Enlightenment Vs. Moral Development

[Connection]

I just thought I would share my experiences here.  Hopefully they might be helpful to somebody on here who’s trying to understand what they are going through. 

So enlightenment?  I watched Leo’s video about spiritual enlightenment.  He talked about how it is such a rare thing, maybe only one in a million could achieve it.  So, yes, that sounds daunting.  It seems like some people have a tendency to lose their minds on their way to enlightenment.  So I thought a somewhat different perspective on the subject might be helpful.

I think my own experience perhaps isn’t enlightenment but just a stopping point along the journey.  I don’t know.  Everyone has their own way of labeling their experiences and this is how I see mine.  This may be something that is easier for you to wrap your head around than enlightenment.  Maybe it is just a story that I tell myself to create drama in my life.  You be the judge.  Life has no meaning until you give it meaning and all of that.  I think my experience is somewhat rare but perhaps not as rare as what Mr. Gura describes as enlightenment.  If I’m going to put a label on what happened to me I would say it was me developing my own morality and sense of ethics and where that ultimately led me.  I think it is something that a lot of your teachers have experienced, especially the ones that you liked really well.  It is perhaps not such an unattainable feat of the mind.

So I was a quiet introverted kid.  I lived in my own head a lot.  I liked to read books.  I would find myself lying awake at night thinking about things like – What happens when we die?  Do we just disintegrate into nothingness?  Can I be okay with the belief that I will one day just disintegrate into nothingness?  That’s sort of sad and disturbing to me.  What does it all mean?  - My mom took us to church I think more to socialize and have a community to fit into rather than through any real need to instill faith in God.  My dad had a somewhat strained relationship with his mother, who was very religious, and I think that made him jaded about God and religion.  He used to read passages of the Bible and make fun of them.  He did not go to church with us.  Eventually I started to hate church and began to refuse to go.  It was just boring.

All through junior high and high school I thought about these types of topics a lot.  A lot of the time I would be going about my daily business on autopilot with thoughts like this in the background.  Hey, I likely could have spent thousands of hours on this.  I don’t know.  It was automatic to me.  It was just something that I did.  I didn’t feel the need to share these ideas.  I just thought them.  I read a fair amount of the classic books because I had to for classes and some on my own.   I liked authors like Mark Twain, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, etc.  Lord of the Flies comes to mind as an important book in my thoughts.  At any rate, what I now realize is that I was drawn toward books in which the characters faced moral dilemmas.  If you look at any famous classic book, it probably revolves around some big moral dilemma that the characters are experiencing.  One of my teachers would talk about God a lot and I thought he was kind of kookie, but I liked him.  There was another teacher who I now realize seemed to be sizing me up on the moral development scale.  I remember him asking me “What would happen if you turned in your assignment late?”  As I was always waiting until the last second to turn things in.

So the year was 1995, I was in college and taking a couple of history classes and a class about the philosophy of morality.  I was an introvert and never fit in to the college scene very well.  I was more immersed in my studies than the average college student I would guess.  But I was studying all of this stuff, Greek and Roman history, Socrates, Charlemagne, World War I and II and it just seemed to me that everything was starting to make sense and come together cohesively in a meaningful pattern.  History wasn’t just a series of random events but almost seemed orchestrated and moving in a direction of greater freedom and social justice.  Political systems were becoming less and less authoritarian as people gained more and more power.  I felt so inspired and uplifted by these ideas and couldn’t sleep at night.  I was just thinking and thinking about all of these ideas and trying to put all of the pieces together.  The philosophy of morality seemed to fit perfectly into the paradigm that I was forming.  I remember reading Kant and his ideas about why human beings should have value.  Why should we have human rights and a respect for life?  Because human beings were endowed by their creator with these rights.  If there is no God than human life has no value and we’re just a bunch of sacks of meat.  I’m sure you could argue against this all day, but this was my uplifting realization.  During this time I was thinking a lot and just didn’t feel like eating so I think I lost 20 pounds, and I wasn’t heavy to begin with.  At any rate, I was thinking all of these thoughts one night and it just hit me that there must be a God and I felt this shift in me like my ego and the part of me that wanted to be selfless came together and something entered my heart.  I don’t want it to sound like another BS religious experience.  It was a profound shift in me.

