What if your sense of right and wrong isn’t truth — but survival? Morals are what you’re taught to do; ethics are what you actually do. This talk explores how belief systems shape your reality, how laws are built on assumptions, and why conflict arises when personal justifications collide. When society enforces rules, are you living your truth—or someone else’s?
Y: You live your lives with what you consider to be reality. That reality sits on a tapestry of belief systems, and that belief system tapestry that you live by constitutes effectively your lives. There are things that you accept about your lives, and you say, “This is the way things are.” And in that concept, you then accuse the rest of the world of believing the same. There are things about your life that you look upon and say, “I wish they were otherwise, but they cannot be. This is how it has to be. This is what is.”
You live within a society that constructs itself with rules, with order, with the concept to control those things that would not control themselves, and very often the concept to control things regardless of whether they will control themselves or not. You establish laws.
Those laws you use to prevent others from damaging you or prevent others from doing things that you think might lead to damage if they were to do things the way that you think they might do them, if they might be the threat that you think that they might be because they haven’t the same set of responsibility that you know that you have.
You construct these laws without regard to the realities of the individual. You set them with regard to reality of the whole. And if it is that you are accurate in your assessment of the reality of the whole, it works. But if you aren’t, then you have conflict. That is the place where it becomes the most difficult for you as human beings. In the realm of conflict, right over wrong seems to always be the thing that will win.
You look upon even your wars that you would hold as human beings on your planet. You would battle this person against that person. This person thinking all the while ’My God supports me in battle, and that other on,e as their go,d is supporting them.’ Never once did a war take place where it is that the warring armies did not pray to God for their victor,y and never once did they go to that field with the thought that God was against them.
The reality is that you use whatever you can to justify whatever you believe, so that you may do whatever it is you choose. And each of you does this to a certain extent. It only becomes difficult when whatever you used to justify whatever you do comes into conflict with whatever someone else justifies to do whatever they do.
So. That is the purpose of tonight’s teaching. To discover the difference between what is an ethic and what is a moral. I will give to you short version. Ethics are everything you do. Morals are everything you’re supposed to do. That is useful? Not quite. Each of you grows from the smallest of child; you grow by learning things. Those things are taught to you. They are fed to you by your parents, by the world around you, by society at large. It defines the hunting ground of your participation, and providing that you don’t vary too far from that hunting ground, it’s effectively real.
You live within a particular society, and providing you don’t suspend yourself in another society, the things you learned will probably work. You live in a little town. You know everyone in that town, and your idea that everyone in the town agrees that ’this sort of thing is inappropriate’ will probably work. You belong to a particular organization that you would call a church, and that church teaches certain behavior patterns to each person within that town, and you believe that that’s truth. And as long as it is that you don’t encounter something different, you can live with that truth.
The difficulty with it is, all of those things that you learned, everything that you learn before the age of puberty, is a moral imposed upon you. It is a rule of action that if you follow it, you get to survive. And if you don’t, you get the pain. It is enforced on you from external sources, and it’s necessary that it should be.