Counter-Cultural Morality

Especially in our present society we need a countercultural morality.  That requires taking very seriously our responsibility to live rightly and a strong sense that “right” is very different from “wrong.” But it requires an equally strong skepticism about rules that specify do’s and don’ts.  It calls for a radically non-legalistic morality, one that places the well-being of the whole created order above any rules and regulations. I have learned this from Jesus and Paul.  I do not know of better, or even, equally good, teachers, but I know that one can learn much the same lesson in other traditions.  I believe that a sustainable civilization will need to encourage the kind of ethical thinking that produced the countercultural reality of the pre-Constantinian church.  That will be quite different from those later churches that called people to serve themselves and became the upholders of conventional morality.

~John Cobb, Five Foundations for a New Civilization

Moral is often used as a synonym for ethical. That’s not the sense in which it is used here, in “The Tao is good but not moral.” Here, moral means rule-based.

Thus morality will refer to any codified description of good behavior through laws or ideology, religious or secular. I’ll leave “good behavior” undefined, but I will say that (1) being good necessarily entails being compassionate, and (2) you know damn well what it means to be good. ...

From the Tao Te Ching (translated by Ron Hogan),

Get rid of morality.
People will respect each other
and do what’s right.

Thus a big problem arises when a society holds up a particular morality as the definition of goodness. For those aiming to do good, it is needless. For those aiming to do harm, it can be employed to do harm under the guise of doing good. And people are easily fooled by it.

~ The Tao is good but not moral

The Negation of God

 

In the East and the West, there is a long tradition of what they call negative theology, and this is just the tip of that empyreal iceberg. Writing in the fifth century, and pseudonymously for reasonable fear of persecution and even execution, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite took one of the most assertive positions in this manner of comprehending God. Essentially, this theological approach attempts to define God indirectly, by saying what God is not, rather than trying in vain to pin down what exactly God is.

“He is neither number nor order; nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality nor inequality; nor similarity nor dissimilarity; neither is He still, nor moving, nor at rest; neither has He power nor is power, nor is light; neither does He live nor is He life; neither is He essence, nor eternity nor time; nor is He subject to intelligible contact; nor is He science nor truth, nor a king, nor wisdom; neither one nor oneness, nor godhead nor goodness; nor is He spirit according to our understanding, nor a son, nor a father; nor anything else known to us or to any other of the beings or creatures that are or are not.”  [from Mystical Theology]

Four centuries later, the Irish theologian John Scotus Erigena (c. 815-877) worked hard to revive this mystic approach to philosophy. “We do not know what God is,” said Erigina. 

“God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being" ...

God, in the extraordinary category of his own, does not exist. He does something altogether different, and we don’t even have the language to say what that is. But whatever that is, it’s the only thing comparable to what we do before and after we exist in this short stretch of time we call life. Furthermore, I think the Way of Negation actually raises God even higher than traditional theism, by placing him beyond our reach and conceding that he transcends any attempt at a straightforward definition in ordinary affirmative terms, regardless of how many superlatives are sprinkled in.

~ The Tao of Fred 

“The Tao which can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao; the name which can be uttered is not its eternal name. Without a name, it is the Beginning of Heaven and Earth; with a name, it is the Mother of all things. Only one who is eternally free from earthly passions can apprehend its spiritual essence; he who is ever clogged by passions can see no more than its outer form. These two things, the spiritual and the material, though we call them by different names, in their origin are one and the same. This sameness is a mystery,–the mystery of mysteries. It is the gate of all spirituality.”

 ~ The Tao Te Ching, Chapter One

"Tao cannot be defined. You can not define something according to itself. If you can define a principle, it is not Tao." 

~ The Tao of Leadership by John Heider, Chapter One

Tao & Salvation

Salvation for Taoism (absent the Buddhist influence) is a matter of participation in the eternal return of the natural world, a yielding to chaos followed by spontaneous creation, in a never-ending cycle.  This is not a permanent transcendent state or redemption such as has been articulated in the Abrahamic traditions. For Taoism, salvation is not an escape from this world; rather, it is to become perfectly aligned with the natural world and with the cosmic forces that sustain it.

~Julia Hardy, Patheos

When The Golden Rule Goes Bad ...

The Tao masters also had a version of the Golden Rule. They said, “In dealing with people, you already have the perfect model of behavior inside you. Act with integrity, according to your true nature. Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to you” The Tao Masters continued with a story . . . “Once upon a time, when a seabird landed outside the capital, the Marquis of Lu escorted it to his ancestral temple, had the music of the Ninefold Splendors performed, poured out a cup of old wine, and spread before it a feast of beef and pork. But the bird became dazed, and it pined away, refusing to taste meat or wine. In three days it was dead. This was treating the bird as the marquis would have liked to be treated, not as the bird would have liked to be treated.” The Golden Rule in the wrong hands can be deadly.

~ From The Second Book of Tao by Stephen Mitchell

When we use the Golden Rule as an excuse to retaliate or cause suffering, we have missed the point. The principle of compassionate reciprocity lies at the heart of all spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion drives us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our earth, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

Tao and Sabbath

"I remain convinced that individual action must be the basis of all other action. So, here’s one thought. Set aside one day a week as a “No” day. This is not a negative, but a positive. Choose the 'No' yourself. It could be no travel, no purchases, no electricity, no television, no to something that you feel contributes to the momentum behind the denial in our society ... Then – when you’ve found and are satisfied with your 'No' day, tell your friends. Who knows. It might catch on. Posters may appear on lamp posts. People may get together and brainstorm more ways of saying 'No' to conditioning and 'Yes' to Tao."

~"Just Say No!" by Bill Martin

"Overworked Americans need rest, and they need to be reminded that they do not cause the grain to grow and that their greatest fulfillment does not come through the acquisition of material things. Moreover, the planet needs a rest from human plucking and burning and buying and selling. Perhaps, as Sabbath keepers, we will come to live and know these truths more fully, and thus to bring their wisdom to the common solution of humanity’s problems." 

~ Dorothy C. Bass, “Keeping Sabbath” in Practicing Our Faith

  

If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
   ~ Tao Te Ching, 22