Conflict and Serenity: Two Faces of Moral Man
Robert Doss
March 23, 1969
Yesterday, while serenely mountain a ladder in the furnace room of the personage to change a light fixture, my head came into conflict with an amoral rafter – and the rafter won – hence the Band-Aid on the forehead – a symbol of lost serenity.
The title of today’s sermon – Conflict and Serenity: Two Faces of Moral Man – is not accurately what I wish to talk about, though it is suggestive.
I would now prefer to say Passion and Moderation – Two Faces Toward Morale.
There will be semantic difficulties here as well but some may be avoided by the change. For example, when I say moral I am not thinking of moralistic, authoritarian or judgmental attitudes. I take the word from its Latin root to mean a way of carrying oneself. It has to do with how we carry ourselves in our relations to others, which is the basis for interaction and community – thus, ultimately for societies of people who have learned enough constructive ways to live together that they come to call these ways moral. The immoral, then, is seen as destructive and uncooperative ways of carrying oneself in relation to one’s fellows and results in the erosion or destruction of community.
But, since the word moral is loaded in the hearing of some, it seems better today to use the word, morale, having to do with a more obviously constructive way of carrying oneself, experiencing oneself and others. High Morale, a positive desire in most people.
As people move toward or away from high morale, and though it is oversimplifying, it seems that two ways of approaching life or experiencing it – two ways our lives may become weighted are on the side of passion or moderation, two faces toward morale.
Some of us clearly appear to live passionately – some moderately – and some work very hard at controlling passions in order to act with moderation. All of us can experience both. And, generally, “we reap what we sow” in morale as in other things.
Years ago a lady who admired Dr. Carl Jung highly went to say goodbye to him in Zurich for what she thought would be the last time. Not knowing quite what to say, at last she did say, “Dear Doctor, I hope that all will come to you that you deserve.”
Dr. Jung laughed and said, “What a silly thing to say. Of course it will. “
For Jung, as for many psychologists, it goes without saying that you will get what you deserve. And, before we think too much about all of the exceptions to this truism, I am leading into a brief description of the Indian doctrine of Karma, to which the idea that we reap what we sow is a manner of acquiescing.
Karma comes from an Indo-European word meaning to create. We are created by and we create what we are. Karma is a sort of moral or spiritual or mental and action law of cause and effect. It is the soul’s responsibility for its own actions.
According to comparative religionist, Dr. Frederic Spiegelberg, Karma means that “whatever a man does will have consequences he will have to bear; and that everything that happens to him is the inevitable result of his former thoughts, emotions, and dreams as well as his deeds.”
In the West, we might say it is one’s destiny. But Karma is not found on a linear time scale. It is a combination of character (which we would say comes out of the past), of action (in the present), and of fate (which seems to lie in the future).
Karma is deterministic but it is not amoral. One acts out of what he is, but he is responsible for the actions he takes. And each action has consequences that follow which one must accept. He gets what he deserves.
Karma is not fatalistic because it is up to a man to perform additional acts to add to or to diminish his “goodness or badness.”
It is a law of cause and effect for morale, good or bad morale resulting from our actions just as it would be with cause and effect or the result of causal nexus in the physical sciences.
Since people act from self-interest, a better way to proceed would be to have it be enlightened self-interest rather than concealed and enlightening oneself about one’s Karma, one does not search for scapegoats. In whatever happens to him, he asks, what about me? What did I do to get myself into this predicament? What is my Karma?... Or, more accurately: What happened is the result of my Karma, which I aided and abetted.
A way of finding one’s way with greater enlightenment would be sit quietly, when one has a chance and meditate. How do I feel? Do I feel upset, depressed or anxious? Then, what have been my actions, thoughts, evasions, repressions that led to this feeling? What I feel is the result of Karma.
The way I now act will determine how I am going to feel later.
If a person becomes a revolutionary, mans the barricades, confronts the society or the university, we would say, in the west, perhaps, he did it because of his upbringing or his alienation, his passion for destruction of the old order or his hope for something more humane and meaningful. In India his passionate actions would be seen as Karma.
If a person is sweet tempered, giving and forgiving, open to his companions, a loving trusting person, compassionate in action, we might say this is the result of fortunate background, loving relationships, fortuitous choice of peer group, or whatever. In India this is Karma.
