58: The Stupidity of Moral Relativism

58

The Stupidity of Moral Relativism

Long before I began writing my spiritual musings (I’m working on my fifth volume now, The World According to “O”), I wanted to write an essay on what I have always felt to be the bad faith of moral relativism; but sometime yesterday afternoon, I don’t remember when exactly, I was gripped by the thought to write a spiritual musing on moral relativism, but instead of focusing on the bad faith I should focus instead on the false premise of moral relativism because it would be more reflective of the subjective/objective truth of morality that I realized in my own journey of self-discovery.

I say subjective/objective truth because I had a singularly convincing experience that initiated me into the impenetrable mystery of our essential nature, and it was because of this subjective experience that I came to realize the objective truth of our moral nature; and this is the premise upon which I’m going to write today’s spiritual musing…

Let me begin by addressing the central issue of moral relativism, the obvious criticism that is sure to arise from what I’ve called the objective truth of our moral nature which can be expressed in the following question that is at the very heart of the philosophy of moral relativism: how can an objective truth come from a subjective experience?

A fair question certainly, but one could discuss this issue until the end of time, which is why I dropped out of university in my third year of philosophy studies to find my own way in life because I saw no end to the dialectical discourses that philosophy gave rise to, and in my quest for an answer to the question that set me on my journey of self-discovery (who am I?) I came upon Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature that became the objective truth and moral compass of my life; and although I have written about this in The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price, it behooves me to offer a Reader’s Digest version for today’s musing.

The experience that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature presupposes the principle of reincarnation, about which I have neither the desire nor inclination to prove because whether one believes in it or not reincarnation is central to the objective truth of our essential nature which is reborn from life to life for the teleological purpose of realizing the potential of our essential nature like an acorn seed becoming an oak tree, and although this may appear to be a circular argument which brings us right back to the subjective uncertainty of moral relativism the very nature of my singularly convincing experience confirms the objective truth of our moral mature and disclaims the false premise of moral relativism; this is why Gurdjieff said, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.” 

Which means, quite simply, that although my journey of self-discovery initiated me into the mystery of the objective truth of our moral nature, it is still a personal experience and the reason why I have called it subjective/objective. Here, then, is the experience that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature and objective morality…

Following up on my belief in reincarnation, which was outside the dogmatic paradigm of my Roman Catholic faith that I was born into and the source of years of personal conflict, I promised myself that one day I would explore some of my past lives like the historical novelist Taylor Caldwell did in Jess Stearn’s book that became my inspiration, The Search for the Soul: Psychic Lives of Taylor Caldwell; and my opportunity came when my life partner Penny Lynn and I relocated to Georgian Bay, Ontario twelve years ago when by “chance” I met a woman in Orillia who did past-life regressions which inspired my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives that I’m going to publish when I feel the time is right.

I had planned to have ten past-life regressions, but I only had seven because seven regressions gave me more than enough information to answer the questions that haunted me about my current lifetime, questions like why do I feel so out of context in my family? And, why do I have a sexual fascination with older women? And other questions about my life that I suspected were brought about by past-life experiences; and I was right.

I got the answers that I was looking for, which cleared up why I felt the way I did growing up; but because I became a seeker at a very early age (in high school, actually; the spark combusting with Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge which I read in grade twelve), I became obsessed with finding an answer to the question who am I?

I cannot go into detail, but in my early twenties I had a traumatizing sexual experience that brutally shocked my conscience from its primordial slumber and catapulted me into my quest for my true self, because I knew that the person who did what he did that night was not the real me; it was me, but not me, and I had to find the real me or die trying. And so committed did I become to finding my true self that I was willing to pay any price that was asked of me, which I did and wrote about in my memoir The Pearl of Great Price.

To my total surprise (and my regressionist), in my fourth regression I went back to the very beginning of my essential nature and ground of all being: I was an atom of God in the Body of God where all new souls come from. The Body of God was an Ocean of Love and Mercy, and I was an atom of God without self-consciousness. I had consciousness, but no self-consciousness; and in the same regression I went back to my first primordial human life on earth where I had evolved up the ladder of evolution into a higher primate with group consciousness but no reflective self-consciousness, and then the miracle happened.

I was the alpha male of a group of ten or twelve higher primates when I experienced the birth of a new “I” of God in the dawning of my reflective self-consciousness. It was a rudimentary sense of self-awareness, but I experienced myself for the very first time in my essential existence; and this changed my life forever.

From the moment the new “I” of God was born I had a separate existence from all of life, and this separate existence initiated my personal karmic destiny that began the individuation of my essential self-consciousness; and from lifetime to lifetime I evolved in my essential self until my current lifetime when I was ready to end my cycle of karma and reincarnation and realize my essential self, which I did with the help of Gurdjieff’s teaching and the sayings and parables of Jesus that I wrote about in The Pearl of Great Price.

From my regressions to my other past lives I learned how I brought my karmic self with me from one lifetime to the next, and I came to understand why I was so out of context with my family and why I had a sexual fascination with older women, plus many other things about my life that I would never have come to understand without my regressions; and as I wrote Cathedral of My Past Lives I connected the dots and realized that we have a karmic destiny that we create ourselves by the choices we make, and a spiritual destiny that is encoded in our essential nature to become spiritually self-realized beings.

And I learned something else about our two destinies that solved the mystery of our paradoxical nature: we can only realize our teleologically driven spiritual destiny through the resolution of our personal karmic nature, which we can only do by taking evolution into our own hands to complete what nature cannot finish by becoming karmically responsible for our own life in particular and life in general; and this was the objective truth that I discovered from the subjective reality of my past-life regressions, because it finally dawned on me that the immutable law of corrective measures was an objective principle of life that governs all behavior, whether we are conscious of it or not. And this makes moral relativity stupid.

Nietzsche wrote, “You have your way, I have mine. As for the right way, it does not exist.” But he was wrong. The right way is implicit in all we do, and not until we learn to live with karmic responsibility will we be free of the curse of moral neutrality. And learning the right way is what evolution is all about…

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