Tuesday 8 August 2000

Pic of the day: Even if you wanted to own the sunset and keep it for yourself, you know you couldn't. Thus fleeting are all things in the universe, but we forget.

Thou shouldn't covet

I'm still not feeling too well, so I am still at least partly concerned about the great things in life. Religion, philosophy, morality, the meaning of life and death, and why we shouldn't covet our neighbor's wife or his ass or anything else that belongs to our neighbor.

And as Al Schroeder, the elder statesman of online journals says: You have to write about what interests you. Not what you think interests your readers. It also helps that I know very little about my readers, though I can see that there are a few. What I do know is that some at least are fad people like me, flitting like butterflies from one great thing to the next. Because those who write to me, I usually try to drag into a dialog. I like dialogs. But they will eventually suddenly disappear in the middle of some discussion, not to be heard from again. That's OK. I am sooo faddish myself. Like one week it is all Master of Magic and the next week it is Edgar Rice Burroughs. I just have my own fads, not in sync with the rest of the world. But fads they are, none the less. I guess you people recognize yourself in that, or something.

***

OK, why shouldn't we covet if nobody notices? If the neighbor has a particularly delicious shiny car (he has not, btw) why shouldn't I wish it was mine? Same thing if he had a particularly delicious wife? It's not like the neighbor would be any poorer. In fact, he need never know. It is all in the mind, after all, right? So - why not?

Well, firstly it degrades my own soul. Trust me, I have tried this. And I am used to looking at my soul. I have seen what happens to it. And let me make something clear: There is a big difference between admiring something and coveting it. I can look at my friend's prize possession and think it is just great, and while I admire it I am happy on my friend's behalf because he's got this thing. (Though with advanced age also comes the knowledge that very few things bring lasting happiness.) But with coveting comes enmity. I want the thing for myself and dislike the other having it.

Do you really think that you can covet someone's goods and your attitude to him would not be damaged? If you meet this guy (and you probably do, since he is your neighbor) then you will radiate your true feelings in some subtle ways. And if you covet your neighbor's wife, you will radiate that to the wifey too. There are so many ways in which we communicate, and our words are but a part of it.

Letting the mind dwell on the possibility will also make it easier to move in that direction. The now so famous Jesus said that if a man looks at a woman in order to desire her, he had already commited adultery in his heart. Certainly it would be hard to commit adultery in the flesh if you did not have this desire first. By extremely good luck, or God's grace as I reckon it, I happened to test this on one occasion, much to my surprise. A female friend (or very nearly so) of mine was suddenly trying to seduce me. Well, I think she did, because you normally don't try to lick the inside of your friend's mouth otherwise, not here in Norway. Whatever silly excuse you make for it. Now, I liked her and I guess I still did afterwards, but I was mighty glad that I did not desire her beforehand. If I had, things would have been a lot more difficult.

And I'm equally lucky that nearly none of the women I actually did look at with desire, did ever reciprocate the feeling. But even when not, it still makes it difficult to maintain other relations to them. Friendship, for instance. Desiring someone's body is really doing dubious things to friendships. I have lately heard several other people tell me that, too.

***

There is one more dimension to this, and it is the whole thing about seeing other people as objects, as tools to be used. As I said, to see them as Non Playing Characters, as someone just part of the game, not as real as I.

Not that I will espouse Hinduism here, but there was a fascinating expression in one bhaktivedanta book. It said that the true yogi sees the Oversoul in all living things. (The Oversoul is somewhat like the spirit, or The Spirit, in Christian thinking.) Some writer, it sounds suspiciously like C.S. Lewis, commented on the greatness of any random human - that one could see in it an awesome, godlike being or conversely a demonic horror, because those potentials were in any human we meet.

Personally, I sometimes try to stop and tell myself: These people are as real to themselves as I am to me. They are the center of the universe. Their world begins and ends with them. Sometimes I just stop in the street and look at someone and wonder who they really are. Or look at the windows of some nameless house as we wheel past, wondering what happens behind those windows which I will never know, about people who do not even know that I exist.

And this, dear congregation, is why we read and write online journals.

But anyway, I still have some work to do on my soul, to get used to the idea that we are all playing characters and nobody exists for my pleasure, though some may want to share with me and I with them. If there is still time.