Julius Skoolafish, source of bountiful good recommendations, reviewed a book called Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. It’s written by an Australian who escaped from prison and spent ten fugitive years in Bombay. Julius describes it as one of the half dozen he’d take with him if stranded on a desert island, and I agree. It got me through two transcontinental plane flights and being stranded at the Denver airport during a snowstorm after my connecting flight was missed by one minute. It’s gorgeously written and has more provocative ideas in its 900+ pp than I can convey here. But I’ll try!
Julius also recommended a video series by a woman who calls herself PhilosophiCat, which is very fun to say. These are on the Bhagavad Gita and called The Song of God & the Way of the Warrior:
In an audacious move, which won’t surprise my readers, I’m going to compare my definition of good vs. evil to those of these monumental works of unsurpassed beauty. Function over form!
the himosphere and herosphere
I’ve been talking recently about Russell Brand and driving away some of my most devoted commenters, in arguments sent during that Denver snowstorm and perhaps after an espresso martini. At the same time I was asking myself, ‘why am I so stubborn? Is Russell really the hill I’m willing to die on?’
The answer I came to is ‘no.’ Russell is NOT the hill I’m willing to die on. But Love IS the hill I’m willing to die on.
The opposite of love is judgment.
The left side of the brain, the ‘himosphere’ that has usurped the role of God lives in judgment. It first judges the person as good or bad and, based on that, judges their ideas as right or wrong. The feminine side of the brain, the ‘herosphere’, is polite and judges neither people nor ideas to avoid social conflict.
The unified mind leaves judgment of people to God, who judges all innocent. It judges ideas based on the non-judgment of people. This is what I call my dogma.
Love sees every person as worthy of challenging their ideas. It doesn’t accept those of our friends or those on our side and reject those of our ‘enemies’. To ‘agree to disagree’ is secretly to judge someone inferior and incapable of understanding. My bulldog-clamped-onto-a-pantleg approach is really seeing someone as an equal ;-)
At the same time, it means being rigorous about not being swayed by celebrity, wit, authority, confidence, mentorship, fame, or a large following. It means not being intimidated by manipulative shut-off valves used to terminate conversation. And rejecting the ‘test of time’ argument that any religious text that’s have for millennia is beyond the scope of mere mortals to question.
the guard dogma
The most difficult temptation for me to resist is beautiful language. My heart is ambushed by a well-turned phrase. An elegant argument seduces me into wanting to say, “yes, Yes, YES, that’s exactly right!” … and not ruin the moment with a churlish and boring dissection of logic. And that, my friends, is why I keep my dogma close.
When John Carter’s clever writing and original thinking lures me in, my dogma tugs me back to the dividing point of men being superior to women. When ICE-9’s fresh analogies and deep research make me gasp my agreement, my dogma blocks the road to blacks having a degenerate nature.
My dogma is that I’m no better than anyone else. In other words, my dogma is love, the absence of judging people as morally inferior to me. Love is a neutral state, not an active position.
What I do judge are ideas as right or wrong, true or false, closer to or further from reality—based on my pet dogma. And that’s what I will dare to do here, with some deservedly beloved writing.
the war against love?
The Bhagavad Gita begins with Arjuna, the warrior prince, standing on the battlefield and telling Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, that it would be wrong for him to kill his relatives, and he won’t do it. PhilosophiCat reads the modernized translation—interpretation may be more apt—of Stephen Mitchell, but I’m going to quote a more literal translation. This is the argument of the gods for why other members of the ruling dynasty deserve to die:
TEXT 39: With the destruction of the dynasty, the eternal family tradition is vanquished, and thus the rest of the family becomes involved in irreligion.
TEXT 40: When irreligion is prominent in the family, O Kṛṣṇa, the women of the family become polluted, and from the degradation of womanhood, O descendant of Vṛṣṇi, comes unwanted progeny.
TEXT 41: An increase of unwanted population certainly causes hellish life both for the family and for those who destroy the family tradition. The ancestors of such corrupt families fall down, because the performances for offering them food and water are entirely stopped.
TEXT 42: By the evil deeds of those who destroy the family tradition and thus give rise to unwanted children, all kinds of community projects and family welfare activities are devastated.
TEXT 43: O Kṛṣṇa, maintainer of the people, I have heard by disciplic succession that those whose family traditions are destroyed dwell always in hell.
TEXT 44: Alas, how strange it is that we are preparing to commit greatly sinful acts. Driven by the desire to enjoy royal happiness, we are intent on killing our own kinsmen.
