The Gordian Knot of Ethical Thinking
The Return to Wonder
II
Values, ethics, morality, good and evil,
Are all fabrications born of limited thinking.
Bondage without anchor in the indivisible reality.
LXXI
Ethics is a personal inquiry, a life process of Self-discovery.
CXCII
Without compassion, any serious discussion of ethics, is meaningless yabber.
CCV
Ethics is the luxury of those who are not hungry or in danger.
CCXXXIX
Ethics is the luxury of a full belly and a safe harbor.
CCLXIX
Ethics is the luxury of entitlement.
CCLXXVI
Morals, ethics, principals, political correctness, is a full belly and too much time on your hands.
CCLXXVII
Democracy versus dictatorship: Which you prefer, which you support,
Depends on the blend of politics and ethics to which you aspire to survive.
CCLXXX
Virtue:
Morality, virtuousness, righteousness,
Goodness, integrity, dignity, rectitude, honor, decency,
Respectability, nobility, worthiness, purity, principles, ethics, uprightness.
The Ponderings of Yaj Ekim
60
Ultimately, there is no evil, there is no sin, there is no dark side.
There is only corrupted, twisted, perverted consciousness.
There is only the veiling, the muddying of awareness.
There is only ignorance and delusion and duality.
Evil does not truly exist in any way or shape or form,
But through the vanity-vanity-all-is-vanity of imagination.
208
Philosophy is bullshit that passes the time,
When you are not hungry or weary or slothful,
And ethics, a fun drinking game in the wee hours.
Breadcrumbs 2015
Leftovers
Ethics is the luxury of a full belly and a safe harbor.
Might makes right, it always has, it likely always will.
The best any can hope for is a benevolent claw and fang.
* * * *
Standing for nothing is the only way to avoid the very common human delusion,
That existence has some paramount meaning and purpose, that values are authentic and true,
That morals, that ethics, are more than just vain inventions of a species, that has yet to come to terms,
With the reality, that they are but temporal consequences of evolutionary happenstance.
* * * *
Regret means that you learned something from the consequences of an action.
Some call it conscience, a.k.a., morality, scruples, ethics, principles, integrity.
* * * *
Conscience, scruples, principles, standards, values,
Ethics, ideals, virtues, integrity, morality, right and wrong;
Pillars of civilization for those who have a full belly and a safe harbor.
Soundbites
Ethics is the luxury of a full belly and a safe harbor.
* * * *
Morality and ethics are the antithesis of our Darwinian roots.
* * * *
Ethics is best served on a full belly from a secure perch.
Breadcrumbs 2018
Leftovers
The challenge is letting go of the cacophony ever playing out in our aloneness.
We spend so much time questing the most unadorned reality the mystery has to offer,
Yet there it is: the awareness, the witness, the enigma, peering out from behind every mask.
What need for religion? What need for spirituality? What need for belief, faith, prayer, scripture?
What need for heavens and hells and purgatories, deities and demons, mythologies, icons, sacraments?
What need for messiahs, saints, priesthoods, traditions, superstitions, caste systems, groupthinks?
What need for philosophies, dogmas, ethics, laws, principles, doctrines, idols, mystic powers?
What need for cathedrals, temples, shrines, holy places, titles, hierarchies, dress codes?
What need for dualistic or non-dualistic concepts, or any light or sound shows?
Why worship what you are? Eternity is right here right now, timeless.
Merely being the awareness is all there is: You are it, it is You.
Anything less is nothing more than the trickster mind,
Playing its more-more-more imagination game.
* * * *
Civility is the foundation, the keystone, the linchpin, the fulcrum, of civilization;
Morality and ethics, its oft-spouted-oft-ignored stepchildren of the red-headed genus.
* * * *
No matter how immense, no matter how tiny,
It is a you-eat-you universe, a you-eat-you dream.
Compassion and ethics are but token notions.
* * * *
Laws, commandments, regulations, rules, decrees, edicts, directives,
Principles, maxims, axioms, dictums, morals, scruples, codes,
Tenets, ethics, mores, values, traditions, beliefs, et cetera,
Are artifices of human invention, as are all the ceaseless deities
Fabricated to give the carrots of desire and sticks of fear greater heft.
Breadcrumbs 2019
Leftovers
Awareness is pristine and immaculate and clear of any blemish or stain,
But is it at all possible for consciousness to be without judgment?
Is not everything thought one form of judgment or another?
Opinions, assumptions, stereotypes, conventions, ideals,
Ethics, principles, labels, laws, pigeonholes, beliefs,
Conclusions, notions, expectations, values, norms,
Any patterns, any definitions, any attitudes, whatsoever.
