How bad is adultery? Taoist perspectives on punishment….

It depends WHICH Taoists you ask, and when. The Complete Perfection Taoists, the largest sect in Chiina today,
adopted Buddhist monastic rules in order to bypass the whole problem of sexuality. But that doesn’t make them more moral.

The founder of Complete Perfection, Wang Zhe (Chongyang), is famous for forcing a long time happily married couple to divorce so that the husband could become his celibate disciple. Was not that interference ‘immoral” by Taoist principles of non-interference? Later the founder Wang, an ex-alcoholic who was incapable of taking care of his own daughter and had to turn her over to others to raise her, would badly beat this converted disciple for hours on end for not following his rules strictly enough.

And his advice for men who sinned by having wet dreams, was to force themselves to give up sleep so they could not have the wet dreams.

So maybe if you want strict sexual rules you and your friend should a half-Buddhist half-Taoist sect …..only to find those rules applied capriciously by the boss.

My point here is, don’t look to others for your rules, you will never be made happy. Your friend chose the woman and the situation, it was an unconscious reflection of him in some way. So should there be a rule against unconsciously choosing unreliable partners?

Perhaps your friend should be grateful that he found out sooner rather than later….and next time he will make clear agreements. But he sounds young enough to try again.

Earth is place to learn lessons. I never heard of spirits incarnating on Earth being greeted by a Welcome Sign: Incarnate Here Safely! All Souls Protected by Rules Against Stupid Use of Free Will.

🙂 hope this helps your anger.
michael

777,

There are always two parties, not just one to blame. If two people are in a fullfilling relationship there is no reason at all to cheat, how can you when you are full with love of the other.

Yet reality shows, and I was in that case, that we carry pain and blindness in us. If all was simple clear of how to deal with our past and pains we could figure out solutions right away and deal with it on the spot but it seems most of us can not. It seems that we need a sort of struggle to face our deepest patterns, sometimes over and over till we die or are lucky enough to discover them and change them causing pain along the way.

Adultery is nothing more or less one of the many paths of pain and challenge.

And who will judge who is the bad one and the good one? Who has so much wisdom to see those two people’s soul patterns?

Why do they need this conflict? Why couldn’t they not see a way out, other than adultery for her and him feeling abandoned and hurt?

Well 777 I guess those judges are rare, so people need to invent general rules and morals because ‘those who can see’ are hard to find.
So we are ruled by general ideas, morals and rules created out of lack of true wisdom, to guide the mass and to make society workable.

Yet as a Taoist you have to look beyond the morals and rules and look for the true meaning of why this happened to these two people without judging one or the other, because they found each other for a reason and created pain for some reason.

It is nice if you could help to discover the deeper reasons for their pains, for both.

Good to see you Alexander adding some of your feelings on this board… !

I do speak from my own experience, since I have been the person cheating on my husband. So I know very well what it is doing for your soul and heart. It is turning it into a hell inside, at least if you connect with that deeper part. I was cut off from spiritual growth because I was living a lie, I hurt a person and I was hurting myself. I was living in inner darkness, lost, and I felt that if I had to die with this lie inside I was condemned to wander in my own hell. THAT made me realize how TRUTH and HONESTY is the only right path.

It is way too complex to explain this on a forum like this but I have NO reason at all to not be honest and fair about this time period in my life or to share my feelings about it.

I DID WRONG and if I had known what I know now I would have done things differently but since I was limited emotionally I had no other ‘choice’ than to hurt my husband and for him it was a self fulfilling prophecy, how crazy it may sound, but his emotional pattern made me do it.

I can not speak for the rest of the world but both my ex and I see this as a deep painful lesson that made us better people, unfortunately we had to hurt each other to learn this lesson.

As for the child, the scars on its soul are already made, I hope that the person who will raise the child will give it all the love it needs.

I think what we are all looking for is a way out of our own pain, and that is all self-inflicted by our judgments against ourselves and others. Judgment is the killer of humanity’s truest instinct – the instinct to love and nurture. Forgiveness implies letting go of something as if it didn’t happen so as to reconnect with the course of natural love that wants to be flowing all the time. But “miss-takes” are usually punished instead because people fear their own self-judgments and self-inflicted guilt. We make scapegoats of projection and blame others in order not to have to feel what we really feel about ourselves. The hardest thing to do as a human is to stop projecting what we don’t like about ourselves on others and then try to do something about the so-called wrongs of the world. That is how the world actually is an illusion – we cast it on ourselves like a trance and then act quite insanely.

The only way out of our pain is to stay in touch with how we feel before we condemn because when that starts to come up from our conditioned thinking it feels wretched and that feeling is the warning indicator to tell us we are about to choose something other than love. It’s either love or fear, unity or separation. The world is the evidence of the choice to judge, condemn, punish and suffer. It is up to all us folks who choose to follow the Natural (meaning “in-born”) Way to return to love as the only means of correcting our world’s situation. Love unites. Thinking and judging divide. Love provides answers. Thinking invents problems.

BTW- I have two daughters, 16 and 32.

Love you,
Alexander