Why does it matter?
Recently “Morality” has been featured in a CFI thread and it included the shared work of great thinkers, but all that stuff seemed to me starched, all about some idealized morality, in idealized situations.
What about dealing with our human individual moral maelstrom of emotions, obligations, conflicts, impulses, those tingles that entice, the daydreams we want to make reality, the disappoints that crash us back to earth, our triumphs, and all the drama in our real lives - all the while meeting the crosscurrents of fast paced unpredictable events and circumstance - which can upend all our intentions in a beat?
A deep inside biological evolutionary understanding helps us identify and relate to those tingles inside - tingles that so often trigger reaction - or frustration. Learning to understand, tame and harness those tingles and triggers, is a valuable life skill.
Learning that your (half a billion years in development) body has deep wells of understanding and agenda, beyond what your thoughts are aware of - it creates a partnership.
A captain and his ship, sort of,
since in this case the captain appreciates that in many ways the ship knows more than the captain,
so there’s a rich partnership at work for maximum constructive results.
To trivialize that is a travesty.
How to translate one’s morals into one’s behavior, to appreciate the difference between our fantasies and our real living life - requires an awareness of what’s going on inside, and it sure helps to appreciate historic realities of our body’s biology and how that influences what’s happening in our minds.
To appreciate how others physically influence us and via versa. To feel a sense of obligation to the ethics one has chosen.
Learning to be aware of and comfortable within one’s own skin, and how that plays into how we behave towards ourself, and others, and in turn, how they behave toward us. And so on, and so forth.
It all starts with a deep appreciation of our origins and Earth’s Evolution, and how we are a reflection of that, and work it out from there.
Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide
I am an evolved mammal, and my thoughts are the reflection of my body communicating with itself. That’s a lot to take in, but it’s based on science, along with plain pragmatic common sense, and it breeds respect for this Earth that created us and nurtures us.
It can even take one step further to being the Eyes of the Universe, reveling in how much we’ve learned about our selves and our universe, that people had been wondering about since forever - and loving one’s short life on this one and only home planet, Mother Earth, we’ll ever have.