We are all agents of the Matrix

We are all agents of the matrix. Snake-biting each other in ways we do not see ourselves, keeping each other down, due to our own selfish impulses. No one is exempt. What determines the character of a person is what they chose to do when they become aware of their own ways of being agents.

That is why awareness leads to conscience, a highly conscious person will have a great degree of awareness of their own actions, and with a will to become a good person one uses this understanding to act morally, thereby approaching the higher self. It is also why you should not blame people for true ignorance, it is impossible to act on what you do not know and everybody has a different level of self-awareness.

With calming the mind comes clarity, and when you are less disturbed by your emotions you can see more clearly inside yourself to obtain awareness. That is one of the reasons why people with troubled lives are more ignorant, but that does not make them any more or less good at the root. What each person chooses to do with what awareness they have makes them good or bad. Even though being a good or a bad person is foremost measured against how you threat others, you are also an agent against yourself. It takes courage to act morally with awareness of how your actions affect others, but it takes even more courage to then act on your awareness of how your behavior affects yourself.

However, not everybody is meant to end up in the same place and no one is in control of the conditions under which they were brought up. What happens during your early phases of life has profound influence on the rest of it. Some wounds are too deep to fully mend and may cause unbearable sorrow to disturb right now or even ever. It is okay to choose ignorance at times, and in fact without ignorance we would all lose our minds. Not everybody is meant to end up in the same place. What makes you what you are is what you choose to do with what life has given you to work with.

Philosophically similar to Buddhism. But in regards to any action being either 'good' or 'bad' - the zen master says, "We'll see."

You are as good as the choices you make. Feeling sorrow for a choice that was not yours to choose is as foolish as feeling dishonored for being a person that you are not. It is only the concept of social personas separate from the personal self that even makes such mental disease possible.

People too often give selfishness a bad rap. They ignore the fact that the measure of a self is the choices it makes. That which does not improve one's capabilities to make good choices is not selfish, and if it is labeled so then it serves an imposter of the true self. The most selfish thing one can say is "I will do whatever it takes to always choose the right choice." It is self-degradation, not selfishness, that deserves the blame.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

You are as good as the choices you make. Feeling sorrow for a choice that was not yours to choose is as foolish as feeling dishonored for being a person that you are not. It is only the concept of social personas separate from the personal self that even makes such mental disease possible.

People too often give selfishness a bad rap. They ignore the fact that the measure of a self is the choices it makes. That which does not improve one's capabilities to make good choices is not selfish, and if it is labeled so then it serves an imposter of the true self. The most selfish thing one can say is "I will do whatever it takes to always choose the right choice." It is self-degradation, not selfishness, that deserves the blame.

'what is right' depends on the culture by the looks of what you are saying. By definition 'right' is ideal. Just a matter of whos definition of 'right'. Everyone should always seek to do 'right' by our own judgement, anything else is but a waste of your life.

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SkyCore wrote:

'what is right' depends on the culture by the looks of what you are saying. By definition 'right' is ideal. Just a matter of whos definition of 'right'. Everyone should always seek to do 'right' by our own judgement, anything else is but a waste of your life.

People overthink this. If you're hungry, eating is usually good; avoiding injury is usually good. The purpose of life is its continuation up to and beyond our maximum individual lifespan. The good is that which best secures the life of our descendants ad infinitum.

It is a simple problem with complex answers. On some facets there is consensus, on many there is not. Culture does play a role, as different cultures prefer different answers. But some are right and some wrong; it is objective, there is a standard.

It is often very complicated to discern the good or bad nature of any single action.

However, it is important not to then apply that to say there is no right nor wrong, there is no good nor evil. It is very important for every person to learn to distinguish between right or wrong and quite interestingly it is directly proportional to how morally you are able to act with any awareness you do have about your behavior and therefore directly proportional to how conscious you become.

The reason it takes more courage to do right by yourself than to do right by others, is the same reason why it is easier to do what is "right" in the eyes of others by ignoring what is right for you. The absence of ignorance in the presence of personal problems brings suffering/sorrow until you move forward with those issues and also at least reach a dynamic threshold of progress.

Another level of confusion is to apply a similar reasoning to the subject of choice. Ultimately, we have no choice, but it is the illusion of choice that is the driving force in creating personality, it is the thing which is oh so hard to define about humans and other beings different from what we would like to consider inanimate matter. We have something that makes us attempt to find meaning of life and our position in it, and that is what drives us to create a subjective reality. Also, for all practical purposes you do have a choice, it is only backwards reasoned that you do not - and therefore entirely irrelevant. Same as unpredictability, the chaos of the universe. There really is not any, but in reality you will never be able to use that understanding for anything and rely on understanding the seemingly unpredictable nature of the world to act in it. Again same as the subject of reality. There technically is an ultimate reality, but you can never use that understanding for anything, every single actual use of reality you will ever see is someones perception of reality, and what we culturally accept as reality is the highest standing theory to explain something.

