Chapter 24: The Impartial Nature of the World

We all eventually come to appreciate how difficult our sentient existence can be, especially when we endure a seemingly unending series of bad experiences or even one earth-shattering incident. Many of us suffer or witness suffering to a degree where we struggle with the belief that life is an inherent good. We may even come to fear being consumed by darkness or ravaged by disheartening events that appear to be enveloped by a malevolent presence. For some of us, we suspect that evil has camped outside the sanctity of our homes, and yet others among us may feel that it has either nested itself inside our own heads or possessed those we love or have loved. And if it is not an infernal source we sense, then it is the raw stench of personal or social injustice we smell downwind from where the greed, corruption and indifference of a crude reality is blowing. But regardless of how we perceive the basis of our misfortune, we are obliged to question the occurrence and prevalence of fairness in the world.

Although we implicitly share the belief that life is unfair, we explicitly react to this worldview in a variety of ways that include open retribution and calculated vengeance as well as lawful action and rationalized exploitation. But most of us compensate for this generalized interpretation of our experience by adhering to a just world principle that can either apply to this life or to the next. By telling ourselves that the world will ultimately restore moral balance, we reveal our need to believe in our own goodness and that good always triumphs. However, given the lack of adequate evidence of an equitable existence or of an afterlife, it is not surprising that this fundamental conflict remains buried in our unconscious and seeps into our search for meaning. We do not easily realize how much of what we justify in terms of our goals and deeds is intimately tied to a disharmony that plagues our sanity, and we also do not recognize the extent to which our contradictory experiences blur our moral assessment of our interpersonal, organizational and socioeconomic interactions. This frequently gives rise to a wide range of irrelevant yet shrewd political viewpoints because we seek the comfort of simple explanations and tangible scapegoats rather than face the complexities of life that tear away at the security we seek in satisfying our personal sense of justice or self-centred morality.

The significance of this conflict runs deeper than the disputes we have about what is right or wrong and how we distinguish between the two. It goes even further as to question whether there is right and wrong. But this dilemma can be partially resolved by acknowledging our innate sensitivity to fairness, which is difficult to deny given that most social creatures predictably demonstrate some notion of equity, however primitive that notion may be. We expect its expression to emerge within any social structure from the most advanced to the least elaborate as a naturally evolving part of our intelligence, which gives us cause to assume it is embedded in our biological design with a greater probability of arising from unruly social settings. We instinctively respond to our bad experiences with a demand for fairness or justice both quietly and vocally. And although it could be argued that this is selfishly driven by those of us who are on the losing end of freely engaged competition, the sense of compassion we witness when people are doing well suggests that there is something deeper at play. We know that within most of us, if not all, there lies a moral sense that individually and collectively directs us to bring things into equilibrium. Morality exists precisely because inequity is a perceived feature of the world.

As a society, we attempt to establish the parameters for judging what is moral. We convey moral standards mostly through religion, but we study and reflect upon them in the humanities. Even science tries to infiltrate this subject by searching for objective methods to define and measure what is good and what is bad. One of our most common guidelines focuses on achieving the greatest value or happiness for the greatest number. But even if we could describe happiness reliably across cultures, why would we assume happiness is the ultimate goal we want to attain? No one will likely disagree that it is a desired state, but history and our own experience have both shown us examples where our actions do not always conform to this alleged ideal. We also see happy people display the most appalling behaviour in contrast to those of us trying to do the right thing while living in socioeconomic misery. For these reasons, we should be vigilantly monitoring the biased affirmation of our moral convictions while embracing what we may profoundly learn from our narratives.

