Thinking Makes It So
Jun. 21st, 2004 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcepsaInspired by a tangent in the Four Noble Truths entry, I've decided to expand upon my comment about my attachment to morality.
Morality is the attachment to the idea that there are certain things that are "right" and certain things that are "wrong" and that doing those things that are right makes a person "good" and doing those things that are wrong makes a person "bad." It is usually paired with a belief that somewhere, somehow, something is keeping a giant repository of scorecards, one of which is associated with you. Every time you do something "right," your goodness score goes up by a number of points proportional to rightness of the thing you did added with your purity of intention, multiplied by the magnitude of your sacrifice. So doing something like picking up the check at lunch gets you one or two points, while devoting your life to saving people's souls will net you several kajillion points. On the other hand, every time you do something "wrong," your badness score is increased by a number that is proportionate to the wrongness of the thing you did multiplied by the twistedness of your intention, raised to a power that is representative of how directly it benefits you. I'm not saying that everybody believes in the same scoring formula, by the way, but they all are basically the same premise: If you do things right, goodness score goes up. If you do things wrong, badness score goes up (or goodness score goes down).
Okay, so now everyone (or nearly everyone) in the world believes that we've got these scorecards. How do we check them? Easy! Just look at how your life is going! If you're mainly doing things "right" and your goodness score outweighs your badness score, your life will be going well. If your life is not going well, then obviously it's because your badness score is ahead of your goodness score and you need to start racking up the goodness points, or else. Simple!
However, some people decided to keep scorecards down on Earth, too. Why? Well, maybe I'll speculate on that later. But they did, and they decided that, given their actions and everything that they had done, their goodness score was higher than their neighbor's. However, their neighbor's life was better than theirs. At this point, they came to a crucial conclusion that has caused untold misery for millennia: Sometimes the ScoreKeeper tweaks with the system!!! That's right, for whatever reason (and there have been many over the years, such as Satan, Karma, Divine Testing, etc.) the system sometimes doesn't work the way it's supposed to. You might have the best goodness score on the planet, and suddenly your crops are destroyed by a freak hailstorm, your family dies of disease and famine, and you're picked up by a tornado and whisked away to far away lands. This sort of thing, they decided, was actually an opportunity to earn bonus points. Not only would you get normal points for every thing that you did right, if you sucked it up and took it like a Good Person then your self-sacrifice multiplier would be ginormous, sending your accumulated points through the celestial roof.
Another way that the ScoreKeeper messes with things--just to keep 'em interesting, you know--is that sometimes good deeds end up having bad consequences for people. The experts on earth, with their own scorecards (which they had, by this time, expanded to keep track of many people in addition to themselves and let them all know how they were doing and occasionally put in for a play-review with the ScoreKeeper--all for a nominal fee, of course) determined that this meant that that person was not as good as they thought they were. To keep them from getting too cocky and slipping over to being a Bad Person in their self-assuredness.
Now, to bend this around and at least make an attempt at closing the circle, let's go back to the point at which those people who were keeping score on Earth noticed the discrepancies in the points and the quality of life. It seems to me that, noticing this, they ought to have said, "Hey, maybe there's not as much as we thought to this whole scorecard thing." Because really, the whole purpose of keeping track is to bank up points so you can live the good life. If banking up points doesn't guarantee that you'll get the good life, then why bother?
These days, though, it seems like pretty much everybody is keeping score. Parents tell their children that "Life isn't fair," but then they go ahead and act like they expect that it will be. Actions speak louder than words, so guess which one idea the kids make their own! The expectation that life is fair, of course. The idea that if they do something good, they should get something good. And then when reality strikes and they do something good and end up getting screwed over, they come up with all of these reasons why it happened: "I wasn't good enough. I didn't try hard enough. Next time I need to do better." And on and on it goes, until their self-esteem is this pathetic little thing helplessly tangled in a web of self-loathing. All these bad things keep happening, so they must be bad people.
Now, just as a suggestion, try this sometime. Take that scorecard, rip it to shreds, bury 1/4 of them, burn 1/4 of them, and then take the other half, make a piñata, and beat it until candy comes out! Life isn't fair, and just because it isn't fair to you doesn't mean that you've done something wrong. It doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It just means that it isn't the way you think it ought to be. Instead of getting pissed that, despite your best efforts, Life refuses to behave, try figuring out how it does behave. Try getting rid of all those ways that you believe life should be and look at how it really is. It's hard, so start small. Let go temporarily of one little thing that you believe about the way that life should be, and take a good, objective look at what happens. You sqeezed the toothpaste from the middle, instead of the end, and the world is still here? Congratulations! Silly as it sounds, that's a very big first step for most people, so insidious is this conditioning. It's very, very hard to get outside of it so that you can look at it. My method of choice is mindfulness meditation, but try different things and see what works for you.
You might be very surprised at what you discover.
