Beyond Good and Evil
Topic: Mysteries of Life
Every once in a while you wake up and you learn something that you didn't know before. A bit of information that gives you pause. Someone you know dies. A shock, a tragedy, something not expected. You feel bad, shaken and upset. What if somebody dies that you don't like. Do you cheer? If you are religious do you think about the will of god or the workings of karma? Would you feel smug about it as the death of someone you don't like confirms your vast and secure theories of the universe? That would certainly be arrogant and self delusional of you to think. What if that person who dies is someone you wished was dead. What if the level of dislike and distaste you have for the person is as high as can be, would you feel happy, vindicated, triumphant over the death of the person you despise? What kind of a person would that make you then? Would that make you an evil person? If you felt your life had been destroyed by that person, now dead, would you be an evil person if you felt happy with that knowledge? What is the level of harm that one person can do to you that makes you alright with being happy they are dead? What if you believed that the dead person wished you dead? An eye of the beholder sort of determination? What if you knew all of that and had fleeting feelings of happiness or whatever you might want to call it and then seeing yourself in that instant, felt remorse and afterwards felt bad for feeling good. Perhaps you could then detatch yourself from any feelings and you went beyond good and evil over it. How on earth would that even be possible? Is it possible to feel enough Buddhist detatchment over the whole thing that you could remove yourself from judgment over it?

When I post information about people who are executed or shortly to be executed my feeling is that nobody should kill another nor participate in the death of another human being. You'll find many anti death penalty websites desperately making up reasons why this person or that person shouldn't be executed. A bad childhood, bad things having happened to that person, the person is too old, too young, retarded or reformed. Rarely do they focus in on the sufferings those people to be executed have caused. The women, children, old people they've raped/tortured and killed hardly have a voice in the attempts to save their killers. I don't feel bad when those people are executed. I sometimes think about how frightening it must be to go through the whole process but then I think of the victims who went to agonized deaths and I think about Karma and cosmic retribution. Two Thai fishermen have just been sentenced to death in the brutal rape and murder of a young woman and as I look at their pictures I see their fear. I don't feel bad for them, I think of their victim and I hope that really is fear in their eyes and I know that their Karma has fully wrapped around them. I don't know that this makes me a bad person, I hope it doesn't make me a bad person.

I don't know. I'm still digesting. Still trying to wrap my mind around it.