A friend of mine, let’s call him Charles because that is his real name, sent out a two and half page list of questions and as he said at the end of the list, any receiver of the list was free to answer any, all or none of them or even just throw the list into the trash and forget about them and even forget about Charles. This writing is in response to the questions:
What is virtue?
Is it important for a person to be virtuous?
In my own humble opinion, virtue, along with it’s opposite, vice, by their very nature as concepts of the human mind denote a dualistic way of looking at an issue that I believe is predicated on the lie that we all share as human beings, a lie that tells us that we are separated from each other and from the source of all there is and the source of who we are, which some may call the divine source or God. I believe that virtue carries with it the subjective idea of something good to do, have, or be and therefore subject to the judgment of human beings. In the Judeo-Christian world-view, the story of the casting out of humanity from the garden of Eden because of the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, I see metaphorically to mean that human suffering is the result of our mind seeing things dualistically, as in either/or, yes/no, heaven/hell, and of course good/bad. What it says to me that all suffering as human beings comes from seeing the world only from this dualistic view. Awakening to the realization that we are, in fact, all one and connected has made it possible for me to see and know myself as part of the connected whole and when I reawaken to this reality, to act in a “virtuous” manner becomes superfluous and meaningless because if we are all truly one, then what I do to another is what I do to myself and why would I do unto myself anything that was not aligned to the highest good of all?” In that level of reality, it would be impossible to do otherwise.
The major problem with this point of view is that our brain is hardwired to view the world in this dualistic way, for that is its primary function. That is also why it is often so hard for us to look outside of this box to see the world holistically rather than just the sum of its opposites. It is the reason why we must speak of such a thing as virtue as well as its opposite vice for we are left with being able to perceive the world of form only because of this mechanism of discernment we are given and while the mechanism serves well to ensure the survival of our piece, our body, personality and the mechanism itself, when we take a step outside of our identity with our piece, only then do we remember the fundamental truth about ourselves, that we are all connected and we are all one. In that level of realization even the two polar opposites of light and shadow do not exist, just as in the Biblical void before the creation of form.