One of the most difficult realities for many of us to accept is that life is impartial, but this is possibly because this fourth viagnostic lesson is also one of the most misunderstood as well. Impartiality does not mean that life is unfair, which is a belief that many of us may not always state publicly but very likely hold privately or subconsciously. Instead, it simply proposes that it is neutral or amoral, which seems inconceivable for most of us because we were more or less raised to believe in good and evil with the expectation that in the end good always wins and bad is penalized. An amoral existence makes us very uncomfortable because even though we can readily admit to countless inequalities in the world, we still want to believe that justice prevails or at least that merit is rewarded as much as crime is punished. This is a vital assertion in the sustainment of civilization by ensuring the minimal degree of social cohesion necessary for people to cohabit and cooperate. Many of our cultures also infuse the concept of karma into our everyday language as an inherent association between action and consequence because we are compelled to find comfort in the idea of an underlying force that naturally brings our chaotic surroundings into a palatable order even if we may not be able to directly perceive its outcomes.

However, when we remove ourselves from the celestial equation, there is no judgment built into the elementary workings of the universe and the events of life are not shaped by any preferential treatment outside of the temporary advantages and disadvantages of their specific conditions. This is the impartial nature of the world, which is neither positive nor negative and which can neither care for nor discriminate against life, except to enable it. Yet we could claim its neutrality is the most basic form of fair play by not intervening in or interfering with our lives and by placing morality in our own hands. Hence, while it is not partial to our personally acquired and practiced values, it does create a setting for the indescribable moral truth encoded in the circuitry of life to express itself through us. And it does so through our morality, where we seek to unveil its meaning by recognizing its signs and identifying its patterns as we navigate through the circumstances that set the trajectory of our stories.

A NEUTRAL WORLD RULED BY AMORAL CONDITIONS

All of our experience eventually returns us to the fundamental conclusion that life is ruled by conditions. We know that we are at the mercy of parametric shifts in our environment and that we are vulnerable to even the most imperceptible changes that can have unexpected impacts on our present and future lives. Moreover, since we live in a neutral world ruled by amoral conditions, any momentary advantage can lead to compounding benefits and escalate to a consolidation of newfound profits and influences that tip the balance of power. This impartiality in a morally oblivious universe ironically generates an inequitable distribution of opportunities across the biosocial strata that differentiate within our ecosystems, and yet it ultimately neutralizes all gains and losses of life through our inevitable mortality. This means that it does not matter who we are and what we think we did or how popular we thought we once were, we all eventually die and fade into our shared history, despite how relentless we may be at maintaining our egocentric delusions of importance or greatness.

Conditions determine the course of life. They also determine whether life will flourish as well as how it will likely end. Although some of us may hope for magical interventions in the world or a god that will save us, too many among us come to discover an aloof world that does not care. It does not mean that life is intentionally unfair. It is neither fair nor unfair, in the same way that it is neither moral nor immoral. It simply does not align to or abide by a moral framework that considers equity or fairness. It demonstrates no discretion other than obeying or following its own laws. Hence, when we are fortunate, it is because we have aligned with favourable states and circumstances within any or all domains of existence that influence our lives, and this includes everything from the genetic to the ecological, from the personal to the socioeconomic and from the quantum to the astronomical.

We could argue that our morality is an expectedly logical outcome of knowing that we are impartially governed by partial conditions, and that this implicit knowledge surfaces our concern with merit and justice that most of us share at the very core of our biotic motivation. In addition, it compels many of us to possess a more karmic view of life where we all ultimately reap the rewards and pay the consequences of our actions in order to sustain or restore our ethical sense of balance. But despite our desired beliefs, we do not generally get what we deserve in the end, and the conflict that arises does not lie in the universe but within us. There will always be things for which we can never control, but we know that any measure of justice we see depends on the actions we commit or fail to commit, which is probably why our pervasive belief in cosmic retribution is also a convenient way for us to relinquish our responsibility. Bad people may do horrific things, but good people seem to let bad things happen. Hence, this brings into question how we determine what makes us good given that most of us only care about things that appear to affect our own lives or matter to us and that we are usually more charitable when there is little to no risk to ourselves. But this does not mean that self-sacrifice is an inherent good either since our lives are equally important and we cannot engage in benevolent acts if we are dead or incapacitated. Instead, it means that good and bad are relative judgments rather than absolute truths.