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Crackmonster wrote:

It is often very complicated to discern the good or bad nature of any single action.

However, it is important not to then apply that to say there is no right nor wrong, there is no good nor evil. It is very important for every person to learn to distinguish between right or wrong and quite interestingly it is directly proportional to how morally you are able to act with any awareness you do have about your behavior and therefore directly proportional to how conscious you become.

There is no right or wrong or good or evil. These are sophomoric judgements that don't take into account the relativity of all actions.

Example: The holocaust or the genocide of rwanda are widely considered some of the most evil acts of man in history but even these aren't 'evil' when relativity is taken into account and in fact are genuinely good events from some perspectives. Take the perspective of other species of life on these events for example. We are a direct threat to thousands of species on this planet and if they could they would likely wish for our numbers to be reduced by literally billions. So from their perspective not only were the holocaust and rwandan genocide etc good but nowhere near enough humans died.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Take the perspective of other species of life on these events for example. We are a direct threat to thousands of species on this planet and if they could they would likely wish for our numbers to be reduced by literally billions.

But why would you value bacterial or insect life the same as intelligent technological life? Clearly the latter is a lot more rare on the universal scale and more difficult to replenish, and therefore objectively more valuable.

The extermination of millions of humans is more evil / more wrong than the extermination of millions of ants.

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morbo wrote:

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Take the perspective of other species of life on these events for example. We are a direct threat to thousands of species on this planet and if they could they would likely wish for our numbers to be reduced by literally billions.

But why would you value bacterial or insect life the same as intelligent technological life? Clearly the latter is a lot more rare on the universal scale and more difficult to replenish, and therefore objectively more valuable.

The extermination of millions of humans is more evil / more wrong than the extermination of millions of ants.

That's true from our perspective but not the ants. Assuming the ants at least have the desire to survive.

Again I go back to the zen master's quote, "We'll see." There's no way to judge what's more wrong or more evil. For example you could say if the choice is millions of ants vs millions of humans then from our perspective sure the ants go but what if a disease that's going to kill billions is ravaging humanity and if we didn't kill those ants we could have concocted a cure from them to save billions, millions die now to save billions later.

My point in all this is it's impossible to weigh the goodness or badness of any set of actions no matter how obvious it appears and a person seeking wider awareness and consciousness like the OP would at least consider these other avenues of contemplation rather than prematurely stopping analysis after only considering a limited perspective.

It's a fun thought experiment but it's ultimately impossible to glean anything more from trying to judge an event other than that simply 'it happened'.


Edit: I think our tendency to view life as simple weighted good and evil stems from our tendency to perceive only small chunks of time at a time and as well as our tendency to view life itself as a zero sum game when in reality it's infinitely more complex.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

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Crackmonster wrote:

It is often very complicated to discern the good or bad nature of any single action.

However, it is important not to then apply that to say there is no right nor wrong, there is no good nor evil. It is very important for every person to learn to distinguish between right or wrong and quite interestingly it is directly proportional to how morally you are able to act with any awareness you do have about your behavior and therefore directly proportional to how conscious you become.

There is no right or wrong or good or evil. These are sophomoric judgements that don't take into account the relativity of all actions.

Example: The holocaust or the genocide of rwanda are widely considered some of the most evil acts of man in history but even these aren't 'evil' when relativity is taken into account and in fact are genuinely good events from some perspectives. Take the perspective of other species of life on these events for example. We are a direct threat to thousands of species on this planet and if they could they would likely wish for our numbers to be reduced by literally billions. So from their perspective not only were the holocaust and rwandan genocide etc good but nowhere near enough humans died.

I see what you are saying even before reading your example and cannot disagree, but what applies to choice, unpredictability and reality applies to good and evil as well. While it is true that it is not there as an ultimate quality and is instead a relative concept, it is completely irrelevant to anything actual, and it is essential in life to be able to distinguish between right and wrong(and any practical application(which is 100% of uses) is relative).

It is a slippery slope to say there is no right or wrong, no good or evil and leads to moral decay, even if it is right. Consider what the world would be like if no one was able to distinguish between right or wrong.

It only exists in practice as a subjective truth, to claim that it doesn't exist as a subjective truth is not true. And it needs not be defined because it is always understood to be subjective in applied use if you think about it.