What are Good and Bad?

At first glance the answer to this question seems obvious to many, but is it? These values may be apparent from an individual’s perspective, but we all know one persons pleasure is often another’s pain.

Without a conscious observer there is no good or bad, things just are. When a fish eats another fish it’s not really bad or good from a human perspective, rather it’s just nature running it’s course. It’s just the nature of things, as its been said… the ?circle of life?. Concepts of scale aside, this is a relatively simple formula not unlike a machine or a mathematical equation.

Unless we are somehow a supporters of one of the fish or champions of the rights of individual fish in general. But of course if an observer did take a stand in favor of a fish that would be a conscious position.

As biological beings we are bound to certain realities of our bodies in the physical world. We must eat for example, no matter what that always involves consuming a living thing. Because of a biologically imperative need to reproduce we also have a tendency to want to better ourselves in other ways, even at the expense of other beings. These are not Human qualities at all ~ they are literally separate from humanitarian thought. These natural tendencies would seem to be common to all living things in one way or another, and most certainly they are common to all animals. They are an inescapable part of ‘mechanical’ biology, but also separate from… or at odds with… the idea of Humanity.

Without the intervention of conscious thought we would simply attempt to take whatever we wanted whenever we wanted it without any regard for the needs of others. It is only as thinking beings that we can create the idea of good and try to act in a way that we believe is consistent with that good.

Good and bad are ideas. Without someone to judge a situation they don’t exist. When they do exist they are always a function of a conscious perspective.

So have we determined that good and bad are ‘just’ ideas? Not hardly. These are very important ideas, very important indeed. Put simply, they are fundamental to Human consciousness. The idea of these two mutually dependent qualities are among the elements that we form our notions of morality from, and they are at the core of what it means to be Human rather than a ‘lesser’ animal.

With classic physics we’ve learned that there is no such thing as cold. Only varying degrees of heat. It is not possible to ‘make cold’ …all that we can do is remove heat from a body or a space. The same basic principle is true of light, or any other form of energy for that matter, one can not produce darkness, one can only extinguish or block the light. Theoretical physics aside, this is our truth. Within this physical reality any other interpretations of hot/cold light/dark only exist because of inaccurate perceptions (illusions).

Think of your conscious mind and/or Divinity that creates and encompasses your conscious mind as light or heat or energy or just the ‘perceiver of good’ or ‘creator of good’ or whatever. From our perspective as upright bipedal beings with our brains in our head at the top of our bodies it makes some sense to think of these properties or values as ‘higher’ than the more mechanical/biological aspects of our being. It seems reasonable to assume that this is why ideas of ‘Heaven’ are usually thought of as existing ‘above’ us, and it’s the reason we’re going to continue with these thoughts by referring to Human values and morality as the ‘Top’.

Think of the physical world as described by pure logic and understood by scientific method as earth, as external reality, as the very ground that we walk on. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, what goes up must come down, 1+1=2 and so on. Feet on the ground so to speak. This is why we are labeling our physical world and purely biological aspects of our existence the ‘bottom’.

More to come…