Morality is a projection of how we see the world should be, and not how it is, which is why we are inclined to interpret events in accordance to our worldview. We tend to see the outcome of the events as lucky, destined or deserving when we benefit from their occurrence and as unlucky, uncontrollable or undeserving when we suffer from their incidence. Sometimes, we accept their consequences without credit or blame or without cause or justification, but generally our biased preconceptions interfere with our search for moral truth. This is perhaps inescapable because we are living evidence of both our ancestral good deeds and their terrible sins, and we do seem to unwittingly carry the conceit and shame of generations that are inconspicuously encoded in our replicable genes and reconstructive memories. So if we want to grasp and apply the meaningful and unfiltered truth of life, we have to recognize the good and the bad, the pleasant and the ugly, and the fair and the unjust.

A belief in a just world has many interpretations. But there is one version that hides behind the rhetoric used by some among us to suggest we are all more or less immoral creatures, and whether or not we are, this provides a rationale that is more commonly supported than many of us would like to believe. In the Batman film, The Dark Knight [24], the would-be and eventual false hero Harvey Dent develops the dissociative personality of Two-Face. This occurs after a twisted ploy by the Joker to kill Rachel Dawes and intentionally push Dent beyond the edge of his sanity when he experiences the devastating loss of his great love, whose murder was enabled by corrupt cops and desperate mobsters. The explosion from which Batman rescues him disfigures the left side of his face and mars one side of his two-headed coin that once represented his former belief that we can make our own luck or that we have the ability to control the outcome we want. Dent subsequently uses his half-scarred silver dollar to determine whether he should execute those he deemed responsible for Rachel’s death because he convinces himself and declares to others that the only fairness in the world is chance given that he really can no longer distinguish between who is good and who is bad.

However, chance is neither fairness nor unfairness. It is neutral like playing the lottery. The only equitable component lies in an agreement by all parties to accept the outcome of who wins or loses with the assumption that the process is not rigged and the results are not staged. Since anyone who partakes can win the lottery, it does not discriminate against personal background, history or identity because it does not care. But we do care if someone who wins the lottery is also someone who has committed dreadful or deceitful acts against us or against those we value. We generally do not wish for fortuitous things to happen to people we despise unless perhaps we believe or hope such events will make them better individuals, and it is in such moments that we become more concerned with having control over how things unfold or at least control over how we feel. Few of us, if any, would remain unaffected by the awareness that someone or some group gained a significant advantage over us if it involved breaking sacred laws or literally getting away with murder.

When we are flooded with too many examples of unjust events as we often are, we filter out this information to the point that we are emotionally divorced from these realities. Most of us could be driven mad if we were subjected to senseless violence or malicious betrayal. This could also occur if we endured deeply conflicted or incongruent experiences repeatedly for prolonged periods that came to define a deplorable norm. Our states of mind are critical to our ability to live our lives, which is why we acquire and uphold certain beliefs that offer us stability and allow us to persevere. However, we also have difficulty with acknowledging an amoral universe because it suggests that we are not in control of our lives, whether it is to adequately predict our future or to exercise deliberate control over our decisions. The point is that we do not want to feel helpless, subjugated or controlled by some means that diverts us away from who and what we really are or at least the person we think or feel we are. In addition, we do not wish to believe that we would behave like others with whom we disagree if we were faced with the same set of circumstances. But often this is because we avoid situations that prevent us from behaving like them, and sadly, our judgments of others frequently reveal our attempts to evade fundamental truths about ourselves, which not only reflect our questionable morality but also how little control we have given the greater and deeper forces of nature in steering the self.

