camera, so the issue of guilt or innocence was not up for discussion.

As you might imagine, the jury was howling for this guy's blood. The sentencing lawyer brought in evidence of this person's background that totally turned around their opinion. He brought in evidence that this fellow had been horribly, savagely abused during most of his childhood. One thing I remember was that he had literally been kept in a cage in a dank, dark basement by his father for long, long periods of time. This guy was a menace to society, so the jury had to do something about him. But because the sentencing lawyer had forced the jury to understand some of the motivation that went behind the "senseless act of violence", it was able to develop some compassion towards the situation he found himself in.

A second element that creates a clash between Compassion and Justice is that of "punishment". This is represented by the sword that lady Justice carries. In our society the legal concept of punishment has two elements. At its best, the idea is that if people experience a significantly unpleasant result of a behaviour, they will stop the behaviour. It is also hoped that others watching the punishment will learn a vicarious lesson and avoid copying the convicted criminal's behaviour in order to avoid suffering his fate as well. (My understanding is that both of these justifications are demonstrably false, most criminals are people with bad impulse control who never think that they are going to get caught---so deterrance simply doesn't work. And incarcerating people with signficant internal anger problems only adds fuel to their fire.)

At its worst, however, punishment becomes a public ritual where both the victims of this particular criminal's crime, others who have been subjected to similar crimes, and others who feel outrage at the existence of all crime, are able to give vent to their anger. It used to be that the actual execution used to be public. Now, however, the only venue that people are allowed to give vent to these sorts of violent emotions tend to be the trial itself, pages of newspapers and political debates. I suspect that one of the latest versions of this type of emtional spectacle has been the trial of Omar Khadr.


On the face of it, it seems cruelly absurd that this young man, who was raised in a crazy, pro-Al-Qaeda household and who was captured during a horrific fire-fight with special forces at the age of fifteen, would be convicted as a war criminal and sentenced to 40 years in prison. (The argument was that he is a war criminal because he was out of uniform---under that reasoning one would think that every single Taliban fighter in Afganistan would also be considered such. It appears that the real sentence will be eight years in Canada due to a deal negotiated earlier in exchange for a guilty plea.)

In contrast to these notions of retributive justice, there are alternative models of "restorative justice", that try to step beyond issues of "right" and "wrong", and instead consider how to heal the dislocations that crime creates in society. Similarly, models of "rehabilitation" try to use the best knowledge gained from psychology and sociology to try and understand why people commit crime and help the criminal work out ways of becoming a more productive member of society. As I see it, these systems of "justice" could be made to be compatible with compassion, but the fact of the matter is that it seems that they are becoming unpopular with our current popular opinion, which seems wedded to a retributive model based on venting strong emotions and punishing offenders.

I've put considerable amounts of space in this post to the criminal justice system not because I have any very cogent argument on the subject, but rather in an attempt to try and give people a chance to "walk through" the emotions involved in trying to understand compassion. As I it seems to me, compassion is a specific type of love that builds bridges between you and another person. In contrast, when we label someone as "evil" or "hated", we are building a wall between us. And I think that if Karen Armstrong and the Scarboro Missions are right (which I think they are), then when we call someone else "evil" and start to hate them we are walling ourselves off from the "divine" (I choose to call this "the Dao", but others will call it "God".)

There is a teaching story that talks about a man who is trapped on a cliff. Above him is a ravening tiger, below a pack of wolves. He can't climb up, he can't climb down. But right in front of his face there is a trickle of honey from a bee hive farther up. He sticks out his tongue and tastes the honey---nothing ever tasted so sweet.

When I was younger I thought that the "moral" of the story was that we face signficant problems in life and instead of dealing with them, we distract ourselves. As I've grown older, I realize instead that the story is about the fact that we face problems with no solutions at all. So all we can do is reach out and taste what sweetness that life does offer us.

The sense of peace and love that comes from honestly feeling compassion towards another human being is that sweet taste of honey that is the consolation of life. It is what people have called "God" or the "Dao". And the honey gets sweeter and deeper the more we expand our circle of compassion so it includes not just our family, or our friends, or the people on "our side", but also the dirty, the smelly, the angry, the wicked and our enemies. It even extends beyond the human race to all the creatures of the earth. Maybe in future generations our compassion will be stretched to include creatures from other planets.

But if it does, the honey of life will become that much sweeter.

Another long, rambling mess of a post. But if you wade through it, I think there are at least one or two things of value.