Honesty and manners: A social lubricant that respects differences - Joe Bennett

Joe Bennett says manners and honesty enable us to rub along without our sharp edges catching. Photo / 123RF

Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton-based writer and columnist. He has been writing a column since 2017.

OPINION

A friend raised his daughter to a simple formula. He wanted her to be honest and well-mannered. Everything else, he said, would look after itself.

Is child-raising that simple? Having never raised a child I am in no position to comment. But I did have plenty to do with other people’s children during 15 or more years of school teaching, and I’d have to say that those kids who were honest and well-mannered were not only nicer to teach but also more likely to do well. (Hardly surprising, perhaps, when the polar opposite of honest and well-mannered is Trump.)

Manners maketh man, wrote a 16th century schoolmaster. In other words, we are how we behave in company. Manners are a social lubricant. They enable us to rub along without our sharp edges catching. For we are different, and manners respect difference.

Manners come to mind today because a kid has sent me a book he’s written. The kid is 57 years old, but I taught him when he was 16, so that’s the age I still see him at.

He was a gentle, thoughtful child and he took an interest in things spiritual. Initially this meant Christianity, but it soon morphed into yogic meditation. He’s been meditating now for 40 years and that’s what his book’s about.

Twenty years or so ago I was troubled about something now forgotten and he advised me, by email, to try meditating. I did, following his instructions exactly. I sat upright on a chair in a warm place, laid my hands palm upwards on my thighs, closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, and thought or muttered a two-syllable mantra, Hong Sau, with the Hong accompanying the in-breath and the Sau the out-breath. I focused my attention on a point between my eyebrows, the location of the inner or third eye, the ajna. And over the course of several sessions, each of which lasted at least 10 minutes, I saw and felt nothing. Meditating, as far as I was concerned, was just sitting down.

But not for him. He meditates every day and finds it calming and nourishing and sometimes startling. He writes of seeing auras of energy around people, and of being a conduit for electrical energy, and of rising out of his own body and looking down on it as if it were a shell that he had vacated.

For him, the point of meditation is to connect with the giant collective consciousness from which we are all formed and to which we all belong and to which we return between incarnations. (He has identified at least one of his own past lives in great detail.)

He observes that an atom consists of a tiny nucleus and even tinier electrons and an enormous amount of nothing. So, an atom is more a relation of space and energy than an assemblage of matter. And since we are made of atoms, the same is true of us. ‘Everyone and everything is basically an expression of energy and the energy is expressed in differently localised forms that we call, Jim, John, chair, house, pancake and so on. In reality it’s all a quantum soup consisting of one continuous whole... but we perceive it as a series of separate objects or separate phenomena. It’s a trick of the human mind.’

Once, when meditating, his breathing slowed until he was barely drawing air at all, and a light beckoned him down a long curving tunnel. Suddenly ‘all was blinding whiteness. I became a speck of consciousness in the vast ocean of light, caressed by currents of pure love. It was so pleasurable that I found it barely tolerable.’ He had come close to, for want of a better term, God.

I don’t doubt his honesty for one second. He is incapable of dishonesty. At the same time his experience of the world and his beliefs about it are utterly remote from mine. We cannot both be right. How do we resolve the difference? The answer is simple, and it is manners. I do not try to persuade him, nor he me. And we remain friends. (All of which explains why missionaries are so appalling. They’re not just smug and patronising; they’re rude.)

The friend’s daughter, by the way, whom I mentioned at the outset, is now a young woman, making her way in the world. She is loved wherever she goes and she is thriving. Honesty and manners.