Source of Ethics - Our Individual Compass

We live in a pretty mysterious world, with weird manifestations of extreme evil, gorgeous vast diverse forms of beauty, a universe with huge size and diversity greater than we can imagine. As our consciousness of all this expands, we see appearing more and more different streams of thought. Indeed, almost any idea, any moral, can now be debated and brought up. Most foundations of society, traditions, anything that has held humans together for thousands of years, and in many cases that has allowed us to function, including even our basic biology, anything is now up for debate and questioning. This can bring us to be very confused, and this can also allow us to not do things with automatism, without thinking about it, and instead to look with honesty and decide for ourselves, what works and what doesn’t. However that deciding process can be challenging because we are often pretty lost and confused ourselves, yet having to appear as if we have it sorted out, so we can manage in society and earn a living.

Immersed in this situation, in this maze of different ideas and morals, how can we hope to have a good compass to navigate life towards something good, pleasant, successful, and fulfilling our purpose? Where does our purpose come from in the first place? Where can we find a reliable sense of what’s good and ethical?

The most ancient and widespread sense of that comes from the notion of oneness of life, that somehow all life is one, that the whole universe comes from one creator, god, source, and all life is like one big organism, one ecosystem, and everything in life originate in this primal, divine source. This notion is found in all traditional cultures, and also intuitively in many modern people. Like everything else, it is of course up for debate, which is a good thing, because if we were to take any point of view for granted, or as something which can not be questioned, then it would no longer really belong to us, it would no longer be our own to work with, we would just be undergoing it, managing somebody else’s point of views, following their own terms and conditions, living in somebody else’s mind as a servant.

So we have two options of viewing the world, either it is as we just described, all one organism with intelligence that we may call divine, or it is some kind of random machine, and intelligence is accidental. If we take the second option, then ethics may not be really seen as needed, we may just care to make things function well for ourselves, but that may quickly become a sad, unpleasant, unfulfilling experience, and we may seek to have ethics instead, which will bring us to live closer and more happily with others. Arguably, the richest people who live selfishly trying to tyrannically control everything, abusing others, lying, etc., surely live much less happy lives, always disconnected from true warm connection with others and the world, than a poor, but loving family with strong bonds, a sense of purpose, ethics and dignity, and connection with nature, dancing, singing, etc. The first option, to see the world as one divine intelligence, can arguably be observed in the natural world, in the way ecosystems function together, in the way life responds to us and speaks to us intimately, and this oneness can bring us to act with ethics. That is indeed my subjective point of view, but in both cases, we can advocate for seeking a set of ethics to make our experience in this world more pleasant and beautiful.

However if we look at things long enough, deeply and honestly, we may often struggle to have a clear cut ethical judgement of situations, for example a beautiful colorful flying bird can subjectively be seen as clearly good, but from the point of view of the snail which it is plunging towards to eat, it may be seen as bad. Therefore our judgements are subjective and can only apply to ourselves, and should not be extended and imposed on others.

So what is the central essence of ethics? It can be seen as our own personal compass to choose what is good for us at a particular moment.

So as we follow the flow of life wherever it takes us, how do we judge what is good for us or not? In this process, we may often fall into old traps that have been strongly installed into human consciousness for millenia, which keep taking on new shapes and therefore, fooling us again and again.

One of these traps relates to how we need to belong, to a family, a group. We can not survive long on our own out there, at least not happily. Our brain therefore has learned to associate rejection with pain, as both trigger the same part of our brain. We will therefore do almost anything to avoid it, even unethical things. We will unconsciously want to belong, to be part of a common dynamic with the group, and think together, even when it doesn’t make sense. We may then reject the mainstream thoughts and mistakenly think we are now free from this trap, but then we can often fall easily into the same problem rapidly when joining another alternative stream.

This unfortunately occurs so often in modern groups, including and especially in spiritual and political groups. We see tyrannical ways happening in mainstream political and religious spheres, so we quit that, and yet recreate the same, only under a new disguise.

If our source of truth comes exclusively from one or few select individuals, who for some reason have accessed special status, and if whatever they say can not be rationally and peacefully discussed and debated without being accused, then we have indeed recreated one more new form of tyranny. This has become so prevalent today, strangely unnoticed, that we need to be really vigilant and question ourselves, if we are not in this case, in anything we are involved in. Are we looking up to some ‘select’ individuals, automatically following anything they mention and discarding anything they have not mentioned, and automatically judging anybody who differs or questions even slightly? Are we tolerating that our own views be questioned rationally or are we too insecure in them? If we are too insecure, is that not because these views are flawed, or need more reflection? The modern scientific and medical structure is a clear example of that. Phrases like ‘scientific consensus’ or ‘follow the science’ are absurd, as the beauty and power of true science is that something is not true just because somebody with special status said it, and nothing is seen as established unquestionable absolute truth, we just have points of views and theories because we question and study them, and the truth can come from anybody if they can demonstrate it properly. Unfortunately, we have seen dogmatic, tyrannical behaviors take place in the name of science, banishing, censoring, insulting, hurting people, only for having different scientific theories, even non-violent ones. We also should see that the most violent ideas can only be solved by openly discussing them, otherwise they will never be explained and will keep coming back.

We also see the same thing in various new spiritual and political movements, who proclaim unquestionable absolute truth with emotional outrage, oftentimes because somebody ‘special’ said it, a website owner, a blog writer, etc., and demand people follow it, judge with guilt and shame those who don’t, even those who only have rational questions.

In a world of oneness, we are all playing our unique role, expressing our own unique creativity, and the question is, where does the authority, the ethics, for how that will be done come from? If the world is just a random machine and intelligence is accidental, then ethics can only come from something demonstrable, and therefore properly debated. If the world is one big divine intelligence, then ethics can only come through from within, as the source of all is our origin, which we are originally, our soul which is part of source, which guides us to navigate the outside world properly. That only can be our authority, above everything else, above all pressures of the world, because that is our own connection to the origin of intelligence of the world. The manifested world always contains insights, valuable information, but that always has to be checked with our inner guidance from our soul, the supreme authority. It is just like my hand and my eyes do not decide on their own wherever they want to go, I decide, as the one source and unity of my body, and in the same way, the source within me decides what I should do.

So, can we reconcile these two points of view: ethics can only come from what's properly demonstrated on one hand, and ethics can only come from the universal intelligence within on the other hand. I would say that since we obviously have limited perception in our little human bodies, we should be humble and admit that we aren’t 100% sure about either of them, and therefore should accept using both.

And as we do our best to grope in the dark and try to work things out, we should especially beware of people who gaslight us, who talk to us about great things, about freedom, about listening to ourselves, about a fair beautiful new world, but then only create the conditions for the opposite, proclaim themselves as the only true guidance, the only legitimate authority, creating conditions for them to remain on top, usually to sell us something and profit somehow, and not for people to be actually free. We should especially beware of those who keep polarizing situations, tricking people into adopting the superiority of a gender or an ethnicity or any other polarity, especially nowadays, those who play that trap in reverse, who condemn the oppression of the feminine and trick people into degrading the masculine and thinking higher of the feminine, or who condemn nationalism and racism, only to trick people into thinking less of themselves and higher of foreigners (or aliens), recreating again, the same problem, while pretending to fight against it. All of this polarizing, always results in the denial of our true compass, proper debate and demonstration, and proper ability to listen to one’s own inner guidance.

May we manage to keep these true compasses in sight, to navigate our lives with ethics as much as possible, and realize our true potential as humans, which is truly great. With ethics, we can make use of all the interconnectedness of different cultures and knowledge expanding in this period of human history, to create beautiful lives for us all.