THE VOLITION OF AN INVOLUNTARY SELF

There has been a longstanding proposal that we have little to no control over what we think or do. From this viewpoint, some of us regard our conscious experience as a kind of passive witness of events, and when those events involve us, we are somehow propelled into action where we are instantly deemed accountable or, at the very least, we are obliged to respond to matters pertaining to our own immediate survival. When we consider the automated nature of our bodily functions and the absence of any sentient participation in making ourselves conscious, it does undoubtedly bring into question who and what we are to the point where it seems silly for us to think of our mindful selves as truly in control. We simply appear to live as if some basic set of goals were programmed into us before we were given the opportunity to provide any input on the subject. Our bodies and brains are basically predesigned to respectively serve as a vehicle and lens for our consciousness to come and go as required for our progressive survival by defining and understanding problems and then devising and assessing solutions, and this includes which activities we need or desire to do to feel secure and to be content. But if we have little to no voluntary control over our natural awareness and much of what we do functions in a predetermined manner, then the volition of an involuntary self needs to be reframed.

Unfortunately, the debate over determinism and free will has always been a rather meaningless one because determinism and free will are not mutually exclusive concepts. Volition can take place concurrently while behaviour is predetermined. For instance, if we choose to live by a valued principle like showing others respect or engaging in passive resistance even if we are mistreated or subjected to violence, our behaviour will be predictable despite having made a conscious choice. While the reasons for making that choice and the ability to maintain the integrity of that principle can also possibly be determined, it does not take away from our awareness of the world and the decision to follow a certain path. Moreover, when our minds and bodies are automatically geared towards taking a particular course of action, we are still aware that we are executing certain actions or that we made specific decisions for us and by us, regardless of whether we deliberately made those decisions with our full awareness or not. The part of us that is not conscious is still us because our conscious self cannot be separated from the unconscious part. We are essentially one entity, albeit interconnected with countless others.

This does mean that we are always directly responsible for our actions, but it does require us to be responsible for our choices to the extent to which we know at each point in time when those choices are made, even if we become aware of their consequences long after decisions or deeds have been committed. We do have sufficient independence of mind to make choices, and despite all of the limits and controls we encounter in our lives, we are not categorically tied to a predefined fate. The challenge we have is trying to negotiate and coordinate with the various components that comprise our minds and bodies while competing and cooperating with everyone and everything else outside of those personal boundaries. There may be basic internal programs that we do not consciously govern or understand how they work, but there are others we acquire that we can reprogram and use to guide the programs we do not directly and willfully manage. Hence, regardless of how predisposed we may be in terms of what we believe or feel and how we behave, we still have the power to culturally rewire our behaviour. We may be the product of biological processes and environmental influences, but that product comes with the ability and will to change.

While we can argue over the extent of our preprogramming and our capacity to think freely without an underlying prejudice, we all more or less treat our sentience as self-evident and this is confirmed by the social responsiveness of other beings we assume are self-conscious as well. And although we can certainly inquire as to whether or not we are sentient creatures, it is in that awareness and the ability to question it that makes our sentience truly obvious. However, consciousness is distinct from our physical capacity to change things, which can leave us feeling powerless when we assess what we might want against the limits of our influence to achieve what we want. While our power of inquiry provides a foundation for free will, which we can expand with the wisdom we gather and integrate over time, our volition nevertheless requires some minimum degree of control or persuasion to take responsibility for our choices and their associated actions, especially when we are aware of those actionable choices and their potential consequences. In addition, volition depends on the availability of options through our own direct capacity to act upon them or through someone else’s physical ability to do so on our behalf. Hence, freedom of choice presumes that we have choices, that we are conscious of those choices and that we are able to make them by exerting some power available to us.

However, awareness of a choice without being aware of its consequences poses a problem. When we accept the idea of free will, we assume responsibility for our actions as individuals in a society where we are aware of our personal rights and civic duties. And this includes the things we are collectively prohibited from doing, which are accompanied by the penalties incurred if established rules are violated or the costs we are willing to pay for specific privileges. Unfortunately, there is no practical way for any of us to fully know and understand all of the rules that may be applicable to us alongside the natural and legal consequences of their violations. To complicate things further, we inevitably encounter unwritten and unspoken expectations unbeknownst to us on matters of social etiquette where those of us belonging to one culture are introduced to another whose norms may oppose or dismiss our own. Finally, there are always personal conditions that may result in violating these rules due to illness, trauma or history by preventing us from functioning within the tolerable bounds of societal demands.