If a nation builds its power, contends with another nation, uses force, goes to war, we may look for economic roots, ideologies, legalisms, and so on.
Karma.
One reaps what he sows; the moral law of cause and effect.
If one acts with passion or if one comports himself with moderation – Karma.
This is what Timothy Leary was getting at when he spoke to the campus radicals saying their job of political activism was necessary, but just too bad. What people really want is to feel good, and we have to learn to love or perish. Confrontation and conflict will not do it.
So, he says, being a radical political activist is too bad, bad luck, the result of bad, but necessary, Karma.
It is noteworthy how widespread the interest is Karma has become in the west. It is, of course, not new to psychology. I can see how Karma and the theories in the latest entire issue of the magazine, Psychology Today, give over to a look at man and the machine or man as machine, might be reconciled. Karma and man, the machine. Machines more clearly operate by cause and effect. Karma means the human-spirited mechanism does as well.
The idea, then, that there is or there are causes for all behavior is not new. The thought that certain consequences inevitably follow from certain actions is reasonable. But it remains hard for westerners to say – I get what I deserve – unless we got what we liked. Even then, some of us feel guilty about good fortune. And saying one gets what’s coming to him seems unfair in the face of some of our suffering. We do not wish to abandon the belief in chance. Besides, being responsible for all of our actions is a great burden.
I cannot accept the doctrine of Karma altogether party because good is not always rewarded – nor evil punished – partly because the doctrine of Karma is lifted out of another religion without also bringing along the doctrine of saṃsāra, or reincarnation, to which it is closely linked. With Samara, one goes through many lives, Karma operating in each in order to reach the ultimate.
Today, forgetting that long religious journey of the east, some westerners believe they can reach the blessed state too easily – without discipline, without long meditation, without responsibility – through taking drugs, for example, and saying, “I can’t help what I do because it’s really my Karma that’s to blame, not me,” while Karma is you and one is responsible for what he does.
If one cannot accept the inexorableness of Karma, 100% of it is helpful all the same – maybe 95%.
What to do?
1. Be still.
2. Think of how I feel.
3. What is it about me that makes me feel the way I do about him or her?
4. What I do today will determine what I become tomorrow.
5. There are reasons for goodness or the good will I feel.
6. There are reasons for the misery I experience.
7. It is up to me to straighten out my thoughts and actions.
One of the hymns we sing declares:
“What we choose is what we are,
And what we love we yet shall be …”
Karma, a very useful doctrine.
I started the sermon with the title – Conflict and Serenity – now passion and moderation, as two “ways of life” influencing our morale.
The discussion of Karma was to suggest that the way we choose, perhaps a way of passion or a way of moderation, may be the result of Karma, or to use western words: background, genetics, environment and temperament.
But the responsibility is always ours.
Either way may involve commitments or may involve escape from commitments. The passionate man may be passionately incoherent, passionate all over the place, perhaps a rebel without a cause.
The man of moderation may become overly passive – without direction – He may drop out or cop out, as it were, while saying he is simply for moderation in all things.
Or either person may be involved and committed to ideals and actions – one choosing a path of moderation, the other a passionate assault.
I cannot say one way is necessarily good and the other evil. They are different.
The great sage, Lao Tzu said:
A man with outward courage dares to die,
A man with inward courage dares to live;
But either of these men
Has a better and a worse side than the other.
And who can tell exactly to which qualities heaven objects?
It is facile to attribute strength to either way depending upon preferences. Either way could be strong, either way weak.
Remember Alan Watts’ discussion of philosophical disputes being reduced to arguments between advocates of priceless and advocates of goo?
he defined the prickly people as “tough-minded, rigorous, and precise (liking) to stress differences and divisions between things.” While the “the gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand synthesis. They stress underlying unities and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism.”
Watts tells us, ‘Prickly philosophers consider the gooey ones rather disgusting, undisciplined, vague dreamers who slide over hard facts like an intellectual slime which threatens to engulf the whole universe in an ‘undifferentiated aesthetic continuum’. But gooey philosophers think of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and click without any flesh or vital juices, as dry and desiccated mechanisms bereft of all finer feelings.”
And, he concludes: “Either party would be hopelessly lost without the other because there would be nothing to argue about, no one would know what his position was, and the whole course of philosophy would come to an end.”
