Morality and Direct Experience: Which Comes First?

Remember the post I did on "Rational Reptilian Rapacity"? Well, this post here is about related issues. Oddly enough, it was also sort of inspired by something being discussed over at Tim Boucher's site, the same way my Reptilian post was: www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/12/20/as-the-spirit-moves-you/

(I'm not stalking Tim or anything; it's just that I do hang out on his blog relatively frequently, as do several other people, and Tim's posts are often food for my thought in this way).

Anyway, there seems to be something of a disagreement (again!) between me and the some of the other folks commenting on Tim's post, including Tim. I say this:

I wouldn’t personally want to ignore the moral/ethical aspect of anything
spiritual I’d see any point to being a part of. Not that I’m saying anyone’s
ignoring that, it’s just that I’ve been equating religion/spirituality with
morality and ethics for as long as I can remember (not that I practice what
I preach of course). I guess I’ve figured breathing exercises and other
spiritual practices are mainly useful for helping one develop a more
compassionate consciousness that will in turn help one behave more
ethically/morally.

In response, Tim said:

Ethics and morality are simply tools to prepare you, to enable you to live well
with others, and to give your life structure as you go along the way and
experience various things falling away. You needn’t ignore them.

Also, another commenter, under the name Piers, said this in agreement with Tim:

I’d say that it’s a major mistake to equate religion/spirituality with morality
and ethics. Morality may be important, but to equate spirituality with it is to
ignore the reality of spirituality. Ultimately spirituality must be about an
experience of the divine. It’s perhaps our dessicated traditional western
Christianity, which appears to offer nothing but a bit of aesthetic experience
plus some rules for how to be nicer people, that makes people view
religion/spirituality as essentially being about morality.
I heard the beginning of an intellectual discussion about hell on the radio this morning, and amid all the talk of the Greeks and Egpytians and the Bible (interesting stuff), the one starkly missing aspect (that no one noticed was missing) was any
consideration of whether hell really exists. Seeing as it was a mainstream
intellectual discussion, that would be taboo and rather ridiculous. And that’s
perhaps slightly similar to thinking religion is essentially about morality.
If the divine does exist, if we are more than accidental bodies, then
spirituality must be about much more than morality (about reality in fact), but
if not, then it wouldn’t be much more than that.

So basically Tim and Piers say that morality is a tool to help you get along while you go toward the real spiritual goal, which is the experience of true reality and divinity. I argue that the attempt to experience true reality is a tool to help you act more morally.

For a while I was pretty much convinced I was totally right. Not so much in the "I have to kill you" sense that airplane-hijacking fucktards think they're right, but in the nice normal way that meant I really just thought it was an open and shut case. Okay, I felt just a hint of my old OCD paranoia, of course -- I thought at worst that for weak-minded me to apply Tim and Piers' viewpoint could lead me to devalue moral behavior more than it should be, but that wasn't really a major concern.

Now? I still think I'm largely right. And I was all set to sit down and type up a rootin'-tootin' refutation of Tim and Piers' arguments, too. But then I started typing -- and I realized that, goddammit, they have a point. I have a bigger point, yes, but now's not the time for me to be unzipping my pants.

See, I started thinking a bit about the reasons for moral behavior. I'd done this earlier; I'd even commented on it on another of Tim's posts [http://www.timboucher.com/journal/12/21/2006/if-thine-eye-be-single/], before I started this post of my own:

I guess I’m primarily concerned about morality because I want to avoid cosmic
punishment for doing the wrong things. If it doesn’t help me avoid cosmic
punishment for my sins, I don’t see the practical need for spirituality or the
near-insanity of trying to pay attention to every motherfucking moment. Any
input, or am I just being dumb again?*

At any rate, I think that experiences may be one of the central purposes of life, and furthermore, I agree that morality is mainly a practical matter for how to get along during life. If we take life as "for its own sake" -- which, let's admit, we do anyway -- then Tim and Piers have a genuine point.

However, none of this minimizes the importance of morality. This is especially true because many if not most religions have claimed that a more moral lifestyle -- one that is less selfish and more loving -- is also happier. For example, I like to think of the gist of Buddha's message being, "You'd be a lot happier if you weren't such a selfish asshole."

So we've possibly bridged the gap between morality and happiness. But Tim and Piers weren't talking about happiness as the key to spirituality. They were talking about direct experience of the divine. Right?

This begs the question of whether one can experience the divine without at least the attempt of moral behavior playing some part. I guess I feel that moral behavior is sort of part-and-parcel of any real experience of divine mystic oneness. Then again, this begs the question of whether we can ever be moral enough; if we're not careful this can throw us into the jaws of the dreaded Bible thumpers and their talk about Jesus' debt-paying blood being necessary for one to be reconciled with God (Don't think I'm beating that dead horse again, at least not here).**

I don't know about you, but I take the common-sense approach that we can never be morally "perfect"; even if we had it in us (which we don't), the world sometimes doesn't give us clean-hand choices. Fine. but, meanwhile, related questions come begging as to "What do we mean by 'divine'?" or "What do we mean by 'experiencing' it?" While those questions circle our flank, from behind comes an ambush of the question "Does 'experiencing the divine' equal 'happiness?"

This last question, any religious/spiritual person would tell you, would probably be answered with a simple "yes". At the same time: Does "happiness" equal "experiencing the divine"? And if you're not experiencing the divine, are you truly happy? And if you are truly happy, are you experiencing the divine? How can you say what's truly happy anyway? Is true happiness only found while one is engaged in moral behavior? Is this the key? Am I being too lazy by resorting to filling this post with interrogative sentences that I don't answer? Or am I a frickin' guru?

*To make things clear, the order of events was: 1. the discussion on Tim's "As the Spirit Moves You" post, with the three comments by me, Tim and Piers higher above; 2. my comment on Tim's "If Thine Eye Be Single" post, part of the comment being directly above; and 3. my starting to write this post on my blog, where I begin to realize Tim and Piers had a point. Yeah, I know you're still confused, but come on, you're probably so bored by this anyway you stopped reading after the first paragraph.

** Postscript: Why didn't this occur to me right away? There's the whole idea that mysticism and what-have-you is about experience, not of any particular thing that is "divine" but rather experience of, well, regular stuff, directly and as it truly is. Gosh, I have read Hardcore Zen, after all -- you'd think I'd remember to put that in.

This idea would, of course, get us out of a lot of philosophical traps -- not least of which would be the whole "do you think you're good enough to be in the presence of God without faith in Christ" shit that bombards you throughout the area I live. Of course, the questions would still be begged as to what the true, direct experience of regular stuff entails and whether that is even possible.

The experiencing-everything-as-sacred thing might help tie the whole mess to morality, in that being aware of how things really are will help us to (a) see the reasons for being moral, insofar as the truth we experience is that we're all connected; and (b) maybe help us a little bit to be moral, as far as seeing our "selves" as the empty, interdependent things they truly are might, like, humble us. I could not pretend any of these ideas were orginated by me -- this is all pretty much what I've come to understand to be basic tenets of Buddhism, if "tenets" is the right word. It should be noted that Buddhism's Eightfold Noble Path to nirvana calls for both moral behavior (and thoughts) as well as training to increase mystic awareness of breathing and really eating that potato chip and stuff.

Okay, so at the root, morality and mystic experience are interrelated, the same way everything else is, I guess. At the same time, I still think there are reasons for considering morality to be the most important aspect of religion. Since starting this post, I began reading Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, by Brooke Allen. Most of its contents are not totally new to me, but and it reminded me of how commonsensical was the Enlightenment-era toleration and emphasis on Jesus' moral teachings instead of dogma and all that.

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