Nevertheless, morality is not simply about learning and obeying rules no more than volition is about choosing to obey them. Life often compels us to cross boundaries set by those who are complicit in hypocritically breaking the same laws they help to pass or enforce, and sometimes, it means we must refrain from abiding by unjust decrees and rulings. Fairness and justice are not principles that govern the universe, but they are embedded in us to make life fair or more just. We are the instruments of these principles, and the choice falls onto us to ensure some semblance of morality in the world since equity or justice can only prevail through our actions. And although the complexity of our biases can only be managed and never eliminated, their awareness increases our capacity to be impartial and objective enough to counter our prejudice and prejudgment, especially when there is no time to carefully analyze a risk or produce adequate evidence of indiscretions we know are taking place. Our subjective judgment may be necessary sometimes to ensure our survival, but our preconceptions frequently stand in the way of seeking truth and integrity. Hence, impartiality improves the likelihood that we will practice and instill fairness in a universe that cannot express it on its own except through our demonstrable volition.

Our pursuit of truth is a moral one. The quest for veracity is not just about knowing how the world works and why it works, but how to survive and progress within it and why we should care beyond the quality and continuity of life. It is about a purpose beyond its preservation and proliferation that questions how life should be lived and that can only be determined by experiencing it. And while our beliefs regarding our origins and fates may vary, we all recognize to one degree or another that we are self-aware beings, capable of inquiry and decision. Thus, however we got here, we are here and the real question we face is what we are going to do with our free will in the conscious moments we have left. Will we seek to live by pursuing pleasure in our lives or by achieving dominance over others through threat and deceit, or will we instead seek to create and contribute to a world greater than ourselves by applying the principles we learn from our experience through the narrative of life?

THE SYNCHRONICITY OF OUR MORAL NARRATIVE

None of us can ever truly be sheltered from the tragic events that may occur in our impartial world because we are intimately connected to our physical and social environments. Yet this connection is also why meaning is always found in our narratives, which fundamentally string together all of our blessings and misfortunes into lessons we can learn. Although most stories simply illustrate the realities of life, some of them reflect our sense of morality as examples of how we inject value or justice back into our collective experience. The rest of our personal and historical accounts remind us of past injustices that may serve to inspire future stories that restore balance or dignity, but all of them generally afford us a set of options to respond to an indifferent existence by working towards utility.

The universe sets the amoral or neutral background of life that positions us to be its potential morality, which we struggle to place in the foreground of our experience. And although our wilful sense of responsibility ensures our engagement in the political arena of societal ethics, we need to be careful not to confuse our moral self-righteousness or what we believe to be good or fair with the moral truth. We have always seen or heard horrific acts being committed and declared in the name of a greater good or justified as retribution for past sins and atrocities. Hence, we should routinely remain cognizant of our misplaced convictions and differentiate between the alignment and supremacy of our beliefs, where the first seeks cohesion with reality and the other demands its compliance. The latter part of that distinction becomes clearer when we look at how power consolidates and dictates the rules of our biosocial wilderness with physical threats and specious arguments used to rationalize its views and choices as part of a higher moral authority. And it is here where we find evil hiding behind obscurity and inhibition to appeal to the clarity of absolutes and the liberty of extremes demanded by an illusory ego.