I remember saying that when it comes down to where the pips really squeak, I have to admit that I fall in the gooey side more than the other, but, and therefore, having a love of underlying unities, I concluded that the ideal would be a combination of both.
I feel somewhat the same way about passion and moderation. If passion be an aggressive and prickly kind of thing and moderation a more gentle approach, I have to say my own desire would be to come down on the side of moderation more of the time – but I believe most of us are combinations of the two. And some of us feel one way, but act the other. Witness the person seething with passionate rage – who smiles sweetly while his own juices boil his insides.
Even moderation and tender concern for the mind of man can get out of hand as it does on the button I have seen which reads:
“BELIEVE IN MENTAL HEALTH OR I WILL KILL YOU!”
So it goes.
I guess I would say my Karma, good or bad, expresses itself as gooey moderate, which I am willing to live with except when being prickly passionate.
Surely, there are those who are
moderately prickly,
passionately moderate,
militantly tolerant,
passionately prickly,
moderately gooey,
gushingly passionate!
Examine your Karma and see where you are!!
Today, let me speak for moderation – not by downgrading the passionate approach to our commitments but by speaking for moderation in a time when it seems to me, moderation is very much needed. Not inaction, but moderation for the sake of the low morale of so many American communities.
I want to speak approvingly of Dr. Buell Gallagher, president of the City College of New York, who in an article I received from one of our members, is saddened by the New Intolerance and the New Vulgarity on some of our campuses. He asks:
“Who speaks for … humility or moderation, or understanding, or appreciation of diversity? Who?”
And says: “There is a widely read book which has for its title, The Arrogance of Power. But the pages of the book of contemporary life are written large in the story of the power of arrogance. It is a power to destroy. It cannot create. Above all it cannot create the beloved community.”
Karma.
And, Dr. Gallagher closes his observations with a quote from the Bhagavad-Gita:
For the uncontrolled there is no wisdom,
Not for the uncontrolled is there the power of concentration;
And for him without concentration there is no peace.
And for the unpeaceful, how can there be happiness?
Karma?
I believe the congregation, in its actions, generally has chosen the ways of moderation. Sometimes we have been inactive when we might better have been more active. But our ways, by and large, have been moderate.
Karma? I do not know.
But there does appear to be Karma-like wisdom in our hymn:
“What we choose is what we are and what we love we yet shall be.”
I know a value we can cherish – may not live up to always – but aspire to. It comes from perhaps the greatest of philosophers of moderation, again from the ancient sage, Lao Tzu:
“As long as there is a foe, value him,
Respect him, measure him, be humble toward him;
Let him not strip from you, however strong he be,
Compassion, the one wealth which can afford him.”
Passion? … Compassion … Moderation. … KARMA. We are responsible for our own actions, for our own souls, for our own morale.
For the coming decade, I hope we get things done.
That hope may require passion.
But for the healing for a lifetime and for the long pull,
I speak for action and moderation.
Let me close with a quotation from Robert Bolt, author of A Man For All Seasons, the story of an heroic stand. This statement comes from Bolt under the title,
A Modern Man For All Seasons:
“Indeed I don’t think we want, don’t think we can afford a Hero. It seems that, if we can negotiate the next fifty years or so, many of our present problems will be solved. It’s a big ‘if,’ but the prize is proportionate. Meanwhile the times are critical.
“A Captain of Fate, an epoch-making specialist in one particular virtue, rocks the boat to one side or the other. I think we want not a captain now, but a full crew of moderate men. But:
“‘Moderate’ will not in them mean slothful, or devitalized as it often does today. On the contrary, they will be moderate, these mean, because they are complete. …
“Our (modern) man (for all seasons) will have the love of life (his own life, too – he’d make a most unwilling martyr). But (the) crude vitality, which he shares with bacteria and chicken-weed is in him informed with all (the) pulls and counter pulls we’ve been considering.
“He will be a complex creature, troubled, knowing, wary, worldly-wise, never nearer to the truth than when he’s nearest laughing at himself (never using laughter as a get-out though), often tired. An exhausting business being a man; seventy years or so we die of it. But it seems after all that the Man we want is just a man without the capital M.”
Moderation for Morale.
What we choose is what we are – and what we love we yet shall be.
“Be ye lamps unto yourselves,
Hold to the truth within yourselves.
Be your own confidence.”
–Buddha
Amen.
© Robert Mabry Doss