Honoring our Inner Ethics

Values. Principles. Ethics. The greatest of human beings don't short-change theirs come hell or high water. "I lose everything if I lose my self-respect," might be the philosophy underlying that.

And I think it's important to remind ourselves that there is no such thing as flexible ethics. By definition, ethics are something absolute. No relativity there.

And this can make it very difficult to adapt to our modern society of moveable values.

Today on Healing Through Consciousness, Honoring our Inner Ethics.

This seems like such a black and white issue on the surface. Principles and ethics are something carved in stone, aren't they? Tell the truth. Live with integrity. Do unto others. We've been raised with the music of these eternal truth and the fables and stories that accompany them.

But it gets a little more complicated when you mix in other cultural ideologies, or the persuasive tug of anarchistic peer pressure. Or the financialy influenced legal or legislative decisions that enshrine injustice or unreasonableness right into the law or the cultural belief system ... as so often happens in our so-called democratic process today.

And we don't have to go far back to see that. 150 years ago, the color of your skin made a big difference in how you were treated in a hotel or restaurant or even on a bus. Culturally supported. Politically sanctioned. Legally enforced.

And of course, dead unethical. How could that ever get run up the flag-pole? Only by going against the universal valued we have inside us, which is a way we have of corrupting ourselves. Like, we know better, but choose to do wrongly anyway.

And I think this is significant somehow. That there are universals rules of conduct that we all know to be true. So what is the process, then, whereby we enshrine these universals in glorious documents like the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then lawyer or justify our way around them first chance we get. We can stand all misty-eyed when some great humanitarian invokes the creed of this document or others like it and then do nothing in protest when our country leaders trample those exact same rights, right before our eyes.

There can be only one explanation: we forgive atrocious disregard to universal values and ethics because we are guilty of side-stepping our ethical responsibilities from time to time ourselves.

Now, I admit, these documents and the examples of saints and good men set the bar pretty high, but this is something we must come to grips with if we're to advance as a society.

Norberto Keppe is not shying away from that conversation in his more than 30 books and hundreds of TV and radio programs. This is stimulating and motivating work. And humbling, too, as we see how often we fall short of the integrity we have at the base of our humanness.

If you'd like to join us in the discussion, please do so at our Trilogy portal. And, of course, we're always available by email.

Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco and I are talking today with Wayne, who's written us an email related to his difficulties in finding a new job, and his feelings of insecurity about that.

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