So it all comes back to the women. Without a strong dynasty enforcing the religion, the women will have sex or marry for love and not within their own caste. These children are unwanted—not by their fathers or mothers but by the ruling caste. Those bastards, figuratively or literally, will stop giving food and water to their ancestors! They won’t do community projects and family welfare activities! All the ancestors will go to hell!
So that’s why it’s righteous and good to kill these kinsmen, who are not subjugating the women, so that you don’t end up in hell. Does anyone else see a strong correlation to the Torah, with its condoning of violence and condemnation of love? The ‘sin’ that can never be forgiven by Yahweh is intermarriage with the Canaanites. All the killing in revenge for that is a-okay with God.
krishna’s ventriloquist
Like the words of Yahweh, the words of Krishna are imagined by men. They were written in the same timeframe of the first or second century BCE. The rulers were a theocracy in which ‘following your dharma’ meant protecting or serving your betters, depending on your caste. It depends on a reality/ God in which some are more beloved than others.
PhilosophiCat reveals other ways in which she seems to agree with this. She doesn’t believe that someone can come back in their next life as a member of another race. On what inside knowledge of reincarnation does she base this? Someone may believe their dharma calls them to be an intellectual, she says, but be stuck doing manual labor, or to be a warrior but be stuck in a desk job. Curiously, no one thinks their dharma is to shovel shit in India like the lowest caste.
The real question isn’t whether killing is just or unjust, it’s why. In my philosophy, the only just use of power over others is to protect people’s power over themselves. Torture can never serve that purpose and is always wrong. Killing may be wrong or right, depending on why.
The Bhagavad Gita says that the reason to go to war against your own ruling family is because they’re allowing women and lower castes to make their own decisions about who they share their bodies with and with whom they would like to have children. That would be a war to oppose sovereignty and love, the equal right of all to take responsibility for their own lives.
PhilosophiCat agrees that a war against love is just.
evil is the source of all money
One of the great joys of Shantaram is that Gregory David Roberts can try out many philosophies in the voices of many characters. One of my favorite characters is the Palestinian Khaled Ansari, whose family was killed in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Of the many underhanded treacheries of Israel, this ranks among the top.
After the Yom Kippur War, Palestinian fighters and their families retreated to Beirut, where they made their stand in the Shatila refugee camp. A ceasefire was negotiated so that soldiers could move back onto the battlefield and the women, children and elderly would be not in the line of fire. Protection was extended.
After the men left with their weapons, the IDF descended on the camp and slaughtered up to 3500 defenseless people. They then hid the bodies, knowing it was a war crime. Wikipedia lies and says that Lebanese forces did it and the IDF ‘failed to protect.’ I was glad to see Gregory knew better.
Khaled Ansari is in charge of black-market currency, which the main character Lin is learning. Khaled delivers my favorite line of the book:
People say that money is the root of all evil … But it’s not true. It’s the other way around. Money isn’t the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There’s no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there’s no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. [444-5]
Khaled has neatly summarized my own book. Money was created to co-opt all people into the enslavement of their neighbors in order to keep their own families out of slavery. As it was then, so it is now.
the sin in the crime
The lord of the Bombay mafia and surrogate father to Lin is Abdel Khader Khan. He had many memorable speeches, like this:
Wherever you go in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice … We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.
For me, the opposite is true. For me, the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime. You asked me, just now, why we do not make money from prostitution and drugs, as the other councils do, and I tell you it is because of the sin that is in those crimes. It is for this reason that I will not sell children, or women, or pornography, or drugs. It is for this reason that I will not permit those businesses in any of my areas. In all of these things, the sin in the the crime is so great that a man must give up his soul for the profit he makes. [472]
It’s Khader who explains his theory of good and evil. After laying the foundation with the Big Bang, he continues:
The universe has a nature, for and of itself, something like human nature, if you like, and its nature is to combine, and to build, and to become more complex. It always does this. If the circumstances are right, bits of matter will always come together to make more complex arrangements. And this fact about the way that our universe works, this moving towards order, and towards combinations of these ordered things, has a name. In the western science it is called the tendency toward complexity, and it is the way the universe works. …
It is moving toward … something. It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity. … And that final complexity, that thing we are all moving to, is what I choose to call God. If you don’t like that word, God, call it the Ultimate Complexity. Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving toward it. …
Anything that enhances, promotes, or accelerates this movement toward the Ultimate Complexity is good. Anything that inhibits, impedes, or prevents this movement toward the Ultimate Complexity is evil.
poetic justice
Khader’s description of good and evil is very poetic, but is it useful? How would it apply to determining the amount of sin in the crime? Selling children as sex slaves could contribute to the complexity of the universe, I think. It would certainly make their own lives more complicated. They may become more complex as a result, rather than the simple peasant life they might have spent unmolested.
