Pop a Pill and Become More Moral – Really!

A pill to enhance your sex drive, a pill to calm your nerves, a pill to send you to sleep and now, dear troubled world, and get ready for a new pill coming your way to improve your morals. It can also reduce your racist remarks and behaviour. No, its not science fiction but the result of new research at Oxford University released in a new book, Enhancing Human Capacities by two dons. Don’t believe all this science fiction; verify it for yourself at www.guardian.co.uk

Researchers have become very interested in developing biomedical technologies capable of intervening in the biological processes that affect moral behaviour and moral thinking, according to Dr Tom Douglas, a Wellcome Trust research fellow at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre and a co-author of this book as reported in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper in Britain.

His colleague, Dr Guy Kahane, said, “Science has ignored the question of moral improvement so far, but it is now becoming a big debate,” he said. “There is already a growing body of research you can describe in these terms. Studies show that certain drugs affect the ways people respond to moral dilemmas by increasing their sense of empathy, group affiliation and by reducing aggression.”

Do we really need drugs?

Do we really need drugs to reduce our aggression, violence and make us more moral when Osho has shown us the way with his meditations? And in any case, who wants to be more moral? What are the acceptable parameters of morality?

Listen to Osho,

“Buddha says: The morality that comes from without is not the right morality. The morality that comes from within is the right morality. All that we think is moral is not really moral. It is just conditioned by the society. You have been taught to behave in a certain way and you behave in a certain way – but that behavior is the behavior of a slave. It is not that of a free man, it is not out of freedom. And how is morality possible out of slavery?

“Buddha says: ‘Morality is possible only when you are totally free, without any conditioning.’ Not that you have to do certain things, not that it is your duty, not that you have to follow a certain rule; but that you have become conscious, you have become aware. And out of that awareness you behave in a certain way. Awareness is right morality; unawareness is wrong morality.”

Who wants to be more moral?

Who wants to be moral in today’s awful society? Osho provokes everyone by saying,

“The people you think are moral are just repressed people, egoistic, carrying all sorts of repressed desires in them. Once an opportunity is given to them, they will explode. Out of fear and out of greed they have repressed themselves. They are not really moral. Only a religious person is moral.

“Ordinarily you have been told, ‘Become moral if you want to become religious.’ I tell you just the contrary: ‘Be religious, and you will be moral.’ If you try to be moral you may become moral, but you will never be religious – and your morality will be just pseudo. From where will you learn the morality? From the immoral society. From where will it come to you? From the same rotten structure. No, it cannot be moral. First become religious.”

What’s morality all about?

Before you try and become moral according to today’s mores, it is pertinent to know what morality is all about. Osho enlightens,

“Morality is not religion, although a religious person is always moral – but not vice versa: a moral person need not be religious. A religious person is necessarily moral, because religion means experience of the divine – one who has experienced the presence of God, how can he be immoral? In fact, he is the criterion, the decisive factor as to what is moral.

“Whatsoever an enlightened person does is moral; there is no other way to decide. It is not that he is trying to do that which is moral – whatsoever he does is moral. He cannot do any harm to anybody; he is a blessing to existence. When God has blessed him, what else is left for him, except to be a blessing to the existence? What God has given to him, he goes on giving to everybody else. His heart is full of bliss, and the bliss starts overflowing. That overflowing bliss is real morality.

“Morality means compassion, morality means love, morality means creativity; morality means making the world a little more beautiful than you found it, leaving it a little more beautiful, giving it a new plane, a new level, a new dimension of existence.”

Osho, The Fish in the Sea Is Not Thirsty, Ch 10

Before you pop that pill, listen to Osho and meditate.