a few weeks back, i wrote about the elusive balance and how it relates to the lightness/darkness polarity within pagan practice. the problem with using light and dark as a metaphor for moral behavior is that it doesn’t quite give any concrete guideposts or criteria for what we aught to do vs. what we aught not to do. there really is no way to determine, based on this polarity alone, what constitutes action that is ‘too lights’ or ‘too dark’. the whole notion of lightness and darkness of action is too nebulous to be useful. i have yet to find a terminology that i feel does any justice to the subject of ethical analysis (especially when it comes to magick). white/black is no good. good/evil is also out. dark/light is only marginally better. currently, i’m thinking in somewhat more mathematical terms with additive/subtractive, but i dislike the ‘clinical-ness’ of those words.
many pagan practices, while still employing lightness and darkness as descriptive terminology, have moved past this polarity and seek to base their moral outlook on something more unambiguous and quantifiable. since it is difficult for typical human beings to measure and observe karmic interaction (none of us are buddhas…) we need to look at the directly observable effects of our actions – the most visible being the ‘harm’ that results from them.
on the additive side, how far is person x willing to go to achieve their own goals, and how willing / to what degree will person x sacrifice person y’s goals in order to achieve their own. but on the subtractive side, to what degree will person x sacrifice their own goals in order to achieve person y’s. and when conflict occurs, at what point does the balance between sacrifice and achievement tip the moral scale, so to speak.
for now, all that is still a jumble of words floating around my head at the moment. but going back to the dark/light model, the important question is ‘uninfluenced by any other factors, how much potential harm are you willing to do to others in order to get what you want?’ – regardless of whether you actually act on that potential or not. the risk-tolerance toward others is what delineates dark from light in my mind. and perhaps to a lesser degree, the willingness to either observe or abandon the norms of social etiquette. within any magickal practice, you’re going to have both light and dark elements, so it is more useful to look for overlapping trends, as opposed to mutually exclusive dualistic extremes. going back to the dark/light model, the farther from observing social etiquette your practice takes you the ‘darker’ your practice will be perceived by those observing it. go into a public park and ritually sacrifice a cat… vs. go into a public park and pray. its totally subjective based upon the beliefs of the observer, hence its of lesser importance – yet part of being ‘light’ or ‘dark’ is how one’s actions measure up to the standards of those who are judging them; so there must be some correlation between the action and how the action is perceived.
so how does all of this factor into paganism and what we ‘do’ as pagans? well, on the wiccan side of things there’s that pesky little thing known as the rede that seems to cause quite a bit of controversy… often maligned, misunderstood, and usually taken completely out of context (by wiccans and non-wiccans alike…) i’ll be taking a closer look at it in an upcoming post.
as always, comments and scathing criticism welcome.
-justin
I feel perhaps the words you may be looking for are Dharma(right actions) and Adharma(wrong actions).
It requires a more expansive level of the brain than most people are used to understanding, namely the heart brain. The level of intelligence of the heart-brain (what some consider our soul) is based on wisdom and knowing. And knowing can be defined by yin-yang polarities such as true-false or yes-no.
However, what determines positive and negative responses of the HB is the belief stucture of the individual at that moment. And since we are influenced by the common belief structures of our environment, environmental factors do play a part in what our hearts tell us is dharmic and adharmic. Depsite whatever our belief system is I believe we should be aware of the connection between ourselves and our environment.
I won’t say that a person sacrificing a cat in a public park is insane because he sacrificed the cat. I might not agree with it, but if his belief structure says it’s dharmic, then so be it. I would, however say he’s insane because he had no awareness of his environment to understand that doing it in a public park would raise a few eyebrows.
The more closed the heart to the world, the more it survives. The more open a heart to the world, the more it Lives.
i think the issue i have with such dualistic models of ethics is their relative nature. ‘stuff’ and the laws that govern the interaction of stuff have existed long before the consciousness of man (individual) and man (soul of the species) arose on the scene to perceive them. so, like laws of gravity and thermodynamics, the karmic reciprocal force was already well established before there was consciousness to question it (having arisen directly from the same primal chaos that gave birth to all the other governing laws of the multiverse)… which leads one to believe that moral weight is not relative – that given circumstances y, action x always carries the same moral weight regardless of where and when it is committed because it is always subject to the governance of already established law.
and if right action itself is relative based upon the perceptions of heart and mind, wouldn’t we all be little buddhas running around – masters of our own individual ideal dharmic worlds? yet there is still so much suffering, which is what following dharma is meant to alleviate, that it would seem there is an objective standard most of us fail to even recognize, let alone attain. and yet… within this greater scheme there is always the realization that each individual is walking their own trail and finding their own homeostatic balance; subject to objective standard (wtf?!) yet within their own niche in the greater system.
i have yet to reach an internal resolution to this issue, and i’m not even certain that there is any resolution. but thank you for your comments, they’ve certainly provided some food for thought.
-justin