An amoral basis for being good

Perhaps the most iniquitous contribution of post-modern and liberal thought has been the deprecation of Sattva as self-righteous conservatism. The case in support of this hypothesis, however, is strong. Most seekers after spiritual enlightenment appear to have lived decidedly unconventional lives, and there are several extremely pious citizens who can't see wood for their incense sticks.

The question acquires a personal dimension for me when I try to be amoral. On the one hand, I worry about how justified I am in breaking with this traditional wisdom and indulging in proscribed activities (non-vegetarianism, music). On the other hand, I also worry about how justified I am in using this traditional wisdom as a moral basis for rejecting and mocking other proscribed activities that I do not partake in (gossip, frivolity).

Since Sattva is for me, both the fly and the ointment, I have often thought about how it really is related to the search for self-awareness. Today, during meditation, I thought I figured some part of it out. I will try and capture it here, before it fades away into the extra-logical Tumbolia it came from.

Sattva is desirable because it offers the least resistance to my mental conditioning with respect to self-awareness. The phenomenon of conditioning is a manifestation of reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning operates on the principle of changing priors over possible actions hoping to maximize an expected 'reward'. That is, one is more likely to perform an action (or an action viewed as similar) in anticipation of a reward. At this point, there are dozens of examples from the psychology literature that I could quote to support my point. Instead, let us just cut to the chase and talk about how this impacts the relationship between Sattva and self-awareness.

Insofar as my own experience goes, once circumstantial distractions have been dealt with, the two most significant obstacles to tranquility in meditation are excitement and guilt at being excited. While meditating, I will think of various things, and on realizing this, will try and shut them down as viciously as the guilt associated with the thought will recommend. And it is an oft-quoted suggestion that seekers not clamp down on their thought processes, but let them flit about and die harmlessly.

Given this, I am far more likely to let a mental audition of a bhajan wind itself down than to allow a vision of a pornographic movie to continue. That has nothing to do with their relative moral merits, it has everything to do with the mental conditioning that modulates my personality. If I were brought up in an environment where watching porn was an incentive towards spiritual practice, I would probably feel extreme tranquility imagining Tera Patrick's sensual undulations.

Also, my thoughts are more than likely to be derived from my own experiences and actions. Therefore, thought harmless to my conditioning will likely only result from experiences and actions that my conditioning judges to be likewise. If I wish to preserve a mental sanctum of tranquility, it will be rather difficult to sustain if I do things contradictory to my essential nature.

Shallow ambition and the associated apathy, loud noises and the associated emotions - none of these are inferior in principle. For a child brought up to believe, somehow, that worldly noise and confusion is strongly correlated with inner peace, they would in fact be desirable. The story of Angulimal, a mythical Indian dacoit, is a case in point. To him, killing and maiming was a blissful experience, by virtue of his upbringing and worldly experience. Meditating while focusing on his desire for murder, he attained a high state of self-awareness and was henceforth known as Vishwamitra.

I, alas, have had more conventional conditioning. To be calm under stress, to be active and resourceful: these are ideals that I have grown up with. Therefore, the Sattvic life recommends itself, not by virtue of some objective morality, but as a choice of least mental resistance.

I admit that this sounds like an exceptionally Freudian view, in the sense that I appear powerless to change my conditioning and accept other influences as being equally healthy and rewarding. To me, at least, struggling to escape my conditioning was excruciatingly important at one point, but in its active form simply led to one guilt trip after another, and a lot of time wasted. That was one of the main reasons for me to take up spiritual practice, as an orthogonal and passive alternative.

For the sake of completeness and scholarly reference, I have suggested here that Ken Wilber's distinction between transformation, which to him is analogous to deepening self-awareness - and translation, which he defines as different ways of explaining the lack of transformation to ourselves, is correct but fails to take into account the fact that all translations are not equally distant from inducing transformation. Based on personal landscapes, and I will take the Kantian view and claim that they have a universal template, some translations will be less deleterious towards transformation.

That does not make them transformative in any sense. In the familiar terminology of Christian theology, the spirit seeks to know itself, but the mind-body needs stimulation. If that stimulation gives it strength and endorses its belief in its reality (through exalting sensory perception), then the spirit's task becomes much harder. If, on the other hand, the stimulation is abstract and intellectual (e.g. mathematical), the mind-body's belief in its reality is weakened, and the spirit has an easier task.

I am afraid I have not been as concise with my logic here as I would have liked, and I will certainly revisit this and make changes when my perspective on the issue deepens further. In the meantime, this is what I think, and this is how I seek to construct an amoral basis for being 'good'.