Sunday Workshop: Defining Morality Today
On tripping and falling at a Buddhist temple, challenging rules, and a workshop on definitions of Modern Morality
A registration link is below for this Sunday’s mini-workshop for paid subscribers on modern morality, according to Jungian psychology. A video link will also be below afterward we gather.
There are two spots left in my June 19-23 retreat for Quarterlifers on San Juan Island!
I spent an impactful few months living adjacent to a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka when I was nineteen years old. When I first arrived, the monks expressed feeling that I’d lived there in a past lifetime, a suggestion that felt true to me too. Everything was so familiar. “Satya!” They’d declare. “That’s a Sinhala name.” I became close friends with two of the monks who were near my age. Despite their limited English and my brand new exposure to Sinhalese, we’d spend whole afternoons together talking. We found a way to share our thoughts on life, religion, our different cultures, and their mixed feelings about having committed to the Buddhist priesthood when they were young. When their parents visited the temple on occasion, they’d bow before their children, now draped in red robes. I’d watch as my friends seemed to endure these shows of reverence, their big toes lifting off their flip-flops and their hands twisting awkwardly behind their backs. We were all playing roles, wearing what we were supposed to wear, and tolerating certain constraints.
As a young, foreign woman, I moved between strictly respecting all the cultural rules and gently breaking them at times. I observed all the dress requirements, for instance. I always covered my shoulders and worked hard to keep my knees and ankles covered too, even in the unfamiliar heat. But I didn’t always leave the little temple library before dark, as was expected of me. The boys remained studying as the young girls packed their things and ran out. My tiny protest against this encroachment on the girls’ ability to study was to stay reading after the sun went down.
No matter how close we became, this fact of my being female was an undeniable moat between myself and my new friends. In the village, day-to-day, we found ways to ignore the distance. But when we left town—which we only did once—that gap announced itself as ultimately unbridgeable.
This was the day when they took me to see Sri Lanka’s famous Temple of the Tooth, where a sacred relic of the Buddha—yes, a tooth—rests on pillows and under glass. I was excited to be able to visit and to have my friends as guides, but I was also nervous. I didn’t want to make mistakes. I didn’t feel certain that I knew how I was supposed to behave in that space. As we walked towards the entrance, my mind felt clouded and unsteady. It was also a hot day and as I tried to keep pace with my friends, the thin cloth of my wrap skirt began to tighten around my legs. I was unaccustomed to this kind of clothing and the dust of the ground mixed with the humidity of the air to alter how the fabric fell against my skin. Before I could make an adjustment, my skirt tangled in such a way as to bind my legs and make it impossible for me to step forward. I suddenly fell, hitting the hard earth, as if I’d been hooked by a cowboy’s lasso at the ankles. In shock, I looked up to see my friends both staring down at me. Far above them was a circle of countless monks, all draped in various hues of orange and crimson, watching from the top of the temple. We were already like the start of a bad joke: two monks and a white girl walk into a temple. But I knew that I was the punchline. For a brief moment, I waited for my friends to reach their hands down to help me up. But I realized, in the eternal seconds when they did not help me off the ground, that they were not allowed to. Their vows forbade them from touching a woman. No matter the state I was in, they would not assist me. I buried my humiliation and, in front of them and everyone else in that vast temple, stood myself up. I straightened the fabric of my offending wrap skirt and mumbled something like an apology or an explanation. All of us embarrassed and exposed, we carried on.
I shared a quote of Jung’s last week that led me back to this memory.
“We must have the freedom in some circumstances to avoid the known moral good and do what is considered to be evil, if our ethical decision so requires” (Jung, Memories, p. 330)
I wished my friends had helped me, but I was never upset with them for not doing so. They were, like me, young and scared in that moment. I could see the conflict in their eyes: their natural instinct told them to reach a hand toward me, but the rules in which they’d been carefully trained had taught them that, because of my body, such a thing was wrong. Forbidden. It was in some ways a tiny thing, but I felt the revelation in that moment looking up at them that they’d been trained against their natural desire to care. In that moment, I felt, the rules needed to be defied.
We have all been trained in different ways against our instincts; it’s part of the intention of civilization and education. As a result, we have been taught that good things are bad and bad things are good, trained carefully by many different elements of culture, education, law, philosophies, and religion.
Ethical decisions today often require doing what is considered “evil” because evil is an interpretation, one often projected from a dominant group onto others because of sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, class, ability, political party, or even species. Animals are the constant recipients of our projection of evil. This is why we must “wrestle with evil,” because in every era, “evil” requires reinterpretation. It cannot be rubber stamped from the lives of others; it cannot be observed blindly from holy books and rule books.
One of the reasons I have been so drawn to Jungian psychology is because it provides a new roadmap and insight into what true moral reckoning requires. Laws and rules provide guidance and reassurance; without them, discomfort, loneliness, and fear are bound to arise. We all need new guidance and guideposts.
Join me this Sunday at 10am PDT | 1pm EDT | 6pm UK for a mini-workshop on modern morality.
Link below for paid subscribers.*
One Sunday each month, I gather with paid subscribers for a conversation and mini workshop emphasizing a specific theme. Last month we explored dreams and dreamwork—and I really, really loved what unfolded. These monthly one-hour gatherings provide space for us to be together in an intergenerational community exploring some of life’s deeper questions while the world tosses and turns.
This month, we’ll explore this theme of “good” and “evil” and the extraordinarily complex topic of ethical decision making today. I’m looking forward to spending an hour with this sweet community.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber and would like to join us, you can upgrade anytime and the registration link will become visible below. You’ll also receive the link directly in your upgrade confirmation email.
*If finances would prohibit you from joining but you want to be there, please reply to this email or send me a note at satyadoylebyock@ substack.com ASAP. I’m happy to comp you a subscription. I operate on trust for this and don’t need an explanation. xo
“Too many still look outwards, some believing in the illusion of victory and of victorious power, others in treaties and laws, and others again in the overthrow of the existing order. But still too few look inwards, to their own selves, and still fewer ask themselves whether the ends of human society might not best be served if each man tried to abolish the old order in himself.” (Jung, CW7, p.5)