Trying to be good

There’s been a bit of a spat recently between a couple of writers I follow on non-duality/Buddhism and it has been fascinating to watch the consequences.

The trigger for the argument was trivial but it was fuelled by the followers each writer has who started ramping up the indignation. Thankfully, after an initial spate of name calling, both writers calmed down, had a Zoom call, and subsequently wrote interesting posts about the event.

The reason I am writing about it here is that here were two people, who write about self awareness and was of achieving calm and equability, losing it in public. Both subscribe to a world view that says that everything that happens is grist for the mill, that even bad things, maybe particularly bad things, give us the opportunity to learn about ourselves and life.

But we overlay this with the perceived need to be good, to be seen to be good. What good is can be incredibly slippery. Trying to be good is hard. We fail as often as we succeed. But somehow it still feels important to try than to give up.