On the subject of spiritual ethics, spiritual practices are observed to reinforce a commitment to a set of attitudes and thereby insure the manifestation of these attitudes in society, or to open the mind to spiritual insight to allow change in attitudes and thus improved spiritual and even physical well being. An example of a change based spiritual practice would be a Shamans vision quest.
So ethics are the fundamental pattern behind our life and everything we do? Scary to think many of us don’t consciously know our ethics. Regardless, you will have attitudes, preferences, and beliefs about any experience you have in life.
Would you say that ethics follows behaviour or behaviour follows ethics? Behaviour follows ethics as behaviour has no reliable governing factors on a strictly physical level. Even genetic traits can fail to activate due to experiential changes in childhood and development of hormonal shifts in the adult body. Even the practice of spiritual “medicine” changes this. As I have shared previously, recent research shows that the principle of suggestion is functionally invalid. That you need not be convinced that something will have an effect, you just have to imagine it will.
How does spiritual medicine change it? Ah, well in the case of early medicine, and even more modern practices, the willingness to experiment with the experiential impact of substances and activities has had an impact on human genetic expression and development. It need not even involve the consumption of herbs. Even rite of passage ceremonies and hunting rituals encourage changes in the biology of their practitioners. The ecstatic state hunters achieve around the ceremonial fires carries out by virtue of neural linguistic programming if nothing else. They go away from the hunting ceremony with the expectation that they are made more powerful and will succeed in their hunt.
Ethics is in our biology? Yes, even in pack animals. Dogs have shown to have rather strong, stable ethical principles that let their packs remain coherent and functional.
So you say we can create anything if we imagine it? You can create in yourself any state you imagine, and your imagination will be inspired by your life. By changing your state of mind or consciousness, you discover that your attitudes about your experience changes, and often you gain intuitive insights into a situation that seemed impossible to handle.
It worked for Beethoven, creating and imagining. I think the great creators of music and movies and such can imagine their creations. Often from an artists efforts to reflect some intuitive insight they had into the world without any effort on the artists part.
Science has gained insight that has allowed incredible progress. Much of our understanding of medicine stems from an artists effort to realistically portray the body and how it moves and changes. No concern for taking anything apart, but just a desire to see deeper and more clearly. Thus they often say magick is an art.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~