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The Ten Commandments: Signs of Progress on the Spiritual Journey · Tracking Wisdom

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  Views, interpretations and opinions expressed are not advice nor official positions presented on behalf of any organization or institution.
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  They are for informational and entertainment purposes only.
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  Now join Ryan and Peter for another episode of the Tracking Wisdom Podcast.
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  Good morning everybody.
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  Welcome back to the Tracking Wisdom Podcast.
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  I'm Ryan.
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  I'm Peter.
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  And today we have, I think, a really interesting topic.
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  This is something that's been on my list of discussions for a number of years now.
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  And what we're going to be diving into today is digging into the Ten Commandments from a reframe of what I consider the conventional or traditional teaching or understanding around the Ten Commandments as sort of divine law.
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  I think the definition of sin in a way, sure.
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  And, and rules, to me it comes with this sense of obey and punishment almost.
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  You know, it brings that sense.
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  My first exposure to looking at the Ten Commandments from this kind of lens was actually through my reading with conversations with God where in the narrative it was reframed as 10 commitments.
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  So want to dig into the friction I feel with the idea of commandments from an all loving God and the freedom of choice and what the implications of that are and then reframe it more as signs, more like
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  waypoints on the journey than absolute dictates from the divine.
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  For many, God is the unconditional love, the one essence that flows through all things.
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  And in Christian scripture, and I suppose it's probably also Old Testament that humanity has been given freedom of choice by an old knowing all loving God.
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  And yet we have this image or interpretation of requirements and rules that we could choose to not obey and then that angers God somehow.
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  So it's really conflicting to me to number one, conceptualize or experience a God of love and tenderness and acceptance that also gets angered and doesn't want to be disobeyed.
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  You know, this, this sentiment rubs against my intuition and my experience.
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  So if God is all powerful and omnipotent, why would we not just be made to do the things that would that God wants us to do?
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  And if it is to give us choice, is it actually a choice if we do the wrong thing and are then punished?
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  Now that's not to say that there's no consequence and I think we'll talk about that a little bit.
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  But I don't believe in this sort of retribution and retaliation from an all loving God based on our choices.
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  The conventional teaching or understanding this fosters fear and guilt and, and repression as opposed to an inner peace which from my understandings from the Gospels and, and the New Testament is the pursuit of this inner peace.
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  And I think that that's where this conversation kind of goes, where it's more about achieving that oneness and peace and understanding versus a compliance based mechanism.
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  Anything you want to share before or say before we move on?
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  Yeah, but it's kind of far afield because I, I'd mentioned Tom Campbell off Mike, who's a physicist who talks about kind of the nature of reality a la Donald Hoffman.
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  And one of the things that he says is that universal consciousness is learning.
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  And so I think the interview I heard, someone explicitly asked him about.
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  No, he said, he said, well, so for example, that's why Old Testament God's different from New Testament God.
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  I was like, oh my God.
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  It's like, oh, Old Testament God was immature God.
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  And basically he says that's essentially what he's postulating, is that the reason that we exist as, and we've talked about this with conversations with God and other things.
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  Right.
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  As, as pieces of consciousness, as pieces of the divine, is that we exist so that the divine can have our experiences.
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  But he takes a step further, further to say it's how the divine learns.
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  Yeah, so God learned by creating an avenue and then running the, the exercise for 4,000 years or whatever.
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  And then it's like, oh, oh, maybe I don't have to force this so much.
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  Like, and, and then I realized it's like learning as a parent.
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  Yes, right.
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  I mean, we've had those experiences and this is like what we've been talking, I've been talking about a lot is, you know, the need to control as a parent and then the need to let go and say, oh,
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  yeah, you know what?
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  All I really need to do is love you.
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  I don't need to control you.
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  As long as I love you.
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  You make your own decisions and you'll be guided by love and not by fear, and then you won't go wrong.
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  And that's the way we want to be as parents.
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  But then we constantly fall back into, oh my God, I, you can't do this.
