I often experience a feeling that I lack both the interpretive and communicative skills to clearly dialogue with you. This may be my own issue and have nothing to do with you. I think it can happen any time I attempt a challenging discussion or at least at times. It does not help that any approach to what I would regard some ‘deep truth’ for a lack of better words always involves paradox. To me that means that a higher insight into reality dissolves opposites one or the other of which someone else may see only one side of.
At any rate, I feel l may have gone aground on the ideas of moralism and morality. I use morality as a real thing, not a subjective opinion, and moralism as a bigoted judgement, a tool people use to raise their own personal stature in their own eyes above that of others. This is the disease of comparison, the disease of judgment, the disease of competition, an endless state driven by fear of failure and inadequacy.
There is no better way to steer the bus than morality, but only morality that is real. That can be had only by enlightenment, the death of the false self and the are re-acquisition of the true self. This is what I believe and can see. I do not think it is a widely shared view.
To answer whether I have any evidence it took hold, I need to know took hold in whom. For me personally, yes. It was the question that led to my personal destruction of everything sacred to me, my Christian faith. I could not find any way to prove that to be moral was superior to selfish greed which would be obvious if God we’re real, and I could not prove that he does. This robbed me of any future hope of joy.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the utter surrender to despair, the acceptance that life has no meaning. In a flash I realized that my need for meaning is as meaningless as anything else. I knew in that instant why the zen masters have the story about a man of slowly fading strength hanging from a cliff, tiger above and tiger below, who plucked a strawberry growing there that tasted so good. It has tasted good all the rest of my life. It tastes like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy or Silent Night. Who understands that God is within? You prove God exists when he reveals His face to the dead.