Why my focus on morality?

Blimey now that I am being chased by a collapsing relationship into the arms of my computer, I've got time to write down everything!!

Here is the biggest narrative of my life - the struggle with evil. Some is quite ugly, but it's what has happened in my life so its in the blog on life.

Aged around 8 I was reminded in horror of the worst thing I ever did. In the summer of 1977, when I was six, my preprep group was joined for an afternoon each week by a preschool group. I remember this dark haired, doe eyed girl that became the object of my desire. She used to wear a strap dress and I wanted to take it off. Aged 6 my weak mind was consumed. I asked her if she would, she said no, so I chased her. She was screaming and crying and got to the teacher. I remember having no care for her at all, I was like an animal.

Aged 8 I was horrified to think i could have been so utterly uncaring. I may as well have killed her for how bad I felt. It was a dagger in my heart, an end to my innocence and the loss of the belief that i was good. I racked my memory to check I had not done other bad things. I remembered doing the same thing to her the week after. I got my friends to help in a game to catch her. When they caught her they asked what to do, I said take her dress off, some complained that it was wrong and told teacher and I was told to play in another part of the playground away from the object of desire. There were other events that troubled me. I once pushed someone in a race and they got cut on glass - not deliberate, but it all mounted together to an awareness that I needed to guard this wild creature to make sure it didn't do bad things. That guilt was always with me and guided me to be a better person.

As a teenager I still mourned the harm I had done. I wondered if she might have been psychologically effected by the events, that those few summer days of madness may have changed her whole life. It was a guilt too hard to bear. I vowed never to hurt another person in the whole of my life.

That vow did me well except for fights with my parents. I even hit my mother and father a few times. It was enough however to purify me and in 1983 after confirmation and praying every night I attained a trance by accident while doing some homework. That experience began my consciousness properly, I saw the infinite space of the mind, it was the most beautiful experience ever. I ran down stairs to tell my father and he must have thought i was mad. That he knew nothing about it I suppose is why i forgot about it until I came upon it by accident in Buddhism.
I had been told by friends at school that what i was talking about in general in life was like Buddhism, but it took 10 years to check it up.

Then in 1987 the next terrible thing happened. I had not had a wank for a week on holiday, and while fantasising freely in the car on the way home I imagined a coven meeting in the forest to summon the devil and in the ecstatic orgy a man cut off a girls head and started to screw it from the neck into the wind pipe!

My mind stepped in the moment it knew what was happening and froze everything. How the hell do you deal with that! where did it come from? why did I think that? did I enjoy that?

A question was raised in my mind. Did I enjoy it as a sadistic act? It was a horrible question because it was suggesting that causing suffering could be a goal of desires. That 6 year old beast of a child could have enjoyed inflicting pain.

I remembered again another event. A friend showed me how easy it was to trip up his baby cousin. I was gripped by a sadistic pleasure in tripping him and making him cry. We only did it once, but remembering that was enough to prove that inflicting pain can be pleasurable in the free unguarded mind.

My own self was now a demon to be guarded. I was deeply guiltly, apologetic and pained by the huge responsibility I had to keep this inner self in chains and guarded from further cruel and evil thoughts and behaviour. I began my moralistic thinking to try and see if it was possible to work out what caused these violations of human decency in my mind, in a bid to cut them off and free my mind from its endless duty.

The 3rd and final trip came at college in 1991. I was continuously troubled by the nagging knowledge that there were unwholesome elements in my mind. I was always fearing that they might spring forward and give me that intolerable sadistic pleasure again. I also began to wonder whether the grotesque things you see in the news sometimes and in films of people killing and abusing people for kicks and pleasure were motivated by the same demons I had. I began to wonder whether I was destined to become one of these people - a psycho as I feared it.

One night while talking to a friend he mentioned that it was possible to do psychological tests to determine whether people were psychos. I was stoned and that was enough to do something to my brain. If an external person could determine independently of my own freewill whether I was a psycho, and presumably whether i was going to offend, then I had "no will" against my destiny. If I was a psycho there was nothing I could do about it, and since I knew I had some elements within me that could be exactly that. I felt my worst possible nightmare was coming true. (The disempowering nature of such testing and legislation is why I am very opposed to this branch of psychology)

That night I slipped into an horrible obsessive compulsive state of mind where I literally believed that i was about to get out of bed go down stairs, get a knife and do a psycho job on the Chinese guy who lived next door.

For anyone reading this who knows this state of mind - rest assured that the part of the brain that is experiencing OCD is completely different from the part that actually does things. You may believe you are about to do something but actually you must develop faith that it won't happen.

I didn't know this. It was terrifying. I eventually got to sleep but my brain was changed. I lived in the belief that i was a psycho from there on, on the verge of doing horrible things, and only my own self control stood between me and the pit.

Typically I tackled it rationally trying to take it all apart to understand where all this came from. I can explain some results here...

Consciousness while being a subject usually views other things as objects. That is the cause of all the problems in sin. Being sinless in Indian thought is undoing that dualism. In desire the subject seeks to consume the object. The more objectified (i.e. over there) the object is, the more desirable it is. In porn you may find this. The highest degree of objectification is what they call alterity. It is complete dualism between subject and object, where the subject divorces all responsibility for the object. It is the explanation for the treatment of Jews in the holocaust. In a sadistic experience this is what is happening, the Ego(subject, self) is extremely objectifying the object. The pleasure arises because the act of extreme objectification, is a tangible show of strength and solid existence for the now supersized subject. It revels in the glory of its conquering, while the poor object experiences utter destruction and rejection - and probably wondering why it was chosen for object in the first place! That is the chink in the Ego's armour - it forgot that it could only do this because it chose the object in the first place! an unfair battle, and meaningless victory. But the deluded self is a sucker for its own self flattery and justification. So there is lack of power within my mind which it tried to compensate for in sadistic movements.

Trouble is, OCD is another ball game and requires much bigger thinking than plain phenomenology. Don't do drugs if you have any mental weakness is the lesson here - or do drugs and find out if you have if you want! Omega-3 oils have made a hugely good impact, combined with positive thinking and faith that the mechanism of OCD is harmless. Falling in love also gets rid of OCD because the two work the same way. Obsession about an individual - sound familiar ;-) I became fish-vegetarian in 2000 at the same time as making the break from my muse, and that is where the OCD took over completely.

I would say I'm almost over all this now. It was Indian thought which saved me. The belief that the true-self is good. It is not the Freudian model of Id seeking to over-throw the influence of the Super-Ego on the Ego. Quite how I got stuck in that model as a teenager unawares of Freud is a mystery, or an illustration of the power of shared cultural narratives.

It is not that we don't have a lifetime of struggling against little evil impulses, but that the light at the end of the tunnel is a pure good self - rather than the hopeless pessimism of being a Damion in the Omen who is destined to evil. The difference between a saint and a sinner is that the saint never gives up trying. But don't try too hard because as Buddha points out a string snaps if tighted too much, and wont play if not tighted enough.

Freed from the idea that we can be "just evil" and that with effort we can rid ourselves of imperfections turned my thinking around. Instead of worrying and guarding myself, I opened myself up and faced the battle in the open. Were a negative impulse to occur I would close down, then when it had passed try and replace that negativity with a positive response. That way the mind is trained to experience positive instead of negative. That way we positively believe the mind gets closer to its true nature of positive goodness.

So this mind has been through some bad times and followed completely the wrong path many times, but it was worth it to - as Simon Le Bon once advised - "stay good" which is the only way to freedom, liberation and happiness.