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  And anyway, so that's like you're talking about this thing.
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  I'm like, oh my God.
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  Like everything else I've been going through recently and I just heard about on the, on the way in here, it kind of resonates once again every time we do this.
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  It's funny actually, when you were talking about, I'm like, oh, this actually kind of relates.
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  I didn't say anything to you, but.
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  This is a major question that you raised, like a major theological question that you raised, it comes up and again and again it's like, well, how do you reconcile the angry God and the loving God?
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  This postulation that humans are.
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  Are fragments of God consciousness separated so that God can have our experiences or observe our experiences or learn whatever.
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  Right.
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  Somehow God is interested in our experiences, created us as separate in order to have something that it couldn't have without us being separate.
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  And it just fits very nicely.
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  Yeah.
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  And then the other thing is, and we've talked about this many times from a Western Buddhist perspective, I say that because I don't really know if it's different from more traditional Buddhist interpretation, that the Buddhist precepts, which are
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  kind of analogous to commandments, are taught as not Buddhist being commandments.
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  Right.
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  You know, it's not that you can't do these things, it's that these things aren't aligned with spiritual goals of growth and attainment or whatever.
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  You know, peace.
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  Yep.
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  Right.
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  Which is, I think what you said as well.
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  Yeah.
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  And I think that that's essentially where this line of reasoning ends up going.
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  Right.
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  And we've touched on this before, that these are characteristics of wholeness as opposed to, I mean it's a, it's a chicken, egg thing or.
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  It's not chicken or egg, it's chicken and egg.
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  Right.
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  That these are both.
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  Both.
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  If you manage to live this way, it's easier to realize your wholeness and awakening.
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  And also if you just have a spontaneous awakening, you tend to align and experience things in this way, you know, aligned with commandments or precepts or ethics, spiritual values.
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  And so it's.
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  I'm trying to find an idiom, I was gonna say a two way street.
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  It's not really two way street, but anyway, it's chicken and egg.
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  It's both the cause and the result as an anecdote.
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  This friction that I'm describing as far as a discordance between my understanding of what the divine is or would be and the way that it tends to be presented in mainstream religion and mainstream Christianity specifically, was an obstacle
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  to receiving the value and the meaning behind what I think the teachings are intended to convey.
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  And that's not to say that another person who hears it in this way has the same obstacle.
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  And this is something that I'm continuing to come to terms with, I guess in my own experience and self awareness is it touches specifically on things I think you've said more so than I have.
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  But that just because it's an obstacle to me doesn't mean it's an Obstacle to everybody.
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  Right.
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  I have often I've expressed frustration in the way these are communicated.
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  And that's not to say that communicating them in a new or alternative way way is wrong.
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  You know, the pursuit of trying to share what resonates with me and us is not an irrelevant pursuit.
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  But it also doesn't mean, because I find value or more alignment or spiritual awareness and fruit from hearing it the way that we're expressing it doesn't mean that somebody else doesn't receive that message and fruit by hearing it
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  in the conventional way.
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  Right, right.
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  So this is in no way intended to chastise anybody on, on the way they of their understanding, but share that.
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  I have personally felt friction with this punitive, retaliatory, angry description of a God to me is just a personification of, of our humanity.
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  Right.
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  The way we parent the way.
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  And so when historical people were conceiving of their understanding of a creator, this parental figure is a natural image to describe that kind of relationship.
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  And it would also be reasonable to expect that, that in the absence of, you know, continued deeper experience.
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  And that's not to say that mystical experiences and understanding didn't exist back in those days.
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  And as I've said before, I believe some of this is a function of the distance from the original teaching and the translations and reconveyances, perhaps through people who don't fully understand the original meaning, has introduced some noise that's
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  sort of my perception of how we in part got to an angry God, so to speak.
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  But your comment about the maturity of God, that's what I was getting back to before.
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  That's an interesting thought because it's insinuating not that God isn't all and perfect in and of itself in its existence, but that it's continuing to learn about itself.
