Hi.
Thanks for new thread and welcome. My time here has been so much fun, that I have been spending a little too much time on the forum!
Stile writes:
First, I think it would be best if Sombra was able to give a description of what he generally means with the words "Skillful" and "Unskillful" in the context of his moral system.
Context of morality
Almost anything beings ever do, is run away from suffering and chase after whatever they THINK leads to happiness. Our real goal is eliminating suffering. We are not really interested in ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘the truth’. These are just things that we think will bring us happiness. The following rant explains the logic behind this.
Suffering must be understood in all its forms and extension, if we really want to end it. I mentioned it in the other thread and I will copy/paste it here. Suffering extends into:
-Physical: things like hunger, thirst, aging, death, disease, stress, our environment(cold, heat, sun, rain, snow), and the obvious ones like getting hit due to violence, or a car accident, work accident or a sport injury, etc.
-Mental: like fear, hate, anger, distress, depression, grief, despair, sorrow, disappointment, anxiety, and many others.
-Deep mental level basic unsatisfaction: the fact psychologists have come to, that we are always unsatisfied, we always want more. It is never enough love, friends, comfort, luxury, sex, anything we like. We are satisfied for a brief while, but after a little time, we want more, and if we can’t get it and haven’t developed patience, we start feeling the previously described mental and physical suffering.
This is all we do in life. We spend our time in jobs to fight of hunger with food, the environment with a society and a house, disease (and sometimes stress!) with medicine/drugs. As for the mental ones, the typical human response is to ‘release it’ into the world around you. We use all types of activities to ‘let out’ our mental pain, our stress. In a party, listen to the voices that say fun on the surface but fear underneath. Feel the tension and the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. We fake all the time. Watch in the stadiums the irrational fits of anger and frustration surging from people, camouflaged under team spirit or enthusiam. Drunks and fights. Look closely, we let out our insatisfaction in many ways. I am presently in this forum releasing the tension of curiosity. It gets worse from here, because we think we feel unsatisfied because we don’t have enough things. We think that if we had more money we would be happy. Or if we had someone that really loves us. Or if I were 5% body fat I would be happy. Or a fancier car, or a yatch, or a castle, and so on. This is what has led us to materialism/consumerism. Buy yourself something, apply a coat of superficial optimism (maybe in the form of a god?) and go on repeating the cycle. Then we mistakenly believe we solved the problem, or a god will take care of the details.
In this forum we are curious as to where our universe began. Why do we want to know that? Beats me! We just know we will get a pleseant feeling if we ever figure it out! Why do we want a pleseant feeling in the first place? Because we are uncomfortable with the tension caused by curiosity. We are suffering. If we were not suffering, we would stand pat with peace, not looking to get a plesesant feeling from satisfying our curiosity.
We don’t know if satisfying this specific curiosity will be everlasting or not either.
Morality
So, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ don’t exist. The things that our minds associate with giving us pleseant feelings are labeled ‘good’, and the things our minds associate with suffering are labeled ‘evil’. But nothing is inherently ‘good’ or ‘evil’, our minds just conceptualize things that way. What we are really after, is a pleasant feeling, one that is superior to all others, and that lasts forever. We don’t know if such a thing exists, but it is what we are all after. Anyone will agree if they care to look hard enough. We are not interested in the truth, or in right and wrong. Our minds just give us a pleseant feeling when we satisfy our desires. Our minds endlessly create new desires, we endlessly try to satisfy them. Over and over again. If we don’t satisfy them, we suffer. Our mind tricks us, just to get its pleseant feeling, it lasts for a little while and then goes for another. It does the same thing over and over, with food, sleep, comfort, shoes, clothes, sex, anything.
In order to get the most pleseant feelings possible, and make them last as long as possible, it is necessary to understand two things:
1. That pleseant feelings depend much more on our mind and much less on things outside of us, and
2. The mind’s relation with the law of morality.
1.
That most of the pleasure from comes within is easy to see. Take any experience. I will use sex for this example, but you can use any sensual pleasure (sensual pleasure= pleasure of the 6 senses: body, eyes, ears, nose, tongue or through the mind in the form of feelings, complex emotions, ideas, thoughts, opinions, etc.). Supose you could repeat a sexual experiment and keep all external variables exactly the same. The partner, the setting, the time, the duration, the position and variations, evertything but the state of your mind. Every time you repeat it, the experience of pleasure will differ. Sometimes it will be more pleasurable than others, sometimes it may even be bad sex. This is because your mental state affects the way you feel and percieve the experience. For example, if you are not good at sex or are very worried about something (will I please her?, how do I look?, etc), your experience won’t be as good as if you are good at sex, or are completely confident that you will please her, because worry does not feel good.
