Thoughts about Morality from an Indian mystic
Submitted by xy on April 29 2002 06:04:18
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A few days ago, people were having a conversation about morality over on Boychat, and I thought of joining that one, but didn't get to it. Anyway, I thought this would be an interesting read to my Christian-oriented brothers, so here's my contribution, via the words of someone who makes a lot of sense to me. I hope the format is okay for people...somehow it just came out that way...and I like it! P.75-79 Tantra Spirituality & Sex in the chapter "Cosmic Orgasm through Tantra" by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) an Eastern Indian mystic/teacher who promoted Tantra while living in Oregon, USA. "Morality is concerned with ideals--how you should be, what you should be. Therefore, morality is basically condemning. You are never the ideal, so you are condemned. Every morality is guilt-creating. You can never become the ideal; you are always lagging behind. The gap will always be there because the ideal is the impossible. And through morality it becomes more impossible. The ideal is there in the future and you are here what you are, and you go on comparing. You are never the perfect man; something is lacking. You feel guilt, you feel self-condemnation. "On thing: Tantra is against condemnation because condemnation can never transform you. Condemnation can only create hypocrisy. So what you are not, you try, you pretend to show. Hypocrisy means you are the real man, not the ideal man, but you pretend to show that you are the ideal man. Then you have a split within you, you have a false face. The unreal amn is born, and Tantra is basically a search for the real man, not the unreal man. "Every morality creates hypocrisy, of necessity. It will be so. Hypocrisy will remain with morality. It is part of it--the shadow. This will look paradoxical because moralists are the men who condemn hypocrisy most, and they are the creators of it. And hypocrisy cannot disappear from earth unless morality disappears. They both will exist toghether; they are aspects of the same coin. Because morality gives you the ideal and you are not the ideal; that's why the ideal is given to you. You start feeling you are wrong and that wrongness is natural: it is given to you, you are born with it, and you cannot immediately do anything about it. You cannot transform it; it is not so easy. You can suppress it; that's easy. "So two things you can do: you can create a false face; you can pretend something you are not. That saves you. In the society you can move more easily, more conveniently. And inwardly you have to suppress the real, because the unreal can be imposed only if the real is suppressed. So your reality goes on movin gdownwards into the unconscious and your unreality becomes your conscious. Your unreal part becomes more prominent and the real recedes back. You are divided, and the more you try to pretend, the greater will be the gap. The child "The child is born one, whole. That's why every child is so beautiful. The beauty is because of wholeness. The child has no gap, no split, no divisions, no fragments. The child is one. The real and unreal are not there. The child is simply real, authentic. You cannot say the child is moral; the child is neither moral nor immoral. He is just unaware that there is anything moral or immoral. The moment he becomes [increasingly] aware [of society's norms], the split starts. Then the child starts behaving in unreal ways, because to be real becomes more and more difficult. "Of necessity this happens, remember, because the family has to regulate, the parents have to regulate. The child has to be civilized, educated, given manners, cultivated; otherwise it will be impossible fo rthe child to move in the society. He has to be told, "Do this. Don't do that." And when we say say, "Do this," the child's reality may not be ready to do it. It may not be real. There may not be any real desire within the child to do it. And when we say, "Don't do this or don't do that," the child's nature may like to do it. "We condemn the real and we enforce the unreal [(fake)], because the [fake] is going to be helpuful in a [fake] society, and the [fake] is going to be convenient where everyone is false. The real is not going to be convenient. A real child will be in basic difficulty with the society, because the whole society is [so fake]. This is a vicious circle. We are born in a society, and hitherto not a single society has existed on the earth which is real." ------- I question this, unless he is defining "society" in terms of modern ones, and not so-called primitive ones, like some Amazonian clans, for example. ******* "This is vicious! A child is born in a society, and a society is already there with its fixed rules, regulations, behavior, moralities...the child has to learn [to conform, or be punished]. "When he grows he will become false. Then children will be born to him, and he will help make them false, and this goes on and on. What to do? We cannot change the society. Or, if we try to change the society, we will not be there when the society will be changed. ...What to do? "The individual can become aware of this basic split within: that the real has been suppressed and the unreal [(fake)] has been imposed. This [fakery] is pain, this is suffering, this is hell. You cannot get any satisfaction through the unreal, because through the unreal only unreal satisfactions are possible. And this is natural. Only through the real can real satisfactions happen." ---------- Final comments from me: Morality is a set of demands for having the broad diversity of people *conform* to a given imagination about reality. We don't have to automatically subordinate ourselves to these demands, and can create our own. Of course, Osho says we can celebrate and *indulge* in our real selves, and avoid getting stuck in the first place! ************* P.89: "You cannot find a moralist who is not violently condemning; of everyone he is condemning--everyone is wrong. It feels good; his ego is fulfilled. But why is everyone wrong? Because everywhere he sees the same thing he is suppressing [within himself]. His own mind will become more and more sexual, and more and more he will be afraid. This brahmacharya is perversion, unnatural." |
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