Regrettably, too many of us dismiss how attributes such as dominance and possessiveness stem from our repressed insecurities, which cause us to mistakenly assume that we are the point of it all. This ultimately leads to our own spiritual confinement where we continue to feel as if we can never quite achieve peace within ourselves or with the world because much of what we do, which is based on what we think we want or need, does not bring us closer to our essence. Instead, our tendencies support and defend a system of life that only offers us the pretense of meaning. However, if we could loosen our obsessive control over managing or planning every moment of our lives from careers to vacations, we might discern the presence of something deeper or greater at play that extends beyond our own importance. Since our value is found in the connections through which we relate to one another, our stories are not really about us personally as much as they are about being participatory witnesses in a much larger narrative to which we contribute the morality of life. And if we could let go of those delusions that we are so desperately convinced are true and necessary to function in life and listen attentively to the inner voice we tend to ignore but tells us that we are misaligned, something unannounced will begin to take shape in the events that come to inhabit our stories.

The purity of the universal truth reveals itself in how things synchronize and complement one another. When we engage life and set forth to make it purposeful without being definitive in our expectations, it will quite naturally and inconspicuously place us in settings with the right conditions that result in the synchronicity of our moral narrative. Many of us do not notice or merely disregard instances of synchronicity as little more than coincidences, and although we certainly should apply additional caution in reading into these chance occurrences, they should not be dismissed because we do not truly comprehend the significance of biotic entanglement in the much broader context of an extra-dimensional and holographic multiverse proposition. The vibrational harmony of a quantum reality converges with consciousness to divergently signal our fundamental interconnectivity, where space is without distance and time without duration. Instances of synchronicity serve as reminders that there is something more to life than the one we think we are living and that there is a deeper moral truth to our viagnostic narratives. The complexities of the universe provide the means for events to meaningfully intersect or overlap so that we know there is a significant narrative to develop in living our lives. And regardless of what we believe about the underlying mechanics of existence, we know change is necessary to have experience and alignment or misalignment enables our stories to convey meaning.

At the most basic level, synchronized events expose the fallacy of a random universe. Life may be morally impartial, but it allows us as sentient beings to transcend our raw familiarity with pleasure and suffering from which we consciously access the harmonic properties of meaning. We know that we are connected. We know that we have a much more intimate relationship with the world than many of us want to admit. And whether we forge that relationship through other individuals, nature or the notion of God, how we want to describe it is less important than our capacity to sense that relationship altogether. Unfortunately, we often diminish its significance by either trying to oversimplify this relationship or to confine it to what we can physically perceive that inhibits our exploration of what it might signify on a metaphysical level. There are also those of us who try to convert our existential challenges largely tied to the most vulnerable part of our formative years into personal crusades to make life better for others or save the world from its destruction. However, it is our own selves rather than the world that needs to be saved. As we all know, the world will go on without us, but we have a responsibility to sustain or replenish its resources, including its vibrant biodiversity, in order to subsist as sentient beings and to ultimately introduce and practice the morality it cannot offer.

Since we are inseparable from the world as well as from one another, we quickly realize that our relationships are essential to our continued existence, and consequently, to the meaning of our stories. These relationships inspire us to develop our viagnostic narratives by serving as magnifiers and enablers of their significance. And it is in this context that we truly come to care for someone or something in which we recognize value. But to become the unexpected and often unsung heroes of our moral tales, we have to tap into the forces of nature and enlist its energy in response to a shared need or an aspiring possibility that only we can see based on a lesson that we have learned before that need is fulfilled or possibility is actualized. We also have to be attuned to the cosmic rhythms of our mysterious universe to extract meaning from synchronous episodes in our lives that are more than mere coincidences by seeing or forming the underlying connections of the greater truth through the true expression of love.

THE CLOSENESS OF LOVE IN A DISTANT CONNECTION

It is difficult to imagine that anything remains sacred when cynicism and irreverence become endemic to our extremely stratified societies, clandestinely governed by voracity and ruthlessness that lacerate and disfigure our naive childhood dreams until the nightmares of our traumas have taken their place. Whether we are gregarious or reserved, experience teaches us to disclose our personal truths to an exclusive few, if we are even lucky enough to find one being with whom to open up the vulnerable space of our most intimate thoughts and feelings. We negotiate with our egos to determine which parts we can outwardly express while we avoid confronting others within ourselves. As we impressionably learn to imitate our proximate role models within our shifting social sphere, who may or may not have suffered the same afflictions as our own, we eventually become something that is somewhat removed from what we really are. Sometimes, we reach a point where we lock away the spirit that embodies our essence to be tortured in the secret dungeons of our self-censored darkness. But buried beneath the unrest of our multifaceted illogic that purposely disguises our dysfunction, we uncover the underground passages to our souls that help us find and feel the closeness of love in a distant connection, which proves quite definitively that heartlessness and cruelty do not foundationally rule the universe.

