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filthyjeeper:
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Me:
Hmm. In fact, that is a really deep hmm. That's going to take a lot to digest, so please understand anything I write here is very tentative, a real thinking aloud. What may seem like an argument against it is me trying to interact with the idea. I am profoundly interested and frankly moved by it. (I may one day request a bibliography.)
My first thought is that this reminds me of a thrust of the Gita, which is to criticize an addiction to stillness. I think being embedded in a reality gives us dharmas, and the more important thing is to quiet our desires in the practice (not concern ourselves with the fruit of action, but make the action itself as meditation). And for us in times of peace, it seems to me our dharma is compassion.
Or at least it was for my profession of teacher. But that seems backwards. I choose to teach because I wanted to nurture, and like most veteran nurturers I noticed that empathy burns you out, but compassion is sustainable. With that said, I have good reason (in the form this article) to believe that works fine as a professional nurturer, but may very well be a disaster to try as a parent. Different contexts. Different dharamas. I will try to write a long form essay to be more clear what I mean one day.
It's also possible I'm just stuck in Judeo-Christian baggage. I recently read the Illiad because for the first time I had a good enough reason -- I wanted to see that version of the divine to compare it to same claims I had read about how some roots of Christian universalism are in Judaism. . . . I think that's about right. Judaism presents a god who will keep his end of bargains. The Illiad does not. Somehow our Western sense of logos flows from one tradition (probably nothing in the Illiad itself, but I'm giving credit) and equality under the law flows from the other.
Coming back full circle. There are other paths to compassion than this universalism. And I think anyone who clears away enough desire does so little harm that they might as well have compassion. (I may have rambled myself into my main theses regarding what you presented about the Aztecs) But I think I've simply dug in to the point you're making
the only eternal things were movement and transformation, so even compassion was a contextual moving target.Dharma is a contextual moving target. I'm just glorifying it -- which I don't regret. This also seems to be why daoism is the philosophy of the valley, not of the mountain top. To paraphrase Prisig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The top of the mountain is the highest bit, but virtually nothing lives there. Yes, the top defines the sides, but life is on the sides.
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filthyjeeper:
First off, this is a mighty interesting dialogue, and I am humbled by your public fiddling with it. Secondly, my knowledge of eastern thought is limited - I know broad strokes, but the most of my meager familiarity is through Zen. So I may have a different (or underdeveloped) understanding of concepts like dharma. But I'm going to try to keep up.
Contemporary polytheisms (not necessarily paganism, as it's a much broader theological umbrella) have a term that might mirror this idea: right relationship. Whether you're practicing a revival of the ancient Kemetic religion, reconstructing Anglo-Saxon heathenry, Rodnovery, Hellenismos via the Orphic mystery cult, etc., they all have it. And I think you have something in common with most of us in that, we unapologetically glorify it too!
So I'm not sure if you're mired in baggage, exactly. But I think there are a lot of modern conceptions of "good" and "right action" that may be a Christly hangover, may be convergent evolution, may be a mix of both. I've read John Gray, though, so I'm inclined to believe that our modern flavor of thanatophobia definitely has its roots in world-denying doctrines, which tend to be blamed exclusively on Christianity, but is also probably more likely a combination of Christ + scientism. I'm a 4th generation Christian Scientist as well (ex-, thank goodness), so I know this fear of death and illness intimately.
Where gods are concerned, I think there's definitely a kind of sandboxing effect, but I think this happens in Christianity (Abrahamic religions?) as well, just differently. If you ask YHWH to get you a shiny new Ferrari in exchange for more praise and piety, the odds are against you. That kind of specificity doesn't really work. You'll shoot your eye out, kid! For Christians, right relationship is sort of a one-way street, though, and I think that's the difference: you're an ambassador for god, stuck in a foreign embassy until you get to come home, and that's mostly it. For the polytheistic worldview, you're more an ambassador for humans in the presence of gods. It's a very messy relational type of interaction, but right relationship is good etiquette, table manners. It's primarily a social thing, where all the worlds are your neighbors and pissing them off is just a plain bad idea.
I'm part of a group of monists who've been discussing the concept of enlightenment recently, and it made me think of this. I'm monist, in a sense - it's the cosmic background radiation of my practice, but while I'm here in this flesh bundle, there's really no reason to think much about it. I can thoroughly explore that kind of oneness after I'm dead. And this is where the Zen comes in, because I firmly believe "enlightenment" is a process rather than a destination, because there's no straight lines. So in this way, to come back full circle too, right relationship is the culmination of deliberate actions that keep the void - nihilism, one of the few true evils - at bay.
This is also my roundabout way of saying that yes, it is possible to live in a society that skins people alive in sacrifice to a god (of rebirth and renewal, mind), and also be in possession of a fierce desire to live in compassion and right relationship.
I would also be very interested to read your thoughts in essay form, for what it's worth!
