No such thing as ethics or morals?

A coworker and I work almost every night together, and we usually spend the night debating and discussing. She's a conservative christian, I'm a liberal atheist.
We were discussing this, what do you think?
Morality and ethics are relative. And ultimately, everyone IS selfish. People do things to survive and benefit themselves. Haven't read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins yet but from what I understand the just of it is that people are inheritely selfish and do things only for themselves, no matter how selfless and charitable it may seem.
What do you think? do morals and ethics really exist? who defines them?

 

Maybe it's just the way i'm internalizing it but it seems what you are referring to more is altruism.

Yes, I believe morals and ethics exist. Whether or not one makes an ethical or moral decision based on self interest or that they truly believe in the principle is a separate question, and goes along the lines of what you said about them being relative.

 

Is looking at morality from the perspective of evolution really that much different than looking at it from the perspective of God existing?

 

Humans are social by natural so this would support some selfless altruism for group cooperation. A tribe would be more likely to survive if some of the members were willing to risk their lives.

 

I am an ethical nihilist. I think that in the larger scheme of things, there is no ethics. No good or evil. If a shark eats someone, or we kill someone in self defense, or we go out and murder someone in cold blood--the result is the same, a life moves on to its next stage. To whatever that creative spirit or divinity to the universe is, it is all the same, and that the universe is essentially good, but not good in the sense that we see it. Because we can only view it from the perspective of our 3-dimensional world.

That does not mean that good and evil, and ethics, do not exist----but they only exist at our human level. The shark that eats the person doesn't understand good and evil. It is all about eat---mate---flight---fight. Those are the decisions it must make, and it does that through conscious will and intelligence.

Humans though have a much wider range of basic decisions, including to conform or not to conform. And from the time a child starts to grow up, he starts conforming and shaping his actions and beliefs to fit his parents, friends and so forth. This causes repression of his free will into his shadow---the dark side that resides in his unconscious. Some of the things repressed are good some are bad.

Then along comes religion and the duality of good and evil, and suddenly the repression becomes malignant. The deeper we repress things into our shadow and deny their existence, the more ugly they reappear. Not only do we have individual shadows, but our socieities have their shadows, and the churches, and so forth. We create the evil that exists in our world.

Why is it evil? Partly because we define it as such, partly because it causes suffering within our lives. But I see evil as something that willfully creates a karmic impact. What I define as karmic impact is something that affects us in a negative way long after it has occurred. Sexual molestation of a child for example. Cold blooded murder as another example. In the first case the impact will surely affect the individual for much if not all of his/her life. A cold blooded murder will impact the individual through future lives (the current one is gone afterall).

I make that last statement based on the intensive research done by Dr. Stanislav Grof. He has many thousands of case histories of LSD used for healing and research, both conducted by himself and colleagues and others. One of the healing aspects of LSD is that it uncovers complexes in the subconscious that are the source of disease, and psychological problems. These things have to be confronted and understood to heal the person. But as he did his research, he discovered that many of these problems were connected to events that happened years, even centuries before the patient was born. The patient would relate details and people and other facts, that they would have no knowledge about. Dr. Grof would research and speak to experts and discover that these things were true. There were also cases where people experienced something from centuries earlier in their own family, and he would have to track down the geneology centuries back to find out that, again, the details were true.

So yes at the human level, such things create suffering long after even this life, and are therefore evil.

But to that creative power of the universe, it is all good. Death brings us back home, even if only for a short time, to who we truly are as individuals in larger dimensions. Then we head out again to experience life in a 3-dimensional reality. Ultimately that is all that is really good---experience. And those bad things are merely lessons we encountner as we pass through life (which is more than just this life).

 

There are polar opposites and conundrums in every human being . There is light / dark , good /evil , love/hate , etc. ,etc. , etc. . in every human

It's up to the individual which characteristic the human takes and his soul gravitates toward . There are givers and takers . There are people full of love , and those full of hate . There are those who are selfish , and those who are selfless . There are those who see the universal truth , and those that deny that truth . And there are those " fence sitters" who are luke warm and in the middle . That switch their polarity at will .

I believe some souls are more evolved than others . To have compassion for other suffering human souls , is the first step to stop ones own suffering . We were put here to overcome the material realm . To overcome the negativity of this world . And as you can see from the state of the world , man hasn't done a very good job . It's a challenge we are failing .

