More than any other commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” is spoken of. And the reason is fairly clear: it addresses the issue of life and death, the issue which Cain decided for Abel.
The last five of the Ten Commandments are commonly (and understandably) thought to be social injunctions:
- Thou shalt not kill.
- Thou shalt not commit adultery.
- Thou shalt not steal.
- Thou shalt not bear false witness—
- Thou shalt not covet—
Clearly, when these injunctions are ignored, much suffering is generated.
Yet, is this the only reason for these commandments?
What if there was a commandment, “Thou shalt not jump off a cliff”?
“That’s silly,” you might say, “everybody knows if you do that, it’ll harm you.” But what about these five commandments: if you violate them, will they harm you?
Are there laws that act as inexorably as the law of gravity, laws that will harm anyone that violates them?
Could these five commandments be considered the five Warnings? And, if they could be, could the first five be as well?
- Thou shalt have no other gods before me—
Does “other gods” include self-calming?
- Thou shalt not make any graven images—
Does this include my picture of myself?
- Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain—
This is older language than we are accustomed to: does the name of something higher
ever overshadow my experience of it?
- Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy—
Perhaps the word “remember” is the important one here.
- Honor thy father and thy mother—
Is this our Father, God, and our Mother, Nature?
But, to return to Thou shalt not kill:
Gurdjieff says, “If you learn how to create a flea, only then dare you kill a man.”
And “Do not kill another, even if your own life is in danger.”
It’s been said: “Everyone has to die, but no one has to kill anyone else.”
Looked at this way, killing is an act of supreme egoism.
Even in war, against an evil enemy, killing still carries karmic consequences.
“It was either him or me.” “I did it to protect my family.”
The folk singer Ewan MacColl has a line in a song, “What kind of future can there be with planes and tanks and guns? With flying high and dropping bombs on other people’s sons.”
Even choosing who lives and who dies is killing in that sense.
Mass murder, especially when done against defenseless people, carries vivid consequences. Einstein said of the atomic bomb and his part in its development, “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”
And karmic echoes of the Holocaust still reverberate in the world, throwing the entire planet out of balance, not to mention the deaths of other millions of people, killed at the behest of the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
Even the death penalty has this karmic taint. Of course, some people should not be free to repeat their harm, but to deliberately murder them—-?
So, I ask you, the reader, “What does ‘Thou shalt not kill’ mean to me, now?”
Lou Gottlieb 2/20/2014
The better translation from the Hebrew is “Thou shalt not murder.” 6/26/21
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