Our Western relationship to rules, authority, morality and discipline is confused. We veer between the extremes of rebellion and authoritarian dogmatism. We tend to view limits and boundaries in black and white, either feeling bound by them or fighting them violently. When we are afraid to encounter outer authority, morality, or the law face to face, we resort to underground subversion. Either we become the good child who buries his or her own feelings and identity, or we fight angrily and rebel constantly.
Guilt is also far more prevalent in the West than the East. Consequently, in the West, morality and self-constraint often carry more emotional weight than is necessary. When we become involved in the Tibetan tradition we can easily get caught in a self-imposed rigor and strictness underlain with fear and guilt. If moral boundaries are not based on compassion and an understanding of cause and effect, but on control through guilt, they become puritanical and severe, rooted in fear, judgment and disapproval.
People involved in spiritual traditions often see moral commitments as fixed, static and unchanging. However, our relationship to moral precepts changes as we change, and as we get to know ourselves more deeply. Our understanding of the nature of moral boundaries must relate to the context in which they are applied. So the relative strictness of morality needs to be balanced with the changing nature of our developmental needs, and our ability to uphold them. Imposing moral boundaries may be destructive if they are inappropriate, or if we are not ready for them, but when morality arises out of wisdom, skill, and compassion, there is little danger.
Regrettably, morality can become a severe and rigorous regime that may appear righteous and pure, yet is born out of deep neurosis. Those who become fanatically moralistic are seldom aware of the unconscious malaise that drives them. The inner disposition to be severe and strict can easy be reinforced by an outer authority that demands adherence to its prescriptions. When morality is rigid and inflexible, it becomes food for any inner oppressor, the self-destructive, self-negating side of ourselves, and turns morality into unhealthy masochistic self-punishment.
Rob Preece. The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra (page 64-65)
These paragraphs clearly illustrative the Tantric view of the Western (i.e. Abrahamic) view of morality. A neurotic fetishization of rule following can either spawn a destructive extremism or create a reactive rebellion that itself can be a form of extremism. There is also a danger of substituting moral reasoning for mere rule following - as if the sum total of what it means to be a good person is simply slavishly following a set of rules. Now all that being said, there is a higher level question here, which is — who are moral rules for? Who is the tantric view for? Certainly for an individual predisposed toward spiritual practice and sincere in their commitments this is an approach that may work. However, it’s notable that the paragraphs right before the above quote discuss sexual abuse by Tibetan lamas and the need for tantric practitioners to accept some set of moral vows to avoid the excesses of this perspective. So it can’t be that we should do away with rules for everyone (at a societal level, that would likely be a disaster) — it’s more about the attitude that one takes toward those rules, and avoiding absolutizing them. It’s also a recognition that moral rules and our relationship to them is always shifting as we mature in our spiritual path, and at some point one can live without a net, guided by our own wisdom, no longer relying upon a specific set of rules. This perspective also asks us to recognize that even if we are at a stage in our lives where stricter adherence is necessary (the wisdom eye hasn’t opened!), we can do so without the neurotic baggage that marks the extremity of authoritarianism or rebellion. That view is available to everyone, not just accomplished tantrikas.