People, please GET this….
Our concepts of right and wrong are carefully sculpted over time
and through our blood, fashioned of fear.
Our most profound fear is that of being alone –
of not being able to survive without our Tribe, our Community. This is still engrained in our bones as it is in all living species –
alone, we die.
The Clan, the Tribe, the culture, the society gradually evolved a complex code to define and separate its members as opposed to The Others.
Membership required adherence to the rules of the Tribe –
to its definition of right and wrong.
Good and Bad are definitions of whether one follows the rules or not.
When we base our lives on these concepts of right and wrong, we are not acting,
as we tend to believe, from a desire to do right –
we are acting from a fear of being Bad.
ie, of not following the rules, and ending up rejected by the Tribe –
of being alone.
Where is the morality in this?
Is this the fullness of being human?
Please observe your concepts of Right and Wrong –
maybe even take a break from them for a bit,
asking yourself instead:
Is my intention that of Love ?
Blessings,
Dawn
Hither & Yon... 
I went to a Parenting workshop recently, talking about aggression in kids. The instructor told us how ostracization is a useful tool, the same used by monkeys :-). When kids use violence, either verbal or physical, and they are then excluded from the group, they change their behavior so as to be part of the group. I don’t know about right and wrong here, but when I believe I’m doing this out of love for myself and for my son, it seems a correct action. I walk away, while requesting respect towards each other.
Oh dear….
Perhaps another way of seeing this, Margaux, is not that you are shunning (the Amish term for the same practice) your son, but that you walk away from situations where you are feeling disrespected. This becomes an interaction between the two of you, not a statement that he is bad for not behaving as part of the herd, but rather your defining the kinds of exchange you are willing or not willing to have with him.
Indigenous societies use shunning in a very literal sense – if you do not act as a member of the tribe, you simply do not exist to the tribe….
It seems to me that it is now important that we find ways of honouring both the needs of our communities and our individual needs – of balancing them, moment by moment, situation by situation.