Despite the occurrence of everything that seems to justify separating ourselves from others, whether it is our illusory egos that construct the fictitious boundaries of our individual sovereignty or the treacherous incidents that breed our apprehensive distrust, love is the disarming nurturer that dissolves our artificial borders and heals the sharpest of our enduring wounds. We simultaneously crave and dread closeness out of need and fear of its vulnerability. Yet while this causes some of us to engage in social dominance or prey on others to conceal their deepest terror, most of us take the risk of seeking some degree of connection however unattainable it may seem because it is the origin of why we live as sentient beings. Although we can certainly point to our sexuality as our primary biological impetus, can we really argue that we raise families, cherish our friendships or remain loyal to our partners based on sex? We can indeed accept this as the reason we were born and the only impulse that apparently drives some of us to live. But while sexual desire or erotic love falls along the more primal side of a much wider spectrum of feelings that enrich the meaning of our existence, genuine love guides us to the other end, where we want to give more than we wish to receive. The amorally insensitive world may persuade us all to quarantine our ailing souls, but love somehow seems to bring and keep most of us together because it can draw us towards the closeness we seek from the most distant connections we can find.

Connections transcend our perceived dimensions of the space-time continuum to move us closer to the remote and inaccessible truth. And it is in the emotive proximity of our interactions with one another, where we discover who we really are. When we love, we manifest our essence in any of the creative ways through which what we are matters, and when love is voluntarily and unexpectedly returned to us, that essence is knowingly appreciated. The higher our sensitivity to others, the deeper we reach into ourselves, and the more we approach who we truly are, the greater our capacity to tap into the inner truths of others. However, connections also trigger our remembrance of the dreadful and the forsaken as much as the pleasant and the cherished, and few of us can safely navigate through the darkness of our desperate intentions back to the light of our freedom and will to live. Our well-being depends on the reliable endowment and reception of pure love to bravely explore what we profoundly fear and heal the traumatic injuries of past misfortunes. In its absence, we spend the duration of our lives defending or sustaining our associations to those entities and states that only reinforce interactions that nudge us away from who we really are to become increasingly divided within ourselves.

We may not have an abundance of conscious and deliberate control over the conditions that drive our lives because we are more or less preprogrammed to be selfishly motivated out of necessity. We are obliged by this self-serving need in such a way that we do not recognize the concept of choice in matters of subsistence. We may have options in terms of our livelihoods as the means, but when faced between living and not living, we will take actions that increase our chances of survival relative to others. Undoubtedly, we know this fundamental logic of life adjusts when we can no longer tolerate our seemingly interminable suffering or when our identity extends beyond our own physical bodies. In the former case, we have lost hope in a bearable existence or belief in our own value, but in the latter, we reveal that we are also predesigned with the capacity to connect with others and to create good in the world that defines and expands who and what we really are. Knowing that we can build a little more in the sincere relationships we form than what we destroy in the possession and consumption of the love we tend to hallucinate tells us that we are greater than the sum of our parts when we connect.

Some of us would assert that the greatest form of morality is found in the purity of love as something unconditional and to epitomize that highest virtue is to be God. And while there is a shared belief in this moral quality that is described in sacred texts as a noble pursuit, unconditional love does not mean that we refrain from responding punitively or that we learn to ignore the harmful actions of others. Instead, it suggests that we love life unconditionally and that we do not allow life and ourselves in particular to be overcome by hate. We can find many more ways to care for the people or things that matter to us than the malicious methods we can apply to hurt or debase them because suffering naturally occurs without any pain being purposely inflicted and because our sentient coexistence would cease to be if morality and compassion were not present in an impartial world.

