Distaste

After decades of practicing zazen, I experience extreme distaste for many aspects of myself, past, recent and current. However, I feel exactly the same distaste for the behavior of some, though not all, of the people that I have interacted with. Blame is inappropriate. Distaste is not.

In particular, Catholic indoctrination reinforced by physical coercion was simply abominable. At least I learned how not to bring up a child or to educate young people. Many good and intelligent people never see through or break from their early conditioning and pass it on to the next generation. Members of each new generation have to think and inquire for themselves. Anyone could have been taken as a child and indoctrinated as a Muslim instead of as a Catholic or vice versa, yet each thinks that, fortunately for them, they have been brought up in the one religion that happens to be true as against any of the many that are so obviously wrong.

I started to inquire, at first by trying to rationalize received doctrines, but was paying insufficient attention to the bastards around me.