The roots of pride, of vanity, are saturated with all of the above.
* * * *
You are a liar, a cheat, a thief, and daily plot murder and mayhem,
Between stretches of excessive debauchery and inordinate treachery.
But at least you are not a hypocrite, more often than vain notion calls.
Breadcrumbs 2020
Leftovers
Ethics in warfare is rooted in complete and utter absurdity.
If you are steadfastly resolved on annihilating an individual or group,
Why should-could-would it possibly matter how you do it?
Dead is dead, no matter the ways and means.
* * * *
All values, all standards, all morals, all ethics, all ideals, all principles, all tenets, all beliefs,
Are subjective, arbitrary, fallacious, sentimental, distorted, idiosyncratic,
Skewed, prejudiced, colored, slanted, biased, personal.
Meaningful only to minds conditioned, habituated to believe them.
Breadcrumbs 2021
Leftovers
Have you ever beheld even one moment of awareness,
Where ethics or any other imaginary notion or sentiment,
Had any say, any validity, any reality, any truth, whatsoever?
The eternal mystery does not give a flying hooey about anything.
Oh well, so it goes, deal with it, get over it, move on.
Irony and paradox and absurdity rule.
Practice detachment.
* * * *
Ethics and aesthetics are so vainly subjective in any given mind,
As to warrant little more than a token sidebar of serious discussion.
Soundbites
Ethics and aesthetics are so subjective as to not be worth more than trifling discourse.
Breadcrumbs 2022
Leftovers
The grand strands of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that have created you,
Are only concerned that you generate as many offspring as possible, by any means.
Whether or not any given strand carries on, is always subject to natural selection downstream.
Ethics has never been an issue, in the one and only immortal quest, truly in play.
The constructs of imagination, of illusion-delusion, notwithstanding.
* * * *
Imagination is the Original Sin.
Until it usurped awareness, good and evil did not exist,
And their reality is a still an unproven doctrine, one left to philosophers who pontificate on ethics,
And the rest, to those who ceaselessly spin their self-absorbed realities,
Into every imaginable form of self-righteousness.
Soundbites
Ethics is the offspring of a full belly and a safe harbor.
* * * *
Ethics: Neutered, sterile, empty, absurd,
Breadcrumbs 2023 and Beyond
Leftovers
Does the lion ponder the ethics of gorging upon an antelope, or an antelope, a blade of grass?
Nature has no attachment to the ceaseless vagaries, the absurdities, of human consciousness.
* * * *
What is the purpose of any culture, but to mold the young into its version of the world,
With all its history, its politics, its laws, its economics, its traditions, its religions, its languages.
All its tribal hierarchies, customs, rituals, behaviors, practices, lifestyles, conventions, costumes, patterns,
Beliefs, ethics, routines, schemes, addictions, activities, cuisines, athletics, holidays, celebrations.
And, of course, all the horrors and absurdities imaginable, in this our human paradigm.
How anyone manages to doubt, to question, to awaken, to shake off,
The conditioning, the habituation, the indoctrination,
Is indeed a wonder, if not a miracle.
What a hold imagination has upon our kind.
* * * *
History has proven countless times the pointlessness of ethics, as anything more than forum-born rhetoric,
As anything more than a domesticating agent in the world spun by the human paradigm.
Ethics is what the minions pontificate, well away from any throne.
* * * *
Rest assured, rape and molestation are genetically viable ends and means,
In all the bumping and grinding it took, voluntary or involuntary,
For You to be sitting right-there-right-now reading this.
Ethics is a relatively recent appendage in the human timeline,
Ever enforced by the reigning oligarchy, who decide who gets what.
* * * *
Ethics is a Gordian Knot,
Which only the sharpest sword of discernment,
Cuts loose its imaginary hold.
Soundbites
Ethics is what the minions pontificate, well away from any throne.
* * * *
Ethics is really about domestication.
* * * *
Ethics is a Gordian Knot, which only the sharpest sword of discernment, cuts loose its imaginary hold.
The Corollaries of Yaj Ekim
Ethics:
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending,
and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". The field of ethics, along with aesthetics,
concerns matters of value, and thus comprises the branch of philosophy called axiology.
Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil,
right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy
also is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory.
Yaj Ekim’s Corollary:
Ethics is the luxury of a full belly and a safe harbor.
* * * *
Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
Yaj Ekim’s Corollary:
Hear, hear!
Hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say!
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
Thucydides
Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power,
While the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
Thucydides (c. 460 – c. 400 BC) Athenian historian and general
History of the Peloponnesian War