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  Who is God?
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  What is God?
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  And in fact that is part of what is described through conversations with God is this investigatory learning.
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  So that was an interesting thing that you brought up.
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  Yeah, I think what, what's striking me is I'm feeling a little intellectual tension with.
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  I guess it's the comment that I made about our experience as parents that I feel attention with anthropomorphizing the infinite.
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  You know, it's a convenient way of expressing it, but I really want to be very cautious about saying, oh, this is literally what it is like.
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  Okay, so learning is learning.
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  That doesn't imply a human experience.
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  Right.
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  But I think where, where we get into a lot of trouble in, in trying to talk about these things is over anthropomorphizing and kind of justifying.
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  Well, of course God's angry.
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  It's like, well, wait a second, God's not human.
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  So you can't say, of course God's like, that doesn't make any sense.
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  And so there are similarities, but it doesn't mean that God is human.
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  Like, you know, God's not human.
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  You know, we're created in his image.
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  I buy that, but that has a very, very, very broad interpretation, right.
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  What that means.
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  So just to just, just to make that comment.
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  But I think the other thing I was noticing is that, you know, if you're starting out with a society, you're starting out with Garden of Eden or post Garden of Eden and basically growing community of human beings that
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  are evolving.
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  You know, one of your priorities is, hey, don't kill each other because it's going to screw things up.
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  So kind of like the Ten Commandments are some priorities.
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  They're not the end point.
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  They're just like, we, we have to be able to live together and have a certain level of harmony and so that we can have community growth and security so that we can reach our point of spiritual growth, which,
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  you know, it often feels like we're only just starting to get to, but we keep on screwing it up.
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  I mean, I, I think that.
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  I think that's pretty much the story of civilization, right?
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  Is we start to have it good and people start to get interested in, you know, advanced pursuits not pertaining to survival.
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  And then we start beating at each other.
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  So, like, oh, we have to worry about surviving now, like, why we had all this stuff, like, it's all worked out.
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  Just stop being jerks.
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  But just to say that that from a developmental perspective or of just of civilization or community or whatever, it does make sense to say, okay, hey, to start with, let's not kill each other.
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  Let's not take each other's stuff.
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  Okay.
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  And it's not even a question of making it up as a rule.
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  Right.
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  It's just, you would think it's something that you learn.
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  I mean, just talking about having a roommate, right?
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  It's just like really small community.
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  It's like you have to learn to have peace in, in that household.
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  You start to learn how to share things, which basically means, you know, the Ten Commandments.
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  Yeah.
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  So I guess I'm saying it's not only a question of a potentially punitive approach.
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  Right.
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  It's also just some basic guidelines of interrelationship.
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  Yeah.
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  Helpful relationship behavior.
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  You're talking about peace in an interrelational or communal sense.
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  And yet what I'm talking about here is finding that peace internally.
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  And they're not dissociated, they're not mutually exclusive.
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  They're very much related.
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  Exactly.
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  I'm citing conversations with God.
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  It's where I originally heard this concept.
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  But I'm not specifically trying to discuss conversations with God's specific excerpt.
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  But the point with conversations with God as it was presented that way and the way that I'm understanding the statements, let's call them statements, is not what you should do.
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  Right.
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  It's not do these things.
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  It is more when you are in alignment with the divine, when you are living in accordance with the flow of life.
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  You know, these are imageries that are in are cross denominational Wu, Wei and Dao.
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  And you know, you were talking about the Buddhist precepts that when you are in the divine pursuit or living in that way, you will observe these things in your behavior.
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  You will observe that you have no desire to kill things when you are living in this.
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  I don't want to use too much flow state stuff, but that's just what's coming to.
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  I also don't want to be very stringent on the theological language because I think they all are kind of speaking to the same thing is it's not a rightness and wrongness.
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  It's.
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  It is living in accord with the way things are.
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  So that in conversations with God he called it the 10 commitments, which presented it more in as I guess God's promises to us that these will be.
