Containment and Morality

Containment and morality or containment and ethics. What to say, really? As I write this, I am listening to a chorus of vicious dogs whose bark is not stronger than their bite and their bark is ferociously frightening. Tibetans keep dogs. Some are nice house dogs and pets in the sense that EuroAmericans think of them. Many, however, are made to violent by constraining them with short chains, beating them, and whatever else you do to make and animal angry, violent, hateful, and dangerous. The irony is that they are too dangerous to be let off their short chains and they also therefore cannot really do anything but impotently bark with a guttural compaction and projection of sonic anger. Death in sound, an old sound that every human mammalian brain knows from way back before any of us were born. That brain hears the coming violence and recoils as they are supposed to do by the wealth that demands animal protection. What are the ethics in violent dogs. Surely, dogs do not have the means to do other than they are beaten to do. What then are the ethics and morality of beating a dog so that they are angry enough to protect one’s walled compound from those without walls and, perhaps, without roofs?

All this is to set the stage, encode the emotion, and plant the seeds for a discussion about containment and morality. And/or ethics. Expansion was always a rule by which I lived my life. Onward and upward. Forward as my home state’s motto urges. Always moving on and away and avoiding again. Taking down the shingle and packing the light bag and moving. Where to and when to and how to were the adventure. Expansion beyond the current state, the status quo, was not only a physical movement beyond here, but a blowing up of inside, mind, knowledge, sight, sensitivity, awareness, and all the other mystery things that make me, and you, I suspect, human. This kind of expansion has grown up in me and I wonder where I have gone and why I am here and what has happened to me. And I am afraid.

Thus containment. So much have I pushed beyond and more and up and on inside of me, that I now need (and always did, probably) a container. This is a very difficult thing to know and realize now because for so long containers have been my enemy, I have fought them, I have resisted them, I have run from them, I have destroyed them, I have spoken against them, I have ignored them, and I have feared them. Was it instinctual or trained to fear containment, I do not know. Now, however, after what feels like a long career of deconstructing containers, I am charged with building my own.

Is it a prison I should build or is it a tool? Surely it is a prison because it eliminates opportunity and growth in the wild and nuclear fashion and replaces it with cultivation and concentration. I am not sure that I want that or even if I did, that I would know how to do it. Luckily, I have teachers who I do not know as well as I would like who know what container building is like, how to do it, and nice things like that. The work is there, it is hard and often not tasty, but I know what it is. That makes its it all the harder when I do not do it.

I am very much better at destruction than construction.

I realize I did not get to morality and ethics explicitly here. Though, I believe this passage is laced with its roots. Anyone care to take a shot at it? Where do ethics and morality fit in here?

Containment and Morality

Containment and morality or containment and ethics. What to say, really? As I write this, I am listening to a chorus of vicious dogs whose bark is not stronger than their bite and their bark is ferociously frightening. Tibetans keep dogs. Some are nice house dogs and pets in the sense that EuroAmericans think of them. Many, however, are made to violent by constraining them with short chains, beating them, and whatever else you do to make and animal angry, violent, hateful, and dangerous. The irony is that they are too dangerous to be let off their short chains and they also therefore cannot really do anything but impotently bark with a guttural compaction and projection of sonic anger. Death in sound, an old sound that every human mammalian brain knows from way back before any of us were born. That brain hears the coming violence and recoils as they are supposed to do by the wealth that demands animal protection. What are the ethics in violent dogs. Surely, dogs do not have the means to do other than they are beaten to do. What then are the ethics and morality of beating a dog so that they are angry enough to protect one’s walled compound from those without walls and, perhaps, without roofs?

All this is to set the stage, encode the emotion, and plant the seeds for a discussion about containment and morality. And/or ethics. Expansion was always a rule by which I lived my life. Onward and upward. Forward as my home state’s motto urges. Always moving on and away and avoiding again. Taking down the shingle and packing the light bag and moving. Where to and when to and how to were the adventure. Expansion beyond the current state, the status quo, was not only a physical movement beyond here, but a blowing up of inside, mind, knowledge, sight, sensitivity, awareness, and all the other mystery things that make me, and you, I suspect, human. This kind of expansion has grown up in me and I wonder where I have gone and why I am here and what has happened to me. And I am afraid.

Thus containment. So much have I pushed beyond and more and up and on inside of me, that I now need (and always did, probably) a container. This is a very difficult thing to know and realize now because for so long containers have been my enemy, I have fought them, I have resisted them, I have run from them, I have destroyed them, I have spoken against them, I have ignored them, and I have feared them. Was it instinctual or trained to fear containment, I do not know. Now, however, after what feels like a long career of deconstructing containers, I am charged with building my own.

Is it a prison I should build or is it a tool? Surely it is a prison because it eliminates opportunity and growth in the wild and nuclear fashion and replaces it with cultivation and concentration. I am not sure that I want that or even if I did, that I would know how to do it. Luckily, I have teachers who I do not know as well as I would like who know what container building is like, how to do it, and nice things like that. The work is there, it is hard and often not tasty, but I know what it is. That makes its it all the harder when I do not do it.

I am very much better at destruction than construction.

I realize I did not get to morality and ethics explicitly here. Though, I believe this passage is laced with its roots. Anyone care to take a shot at it? Where do ethics and morality fit in here?

Wonderment

I was thinking yesterday about failure as I bumped along a Tibetan road in a vomit laden bus. I was thinking that I would write a book about it. It is interesting how this thought came to mind. I was first thinking about how I had wasted the last seven years of my life. Then I thought I could salve that wound by doing something monumental: writing a book. Then I thought that I could further salve that waste by writing the book about that failure.

All this may seem dramatic. And it was at the time I conceived it. I was sitting on that bus jolting up and down, left and right, inhaling ubiquitous cigarette smoke, listening to the woman behind me vomit into a plastic bag, and most powerfully, reaping some angry karma.

It was the angry karma that was rocking my world...for the worse. I hated with every inch of my body and the depth of passion in mind that bus ride. Only the last two hours, which, of course, felt like a day and a half.

The failure of the last seven years, I will not detail here. Why, I don't know. But, it seems to cut too deep for right now. Especially since this blog is linked to my website.

What I will describe is the insidious revelation of anger and the way it creeps up and overwhelms.

I think, in this case, it has a lot to do with body sensitivity and the crass way the bus and the road conspired to attack me kinesthetically. Studying yoga and Buddhism trains body sensitivity. Ultimately the idea is to more closely know and observe the relationship betwen consciousness and bodily presence. That work does a lot to train understanding of those connections and also draws one into a red pill scenario where one is more sensitive of everything, including suffering.

While being cramped, congested, and harrassed by the raucous behavior of the bus and its lover, the road, my body was jostled in a violent way. I think, I did not prepare for that well and it resulted in quick translation of that material violence to emotion. I hated. I hated the bus, I hated the smokers, I hated the chinese speakers, I hated the Tibetan that wanted to cuddle with me, I hated everything.

Those brutal, hateful facts swelled over me and drowned my weakened yogic defenses in a sea of anger. There I was, in suffering.

In better news, I am not in a bus, but in a lovely little guesthouse that provides the perfect ward in which to recover from that trauma.