aloha jw,


   There's an unresolved paradox in your thinking, here, bra. Or, a misunderstanding of what I'm no doubt poorly expressing.

   "it's all good" transcends good and bad, it is "beyong good and evil." The buddha of the suttas was very careful not to let people take license from any doctrine of the equality of good and evil. He insisted on "correct" behavior, attitude and thinking, knowing that people will very readily rationalize bad behavior on any convenient pretext, it's practically what thinking is for.

   I'm absolutely not speaking of "aiming for a state." There is only this moment. This moment perhaps involves what you call a "'baseline basis'."  Zen refers to the sound of one hand clapping, or the noise of the wind in the pines when no wind stirs them.

   Good and bad are the up and down of one's behavioral field of gravity. (And we are learning to fly on the wings of spirit.) It has its own magnetic field, protecting us from cosmic rays and enabling our moral compasses. In practice we cannot do without this basic orientation, conventional though it may be. In my reading of heidegger's being and time, what "they" think in terms of moral authority is our conventional god almighty, and we sin (feel guilt and shame) when we deviate from the norm, even in appearance, like being black, ugly, fat, old, poor, effeminate, bad hair day, too happy, too sad, too loud, too quiet, too tall, too short.... Even if one has the confidence to be one's self, one is constrained by expectations, in that every deviation from the norm is assumed to at least require explanation, if not be to be condemned out of hand. (I can't say how many times  people ask me as a vegetarian, 'what do you people eat,' as though the word 'vegetarian' was not self-explanatory.) Conventional "good behavior," doing what is expected of you where it does not conflict with your convictions -"there can be no compromise with evil" - is the path of least resistance for those who have no need to acquire excess goods and seek the moral space to grow spiritually.

   So, good and bad refer only to the conventional realm. There is a great spiritual quest, on the individual level. Gepetto is dead, pinodysseus, and no one is pulling your strings. The blue fairy told you that if you are good and true, you could become a real boy. Wait, your father/maker isn't dead, he's been swallowed by a whale, and you need to rescue him. In the event, you'll let yourself be swallowed by the whale too, and help your creator escape. It's all good.

   There's more to say, about good and bad disappearing into the void as well. Everything reductio ad absurdam. In words it leads to a dead end, the fish swims off unenlightened. Only the leap into the void, beyond any concern with the conventional categories of experience, is truly good, truly right, and washes clean shame and guilt, which attend to all considerations of good and bad.

   In simple, we do our best, bra, and that's enough. Be content.


terry




from "beyond good and evil" friedrich nietzsche, 



from "the genealogy of morals":


Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his “most natural” state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of “inspiration”—and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts (even the firmest concept is, compared with them, not free of fluctuation, multiplicity, and ambiguity).

What is essential “in heaven and on earth” seems to be, to say it once more, that there should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction: given that, something always develops, and has developed, for whose sake it is worth while to live on earth; for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something transfiguring, subtle, mad, and divine. The long unfreedom of the spirit, the mistrustful constraint in the communicability of thoughts, the discipline thinkers imposed on themselves to think within the directions laid down by a church or court, or under Aristotelian presuppositions, the long spiritual will to interpret all events under a Christian schema and to rediscover and justify the Christian god in every accident—all this, however forced, capricious, hard, gruesome, and anti-rational, has shown itself to be the means through which the European spirit has been trained to strength, ruthless curiosity, and subtle mobility, though admittedly in the process an irreplaceable amount of strength and spirit had to be crushed, stifled, and ruined (for here, as everywhere, “nature” manifests herself as she is, in all her prodigal and indifferent magnificence which is outrageous but noble).

That for thousands of years European thinkers thought merely in order to prove something—today, conversely, we suspect every thinker who “wants to prove something”—that the conclusions that ought to be the result of their most rigorous reflection were always settled from the start, just as it used to be with Asiatic astrology, and still is today with the innocuous Christian-moral interpretation of our most intimate personal experiences “for the glory of God” and “for the salvation of the soul”—this tyranny, this caprice, this rigorous and grandiose stupidity has educated the spirit. Slavery is, as it seems, both in the cruder and in the more subtle sense, the indispensable means of spiritual discipline and cultivation, too. Consider any morality with this in mind: what there is in it of “nature” teaches hatred of the laisser aller, of any all-too-great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons and the nearest tasks—teaching the narrowing of our perspective, and thus in a certain sense stupidity, as a condition of life and growth.

“You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither “categorical” as the old Kant would have it (hence the “else”) nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man.