Being Good

I don't claim to be writing a consistent, coherent, organised argument here - this blog is as it says a scrap book to capture "states of thought" during the process above cos my head ain't big enough to keep track of all the bits at once (yet). Its the stage before the polished product normally found in text.

Anyway Goodness ain't a new subject and I'm sure I repeat myself here...

I've resisted "goodness" as the key tolife. There is a book called "Being Good" written by the master of my temple. .. I hated that title and haven't read the book! Why?

Goodness is in my mind associated with fakeness, dogmatism, dualism, criticism and hypocracy.

Being Good seems to me to be avoiding the truth and aiming for something we "want" to be, or feel we "ought" to be, rather than firstly seeing things as they are.

Yet this view is poisoned and itself fake.

Good is a huge word and covers many things. Being Good is also

Being Excellent (after Bill and Ted)

Being Skillful

Being True

Being Noble (after Arya)

Being Graceful

Being Happy

Being Peaceful

Unfortunately Goodness has become an imperative rather than a Way of Being, and Goodness has become "imposed" as the rules (law) of society is imposed. It has become dogmatic, fixed, and separated from the people that it instructs. It has become a Platonic Leviathon against which we are all sinners and all imperfect miscreants who do not deserve the Life that we have been given.

Ironically then Goodness makes us Bad! How many people shun the law or adopt heretical views simply to escape the gravitational force of this monster of Goodness! It drives an Existential mob to rise up against the Law so that they can gain some semblance of true Life. Where does this hyperbolic individualism in the West come from? It is Lutherism and the rejection of the Catholic church born again and again as we seek both Truth but also Life. Kierkegaard a favourite of mine struggled with this (at least officially - he was clearly working with personal issues in the subtext). How can we align ourselves with the Universal Truth in which we are all the same - timeless and spaceless and characterless - yet also live our own particular life (and death)? How in other words can we have death as well as Truth? Or: What is the Truth of Death? How am I to face this inevitability? Ironic to since Death is what we would avoid, and what the Law tells us is the cost of sin! Yet we would taste it all the same - a chance to be ourselves alone for 1 moment and face Death in his true terror. Somewhere between Existentialism and the Catholic church lies Truth!

Life being what Life is you apply a force and it evolves. Life will outstrip all churches and all governances - but what is sad is that it is the rejected "peripheral speciation" which will make the chief cornerstone (Matt 21: 42-43).

NOTE: yes this is not how it is "officially" interpreted but show me the book which tells us the official interpretation and I will reinterpret that! Logos v Mythos - SRH again - how things are interpreted is the received wisdom - the Tradition as I called it recently - the Holy Spirit in chrisitian terminology - so how can the book itself actually "be" the word of God? It is only The Tradition - the Spirit - which insists so! I know this is huge issue in Islam (sort it out guys).

Why do we waste our time going round and round in circles millenia after millenia. Get to the Truth - the empty axle hole at the centre of the wheel - and lets get off this ride!

So "Being Good" is essential - it is the Truth - but I at least have had to rid myself of many centuries of built in rejection of this Truth because it has developed a rather monolithic quality suggesting oppression and death rather than freedom and life!