des hardi said:
i d live by... whats good for the goose is good for the gander. as long as your partner agrees.... i d hate to live "in lies"
yes, and I've felt the same way too, but my thinking and philosophy has changed over the years.
also, you'll see many a women's magazine article purporting that unfaithful partners should deny events to their partners, as it's the 'bigger' thing to do. Seriously! They say it's simply a cop out to run home and confess all right after the fact, to 'clear the air' for the offender and absolve them through their 'honesty' but to hurt their companion, and possibly a lot worse. They have a point, although I don't believe there are any hard and fast rules as you simply cannot generalise on such issues.
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here's something else I read on a recent flight, in a book by Chin-Ning Chu that I'm currently dipping in and out of in between other things:-
'A Holy Man's Sacred Vow'
A holy man was meditating beneath a tree at the crossing of two roads. His meditation was interrupted by a young man running frantically down the road towards him.
"Help me" the young man pleaded, "A man has wrongly accused me of stealing. He is pursuing me with a great crowd of people. If they catch me they will chop off my hands"
The young man climbed the tree beneath which the sage had been meditating and hid himself in the branches. "Please don't tell them where I am hiding" he begged.
The holy man saw with the clear vision of a saint that the young man was telling him the truth. The lad was not a thief. A few moments later, the crowd of villagers approached and the leader asked "Have you seen a young man run by here?"
Many years earlier, the holy man had taken a vow to always speak the truth, so he said that he had.
"Where did he go?" the leader asked.
The holy man did not want to betray the innocent young man, but his vow was sacred to him. He pointed up into the tree. The villagers dragged the young man out of the tree and chopped off his hands.
When the holy man died and stood before judgment he was condemned for his behaviour in regard to the unfortunate young man.
"But - " he protested, "I had made a holy vow to speak only the truth. I was bound to act as I did"
"On that day" came the reply, "you loved vanity more than virtue. It was not for virtue's sake that you delivered the innocent man over to his persecutors, but to preserve a vain image of yourself as a virtuous person".
- and the moral of the story according to Chin-Ning Chu, is that our false concept of virtue often is nothing but vanity and an attempt to gain praise or to be self-righteous about how 'virtuous' we are, so we may feel superior to others. So many times, she says, this false virtue is accompanied by a dose of human ignorance - and 'virtue' becomes an effective weapon in making humanity a victim.
