Journey to Ixtlan

We are all outsiders in our own special way. The appearance of a normal group, with their dogmatic rules, invites the role of the outsider. How to react? What does the group want? This is a poem on that subject.

Outsider's Strife
Poem for Day 83 – 20141215

So speaks the outsider with an inner critique:
I am a stranger among you, can you handle me?
By action I am foreign, ways not your own.
By identity I contrary, an abnormal quantity.
By beliefs I am different, a puzzle to you.
Standards of relating fail when you meet my face.
Friction will be the outcome if realize my place.

What would you name this disconnect?
outsider, heretic
maverick, eccentric
dissenter, bohemian
pervert, abomination

So speaks the group in a voice to shriek:
We are the group, seeking continuance of sanity.
We are to connect in a very certain way.
Rigid adherence is needed to continue the norm.
We hate your difference, but we love you.
Change you way and find shelter in our arms.
Shuck the sin and find the sacred path.

We have our ways to reinforce the path:
philosophy, law
dogma, tradition
morals, rules
ethics, beliefs

The outsider hears the voices: inner and outer.
How will they react with a deck so stacked?
To be true to themselves is fraught with peril.
The outsider speaks of a plan and seeks a path unwise.

So I could break the laws and garner your hate.
I will violated your morals so sin is my fate.
Your traditions are foreign, a creation of your kind.
Your dogma and morals are from your institutions.
None of these things are who I truly am.
None of this matters, for I am a stranger in your midst.

In the end I will hide in your teaming hoard.
A stranger to wear the mask of the scaremonger.
Your traditions I will wear as a cloak not my own.
Morals I will parrot while I go on covert.
I die a little each day in this sham of a life.
To do so is the way of the outsider's strife.

© 2014. Sean Green. All Rights Reserved.

I am getting ready to write a paper about the dynamics of sexuality. The core of my "morality" thoughts are in the following article. I would love to get everyone’s' opinions and feedback on this view of Natural Law vs. Man’s Law. This is being cross-posted on my blog so I can get the great feedback from my friends.

I think in the same vein as those who see the world being a place of connected spirit/energy/vibration. Dogma does not exist here. The rule is indeed survival. That said, we are spiritual beings in human bodies, and to survive a society/tribe makes agreements that are held to be harmonious to the society as a whole. Moral issues spring up from the misinterpretation of these agreements as being dogma instead of just the "really good idea" that they are.

An example is that it is a "really good idea" not to stick body parts into fire for extended periods of time. This can be moralized to state that fire is evil, and must be avoided because of its destructive nature. This kind of attitude comes about by those people who weren't smart enough get their extremities out of fires before harm befell them. Are there some people in every society that need protection that is "extreme" by other people's measures? Sure. Does that mean that society must vilify the things that are protected against? NO!

A last thought. In a diverse natural world that does not have dogmatic definitions of good and evil, and the measurement of the distance that you should put between yourself and something else is the relative harmony/disharmony that the object presents, there is the question of what society can/should do. In the natural law there is no "un-natural" act. How could there be? There are very destructive and disharmonious acts though. A mass-murder is is not un-natural. Killing is something that we are capable of, and who is to judge the motivations behind these actions? That said, a society can deem a mass-murderer as being destructive and dis-harmonious to a tribe/society, and the mass-murderer will be put down for the safety of the larger group. Is this "moral" or just good management?

Feedback? Opinions? Agreements? Disagreements?