Unfortunately, I was still very much me, an awkward introverted girl trying to navigate my college experience and not really doing a very good job of it.  I felt like wow, I need to do something and take action on this.  I tried to talk to people about it and of course they just thought I was nuts.  I dropped out of school and pissed off my parents royally and made a whole slew of strategic blunders.  I tried to find someone to give me guidance, but I realized I was on my own.  I had to figure out my own path and I did a piss poor job of it.  I didn’t really heed to call to go on my own hero’s journey, as they say, and wound up going back to school.  I didn’t have the skillset to deal with my experience and didn’t find anyone to guide me to a better path.  So this became a big source of shame for me.  This experience I had and couldn’t really relate to anyone I knew about.  I felt like I was failing the world in a sense.  I wasn’t ready to be Gandhi or Martin Luther King or anyone awesome like that.

I’m not going to relate my whole lame life story after that point.  It is not impressive.  At some point I started to learn about the dark side, conspiracy, 911 etc. and then my life took on a whole new level of effed upness.  I’m not going to relate that story here.

But this phenomenon is something that is understood and studied in the psychology field.  I’m no expert on the topic.  I do recall one of my high school teachers handing out a worksheet about the levels of moral development and moral reasoning.  Lawrence Kohlberg is a psychologist who spent a fair amount of time studying the subject and breaking down the various levels and what type of moral reasoning is behind them.  You can size yourself up on the scale.

So thanks Mr. Leo for your videos.  I am started to see the light I think at the age of 40, yikes.  Yes, we all need to grow the fuck up and meditate and figure our shit out.

So enlightenment sounds like an attempt to bliss out of reality.  What I experienced is not that.  It is something that ultimately created more suffering in my life.  I still had a lot of layers of crud over my shiny authentic self as Leo would say.  I’m finally finding ways to lift those layers of crud.  It’s a slow process and the hero’s journey still seems like something I still don’t really want to take on.  I have to or I will remain miserable and un-actualized.

That’s all that I’m going to write for now.  Hopefully this will give you something to ponder on your journey to enlightenment.

Anyway, here is some info about moral development

Levels and Stages of Moral Development

Level 1: Preconventional Morality

The first level of morality, preconventional morality, can be further divided into two stages: obedience and punishment, and individualism and exchange.

Stage 1: Punishment- Obedience Orientation

Related to Skinner’s Operational Conditioning, this stage includes the use of punishment so that the person refrains from doing the action and continues to obey the rules. For example, we follow the law because we do not want to go to jail.

Stage 2: Instrumental Relativist Orientation

In this stage, the person is said to judge the morality of an action based on how it satisfies the individual needs of the doer. For instance, a person steals money from another person because he needs that money to buy food for his hungry children. In Kohlberg’s theory, the children tend to say that this action is morally right because of the serious need of the doer.

Level 2: Conventional Morality

The second level of morality involves the stages 3 and 4 of moral development. Conventional morality includes the society and societal roles in judging the morality of an action.

Stage 3: Good Boy-Nice Girl Orientation

In this stage, a person judges an action based on the societal roles and social expectations before him. This is also known as the “interpersonal relationships” phase. For example, a child gives away her lunch to a street peasant because she thinks doing so means being nice.

Stage 4: Law and Order Orientation

This stage includes respecting the authorities and following the rules, as well as doing a person’s duty. The society is the main consideration of a person at this stage. For instance, a policeman refuses the money offered to him under the table and arrests the offender because he believes this is his duty as an officer of peace and order.

Level 3: Postconventional Morality

The post-conventional morality includes stage 5 and stage 6. This is mainly concerned with the universal principles that relation to the action done.

Stage 5 : Social Contract Orientation

In this stage, the person is look at various opinions and values of different people before coming up with the decision on the morality of the action.

Stage 6 : Universal Ethical Principles Orientation

The final stage of moral reasoning, this orientation is when a person considers universally accepted ethical principles. The judgment may become innate and may even violate the laws and rules as the person becomes attached to his own principles of justice.

 

[Henri]

@Connection Thanks for shearing mate!

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[Connection]

Thanks, I'll  check it out!