Warm take—”enlightenment” and ethics are independent 🕉️

Warm take—”enlightenment” and ethics are independent 🕉️

I think it’s better to have our agreed upon understanding of “awakening,” as independent from psychological maturity (growing up) and shadow material (cleaning up). We don’t ask our spiritual teachers to design our bridges or balance our books. Why should we assume someone with a persistent baseline of wild-empty wholeness is the best to design our morals, or balance our relationships?

Perhaps “enlightenment” and “ethics” are only separate when the awakening is partial, and we should be using the word to mean the whole thing. Distinguishing the two makes the pursuit of awakening less sexy (it won’t save us from hurting others or give us magic god-powers), but more honest. I think this is better. It helps us honor the gifts of people we might otherwise ignore, seeing everyone as our teachers. It helps us see the flaws of our most beloved gurus, to avoid and learn from their dark sides. It helps us keep from deluding ourselves into thinking our actions are ethical simply because we’re in flow. It helps us reclaim our golden shadows—the ‘awakening’ we can’t hold for ourselves that we project onto others. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. We’re it.

I think this difference is a property of nondual perception—with nowhere to get, nothing to attain, and nothing to clean up, what sense does right and wrong have? A whole host of unexamined and likely false reality-constructions—that I’m separate from everything and everyone else, that I have to earn love, that there’s something other than all here already, can be recognized as projections onto the things and people we think we need to improve.

But I want to make a clear case for nondual ethics: 🪷

But I want to make a clear case for nondual ethics: I like good dreams and plays with happy endings. If we’re truly all one, your suffering is mine, so wouldn’t I want to ease all the world’s suffering the same way I would want to resettle my body in an uncomfortable posture? And if I’m totally free as in a simulation but I’m still here experiencing it, wouldn’t I freely aim toward the highest good possible, acting from a deep sense of unity and compassion? Aren’t motivations for almost anything other than the world of form reflecting our deepest understanding of love and interconnectedness, shadowy upon close inspection?

This seems to go against my first point—suggesting that in the absence of perceived separation, ethical action becomes a natural extension of the realization of oneness. I don’t have great answers here. The nature of pointing is separate from that which is pointed to. These kinds of questions are about the world of form, which is a world of separation. Still, seems to me the process of awakening can loosen identification or strengthen it (because people experience their finding as THE truth and all relative distinctions pale in comparison); so you can find teachers who are extraordinarily ethical and mature, but you can find others who DGaF.

It’s complicated. This is an email. My tone may say otherwise, but I’m always writing in discovery, trying to find out what I seem to know and don’t, reminding myself of what I want to learn, further integrate, explore, appreciate.