This extends to any aspect of experience. Two people can look at the same tree, and one can feel and percieve beauty, the other might feel hate instead, because he thinks about the time he fell from a tree because someone pushed him.
2.
The mind’s relation with morality might be a little harder to see. The ‘law’ of morality is:
Skillfull actions lead to ‘happiness’, unskillfull actions lead to suffering.
Actions are skillfull based on the underlying motive or intention behind every action. If there is no volition, motive or intention, then you would not commit the action. There are also neutral actions that are neither moral or inmoral.
For simplicity, these underlying motives or roots can be classified into six, three of them I call unskillful - greed, aversion, and delusion/ignorance. Any action originating from these three is called unskillful, because they lead to suffering. The counterpart to these unskillful roots are the skillful ones. Instead of greed we are capable of non-greed (generosity, detachment, etc), instead of aversion we are capable of non-aversion (compassion, sympathy, gentleness, etc) and instead of deluded/ignorant we can be wise.
I say that delusion/ignorance lead to suffering, because the origin of suffering can be traced to our ignorance of what we are, the self-concept. From previous posts with a little editing:
Every evil deed, every example of heartlessness in the world stems from this false sense of ‘me’ as being distinct from all else that is out there. We have separated ourselves from the universe, even though we are inherently connected to it in many ways. We need its air, water and food, we are tied emotionaly, mentally and we are connected to it through its law of morality. But we insist on ignoring this and decide ‘I’ have to get more for ‘me’. Just examine your own actions. Anything you have ever done, do or will do in the future, examine your feelings, perception, thought process and intention. You will find that every act that could be clasified into ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’ stems from either: greed, you desire something for you (it could be a mental or physical thing); or aversion, you wanting to keep away something you don’t like (again mental or physical). This may be hard to see for some and may require certain practice. But if there is no self that desires something or keep something away, there is no ‘evil’. It is actually simple.
All the other types of suffering we experience (possibly excluding some of the physical ones like hunger, thirst, aging, environment) spawn from this.
SO ANY ACTION THAT LEADS AWAY FROM DELUSION/IGNORANCE IS SKILLFULL.
I hope that explains the context and the meaning of skillful and unskillful. If you wish I can further clarify how our skillful actions can lead away from this delusion/ignorance. I will write it another post.
Stile writes:
What about something like opening a door for a blind man? Is this skillful or unskillful?
Opening the door for a blind man will be skillful or unskillful depending on the underlying motive. For example, if you do it because you are thinking it must be hard beeing blind, I want to help him it is skillful. If you do it because he is in your way and want him to hurry up so you can get on with doing what you have to do, it is unskillful. Or if you do it because you want people to see how good a person you are, that is unskillful (because you are reinforcing your ego-image, thus reinforcing the self-delusion/ignorance).
It may be unclear how opening the door for a blind man with the intention of greed leads to suffering. I can further clarify this also. Just tell me and I’ll write about it.
Stile writes:
Does it change depending on if the blind man thanks you for the help, or curses you out for not letting him do things for himself?
No it does not. It depends entirely on your intention. Nothing exterior to you determines if it is skillful or not. You can do it with the best intentions, with great skill, and still get cursed by the blind man. But the blind man curses you because he is upset due to his own delusion, not because you did something wrong. Morality has an impersonal standard, it does not depend on the opinion of people. You are completely responsible for YOUR actions, happiness and suffering, and so is the blind man. You are not responsible for the blind man’s happiness or suffering. You have can have an effect on it obviously. But not the sole responsibility. You can only affect his suffering(positively or negatively), you cannot cause it. He causes his own suffering with his own delusion/ignorance, you only have a limited effect on this, and not the root cause.
Stile writes:
Does the happiness or suffering for you outweigh the happiness or suffering for others? Or is it the other way around?
Remember that the self-concept is a tool we use to interact with our world. There is no ‘my’ suffering or ‘your’ suffering, there is only suffering. One is not more important than the other. To act you must choose priorities though. I guess this is what you refer to as weighing more; that is, which one do you prioritize?
It depends on the situation. There are too many variables. Let us imagine a situation. Someone is terribly suffering because of sickness and requires medicine. You are able to get the medicine for that person, but that requires an effort from your part. It requires your suffering. This may be as little as 5 minutes to carry your body to and from the pharmacy, and $5 for the medicine. In this case I think the other person’s suffering ‘outweighs’ mine. But if the medicine is worth $900 000, can only be obtained in a faraway land, and you are not a millionare, I think you can forget about helping that person with medicine, and focus your efforts on something else.
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