Looking Down the Road (AKA: Living Ethically...

September 10 daybreak

Last night’s dream involved attempting to transport a significant volume of fruit juice into a truck with a pick-up style flatbed but with sides too tall to get easily over. The workers carelessly risked sloshing out the precious essence because they had not secured the containers. Possibly the dream relates to the book I’m reading (Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself ) that extends previous material on theodicy.  How do we individually work out the translation of divine inheritance into daily life? How is our true essence expressed into ethical living?   

Looking down the road

The main text of Lenn Goodman’s Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself concludes:

“Allow me to sum up. As to the relations between God and morals, what I see in the Jewish sources is less an appeal to God’s authority than a dialogue between our moral knowledge and the idea of God. The dynamic of that idea urges our moral thinking toward unwavering rather than compromised values—toward absolute rights most notably, but also toward unstinting generosity and unselfish love…

No one capable of hearing what purports to be a divine command is without moral sense—a product, in part, of upbringing and experience, in part of our human endowment, as sensitive reasoning beings. So we adjust the imperatives to fit our circumstances, ably or ineptly, honestly or invidiously, thoughtfully or mechanically. We scrutinize and criticize what we hear, adjusting our ideas about God as we learn, the better to express our moral, aesthetic, and other values—just as we refine those values in the light of what we learn about God from scripture, tradition, and history…

For the hallmark of monotheism in ethics, and of ethics in monotheism, is the equation of being with value that is salient in our human affirmation of life and beauty, growth, thought, and creativity. What is right, as seen with the aid of this religious speculum, is not something arbitrary, changeable, or contingent but something bone-deep, as we have said—as deeply embedded in being as the fact of change and the reach of growth. . .

… we recognize some imperatives as divine, others as human, and still others as impostures, desecrations of all that deserves to be held holy. We test prophecy by its content, using our God-given reason, which is capable not just of noticing contradictions but also of recognizing truth and falsity, worth and beauty, striving and desert. Revelation, then, becomes an ongoing conversation; and our idea of God and of God’s will grows pari passu [with an equal step] with our recognition of value in all beings and of sacred worth and dignity in the human person. (p. 69)

Home Ground

 

     The recent full moon allows a glimpse of a special world, especially around three AM, offering a space-time which blends nicely with continued reading in Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness. Nishitani probes the possibilities of oneself, particularly if explored in relationship to the field of śūnyatā where one engages the void, the emptiness where our contemporary culture often brings the risk of a severe loss of meaningfulness. But this space or place also, perhaps, gives us a best chance of leaning into the other world. “Being” here/there may also be “identified with ‘true reality,’” (p. 294) and thus offers companionship to endure/engage the stress of existentialism.

“‘Not being self in being self,’ on the other hand, means that on the field of śūnyatā the selfness of the self has its being in the home-ground of all other things. On the field of śūnyatā, the center is everywhere. Each and every thing in its nonobjective and ‘middle’ selfness is an absolute center. To that extent, it is impossible for the self on field of śūnyatā to be self-centered like the ‘self’ seen as ego or subject…

As a being in unison with emptiness, then, the self is one absolute center, and, to that extent, all things are in the home-ground of the self. And so far as our self is at the home-ground of all things, that is, on the field of śūnyatā, all things are also at the home-ground of the self. Such a circuminsessional interpenetration, as we  said before, can only come about when all things, including ourselves, are in a nonobjective, ‘middle’ mode of being. As we also noted there, through this circuminsessional interpenetration, all things are gathered together, and as such render possible an order of being, a ‘world,’ and consequently enable the existence of things as well. . .

… This assembly is the force that makes the thing in question be, the force of the thing’s own ability to be. In that sense, we also said that when a thing is, the world worlds …  (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 158-9)

     Reading Nishitani, for me at least, is challenging; and this post dares not presume much more than to invite a person to read his work for oneself. Nishitani makes clear the necessity for the individual to enter alone: “Just as no one else can see for us or hear for us, so too none of our actions can be performed by proxy. All actions imply, as it were, an absolute immediacy” (p. 166). 

     While this journey into self has an inevitable aloneness, support does come from guides, from long ago and today. Rumi, in particular, resonates with the theme. For example, from his Discourses:

“At this time the world subsists through heedlessness. If there were no heedlessness, this world would cease to be. Desire for God, memory of the other world, ‘inebriation,’ and ecstasy are the architects of the other world. 

If everyone were attuned to that world, we would all abandon this world and go there. God, however, wants us to be here so that there may be two worlds. 

To that end He has stationed two headmen, heedlessness and heedfulness, so that both worlds will flourish.” (Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jalaluddin, trans. W.M. Thackston, Jr., 1994, p. 114.)

An earlier translation of this passage by A.J. Arberry offers additional entry into the mystical edge:

“Now this world goes on by reason of heedlessness; if it were not for heedlessness, this world world not remain in being. Yearning for God, recollection of the world to come, intoxication, ecstasy—these are the architects of the other world. If all these should supervene, we would to a man depart to the other world and would not remain here. God most High desires that we should be here, so that there may be two worlds. So he has appointed two sheriffs, one heedlessness and the other heedfulness, that both houses may remain inhabited.” (Discourses of Rumi, 1961, p. 120)

     We are also fortunate to have contemporary companions on the way. David Whyte offers “Sweet Darkness” including an opportunity to listen to his marvelous voice as he presents the poem and adds his rich commentary. 

     The work of Jim Palmer also stands out in relation to this theme. For example, he elaborates the “language of existential health.”

Existential health is the set of capacities that allow a person to engage the conditions of existence directly, without distortion, avoidance, or dependency on external authority. It describes the difference between having beliefs, identities, and frameworks, and actually being able to live in a grounded and coherent way. It is often misunderstood as a philosophy or worldview. It is not what you think about life. It is how able you are to meet it. Where existential health is underdeveloped, people rely on external structures to stabilize what they cannot hold internally. Where it is developed, a person can remain oriented even in the absence of clear answers, fixed meaning, or guaranteed outcomes.