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Ethics
Ethics reflect one's attitude to one's behaviour to one's interpersonal
relationship with other human beings. In essence, it is what guides
our relationship with the external universe. I think, rather unfortunately,
there is a tendency to imagine that ethics apply only to behaviour with
human beings. Perhaps that is the most important aspect of ethics or ethical
behaviour as such, but I understand from my Master's teaching that the
concept of ethics must be a total concept, a global concept, in modern
terminology for instance which embraces all life. In the vastness or the
illimitability of the ancient Indian Vedic concept, life includes everything
from mineral life to Divinity itself. Therefore ethics governs our relationship
to all life, all nature as we understand it - how we treat minerals, how
we treat plants, how we treat animals, birds, angels, even gods.
Today we see that in the Indian life especially there
is a tendency or there has been a manifest tendency resulting in the
deterioration of ethical values governing human existence. So much so
that we can almost say that a totally selfish attitude reflects a lack
of ethicality or ethical behaviour for instance. So when we become
selfless, in a sense we can say that one is more ethical than one who
is selfish.
So ethics are just rules of behaviour that have been created, like "Satyam
vada, Dharmam chara" in Sanskrit for instance, essentially
reflecting one's attitude to the outer world to promote one's inner existence,
peace, growth, development, evolution to the highest level. But it should
not be ignored, it should not be thought to be of lesser value than it
is, because without ethics the subsequent things cannot happen, because
ethics lays the foundation for one's cultural existence and in that way
it forms the basis of human existence as such.
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