And if you're not, well, you can just give up ice cream for a week or two and earn those points back.
Morality is the attachment to the idea that there are certain things that are "right" and certain things that are "wrong" and that doing those things that are right makes a person "good" and doing those things that are wrong makes a person "bad." It is usually paired with a belief that somewhere, somehow, something is keeping a giant repository of scorecards, one of which is associated with you. Every time you do something "right," your goodness score goes up by a number of points proportional to rightness of the thing you did added with your purity of intention, multiplied by the magnitude of your sacrifice. So doing something like picking up the check at lunch gets you one or two points, while devoting your life to saving people's souls will net you several kajillion points. On the other hand, every time you do something "wrong," your badness score is increased by a number that is proportionate to the wrongness of the thing you did multiplied by the twistedness of your intention, raised to a power that is representative of how directly it benefits you. I'm not saying that everybody believes in the same scoring formula, by the way, but they all are basically the same premise: If you do things right, goodness score goes up. If you do things wrong, badness score goes up (or goodness score goes down).
Okay, so now everyone (or nearly everyone) in the world believes that we've got these scorecards. How do we check them? Easy! Just look at how your life is going! If you're mainly doing things "right" and your goodness score outweighs your badness score, your life will be going well. If your life is not going well, then obviously it's because your badness score is ahead of your goodness score and you need to start racking up the goodness points, or else. Simple!
However, some people decided to keep scorecards down on Earth, too. Why? Well, maybe I'll speculate on that later. But they did, and they decided that, given their actions and everything that they had done, their goodness score was higher than their neighbor's. However, their neighbor's life was better than theirs. At this point, they came to a crucial conclusion that has caused untold misery for millennia: Sometimes the ScoreKeeper tweaks with the system!!! That's right, for whatever reason (and there have been many over the years, such as Satan, Karma, Divine Testing, etc.) the system sometimes doesn't work the way it's supposed to. You might have the best goodness score on the planet, and suddenly your crops are destroyed by a freak hailstorm, your family dies of disease and famine, and you're picked up by a tornado and whisked away to far away lands. This sort of thing, they decided, was actually an opportunity to earn bonus points. Not only would you get normal points for every thing that you did right, if you sucked it up and took it like a Good Person then your self-sacrifice multiplier would be ginormous, sending your accumulated points through the celestial roof.
Another way that the ScoreKeeper messes with things--just to keep 'em interesting, you know--is that sometimes good deeds end up having bad consequences for people. The experts on earth, with their own scorecards (which they had, by this time, expanded to keep track of many people in addition to themselves and let them all know how they were doing and occasionally put in for a play-review with the ScoreKeeper--all for a nominal fee, of course) determined that this meant that that person was not as good as they thought they were. To keep them from getting too cocky and slipping over to being a Bad Person in their self-assuredness.
Now, to bend this around and at least make an attempt at closing the circle, let's go back to the point at which those people who were keeping score on Earth noticed the discrepancies in the points and the quality of life. It seems to me that, noticing this, they ought to have said, "Hey, maybe there's not as much as we thought to this whole scorecard thing." Because really, the whole purpose of keeping track is to bank up points so you can live the good life. If banking up points doesn't guarantee that you'll get the good life, then why bother?
These days, though, it seems like pretty much everybody is keeping score. Parents tell their children that "Life isn't fair," but then they go ahead and act like they expect that it will be. Actions speak louder than words, so guess which one idea the kids make their own! The expectation that life is fair, of course. The idea that if they do something good, they should get something good. And then when reality strikes and they do something good and end up getting screwed over, they come up with all of these reasons why it happened: "I wasn't good enough. I didn't try hard enough. Next time I need to do better." And on and on it goes, until their self-esteem is this pathetic little thing helplessly tangled in a web of self-loathing. All these bad things keep happening, so they must be bad people.
Now, just as a suggestion, try this sometime. Take that scorecard, rip it to shreds, bury 1/4 of them, burn 1/4 of them, and then take the other half, make a piñata, and beat it until candy comes out! Life isn't fair, and just because it isn't fair to you doesn't mean that you've done something wrong. It doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It just means that it isn't the way you think it ought to be. Instead of getting pissed that, despite your best efforts, Life refuses to behave, try figuring out how it does behave. Try getting rid of all those ways that you believe life should be and look at how it really is. It's hard, so start small. Let go temporarily of one little thing that you believe about the way that life should be, and take a good, objective look at what happens. You sqeezed the toothpaste from the middle, instead of the end, and the world is still here? Congratulations! Silly as it sounds, that's a very big first step for most people, so insidious is this conditioning. It's very, very hard to get outside of it so that you can look at it. My method of choice is mindfulness meditation, but try different things and see what works for you.
You might be very surprised at what you discover.
And if you're not, well, you can just give up ice cream for a week or two and earn those points back.
Misleading
Date: 2004-06-27 01:08 am (UTC)-Crystal