Yet to suggest , that human beings are inherently selfish , through some animalistic trait or gene through a hereditary self preservation trait . In my humble opinion is false .

In short I think Yes, morals and ethics do exist . And so does the lack of them . It's up to the individual to define them and apply them or not to where they feel most comfortable on the souls evolutionary path . Yet the universal truth remains , to love all as you love yourself . Whatever you do to another , you only do to yourself . For good or bad .

 

I agree with Papa Wolf. This is the path that relieves that karmic impact that I spoke of. I am not using the concept of karma in a Hindu or Eastern sense exactly. I guess to add on to what I was saying, the concept of evil, being a state that exists within our reality as opposed to the ultimate reality of spirit, is a creation of mankind. I do not believe in a universal or supernatural 'form' of evil (I am using form in a Platonic sense as something that exists as a structural presence of the universe).

The reason why we don't do a good job of overcoming the negativity of this world is that post planter-society man is stuck in a dualistic universe created by a duality that has grown (with civilization) to manifest in our psyche. THis is the duality between the ego and the shadow. The ego defines who we should be, as the ego-ideal, and the shadow, is everything the ego has repressed into the subcoscious mind, as if to banish it, and once repressed, denies its existence.

Think back in your own life, is there anything that really irritates you if someone accuses you of it? You respond to their accusation with an extra bit of anger--because, YOU ARE NOT THAT!!! Maybe they accused you of being lazy, or racist, or closed minded... whatever. If it makes you angry that they even think you might be that (and no, the excuse that you get so mad because your parents/spouse/siblings/whoever always accuse you of that and you are tired of hearing it doesn't work), then my friend, it is your ego that denies it, because it has shoved that aspect of you into the shadow and convinced your conscious mind that you are not that way at all.

Even as we have private shadows, whole societies and cultures have shadows
too. The problem is that the deeper we repress something into our shadow, the more explosive or dangerous it reappears, even if we don't know it. Here in Colorado a few years ago there was a Christian preacher at a fundamentalist church who regularly, and angrily spoke out against drug use and homosexuality. But then he was arrested while stoned out of his mind on drugs and using the services of a gay prostitute. it turns out that he did that regularly. That was his shadow.

Or think of that psychotic killer in the movie Psycho. He was convinced that he was mama's perfect son, and he was going to do everything he could to stay mama's perfect son (the ego, represses things into the shadow in its attempt to make you conform, this starts when you are a baby trying to be the perfect child to your parents, then your friends, your teachers whoever you feel you should fit in with). But he wasn't the perfect son based on his perception of his mother's definition. He had impure thoughts, which he felt drawn to. So he had to kill the object of his desire. It was just a never-ending attempt to achieve his ego-ideal.

The problem of seeing the universe in terms of a duality is that it only perpetuates the condition. The ego convinces the conscious that it knows what is right and how to be good, and that, yes---you are good, but you need to be better to achieve that ego-ideal. But the ego is lying to you, it is denying the existence of the contents of your shadow. It tells you that the shadow is evil. But the shadow is a part of you. The shadow doesn't lie to you---it just is. It is the repression by the ego that makes the shadow act out.

Of course the psycho killer had impure thoughts over a beautiful girl, and felt compelled to spy on her. These urges are natural, and are not evil. But his ego-ideal of the mother within his psyche repressed such natural urges, and it came out in a dangerous way: she was evil, she caused those thoughts, so she muct be killed.

The duality this inflated ego-shadow creates has shaped everything in our culture and society into a dualistic world. Most of us are not psychotic killers, but this duality is very subtle, and our outside world---the way we perceive it---is a reflection of the inside world (our psyche).

The healthy way to deal with the shadow, is to face it, and understand it, and most importantly, accept it. This reintegrates it back into our whole self---each time this happens we become more wholistic, or as Carl Jung would say, more individuated. The power of that shadow content (i.e. evil) is taken away.

The psyche is composed of many aspects in addition to the ego and shadow. It is filled with archetypes and complexes, a collective unconscious, and so forth---a multiplicity, not a duality.

So is our world. It is not black and white, but black, grey, off-white, white, many many shades.

ANd what of perpetuating the duality? The Christian looks towards that day when Good finally wins out over Evil. But what would happen to the Christian devil? He is still one of God's creations. Can he be destroyed? No---just put back into the dungeons of hell. But-----isn't that where he is today? In other words, nothing is changed. This is because, no matter what happens, the ego continues to repress the shadow. It tries to deny the existence of the shadow, but it can't destroy it. The only true resolution is for the shadow to be integrated back into the psyche to resolve its issues---which is a break down of the duality.

