a personal code of conduct

Our own ethics have to be constantly upgraded to keep pace with the increasing levels of violence and the mirror-image vanity of today’s society. As complicated as it may seem, it really always comes back to the difference between an intelligent way to behave and an unintelligent way. All this would hardly be worth a mention if it wasn’t for morality imposing ridiculous codes of behaviour and making nonconformity to them almost forbidden. But in our western world, during the 1960s, a lot of the main moral codes began to fall apart. They were laughed at and to a certain extent the baby was thrown out with the bathwater and we did experience unnerving doubts about who we were, etc. But out of that something else appeared. We began to feel a certain independence from authority. Our instinctive feelings contradicted convention. Personal morality began to challenge authorised morality as contradictions became exposed. As we lost confidence in authority, so we began to question good, bad, right and wrong. Even though an ethics revolution didn’t exactly catch on (except in the expanded consciousness of hippy revolutionaries) the morality bubble was burst. Now, today, our choices are no longer automatically made in accordance with given morality, but by applying a personal code of conduct to our relationships, to our eating habits and to treading more lightly on the earth. It gives us some hope of making a breakthrough in our human conduct.