I appreciate your contrast of Western and Eastern virtue. It’s a rich subject and trolls many waters; most cogently Sufi antinomianism, the goal of incorporating the shadow in Jungian analysis as well as Blake’s progression of innocence, experience and synthesis.

If you don’t mind, please go to my blog and read “seeing in the dark.” I’d appreciate someone of your depth considering it.

Sometimes experience for experience’s sake is just a waste of time, a consumerism, but if its meant to happen, it happens. How often is it just another thing that comes between a person and her self-discovery? Hopefully one can trust her instincts about what to pursue and avoid and stand alone when the gut requires it.

When you look at a vice as a crutch, a different aspect is revealed. You see something that wastes one’s power and gives superficial gratification so one doesn’t have to feel the pain one needs to deal with. It’s becomes something that one has to lie to oneself about.

Then there’s those healing drugs that are used ceremonially which I’ve heard help heal and purge negativity, e.g. peyote, yage, psylocybin, iboga and others. Any of them could become a crutch, something pursued for experience’s sake with no sacredness involved, which insults the plant’s gifts and can become a profound abuse of oneself. But we are so used to abusing ourselves and each other we hardly know when we’re doing it. Anyway, a good commentary on the issue is the life of Shaman Maria Sabina.

In other words — and it’s impossible for me to fully justify this — but, compared to nearly anyone, the way I am is essentially someone who has *already* gone through “vice” and “experienced” its effects both positive and negative, at the extremes of the spectrum. And not only this but I am doing this now, and every day, every moment, and increasingly at every moment. That is not something I can prove… but I do want to make clear what it is I am claiming, even if I cannot demonstrate it to you via writing or words. But there’s really very little in terms of “indulging” that many people engage in that would “corrupt” me — that’s essentially the point I am trying to make, simply because I’m already in it. Of this I have no doubt whatsoever, and I’ve tested this on many occasions (despite my “pure” reputation as I’ve said before, I have broken many rules and continue to do so).

I suppose another way of putting this is that while I can and do indulge in ordinary vices, I find most of them not that interesting to me anymore. It’s not that I avoid them because I want to stay pure, I avoid them because I can only do so many things and I am busy indulging in other dimensions of reality which are for me far more interesting and bizarre. However, again — it’s not so much what actions one does as subtly how one does them which is of interest to me, so I can and do go back and indulge in ordinary vices from time to time, but I do it in a way that’s perhaps different from the way I might have done it at other times (or in other lives, so to speak).

To explain why this is or what I mean is virtually impossible, but it’s certainly what I am claiming.

Right, which is of course why the alternative approach (i.e., to simply avoid some set of actions one calls “vice” via some form of rules of varying rigidity) is not only very useful for many people but essential. In a sense, one could think of such rules as crutches also, they’re ways of stabilizing your situation long enough to work through issues that would otherwise be intractable for many.

In Buddhism there’s a notion of “precepts” which are a set of sometimes quite elaborate rules (in the classical Vinaya) or sometimes a bit more abstract (particularly as it is practiced in, say, many Zen sects). But also in Buddhism there’s a notion that at the “higher” levels, precepts are seen not as rigid rules but rather simply a technique, a way of stabilizing things but not an essentialist set of judgements; i.e., precepts are a way to “simulate” virtue before you’ve really gotten a handle on it. Later, it’s possible to expand your notion of virtue so it’s more along the lines of “non-waste” so it becomes possible to do things that would ordinarily be very harmful in a way that has a different quality.

But I suppose in all this I’m really just trying to point at an alternative way of thinking about vice and corruption; that is, rather than thinking in terms of preserving a natural state of innocence, one starts from a position where you treat everything with a sort of acceptance, both “virtues” and “vices” and move from that point of view. Then one doesn’t have to have this same struggle with vice, it’s no longer threatening to one’s stability. It’s just another aspect of reality like everything else, to be worked with like everything else. This approach isn’t for everyone but I think it ought to be on the table, and it’s the way I personally live.

Thanks for that link, I’ll have to dig into it at some point. Looks interesting.

There’s one other point I wanted to clarify here regarding what appears to be a hierarchy of values I seem to be positing above; i.e., being “bored” with ordinary vices and more attracted to other pursuits. In some rough sense I can talk this way but in another sense I don’t even believe in this sort of hierarchy. It is at most a matter of how I perceive my own decisions, where I go, how I maneuver in the world; which is to say, I attempt to maneuver, gently, towards things that seem interesting and away from things that seem less interesting (rather than towards “virtue” and away from “vice”). But in saying this I don’t mean to create another set of reified categories. In particular, to take Magda’s case of her interest in psychotropic drugs — though I personally don’t take this path I have many friends who do and have and I have the utmost respect for them and what they’re working with. It seems quite interesting and worthwhile, at least for them; I simply chose a different approach but I don’t see this as in any way a matter of choosing the less indulgent path — I’m indulging myself as well, just in different directions.

Then again there’s the case of the typical drug addict who has gotten themselves into serious trouble; what’s the distinction between these cases? I mean, I take Magda’s point seriously here: in some sense it might be said to be worthwhile even to indulge in some things to the point of excess, to experience that aspect of life, too; but to the point of becoming, say, an out of control addict, that just seems to be a collapsed, uninteresting alternative. In other words the reason I’d do something else is because other alternatives seem far more juicy, not because I’m trying to be pure or a prude or whatever it might be. And none of my friends who have experimented with psychoactive substances have done so in a way that led them down that path, either; they all do it with eyes wide open, so to speak, and it works for them. I’m just working on other things, in other ways.