Why we do what we do....

The last few years I was faced with some eye opening situations that challenged my own personal ethics, morals and values with close friendships, their behaviors and how they justified their own actions.  You never know, but until someone you love and trust crosses a line with you that is way beyond your personal ethical standard, you are faced with a dilemma.  I'm sure if one suffers long enough, a person can have their own "Creative Ethics" that in some twisted way justifies their actions to themselves.  It's heart breaking to witness, even worse when they want you to be a part of it.  It certainly changes a "Friendship." There is great good and evil within every person. I get we are all human and learning in a bizarre culture.

This year for me is about noticing the ego in myself and others and not identifying with it or judging it anymore.  Letting go, forgiving and letting go.... not an easy practice, but it sure helps living day to day.  I am not a religious person, or a christian, or an atheist.  I have had several enlightening intimate lessens involving teaching plants and believe that I am most certainly non-dual and eternally infinitely connected to all that is. Honestly, who really knows, but I'm sure I will find out when I get there. I keep this poem close to my heart during this practice:

I am not I.

I am this one

walking beside me whom I do not see,

whom at times I manage to visit,

and whom at other times I forget;

who remains calm and silent while I talk,

and forgives, gently, when I hate,

who walks where I am not,

who will remain standing when I die. 

By Juan Ramón Jiménez, Translated By Robert Bly

This poem helps when I get off track.  For me, my life is about creating beauty, fun and connection and exploring the inner and outer worlds in delicious comfort and style.  How I express that part through all of the mediums, music, public art, writing, cooking, gatherings, good conversations, and silence is how I am doing it right now.

I love to get others views and I found these videos thought provoking. You may too.  Let me know what you think.

Richard Dawkins examines sin. He asks whether the old religious rules about what is right and wrong are helpful and explores what science can tell us about how to be good.

Dawkins journeys from riot-torn inner city London to America's Bible Belt, building a powerful argument that religion's absolutist moral codes fuel lies and guilt.

He finds the most extreme example in a Paris plastic surgery clinic that specializes in making Muslim brides appear to be virgins once again.

But what can science and reason tell us about morality? Through encounters with lemurs, tango dancers, the gay rights campaigner Matthew Parris and the scientist Steven Pinker, Dawkins investigates the deeper roots of moral behavior in our evolutionary past.

He explores the rituals that surround mating and the science of disgust and taboo. Drawing on crime data and insights from neuroscience, he argues that our evolved senses of reason and empathy appear to be making us more and more moral, even as religious observance declines.

Richard Dawkins explores what science can tell us about death.

It's a journey that takes him from Hindu funeral pyres in India to genetics labs in New York.

Dawkins brings together the latest neuroscience, evolutionary and genetic theory to examine why we crave life after death, why we evolved to age and how the human genome is something like real immortality - traits inherited from our distant ancestors that we pass on to future generations.

He meets a Christian dying of motor neurone disease, reminisces about the Wall Street Crash with a 105-year-old stockbroker, and interviews James Watson, the geneticist who co-discovered the structure of DNA.

Dawkins admits to sentimentality in imagining his own church funeral, but he argues we must embrace the truth, however hard that is.

In a television first, he has his entire genome sequenced to reveal the genetic indicators of how he himself may die.

Why does an atheist bother to get up in the morning?

That's the question Richard Dawkins seeks to answer as he continues his exploration of the big questions of life in a world shaking off religious faith.

In a journey that takes him from the casinos of Las Vegas to Buddhist monasteries in the foothills of the Himalayas, Richard Dawkins examines how both religious and non-religious people struggle to find meaning in their lives.

He looks at how our existence is ruled by chance, meeting people whose fate was to be born into extreme poverty in India's slums and the survivors of a natural disaster in Joplin, Missouri, a city ripped apart in 2011 by a tornado on a random course.

In the face of what appears to be a blindly indifferent universe, Dawkins argues that we each have to forge our own sense of meaning.

He meets the comedian Ricky Gervais, an atheist since the age of seven, for whom meaning comes through doing something creative.

For Dawkins, it is the awe and wonder in scientific enquiry - from the human genome to the quest for the Higgs Boson - that get him up in the morning.