Theos-Talk Archives (August 1997 Message tl00221)

Jerry Schueler wrote:

> Speaking from my own experiences (Chuck, I think, will back me up)
> as we experience other planes and slowly integrate spirituality into
> our daily life, our sense of right and wrong dissolves into various shades
> of gray. 

	The expression "daily life" denotes a dualistic mentality (albeit one
which you seem to be trying to lose). There is a relatively new branch
of mathematics, called "fuzzy logic", which looks at complex issues not
as shades of gray, but as multifactored binary situations, where the
value of each alters the meanings of "black" and "white" (or, more
precisely, "true" and "false") for the others. For example, if you get a
job offer, there are a number of factors that may cause you to take or
not take the job, but the value of some factors will change the
importance of others (for a simple example, if the job required you to
work 10 hours a day, that might be considered a negative, but if the
salary level were high enough, it would reduce the importance of the
length of the workday).

	It works much the same in moral issues. Each person has their own set
of moral axioms (and societies have THEIR own, as well). The more moral
axioms you have, the greater the chance that any given action will
violate one or more of them. This gives the appearance of shades of
gray, but can actually be broken down into an individual group of binary
decisions, the level of each of which determines the importance of the
others. Of course, with our level of ability to predict the consequences
of our actions, and the amount of time it would take to think through
every action, we cannot go through these factors very often. If we use,
as a basic axiom (which, admittedly, has to be defined in respect to
other axioms) as, "The most moral action is the one that benefits
Humanity the most, never forgetting that we are part of Humanity", then
the Golden Stairs are a good means to eventually acting reflexively
according to this dictum. And, as the Mahatmas said, intent is the key.

	Bart Lidofsky