And did the massacre of the Shatila refugee camp enhance or impede the Ultimate Complexity? Yahweh is certainly a complex god, full of contradictions. For those who do the bidding of his ventriloquists, there’s no complexity too fraught with moral hazard to deter them.
However, I think the Rule of Reciprocity—or whatever it was called that formed the ethical basis of cultures and millennia—is a more solid gauge:
Whatever would be wrong for someone to do to you is wrong for you to do to them.
That would clearly delineate the sin in the crime, and make Sabra and Shatila unthinkable.
evil-doers need do-gooders: vice is versa
By my definition of good and evil, to do good is to alleviate suffering but to do better is to enable others to alleviate their own suffering. To do bad is to cause suffering but to do evil is to cause others to cause suffering.
The infliction of great suffering is always authorized, not a rogue act. It happens with an ideology and social structure where it’s considered normal. The real army isn’t carrying weapons, they’re carrying words. Great evil requires an army of naive do-gooders to buy into the simplistic dichotomy and place the burden on society for repairing the damage done.
And perhaps virtue even requires vice. If families and communities had the means to care for their own, with suffering something out of the ordinary, we might jump at the chance to be of service and consider it an honor. The stranger would be welcomed, the hungry fed. The sick would be tended and the dying given comfort, as Mark did for his friend Joan.
There wouldn’t be virtue in it, ‘it’s just what we do because we’re human’, as the Inuits say. Maybe those who wield their virtue as a stick to inflict guilt and blame are the enablers of evil. Instead of asking ‘why’ and ‘how,’ they accept it as their duty. And perhaps that allows the cycle to continue.
Khader also talks about doing the right thing for the wrong reasons vs. doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. I’ve found that very freeing! But I would have to confess my wrongdoing to explain why ;-)
the infinite here, the eternal now
I’ll end with a quote from A Course in Miracles from Ch. 15 The Holy Instant:
The reason this course is simple is that truth is simple. Complexity is of the ego, and is nothing more than the ego’s attempt to obscure the obvious. You could live forever in the holy instant, beginning now and reaching to eternity, but for a very simple reason. Do not obscure the simplicity of this reason, for if you do, it will be only because you prefer not to recognize it and not to let it go.
The simple reason, simply stated, is this: The holy instant is a time in which you receive and give perfect communication. This means, however, that it is a time in which your mind is open, both to receive and give. It is the recognition that all minds are in communication. It therefore seeks to change nothing, but merely to accept everything.
What would interfere with my desire to have perfect communication? My secret blame of others, my secret guilt that I think I’m better than them, and my secret fear that they might hate me if they knew my secrets.
Forgiveness of others is just baby steps for the big kahuna of forgiving ourselves. If any one of us were able to fully forgive themselves, it would zip along the neural synapses of the OneMind at the speed of the eternal now. We would be healed in a holy instant, wholly here, wholly now.
Compares A Course in Miracles with the Isha Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita, looking at forgiveness, relationships and moral codes. Examines a book called The Bad Muslim Discount that looks at decisions based on authority and in opposition to authority. Sees the Christ as being in a relationship not a body, and proposes Judas and Saduc as co-Christs.
Nefahotep has outlined important lessons from the Bhagavad Gita for today. I add onto those from A Course in Miracles, the gnostic Gospel of Philip, Vanessa Beeley on the ICJ ruling and Myriam Charabaty’s article on Resistance Justified: Unmasking Deceptive Neutrality.
Why the Golden Rule is wrong and its inverse, the Rule of Reciprocity, was the basis for moral codes for millennia. Gives examples of how this cuts through ambivalence and provides a foundation of morality that supersedes religion, politics, nationality, family, friends and 'sides.'
On Julius' Shantaram review, I posted several comments including other quotes I think that readers will enjoy. Thanks to Rae for going there and liking them, reminding me of the excerpts and impressions from me and from Julius in going through the book: https://juliusskoolafish.substack.com/p/shantaram-by-gregory-david-roberts/comments.
If a word's length was indicative of its importance, then "Acceptance" would be the longest word in the dictionary.
And, it is "simple" to imagine it, but "complex" to practice it. 😉