Yes, we need to be benevolent and do everything we can to lessen the suffering of this world. Indigenous people who tend to have a lesser degree of shadow-ego development (because they are less civilized, we say, as if their being primitive was inferior), see the real goal in life to achieve harmony. They see the world in terms of a multiplicity, and such a world is the happiest and healthiest when it is in harmony. The natural world by itself, without man is in a natural harmony. Harmony, thus being a non-dualistic good, must be part of that universal concepts that extends beyond our 3-d perception of the universe.

 

That's fascinating. How can memories travel to descendants over generations? The memory would have to physically travel in the dna or genes thru reproduction. How else would they get there. Telepathy?

 

That is a very good question. I can't speak for Dr. Stanislav Grof, but I think it might potentially be connected with reincarnation. About 10 years ago, there was a story in The Hindustan Times of a 4 year old boy who always claimed that he was murdered, and gave the names of the people who murdered him. Since his story was so consistent and he knew so many details about this, his parents decided to go to the police. The police discovered that there was in fact someone by the name he claimed he used to be, who had been murdered a number of years ago, in a village a couple of hundred miles away. They contacted the police in that village and they investigated. The dead man's brother, and his cousain, who the 5 year old had accused, then admitted to murder. Apparently he had been a sucessful businesman and the brother and cousain wanted to take it over. I ran accross this story while following up on the bad earthquake they had about 10 years ago. The story was treated just like any other local crime story, so I dont know if this was a common type of story there.

Since then I've read a lot of articles in the Hindustan Times and have not found them to be prone to wierd unexplainable stories like a tabloid or some of the Philippine newspapers. So I imagine the story is legitimate.

This tells me that the memories that are stored in (and thereby create) the neural structure of our brains are not the sole places where such memories are stored. They have to survive death. Another example of this is cases where people lose a part of their memory due to brain damage, and years later those memories return without restored function to that corner of the brain. Or the strange cases of people who suffer brain trauma and suddenly speak in a new accent, or lose their mother tongue and suddenly speak a language they did not previously know.

My own rational explanation of this, and some other things that have happened to me (especially when I was questioning the existence of anything beyond our physical realm), is that our true selves exist in a dimension greater than our three dimensions. Our physical realm is what we percieve as reality, but trapped into these dimensions, we are unable to percieve higher dimensions. I believe in a Jungian definition of the ego, which is a filter designed to maintain consistency of self, and thereby filters out all non-essential perceptions. I therefore see our subconscious mind as the pathway to this higher dimension, but we would almost never consciously perceive it. Therefore we have not only physical memories, but spiritual memories as well, and it is here where everything that happens to us is stored in a more permanent state. This is a concept that could even fit with a holographic universe where even the 3 dimensions we perceive are an illusion created within the mind.

It is possible that we may live numerous lives with our loved ones, which would explain how one could have memories of events many generations back in a family. But that is my explanation.

A purely rational explanation that fits into some schools of early Jungian psychology trying to explain such things as archetypes and innate behavior is that it is buried within our DNA, which in turn creates neural structures in the mind that result in memories, innate memories, the collective unconscious, and archetypical patterns of thought. This could possibly explain innate behavior, archetypical patterns, and generation's old family memories. It also explains why the deeper a memory or complex is repressed, the more animalistic it becomes, if the older animalistic aspects of the brain can take on such repressed images and affect our impression of them (i.e that such structures as the reptilian structure of our brain, can be used to go 'deeper' into the mind). But that doesn't explain that 4 year old boy in India, or any of our more compelling and documetned cases of reincarnation here in the West.

Some of the followers of Dr. Grof question whether through LSD we can actually merge with the mind of other life forms. Actually he has documented cases of this and calls such instances transpersonal expereinces. In such cases people learn things about these other life forms that they could not know by themsleves. Grof has verified such things with zoologists, and naturalists, and validates such knowledge. If time is an illusion as some scientists suggest, then the events of 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, are happening at this moment, only at a point within the universe that is different from our own here and now. This might make it possible that such LSD experiences are transpersonal experiences that involve merging with a familial psyche many generations back, but at a different point in the universe than the here and now.