THE MORALITY OF THE UNCONDITIONAL

While the practice of compassion requires us to understand without prejudice or favouritism, to be truly unconditional is to be definitively conditional. This means that in order for us to know the moral principles of the truth, we must be able to observe them across all conditions. This enables us to discern how these principles integrate with one another as well as to reconfigure or reprioritize their relevance under every different set of circumstances, not as strict tenets to uphold but as adaptive models that align with reality. By seeing what pertains to one case over another, we learn to appreciate the context of a principle rather than merely define a rule to apply. This also compels us to question our false assumptions and to mature our moral sense by building connections with the world and with each other that bring us closer to the truth instead of letting dogmatic beliefs inadvertently limit or divide us. And yet, we cannot have morality without conditions. How can we distinguish the value of our choices and actions without linking them to the specific states or expected outcomes that we associate with value? Morality, like the truth, is a paradox because it must be both unconditional and circumstantial.

We need morality to function as a society, and this demands an adequately shared perception of justice or fairness for which we must take responsibility. However, it also necessitates that we accept the inevitability of tragic events and inhibit our tendency to impose accountability unconditionally even when there is no one to blame. This empowers us to redistribute our resources in an effort to provide support to the victims or survivors of gravely indiscriminate misfortune instead of defaulting exclusively to the survival of the fittest. Even our domesticated social creatures offer comfort or protection to others when they sense grief or danger. When we mutually witness arbitrary devastation that is indifferent to borders or politics, we tend to put aside our past rivalries and cease our hostilities as well as dispense with the legal clauses that formally manage our interactions. Ironically, we often cannot restore moral balance unless we suspend judgment and unconditionally return to a basic respect for life.

Unfortunately, our instinctive concern with fairness also leads to the horrible acts we commit against one another under the banner of injustice. This is because our emotions engage in a coup d’état where our higher moral sense is held hostage until blood is spilled or a ransom is paid and often can only be genuinely reinstated after acts of reconciliation are performed. In those most intensely irrational moments, we fail to acknowledge the deeper motives that reside in our commitment to the values we uphold or convey when we feel petrifyingly threatened or we are in desperate need of gratification. If we want to uncover the moral truth, we are obliged to enter, at least temporarily, into a nonjudgmental space, where we can free our essence to strengthen its connections to a principled life. When we truly test who we really are, we express or add to the greater truth hidden in a universe ruled by amoral conditions and we slowly realize that we are the missing connections essential to reveal the deep-rooted ethics of life. And since we are the reason that morality becomes necessary, it is through us and other sentient beings that nature has a moral expression.

Hence, it falls on us to reduce the deafening noise of our egos if we wish to feel the vibrations of a moral drum that beats inside us all trying to reverberate the principles of a meaningful life perpetually within and across our stories. The impartial quality of existence provides a silent medium through which we can hear the morality of the unconditional in what remains true and grows steadily with every exquisitely harmonic connection we make. The truth is moral in nature not simply because it is pure and untainted by our individual and collective motives, but primarily because there is something to learn from life. There are moral lessons to be derived from our viagnostic stories, and when we learn these lessons that strip away our prejudices and preconceptions, we approach our essence and simultaneously descend into the universal truth to uncover that they are both fundamentally the same. Our meaning unveils itself when we see the foundation of our sentient existence in alignment with reality through any perspective that recognizes our sense of utility in our wider connection with the self and the cosmos. And it is the vital spark of this sacred meaning that guides us through the obscurity of our conflicting motives to fully merge our own viagnostic stories with the greater story of life. It is here where we seed our essence in the fertile soil of our enlightened experiences to harvest the moral truth from our growing and everlasting connections and to bring our lives into their open and inclusive completion.