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  You will recognize these things in yourself or in your experience when you are on the right path.
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  Air quotes if you want, you know, were to put some value judgment behind it.
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  And so the way I'm seeing this is not commandments and rules and dictates, but waypoints and signposts that are evidence that you are on the path, that you, you will observe that you do not have a desire.
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  And this I think is important.
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  There's actually a point in my notes next because this brings what I think is hard for people to understand is the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus was talking about not committing adultery.
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  But if you look at a woman lustfully, you've already committed adultery in your heart.
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  And I think sometimes, and I included had a hard time understanding I didn't do anything.
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  How have I committed adultery?
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  And then am I now in trouble?
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  Right?
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  And I think the idea is getting away from compliance based thought about it.
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  And I think this was also where the historical Jewish culture or not the culture.
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  But the leadership felt like they were righteous because they didn't do these things.
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  But that doesn't mean that your inner person, your inner self was actually in alignment and that the punishment is not eternal damnation or getting kicked out of heaven, but is the opportunity cost of observing the peace and well
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  being that comes from living internally.
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  It drives internally.
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  Your behavior is a representation of your inner being.
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  So, so just reflect on my personal experience.
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  When I was practicing Christian, my concern was never what's going to happen when I die.
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  As a teenager I wasn't like, oh my God, what about when I die?
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  I never, never had that question.
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  My concern was, why am I miserable?
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  And as you, you know, anyone who's heard me talk for more than a little bit, it's like, my concern is suffering.
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  I mean, that's, and that's why I find Buddhism so attractive, because it's like, hey, I'm gonna talk about suffering.
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  Oh great.
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  That's what I wanted.
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  That's why I know, you know, it's like, because I'm suffering now, I'm not worried about suffering in the future after I die.
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  I'm, honestly, I don't, I believe I'm much less likely to suffer after I die than while I'm being alive.
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  So that's something that for me is a very strange kind of thing.
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  It, it feels to me like very much an artificial construct of a culture.
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  You're gonna die, you're gonna suffer after you die.
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  It's like, why would I be like, I'm suffering now?
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  You know?
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  And so while you were talking, I was thinking in terms of peace and harmony, like aligning.
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  Not so much spiritual life per se.
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  Right.
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  Or spiritual pursuits, but just trying to have some peace, trying to have internal harmony.
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  But as we touched on, works both ways.
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  Like if you have internal, internal harmony, you have more external harmony.
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  Right?
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  You create external harmony from your internal harmony.
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  And at the same time, if you can create external harmony, it's easier to find your internal harmony, which is the purpose of all kinds of monasteries and spiritual communities of all kinds.
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  Right.
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  Is you have commonality wherein you're all acting in accord, you have more harmony amongst you, you have more opportunity then to access your inner harmony.
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  And so it really, really works both ways.
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  Oh, punishment.
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  So there's a, you know, the idea that, you know, that anger, you're not punished for being angry, you're punished by being angry.
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  Yes.
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  Right.
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  That these things inherently create internal suffering and that people who do them persistently are probably.
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  Well, I don't Say, probably I believe that they're able to do them persistently because.
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  Because they're very good at lying to themselves, that they're operating in a schema where what they're experiencing is the best that they can hope for.
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  So I am bullying, I am acquisitive, I am taking, I am harmful, I'm experiencing power.
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  That's the highest happiness.
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  There's a huge amount of internal conflict and suffering, but.
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  But it's ignored because, well, I know that I have more than you do.
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  I know that I'm better off than you are, therefore I'm happy.
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  And this is what happiness is.
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  And it's a misunderstanding of what happiness is.
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  And it's a failure to recognize how much suffering is going on internally.
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  But that's the nature of that way of being, right?
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  It's this total commitment to not reflecting.
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  Like, I will not experience my feelings because my feelings make me feel bad.
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  It's like, you're right.
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  It's not your feelings that make you feel bad.
