A Governing Voice

Morality as a Mental Health Hack

I have long thought of Virtue Ethics as an anxiety-reduction strategy.

The end-goal is, after all, Flourishing.

It’s not intended to make us self-flagellating hypocrites, but full human beings — complete with Joy, Happiness, Beauty and the like.

That Beauty is cognizant of Sorrow is only part of its charm.

The idea is to strip away thought processes that are not advantageous, to liberate the mind from the tendencies that keep us bound by self-destructive patterns.

Fail-fully I say this to you, from a vantage of trial and ever-present error.

Yesterday, something occurred to me. It was both event and thought.

Working away like the moody elf I am, I began to get knotted up in one of my neurotic loops.

I was unhappy about something. Let’s call it Monday.

I was unhappy in my work, thought I had a problem with it, and began to ruminate on all of my perceived complaints.

Before I knew it, all of life was intolerable, and I began to have let’s call them self-destructive ideas.

Suddenly, an internal voice spoke to me.

“Are you so ungrateful that, because of these few difficulties, you would throw away all of the Beauty and wonder that I have given you?!”

I had no choice but to respond “No. Of course not. I will be better.”

And on I went with work, everything just the same as before, although entirely different. What had seemed like toil and drudgery was now meaningful work — interesting and engaging to my now-curious mind.

What this voice was, I’ll leave to your imagination.

It’s said that Antisthenes, student of Socrates, had this to say about his teacher:

“I learned how to dialogue with myself. I learned how to do with myself what I would do with the man I was with Socrates.

That is, he internalized the sage.

Much as I did in Vajrayana, when I embedded the visualization of Green Tara, the beneficent goddess, who was ever-present in my consciousness and imbued the whole of consciousness with the soft light of Compassion and the power of the Mantra, I have over the past three years embedded a similar consciousness with the dialectical teachings of Y’shua the Anointed.

This has been cultivated through daily prayer and weekly liturgy, the Mass.

Because of it, I have trained my brain to have a personal relationship with my Meta-cognition, and to realize myself as a participant in the cosmos, as opposed to a slave.

John Vervaeke believes

“You can understand Stoicism as a philosophy, or religion, that's trying to internalise Socrates in a really living way.”

Y’shua said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” His early followers were self-described as adherents of “The Way.”

And the way would set you free.

He sounded a bit more self-aggrandizing than Socrates (to our Modern ear) not least because he was working in an Abrahamic metier. (It’s noteworthy that he never attributed his Power to himself, but always to the One.)

Enough apologetics. The point I’m making is that the Stoic part of Christianity is as helpful as the Stoic part of Stoicism, and that I found the techniques in the same fashion that I found the Stoic parts of Buddhism.

And that part may be described as “dialectic,” the ability to build a mental system which questions the logic of its own assumptions, and seeks to find a fruitful homeostasis within the organism.

We’re beautifully complex creatures, after all, and deserve to enjoy the delights our cognition offers us.

Fond thoughts of you this Tiwesdæg, governed by Mars.

May all of our internal battles be victorious.

Abashedly, 

Aaron