How Can We Know What is Right?

When I took my first meditation class, the teacher gave us a list of ethical precepts. She said, “this list is from my religious tradition. You may be from a different tradition with different ethical precepts. The important thing is not that you follow this list, but that you have your own ethical code, and that you follow it. If you do the deep work of meditation and are not acting in alignment with your own integrity, it will bring pain and difficulty on your spiritual path.”

How can we know what is right? One way to go is to follow the law. The 10 commandments are a good start, but they don’t provide guidance for every situation. The Torah contains 613 laws. The US Congress adds an average of over 6,900 pages of new public laws each year. Certainly, knowing and following the law is a good idea. This is the agreement we have made with other citizens of the US. Following the law keeps us safe from legal punishment and keeps the society heading in a shared direction determined by our elected decision makers. But we all know that some unethical things are not illegal. Owning and enslaving people was legal in this country for centuries. Sexual harassment was not illegal until the 1970s. Simply following the law does not mean we are making the most ethical choice we can make.

How can we know what is right? We might ask “what is normal in my community today?” Years ago, I rolled my grocery cart out of the store without noticing the case of soda on the bottom of the cart that I had not paid for. When I got to my car, I realized my mistake. I brought my soda back into the store to pay for it. I thought I would just go right to the cashier and pay her, but of course now there was a line. I waited until it was my turn and received eye rolls from the cashier and from other customers. Why was I wasting everyone’s time to pay the $2.50 for the soda? I told this story to a group of folks and they agreed “no one does that” or “most people wouldn’t do that.” This is the problem with using the community standard as a test for ethics- “what most people do” is not “what is the most ethical thing to do.” Often there are more ethical options if we look.

Once during an “Introduction to Buddhism” course, classmates brought to our discussion a proposed law that was being debated in the state where we lived. It seemed to us students a very complex issue. The Monk said, “it’s quite simple- it’s a matter of compassion.” We were all shocked. But budgets! But complex politics! “Simple compassion” responded the monk, and as he said it, the dust cleared, and we all saw what the most compassionate solution would be. 

This is hard for our human brains to handle. Scientists have shown that it is very difficult for us to believe one thing if we are doing a different thing. It’s called “Cognitive dissonance” and eventually it must be resolved because it is so uncomfortable. The way it usually resolves is that we decide that what we are doing must be ethical, because we are good people, and we wouldn’t do something unethical. But the spiritual path is full of paradox. We are imperfect beings on this journey, and sometimes with the best of intentions we will harm others, we will do things that are ethically grey, we will make mistakes. We will compromise because don’t want to disrupt the peace of community. We have all faced choices where no outcome is perfect. The spiritual path asks us to hold all those things in our attention-- to take an honest look at what we do, to notice when it misses the mark, to change when we can to bring our action into closer alignment with our integrity, to ask forgiveness from others, and to stay present with our shortcomings even when they are uncomfortable.

I’ve often relied on Walter Burghardt‘s definition of spiritual contemplation “the long loving look at the real.” As we seek an ethical path in life, we can start by simply taking a good long look at what is real. What are we really doing? How does it really impact others? We look lovingly and compassionately at ourselves, knowing we are imperfect and have only a partial view. We look lovingly at those our actions impact. Being a person of ethical integrity is not something that happens all at once and is perfect forever. Being a person of integrity is something we live anew each day. It is a powerful spiritual practice. And it makes all our other spiritual practices possible.