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  You have unpleasant feelings.
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  That's not what makes you feel bad.
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  What makes you feel bad is feel like being bad.
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  And so that there's.
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  That's kind of the failure of the message, right?
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  Like, I shouldn't do all these things because they're bad.
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  But look how well I do when I do these things.
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  And look how air quotes happy I am.
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  You know, I'm doing so much better than you.
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  I'm so much happier than you.
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  I mean, you're being a sucker by letting me trample you.
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  Whereas if you are the, let's say, victim, at peace, fully open and full of compassion and not suffering by being beaten, then you're actually better off.
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  You're actually suffering less than the person in power.
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  So.
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  So I think that.
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  I guess my point of that little exploration is that that's where the messaging feels right?
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  If you say, you must not do this because you will be punished and you will burn in hell, I'm not burning in hell now because I'm willfully ignoring my suffering, right?
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  Right.
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  Then it gets turned as to see, I can prove you're wrong, or, well, I don't care because hell's not here.
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  Right.
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  It's like I'm not dead.
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  Like I'm not dead yet.
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  And I don't believe that anyway.
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  Right?
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  So I don't believe what you're telling me.
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  So therefore I can do these things.
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  And I am happier when I think the other way of teaching it is, well, look at what you're experiencing.
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  Are you at Peace.
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  Are you really happy?
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  Yeah.
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  And when you do these things, pay attention.
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  Does this make you more at ease or does that make you more tense?
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  Right.
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  You know, and when you look at it that way, if you're able to pay attention, of course, what we're talking about here is meditation, mindfulness, right?
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  It's like, that's not trivial.
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  But if you're so inclined to, to do it that way, then you will see, you will see the universal human experience.
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  You'll see the truth, capital T, like, in that anybody who pays attention has.
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  That experience, the oppressor model, so to speak, what you were just describing directly leads to that fear and clinging.
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  Even if the superficial perception of the experience is I'm winning, I'm gaining, by definition, it also includes a fear of losing and a fear of also being taken advantage of or whatever other fears might come into play.
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  And those fears continue to degrade the piece.
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  You know, is that describing that those who are not grasping to gaining, those that are not fearing lack, have the peace?
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  You know, that's kind of how I, how I see that.
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  And I.
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  And again, you know, to, to bring it back to the Ten Commandments commitments, these signposts of, of progress and, and the way or however you want to describe the pursuit of inner peace is that as you develop more
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  inner peace, more awareness of your true self, you will experience these or recognize these behaviors as described through the ten Commandments in your outward behaviors.
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  But I think it's interesting and it's not a, it's not a perspective I really dug into in trying to prep for this, for this episode.
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  Was your point the two way street kind of thing, that harmony in your external experience can open up opportunities to work on your inner experience and that they do, in a way feed off each other.
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  It's not just your inner.
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  Your outer experience is not just reflective of your inner peace or inner experience, but also that taking active steps to.
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  So in that regard, compliance, air quotes does have some value, but only if you take it to the next step.
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  It's not the end, right?
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  It's not just don't kill people, it's don't kill people and continue to work on what angers you to the point of imagining killing people, or work on the fear and lack that is driving you to covet and be
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  jealous of somebody else and what they're doing.
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  Because that's where the peace will start to really ruminate.
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  The outward actions can help create an environment for inner work, but it doesn't do the inner work.
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  Yeah, so I'm, I'm kind of drifting into this non compliance headspace because of what I was just talking about like the, I like our term non compliance, you know, the, I don't really want to say sinner either, but
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  the, I don't know, the violent aggressor, taker.
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  Right.
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  In, in the short term or from an individual perspective, there are benefits, right?
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  So, so, because I mean you pillage and you know, hoard stuff and just have more stuff.
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  And I, so I think there are potentially individual benefits of I don't know what else, you know, power, whatever.
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  But what you're really looking at is more of the same.
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  There's more of what you've been getting, you got more of.
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  Now what there isn't is growth.
