The Moral Landscape

Hello!

Yesterday I conducted the third webinar of my four-part PPS L0Ve as Self-Healing Series. The topic was Conditional love; how do we effectively create conditions to rise above sex and violence loving?

As you can imagine, this is a very complex issue we all face every day in our lives. What I share in the webinar and my teachings on this subject at large is that without core values, people cannot possibly create optimal conditions for themselves; this is exactly why PPS Lesson 1 focuses on finding your dream and establishing congruent core values as a basis for the behavioral changes congruent with the desired experience. Your core values are your own ethical code of conduct. To the degree that you chosen ethics/values are life affirmative, they are also morals.

The issue of morals and ethics is, and has been hotly debated for as long as people have been using language and trying to survive each other. Wars may be seen as values clashes, whether they be personal wars, professional wars, cultural wars, or spiritual wars; Islam’s challenge with Christianity and vice versa is a classic example of a values clash!

In his book/audio titled The Moral Landscape – How Science Can Determine Human Values, celebrated atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris dissects these issues. His approach, in tone, motive and vision mirrors that of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have both been successful at stirring the hornet’s nest of religious dogma. Though I could feel his sincerity, his pain and frustration with humanity affected me most; I heard a man trying to create a moral landscape with “objective” reason and understanding. This is akin to attempting to quantify what love is in a laboratory! It doesn’t work and never will! I will use a diagram I drew to explain why.

At the top of my diagram you see a dotted circle, which represents FIRST LEVEL Creation or ABSOLOUTE REALITY; In my view, this exemplifies unbounded consciousness—Consciousness!—not conscious of x. The Absolute can’t be measured or known “as anything”. Yet, as The Absolute, it can’t be known; the only correlate would be unadulterated SILENCE.

Next, you see the tai-chi symbol. Tai-chi represents two essential qualities of The Absolute (Absolutely Empty and the Absolutely Full) meeting each other, which is the source of movement (vibration), matter, time and mind (conscious of x); this is second-level creation. Here the subject-object relationship emerges.

The heart below contains archetypes: The hexagon represents the fusion of the base octaves of vibration that create life as we know it; earth, water, fire, air, ether (space), emergent from consciousness. The triangle represents the three qualities of existence: Abiding (top), Representing (left), and Reflection (right). The six pointed star represents man beginning and ending life as a child; the child has six limbs; 1. Head, 2. Tail, 3. Right arm, 4. Left arm, 5. Right leg, and 6. Left leg. The complex patterns in and around the archetypes represents memes or ideas, particularly learned ideas that come by way of parents, society and culture. Notice that each step down from the top of the diagram, simplicity becomes more and more complex – literally boxing spirit!

The challenges of ethics, morals and religious conflict can be easily understood by simply imagining that you and eleven others stood on the circle of tai-chi at the 12 clock positions. Each person would look out of themselves to see the others. If I put a multi-colored bouquet of flowers in the center and asked each person to describe what they see, they are all likely to describe something different. Yet, would either of them be wrong?

In my experience coaching people for my entire career, I’ve found that when people focus first on what we all NEED, as opposed to what we each want, we are much more likely to find that what we all NEED is essential to each and all, and without these basic needs (the octogon), we become unable to abide with what is, and become entrained to representations and reflections, which depend on abiding (silence) for their existence. Would we be fighting over issues of sexual preference, defending boarders (which are merely lines on paper!), or be worried about the Pope’s exploits if we had a worldwide water shortage, food shortage, poisoned atmosphere, and the place was on fire?

Morals differ from ethics in that a moral is a code of conduct created as a necessity to support life itself, yet, ethics are simply codes of conduct; Hitler, the skin heads, the KKK, the army, and Monsanto all have ethical codes, but are they life-affirmative – moral?

When one reaches that point of inner-stillness from which illuminated consciousness emerges, they at once see the illusory, entangled nature of the idea-mind. Trying to use brain science to figure out why people constantly suffer from ethical and moral clashes is merely to fall into the trap of trying to use logic (man) to understand emotion (woman), or trying to use objective means of isolating the subjective; trying to determine what love is in a laboratory!

If human beings simply get clear on what is essential to All Life, we can establish a moral code we all understand. From such a legitimate moral base, it becomes much easier to determine when an ethic is or isn’t life affirmative. Only then can people establish any form of life-affirmative government, which would only work if we all agreed on the necessity of sharing life’s essentials with each other.

Until that happens, mind and emotion will continue to clash, and on the current course, we will destroy the planet to the point at which we all find morals together. Then, there will only be one religion – The religion of survival. There, the Atheists will find God, and the religious people will meet the real Adam (creature of the earth [top] soil) and Eve (life-force)!

Love and chi,
Paul Chek