Lou Gold wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2024 2:01 am
Being that this is the Lenten season I became curious about the word 'penitence' and checking the disctionary discovered curiously that it has about 35 strongly-to-loosely associated synonyms but hardly any antonyms. Please speculate as to whether you feel this reveals something about the word bias of the dominant Western Paradigm.
Here are the associated words
according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
I suppose that the question is asked in the context of the widespread understanding that the Western paradigm emerging from the Abrahamic stream and the story of the original sin, is instilled with guilt and the feeling of being sinful, which is supposed to be a tool entirely devised for putting down the souls.
Let’s look at things step by step.
First, we have our deeds. We continuously embed our actions into the World flow. Looking back, we can see how we did this, said that to someone, etc.
Second, when we thus look back, we
feel a certain way about these actions which are now objectively embedded in the World state. One possible way to feel about them is regret (and the whole spectrum around it). This is when we recognize in the pictures of our deeds something that clashes with our moral ideals. We realize that we have acted under the compulsion of a certain narrow desire, uncontrollable explosive impulse, ignorance, etc.
So ‘penitence’ refers to something in our feeling life. We say ‘I feel regret’, not ‘I think regret’. These feelings are like an atmosphere of our soul life and we can’t that easily override them (see the Phonograph Metaphor Part 2 for examples).
Now we should clarify to ourselves what we’re looking for when we ask for this antonym. If we go directly about it, it may be like asking “Assuming that my
deeds are objectively the same, what could be the
opposite feelings?” And in fact, we can find many words that fit this requirement: shamelessness, callousness, indifference, apathy, self-righteousness, self-satisfaction, brazenness, aloofness, and so on. These are all feelings that feel good or neutral in the face of our objective deeds. So we see that there’s no shortage of words. Why the authors of this specific dictionary did not include more, I don’t know. The bias is there, not in the language itself (let alone the Western paradigm).
Of course, presented like this, one would say “Wait, wait, wait, no one suggests that we should feel indifferent, shameless, etc.” Alright, but then what do we mean by ‘antonym’?
Here things can be seen in two directions. In one, it is indeed possible to instill artificial guilt and shame about certain things. This is the case in which, for example, modern man feels a little shame to speak of God. He passes for quite naive – after all, science has probed everything from the atom to the universe and found no trace of God. In this direction, it is indeed proper to recognize certain cultural hindrances that paralyze our inner life. It’s not about becoming a fanatical preacher and speaking about God to everyone (we’ll just become the laughingstock of the company). The more important thing is to be free in our soul and be able to open up to something higher than our ego, which acts through ourselves.
The other direction however leads precisely to the antonyms listed above. This is what easily happens when one embraces today’s widespread agnostic mysticism, where it’s suggested that we should simply flow along (no thinker, no doer). Here things are twisted as if feelings like regret are signs of duality and one should simply eliminate them without really being concerned that these feelings may be
telling us something about what we have objectively embedded in the World flow.
I hope this makes it clear: if we one-sidedly want to eliminate regret and shame, and instead feel at peace and satisfied, we preclude any possibility of understanding the objective value of our deeds for the World. On the other hand, it is true that there’s no point in simply brooding over the feeling of regret. This leads us nowhere, we can’t change what we have embedded in the flow. Yet this feeling is a
feedback. It tells us that we can make things better next time.
RS wrote:Is there anything in life of which we could not say that we could have done it better? It would be sad if there were anything with which we could be completely satisfied, because there is nothing we could not do better.
The difference between a person standing higher and one standing lower in life is precisely that the latter always desires to be satisfied with himself. The person standing higher in life is never completely satisfied, because the subtle wish to do better, even to do things differently, always exists as a motive.
This is an area that is often misunderstood. People see something great when they regret a deed. However, that is not the best we can do with a deed, because we often base our regret in egotism; namely, people desire to have done the deed better to be better people. That is egotistical.
Our striving will be without egotism only when we cease to desire to have done a completed deed better and instead place greater value in doing the same deed better the next time. The intent and the effort to do something better the next time is higher than regret.
So we see that things are more complicated. When we look for the antonym of ‘penitence’, we shouldn’t simply seek the opposite pleasant feeling, but be led towards clearer intuition of moral life and fresh impulses for our future activity.
Thus, if there’s bias (and there certainly is) it’s not because we can’t speak of opposite feelings of guilt, shame, etc. but because it’s subconsciously realized that to find the opposite in a moral way (instead of simply feeling self-satisfied and indifferent) we need to
do something and this is widely resisted (especially if we have convinced ourselves that there’s no doer!)
If we want to seek the cure for regret, we can’t simply hypnotize ourselves that everything is great and non-dual no matter what we continue to embed in the World flow. Instead, we should look at words like those Paul used:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. Only by seeking to live a life inspired by the Divine, we may find the proper way to overcome regret. Not that we’ll eradicate the past, this we can’t do, but we can strive to become an inspired expression of higher life, higher morality, higher ideals, which should ultimately lead humanity to its true free spiritual essence.