Milk Cow

August 22, 2008. It’s clear that the universe is ‘amoral,’ in the same sense that Pakistan doesn’t care about the Stigler Panthers women’s softball team. Morality is a local little human invention designed to temper the worst expressions of ego to the ultimate benefit even of the egotistical—because we simply wouldn’t last long as a species without some kind of check on the insanity of ego. Morality is a tiny little sign of a certain level of self-preservational maturity, and it can even reach a certain level of ‘truth’ when it is applied universally and intelligently. But something higher than our self-preservation is clearly at play. Concepts like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ only have meaning at some fuzzy local level. The things we see as ‘good’ can be broken into two categories: the lower category, which feeds our ego, and the higher category, which feeds our true joy of consciousness.

But I worry sometimes that even my true joy of consciousness feeds something I might not, in the end, agree with—something sinister or foolish. That the universe is just using me as a milk cow.

But how ludicrous is that? Concepts like ‘sinister’ and ‘foolish’ probably don’t even have any meaning outside of our tiny human context. And so what if I’m a milk cow? How can I complain when I’m built to love my pasture and love giving milk? It’s control I’m really worried about giving up—as if I could somehow exert any control over the destiny of the universe! No organized committee of dinosaurs could have dug in their heels and refused to go extinct. The universe had other ideas.

The universe gave me the capacity to be happy and useful right where and when I am. Honestly—do I have anything better to do? Straying from my own heart’s path would be like insisting on breathing bottled helium because I don’t want the outside world to control me by choosing which air I should breathe, when in fact all the outside world ever did was provide a limitless supply of exactly what my body needs.