Open Enlightenment

Enlightened Ethics

Morality has been a perennial concern for humanity. Many religions and spiritual traditions promote a set of rules for how to live, and although some ethics were originally prescribed as a means to facilitate enlightenment, today mainstream religions simply dictate their own specific morality in the belief that adherence to a set of rules will please their deity.

Most religions do however agree that we should be nice to each other, and even those that reject religion or spirituality outright – perhaps favouring a more rational approach – would probably concur.

But the absolute truth – experienced as enlightenment – reveals that no product of the human mind, no matter how altruistic, is the truth itself. If we cannot define the absolute in terms of the relative (in this case, ethics), exactly how is the enlightened person to behave? How should anyone behave for that matter?

Some teachers of enlightenment have opted to consider morality as a separate line of development to enlightenment; after all, enlightenment isn’t limited or defined by any kind of behaviour.

But this neglects to consider the fact that although the Absolute is not affected by the Relative, the Relative is most certainly affected by the Absolute. Indeed, enlightenment itself can only occur as a relative event.

Experience of enlightenment, at whatever stage in the process that leads to enlightenment proper, brings with it many relative affects, such as bliss, peace, certainty, equanimity, compassion, and direction in life. Of course, we can’t define enlightenment with a list of these relative affects, as they most assuredly come and go; but we can say that the absolute brings with it a morality or set of behaviours that reflect the absolute at a relative level; not through conscious deliberation, but through direct, personal experience.

However, a lifetime of accrued behaviours, habits and opinions rooted in the separate sense of self do not just disappear with a single experience of the Absolute, and not even with enlightenment proper. It is even possible to become enlightened with your behaviour left uninvestigated, with practitioners returning to everyday life as if their direct experience of the absolute truth has no bearing on their lives outside of the temple or meditation hall.

The event of enlightenment is not enough on its own; integration is required, unless the ignorance that dictated our behaviour before enlightenment remains unchallenged in our lives, and lives on in our actions. This requires a mindfulness of our behaviour from the perspective of enlightenment, at whatever stage in the process, which in turn leads to an expression of the knowledge of the absolute truth in our everyday actions.

When the absolute is consciously expressed through the individual, we call this behaviour Enlightened Ethics. When a person engages with Enlightened Ethics, they can be said to be living enlightenment.

Enlightened Ethics is not a set of rules or behaviours, but the unique individual expression of the affect of the absolute on the relative world: in a general sense, the movement towards wholeness; in a specific sense, this is nothing less than discovering who you are and what your purpose in life is. Enlightened Ethics is the promise of wholeness for yourself and everyone else.

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