She said, "I'm struggling to live a life in accord with the ethical teachings of our path." The Sage said, "This arises from conflicting tendencies, one innate and one learned. Innate innocence seeks what reflects it outside itself. The senses are the means. Love seeks love, for example. As you grow in welcoming the innocence, you will find yourself more and more living spontaneously that innocence. The struggle will lessen. You will come to know you already have all you have sought. That is why love connects with love, finally, out of its own fullness and not out of any lack or need to get love from anyone. The Way is tending the aspiration and softening the effort. Keep doing that, and all will be well."
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Meetings with an Anonymous Sage."
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Gaylon Ferguson, in Welcoming Beginner's Mind, quotes Toni Morrison, from The Origin of Others: "The human project is to remain human."
Yes, but human is not something existing as a static thing. Human manifests in action. We do not remain human by simply accepting we are human or thinking we are human due to traits differing from what many call non-human. Human is something that can grow, or else it diminishes. We can become more or less human, meaning we can manifest more or less that we innately are.
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A person I worked with closely and considered to have extraordinary moral character surprised me with an admission. This sums it up: "We all have a dark side others do not know about."
My co-worker's words invited me to recognize, "Yes, you're right. I know I do. Yes, how true." No matter how human we are, we have within us the inhuman, the un-human. Within us are seeds, or potentialities, of human and inhuman. Causes and conditions lead to what comes to fruition, even as the environment participates in the ripening of seeds in a garden.
We may not know the extent of this inhumanness or humanness within. And religion and spiritual practice, any pursuit, in fact, can be a ploy to avoid and try to transcend this inhumanity or humanity.
If we avoid the inhumanity, we suppress the humanity. Why? They inter-are. We can know stealing is unwise and harmful because we know generosity is wise and helpful. Without the wisdom, we could not see the foolishness. We know love in contrast to lovelessness. Good news is seeing our rudeness, for kindness allows it to be seen.
And we can enter a spiritual path or practice thinking it will lead only from what we do not like about us and to only peace. Rather, it leads us into what we have wanted to avoid. That is the only way to grow beyond it. We become more peaceful by working through the arising of the lack of peace which has led us away from peace.
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As we see more clearly, all within us is exposed to the light of impartial consciousness. If one turns on the light in a room, the light does not decide what to illuminate, so with consciousness. We become surprised at how subtle our inhuman thoughts and actions can be. We become more aware of our humanness.
For example, meditation is a means to disclose our self-righteousness, to peel back the layers of the unwanted hidden and, sometimes, goodness we have believed too good to be true of us. Some of us have been, due to conditioning, trained to see our inhumanness and ignore our humanness.
In time, we learn to trust more the fundamental innocence within and learn that is an act of humbleness, not arrogance. Down-pushing ourselves does not advance our capacity to uplift others or ourselves. Accepting the goodness in ourselves helps us see and receive it in others.
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The prevalence of inhumanity is more apparent now due to the internet. We can be inundated with inhumanity and astonished at how many people are proud of displaying it and do not mind the whole world being privy to it. We have moved from a culture of shame, propagated much by religion, to prevalent parading of shamelessness in anti-religious, desacralized cultures. Positive self-esteem easily replaces positive self-honesty. Rightful confession is replaced by positive self-affirmations. I say all this to say that taking care of our heart-garden demands honesty. Little encourages us to be honest about ourselves, for we are taught how to appear to get what we want from others, not honestly be regardless of how others respond to us. Our basic goodness is not an appearance. Inhumanity arises from appearing to be an appearance needing something not already given to us. Within us is what cannot be given. What we most need has already been given; it is here, wherever here may be at the moment.
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Not long ago, I received transmission into a Zen Buddhist lineage through the traditional Five Precepts. These wisdom guidelines—not rules or commandments—provide an ethical basis for spiritual practice and awakened living.
The Five Precepts can be stated as follows: no killing, no stealing, no misuse of sex, no false speech, and no intoxicants. Like the Jewish list of the Ten Commandments, these guidelines are in the negative—the Commandments state only one precept in the positive. Jesus' Beatitudes, on the other hand, state blessings all in the positive—what to be or do. These lists imply ethics is foundational to humanness.
In The Mindfulness Survival Kit, Thich Nhat Hanh presents the Five Precepts in the positive. His list is Reverence for Life, True Happiness, True Love, Deep Listening and Loving Speech, Nourishment, and Healing.
To behave humanely is to act with a clear moral compass and ethical priorities. We open to an integration of being with action, not saying one thing and doing another thing. Spiritual practice leads to this increasing, subtle integration. When we fall short of our ethical aspirations, we begin again. We do not linger over our coming up short.
Through this integration, we become practically more human. We discover humanness is a journey, not a destination. We grow in wisdom and compassion, for humanness is a seed needing the right tending to become what it innately already is. Being spiritual is being human. Spiritual practice leads us to become not less human but more human.
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Volunteering to clean at a food bank, I saw how I had expanded my work there beyond what I was given to do. I wanted to, not to impress anyone or out of some neurotic compulsion. Such aspiration is spontaneous for an outflow from our true nature, our inborn generosity. This stimulus reflected a value from an upbringing on a farm where work was honored as noble.
I compared this work-generosity to humanness. That is, the inspiration to live beyond the status quo of what others call right and wrong is a noble aspiration. Simply put, let us not just keep the rules (i.e., conventional morality). Let us aspire to manifest an enlightened, dignified way of living beyond the ethical status quo, not to impress anyone but as a natural expression of the humanness within us, within every being. As we water these seeds of humanity, humanness manifests more. No truly spiritual path ends with the ethical status quo.
In this post-conventional, trans-ego way of being-human, we are not trying to be good persons as opposed to being a bad person. We are learning to live humanely beyond the duality of good-or-bad. We are not running from bad or running to good. We are not trying to please a god by being good. We are expressing goodness as an outflow of innate, basic goodness—better, the inherent light, the essence of humanness, is expressing itself through us.
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Two examples of this being-human are found in the Christian Bible. First is the list of the Fruit of the Spirit (or spirit) found in the Book of Galatians. The Fruit, singular, for they inter-are, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Also, a scripture in I Thessalonians reads, "Keep away from every appearance of evil." So, we do not just settle for not doing evil; we keep away from it. Again, an environment is critical in nurturing seeds, and our seeds of the Good, True, and Beautiful need to be respected and protected by wisely choosing the places, people, and things we associate with closely. We realize our senses are doorways, and we need to be wise in what we open the door to. We expose our innate innocence to what encourages it to manifest in a way of life that blesses others.
