Where do our values come from, anyway?

[morgan_dhu]

Whan and how did you arrive at your essential political, ethical and religious/spiritual philosophies? Have you always tended in certain directions and simply found the influences that brought you to where you are today, or did someone or something teach you/influence you/make you think about these positions and values?

Last night, I was talking with my partner glaurung about some of the books and authors from my youth that I've been re-reading of late (details available on my book journal, bibliogramma. I noticed that a lot of them, quite unbeknownst to me at the time, were fairly radical in some ways - Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Suzette Haden Elgin's At The Seventh Level, Samuel Delany's work... in fact, the other night, I was re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset, published in 1963, and ran across a small passage in which her attempt at a historical King Arthur is looking around at his band of companions, sitting around socializing after a hard day's work of hunting down Saxons, and sees two of his warriors having a cuddle in the corner. His thoughts are basically - lots of warriors form such relationships while on campaign and away from women, but these two really seem to be in love, which is only going to make them better warriors because they won't want to fight poorly in front of their lover.

So I was sort of wondering if perhaps, it was all of this stuff I'd read as a child that had started me on the path to becoming a left-wing radical with some very strong feelings about social justice, a pagan animist with some very strong feelings about the unity of all things, and all of those other values that underpin who I am.

But then my partner pointed out that I'd also read everything Heinlein had ever written when I was a child, and a lot of books by other people, some fairly right-wing, militaristic, crypto-fascist, etc., and hadn't been particularly influenced by them, other than to think about what was wrong in their worldviews, from my perspective, anyway.

Having a working mother back in the early 60s when this was not really common for a white middleclass child may have had something to do with my becoming a feminist at a very early age, but my mother was far from being a radical in political terms. I was raised until the age of about 12 or 13 without any continuing religious influences, except for one grandmother who kept trying to put me into Bible classes, but I didn't see her often at all. Then my mother converted to Judaism, but I was old enough that she simply asked my to keep kosher in the house out of respect for her, so while I studied the basic principles with her, I wasn't being pressured to adopt any particular faith, which was a good thing because by then I'd already developed the basic structure of my own beliefs, which were not at all like those of Judaism or Christianity.

So what was it? What made me initially susceptible to a left-wing/socialist and at the same distinctly spiritual and mystical set of perspectives on the world I live in? Sometimes it seems to me as though I have always felt this way, and that I uncovered my core beliefs rather than developed them, as I would read or hear one thing that said to me "yes, of course, that just feels right" and then read or hear something else and feel that there was something basically wrong about it - and that the rest was simply refining my feelings of "rightness" and "wrongness" with evidence and reason.

And how about you?

Comments

[rhondamatrix.livejournal.com]

Wow, what a question!

I'm not sure where the left-wing side of me comes from because while my folks aren't conservative Republicans they really aren't left-wingers either. They're just kinda cynical towards all politicians.

I definitely know where my bitter hatred of corporate America comes from ... when I was in sixth grade, Mobil Oil bought out the Montgomery Ward retail chain and proceeded to close the entire catalog division. My folks owned a MW catalog outlet which they had poured their entire life savings into, not to mention hours and hours of work every day, so much so that Mom actually wound up in the hospital. So with one swoosh of a pen or whatever, years of my parents' hard work went down the drain and we were basically destitute for the next four years. Not fun.

Spirituality, I have no idea. My views are so totally different from anyone in my family or even from R's. I'm really just kinda doing the whole freaky lone gunman thing with all that. My family were never church people. Dad grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist family, the kind that went to church four days a week, and Mom grew up strictly Catholic, and I think they just kinda burned out on church. I remember going to church when I was really little but stopping at around age four. I always liked the Bible as a story and read it a lot on my own, but not so much for spiritual purposes. Around age nine I started going to a Free Methodist church up the street from my house, but not because I felt any kind of devotion - I was just really bored and lonely and wanted some people to hang out with. So I got into the whole Youth for Christ thing with walkathons and rollerskating parties and all that, until about age 13. Not sure exactly why I stopped going, just got tired of it, I guess.

I think the thing that sets me apart from everyone else in terms of spirituality is that I really, truly, genuinely do not believe in a Higher Power or Creator. I wholeheartedly believe that the Earth did not come to be through any divine action but wholly from the beauty of scientific accident and the chaos of nature.

However, I do not see myself as an atheist either. I do believe there is another dimension, call it heaven if you want (I don't), a spiritual dimension where we all go when we die. I believe that spirits are all around us at all times, watching over us. Not angels with wings and harps and all that, just spirits. Maybe family, maybe friends, maybe strangers who are just attracted to our energy.

I believe that every spirit has the freedom to choice whether to remain on the spirit realm or to come back and try again. I believe that all of us have lived before, numerous times, and that the "unknown" part of our brains is past life memories that only a few of us have figured out how to access but all of us can get to if we really try. The goal of coming back for another existence is to try to resolve stuff that ended badly before, to apply lessons we didn't know before. (Of course, not being able to access specific past memories makes this more of a challenge). I read in a book by Linda Goodman that there is a hierarchy to the zodiac wherein people born under Aries are the youngest souls and so on up the signs to Pisces, which are the oldest souls. I don't know if that's true or not but it's an interesting theory.

I believe that we can communicate with the spirit world and that they can communicate with us because I've seen it happen with other people, although I've never been able to do it myself.

Finally, getting back to my original point, what turns me off about pretty much every organized spirituality, including R's, is that there is a Higher Power, a Creator, a God, a Goddess, someone or something that oversees it all, made it all happen, and is basically running the show. I believe that in the spirit realm, we are all one, we are all equal, nobody is better than anyone else, and there is no need for any power of any kind. There is no need for a hierarchy because there is no personal conflict. It is serenity. It is Being.

Like I said, I'm a freak.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Finally, getting back to my original point, what turns me off about pretty much every organized spirituality, including R's, is that there is a Higher Power, a Creator, a God, a Goddess, someone or something that oversees it all, made it all happen, and is basically running the show. I believe that in the spirit realm, we are all one, we are all equal, nobody is better than anyone else, and there is no need for any power of any kind. There is no need for a hierarchy because there is no personal conflict. It is serenity. It is Being.

Oddly enough, this is something I could have said about my own spiritual belief. so, I guess we're both freaks. No gods or goddesses, just spirit everywhere, in everything, sharing a mutual ongoing act of Being. No One makes it happen, it simply Is.

I call myself an animist rather than a theist or an atheist. For me, the spirit/life energy/whatever is everything - what we see, touch, sense is the manifestation of spirit in this way of being in time and space.

I know that some of my beliefs come from reading - everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Seth book by Jane Roberts - but I did a lot of that reading because I was looking for ways to understand a host of involuntary and spontaneous experiences with altered states and perceptions that I had as a child - everything from seeing auras to having precognitive dreams and moments of apparent egolessness and unity with everything. Strange stuff for a kid to deal with when there are no shamans hanging out in the neighbourhood to explain what's happening.

Of course, years of meditation have made these states more-or-less controllable, to be entered into at will rather than involuntarily, but it was the need to find out what was happening to me and build a spiritual framework for myself that would allow me to integrate these experiences that led to both the reading, and to the beliefs.