I personally prefer my own explanation.

 

DNA is so complex that God knows what is stored in the strands. Like generations of musicians share musical talent.

This seems to be a common theme among LSD truth seekers (rather then the party user).

Wow! Psychedelic time travel. I heard once Jerry Garcia talked with a person from the future at Woodstock.

 

It is funny that you say that. To be honest, I haven't touched anything like that since I was a teenager. I do feel that psychedelics are a very powerful gift from Mother Nature, and can be used to seek truth. But it should be used in the proper spiritual context, and that anyone who parties with it is literally messing with his karma. My concept of karma is also based on the work of Dr. Stanislave Grof, and his discover that a lot of mental or medical issues people have go back to a repressed event. At first he thought, like many psychologists at the time, that it was connected to the birth trauma. He did find through his work with LSD that that was sometimes the case, or that it was events within the womb. But then he discovered that in many cases it involved repressed memories from previous lives, as I have mentioned.

Today I am a pipe bearer, so generally speaking, I cannot use psychedelics. To the Lakota, there are 2 roads, the peyote path, and the Chanunpa path. I am not Lakota, but I participate in the Lakota traditions and I carry a Lakota Chanunpa (pipe), which has come to me, and I must respect it as such. The paths are not absolutes. For example, chanunpas are used in the Peyote ceremony of the Native American Church, and some medicine men, such as Wallace Black Elk, followed both paths. But in order for me to use a psychedelic, following the chanunpa path, I believe it is something that I would need to do, and that this indicated to me, otherwise only bad can come of it. Native spirituality is not something to fool around with, or take lightly. A good example is the people who died in that non-native sweat lodge in Arizona.

Anyway, I do have a San Pedro cactus, which, like peyote contains mescalline. It is used by the shamans in South America. I have never consumed any of it. If I am supposed to, then one day I will. But I never have. I do like to have it around however, and it does always seem to give off an energy to me. Maybe its my imagination, maybe not, I don't know.

Years ago, when I was questioning things that were happening around me, and more specifically the very existence of God and spirit, something happened that answered that problem in a way I could no longer question. I was given a physical gift, in the form of an animal tail. But I was alone, it involved a short period of time, and it appeared in a place where moments before, there was only dirt. I may have shared this story with you before Indy, but it was an unbelievable event, that was completely unexpected, and everything happened in such a way that I could go back and examine it, and do everything I could to try to find an alternative explanation for what happened, but there was none. And the moment I picked it up, I knew it was an answer to my questioning over the previous several years.

So now the problem was, if there really is a spirit world, how does it fit into our reality. The best example of this problem is the issue that has haunted philosophers for years: the mind-body problem. But for me it was no longer a question of whether mind (spirit) exists, it was now a question of how does mind/spirit stay with the body.

Late one night, I was up working on a book I am writing, and dealing with this very question. I was in my dining room working on my laptop at the dining room table. I had placed my San Pedro next to me, I guess for inspiration, I don't know, I just liked to have it close by.

About 4:00 am, I was getting pretty tired, but I didn't want to go to bed just yet. I thought, 'I'll just lay my head down for a few minutes,' but I must have dozed off. Suddenly I had a very vivid lucid dream. At first it was of a structure that was like a very intricate green plant strucuture, that also sparkled with these beautiful gems. It was very tall and the veins or ribs of this structure were geometrically structured. (I have never taken mescalline, but I was familiar with the description of the typical mescalline experience, which often has elements very much like this, and are often described as with gems and green, so this could have been induced by auto-suggestion. But it was very intense imagery). Then the dream changed into a multi-dimensional perception of the universe, which gave me a very deep insight into how the mind-body connection works.

I like to think that I gained this insight from my San Pedro which I attained without ingestion of it. But it is hard to say for sure.

 

Like everything, aren't ethics subjective? I think the beliefs a person holds can lead them to act in unselfish ways, even consistently. But, like any animal, I think humans are selfish to the core. You may be a completely altruistic person, willing to part with your last bite of food - but wouldn't a part of you want to keep it for yourself? Survival itself seems questionable if free of selfishness.

 

Sure, humans are selfish, but what "self" do they identify with?

In the Dharmic traditions, "selflessness" is not a negating of the self and giving to others, instead it is a realization that the self does not end with the four walls of this body. It is possible to serve the self and others at the same time, when we realize we are not different from them.