Tag Archives: morality

Beyond Morality: Beauty in the Ugliness

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The suffering self

An image of what I saw in creative visualization. This large, black blog was suffering, imprisoned in an electric fence. This “moral” guy (aka the ego) had him imprisoned, and had lots of idols on the walls, like a Buddha statue. I freed the blob and shattered all the statues.

I don’t know what to say. In fact, I’m not sure I even want to post anything. But I still have something to share today, and I’d be a fool not to. Ok, maybe not a fool. I’d just be me, but I’m going to share it anyway.

Sometimes, we get so invested in becoming good by our definition of it that we ignore our own suffering. We struggle and strive for an ideal that we forget ourselves, in all our darkness, moodiness, suffering, desires, insecurities and fears. When we desire something intensely that we don’t have instead of tending what is within us, it can be like putting ourselves in a cage. We want to become not-ourselves. We want to transform ourselves into only that which is good, rather than seeing the beauty in the real, untransformed us.

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The Destructiveness of Moral Righteousness

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Yes, that is an impressive unibrow.

Moral Righteousness, examining his own fury

There is a part of you, who, when it sees a part of yourself it sees as a “demon”, it wants to utterly destroy that part of you. Right now I’m calling this guy “Moral Righteousness”, as he wants to decisively “purify” any “evil” he sees with his fiery powers. But unfortunately for him, I’m wise to his game. Yes, something in me might cause problems for me in life, might bring me down or keep me from some goal of mine. Fine. But if you try to come at things from a perspective of moral purity, then you never get to the root cause of what made a part of you “demonic” in the first place, and thus, never heal it. Now if a part of yourself is actively hurting another part, that’s different. Then you just need to stop the self-abuse. But to actively seek to destroy something inside of you? That’s extreme abuse.

And not only that, but it’s denying that the “demon” is a part of you in the first place! Maybe you’re uncomfortable relating to that twisted up part of yourself, or with even having the patience to work with it. But ultimately you’re not working with a “demon” or something outside of yourself. It’s a part of you, and for some reason, a reason that’s important to get to the root of, it’s behaving as it is.

Not only that, but the mindset of “Moral Righteousness” has been part of the reason for many of the genocides in the past century. The impulse to label a certain group of people as a problem, then seek to destroy them in the name of “purity” is something we’ve all seen before. It’s similar on an internal level, with that group of people being called things like “demons” or “evil”, and ruthlessly pursued so it can be purged out of you. And yet, as much as we try to deny it, they are us! We have something in common with everyone,  especially our “demons”.

So then, if we each learn about healing, if we understand what causes “demonic” behavior in the first place, and can work with those parts of ourselves, maybe we’ll see less genocide in the world as well. Sounds good to me!

And btw – what do I mean by “demon”? Well, one internal character I talked about a while back, The Deceiver, I could definitely call a demon. Perhaps anything in you that causes havoc or harm you could call a “demon”.