Owning the young mind

[Skybird]

Morals were there before religion. You do not need a religion to get moral behaviour handed from one generation to the next.

In principle ,the most profound essence of what is needed, is the golden rule. Which all too often gets violated by religions' greed for power and influence and control. Some of the most immoral acts and episodes of barbary were triggered by morals told according to religions, mono- and polytheistic alike. The argument that it takes religions to get moral behaviour else the beastly nature of man breaks out, has been proven wrong by history so very often.

Man does not like to face the fact that in this giant universe his presence is unimportant, and that he has no total control and power over his fate, that is life is easy to break, and that he can all to easily get lost in the abyss of this void, and one day finally will. Man needs to form at least an illusion of some minimum control and influence he has, to make life bearable and add his existence a meaning that else he fails to see. These religions then function to a principle of: I offer a donation to the deity, and deity then does something for me. In the end, religions basing on this, are a bartering place where the devout is not that devout at all, but has power over his deity - by bribing it he can make it to do what he wants it to do. Great god that is, eh?

The most complete system of explanations of the human psyche that I know of, is not the Western tradition of modern psychology, but Buddhism. It is because it is not only radically empirical, but also combines a precise description of how the psyche, or say: the ego, functions, and why and how it comes into existence in the first, it combines this with a cosmological model of explaning mind and space, their relation to forms (matter) and what we - falsly - consider to be our ego. That is something that the Westrn tradition of psychology usually igores: the hunger for meaning, the crave of man to get answers when yelling his questions out into the void out there. The dualistic separation between mind and matter we have in the Western tradition, has a lot to do with that as well. It has enabled the western temporary conquest of parts of nature by science and engineering - but also has led to a deepening split inside our inner being (to call it like that in absence of a better idea of how to express what I mean), that has the dramatic consequence of us now perverting these capabilties of ours into tools of destroying the very basics of our natural survival in this planet's environment. We are, I have no better word, we are hopelessly "splintered". Some of us who hungrily search in the philosophy of the far east for something that eases their hunger, even take these Western patterns and enforce them onto for exmaple the Eastern symbology on Yin and Yang - then interpreting it as the Asian way to express a battle between the forces of the Light trying to defeat the forces of the Darkness, a monumental conflict. But the early taoists in china had a very different view of it, and that is the real reason why the round Yin-Yang-symbol is so harmonic and gentle and round. They thought of Yin and Yang not as Heaven and Hell, Light and Darkness entangled in bitter hostile fighting, but as two kids friendly wrestling with each other in a child's play. No bitter conflict in an eternal struggle for power and dominance, but a light-hearted playing around, and as a result of this play the myriads of forms emerge from the void and come into existence for some time, before they dissapear again - like kids sooner or later get tired of playing always the same game.

The real idea behind taoism is something very different than what many Westerners think it is. It is absoutely no surprise that early taoism and early Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism entered a mutually so very fruitful symbiosis once a long time ago in China. They complement each other quite well.

Okay, long lecture again, sorry. What it comes down to: Golden Rule. If we would learn to play by that alone, already more would be won than all religions together have ever acchieved in all their history. The world would be a very different one. And a much better one, you can bet your life on that.