Dear Erin,
It was difficult to understand what you wrote 22/5 23:35 -0400.
Regarding how to combine mysticism and social activism the most important
idea I found in your e-mail was however:
'I just don't want to cling too tightly to a destination of "no more
suffering" but having that destination seems like a right path to me. If the
social activism involves clinging tightly to any idealistic destination then
I think some people start missing the quality in the ordinary day to day
life activities and their social activism is no longer life affirming.'
I agree that combining social activism with mysticism requires having no
fixation on any goal or destination. A mystic is open to new values and
openness to new values is not possible if your goals are fixed. You can be
primarily a mystic and secondarily a social activist if you use the new
values deriving from mystic experience to change the world (creating new
static patterns of values from these new values). You stay a mystic when you
are a social activist by not concentrating on preserving and expanding the
new static patterns of values, but on their continuing change-to-the-better
(on DQ).
At the end you wrote:
'On another note you had said that collective morality was the unconscious
not social to you. I am not clear why it can't be a collective conscious
(social) and a collective unconscious that creates a collective morality. I
think the importance of a collective morality is the recognition the
interconnectedness of everything--- you can get this internally and
externally.'
This is to me a mix of sloppily formulated ideas that defies (my) analysis.
The best part seems (to me) to be your statement of the value of recognition
of interconnectedness of everything. I don't understand how you relate that
value statement to the dichotomies of collective/individual,
unconscious/conscious and internal/external however.
To me social patterns of values are unconscious whereas intellectual
patterns of values are conscious. The dichotomies of collective/individual
and internal/external are irrelevant to the way in which I primarily
distinguish between the social and intellectual levels of (static) quality.
Both social and intellectual patterns of values have collective AND
individual aspects and aspects that are experienced as internal AND external
to the individual/collective. A 'morality' is for me synonymous with a
'static pattern of values'.
(Herewith I retract my suggestion as presented in my postings of 15/1/02
18:22 +0200 and 28/1/02 0:26 +0200 and on
www.antenna.nl/wim.nusselder/moq/wilbermoq2.pdf that the inorganic,
biological, social and intellectual levels can be characterized as external
individual, external collective, internal collective and internal individual
respectively.)
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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