I think I want to tease out this lesson for SH101 for myself by thinking through the difference between morals and ethics, and the ramifications of what that means for embodied humans vs. the Otherworld.
It’s kind of like human law vs. spiritual law – they are NOT one and the same, and what is true spirituality and what constitutes breaking spiritual law doesn’t always sync with human law and, well, the crap they pull, and the rules they set up to allow it.
Humans like to think the crap they make up is the same as spritiual law, because in the Abrahamic religions, Man is made in the image of God and well, put here to plunder everything else. Folks that are further along the spiritual continuum relise that plundering the world isn’t really what is meant; think GOOD HUSBANDRY, not ‘use and abuse’. Nevertheless, it puts man in a different category than the rest of the world, instead of smack dab in the middle of the web, interconnected, but not any more special or better than any other creature. But I digress.
Ian Welsh in his ‘Ethics 101’ says, very succinctly, ‘ethics’ is how you treat people you don’t know, and ‘morals’ is how you treat people you do know. Ethics is for the wider, faceless society, a group norm that is applied on a large scale. Morals are personal, face-to-face dealings.
Most definitions of these things have a great deal of overlap, but that’s the best understanding I can grasp at this time.
So, is there ramifcations for us here in the Otherworld? Of course – Ethically, I conduct myself with thought to greater impact in the worlds I journey, in how I conduct myself as a human moving through that space, and being mindful and respectful that I’m not ‘making things up’ and ‘imagining things’ and therefore, the beings I interact with, the landscape I traverse, must be treated with the same respect I offer to my boss or my partner or my child or my home.
Morally, the beings and places I create relationship with in the Otherworld are respectfully acknowledged as existing in their own right and with the same Ghosti principles I would treat any other friend.