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  What there isn't is improvement.
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  What there isn't is, you know, building of community of, you know, the species expanding into something different by exercising culture.
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  And so I think there is a short sightedly valid, a value proposition.
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  But again, that's a very weirdly narrow definition of success.
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  It is.
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  And I think that that is in part what the gospel teachings related to the commandments and the commandments as described by Moses are kind of getting at is that that's not actually winning you anything.
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  Well, I mean, I think the point is civilization and, and species success versus individual success.
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  I mean I think that things like commandments come out of civilization.
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  Right.
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  As opposed to, you know, troops of animals acting biologically.
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  Right.
• 32:17
  But I think, you know, when we talk about the, the opposition to something like commandments, the opposition to these constraints on behavior that is a.
• 32:31
  Instinctual.
• 32:33
  What am I saying?
• 32:34
  Like this more basic evolutionary drive kind of stuff versus any intention towards improvement and growth and gain.
• 32:47
  Right.
• 32:47
  Real gain.
• 32:48
  Right.
• 32:49
  Progress and then gets complicated.
• 32:51
  And now I just said the word progress.
• 32:52
  I'm like, well, yeah, well what about, you know, people who do.
• 32:56
  That's the way to define progress.
• 32:58
  It's this whole, it's the materialist paradigm versus you know, what we been talking about, you know, like the, the are learning about the fallacy of materialism.
• 33:11
  Right.
• 33:12
  And that material progress is again just very, very short sighted and narrow and not anything like the progress for which we have potential, which is almost inconceivable.
• 33:30
  So anyway, yeah, that was just weird going thinking that way a little bit about like well, what's in it for me it's very uncomfortable.
• 33:39
  It's like.
• 33:42
  But I wanted to pursue that a little bit because I think that's kind of the point.
• 33:46
  Like that's, that's A contradiction.
• 33:49
  That's who this is talking to in a way.
• 33:51
  Right.
• 33:52
  I guess that's the reason for what we started out with, which is the commandment and the forcing it.
• 34:01
  Because there are people who are not open to.
• 34:07
  They're not looking for increased peace.
• 34:10
  Is that fair?
• 34:11
  They may not be conscious that that's what.
• 34:14
  But that's what I'm saying.
• 34:15
  I mean, if you're talking to spiritual seekers who are looking for increased harmony and peace and love, you're going to teach us differently.
• 34:24
  Not to say that teachers do teach, but what I'm saying is if you were starting out there and developing this system, your approach would be different.
• 34:34
  Your approach would be different.
• 34:36
  But in reality, historically, you're not starting out with that.
• 34:40
  So I think what we're looking at in terms of like, wow, this seems confusing, right?
• 34:46
  This seems contradictory.
• 34:47
  This seems confusing is because we're looking back through time, right?
• 34:51
  Right.
• 34:52
  To things that started out.
• 34:54
  When societies are different, life was different.
• 34:59
  I'm not.
• 35:00
  I'm pausing because I'm like, oh, my God, life is becoming more like that in terms of external conflict and selfish rationalizations and stuff like that.
• 35:11
  So there's a zeitgeist now that's tugging more that way.
• 35:16
  And of course, that's what we're trying to move the other way.
• 35:19
  Oh, this is an interesting exploration.
• 35:21
  Thanks for.
• 35:21
  Thanks for bringing this up.
• 35:23
  No, I mean, this has been one that I've been wanting to attack, so I'm glad we were able to get to it.
• 35:28
  Hopefully the listeners had something to take away from that, and we'd love to hear from you as well.
• 35:33
  Next episode has a little bit of a callback to hear specifically about idols and worship.
• 35:42
  So join us next time on the show.
• 35:44
  We hope you enjoyed it.
• 35:45
  Until next time.
• 35:51
  Thank you for listening to the Tracking Wisdom podcast.
• 35:54
  Join us next time as we continue the discussion.
• 35:57
  Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and visit www.eth-studio.com for more information and.