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Guggal

Guggal is a flowering plant which produces a fragrant resin called guggal.

The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all directions.

How to Be Good – A Very Tough Problem

As soon as you realize that every religion is mind-made, and that the God or gods you believe in are relative to the society you were born into, absolute morality falls apart. There has been a strong strain of believers in “natural” morality. They may see sermons in stones, meaning that Nature is their moral teacher (Darwinism and the struggle to survive did this school in).

Life gains meaning and purpose form the inside out. Love, compassion, altruism, heroism, self-sacrifice, gratitude, gracefulness, honesty, and generosity—all the values we associate with being good—arise naturally once we decide to seek them in ourselves. Holding a higher vision of what it means to be human is what it means to be human. Survival, in the Darwinian sense, is beside the point. Human beings will die for a good cause, and we help and heal the weak so that they can survive.

The cloud of causes that determine your own goodness is a confusing thing, and I sympathize with those who search for moral laws and principles, just as I fear what lengths the same people will go to in order to impose those laws and principles on others—historically, it hasn’t been a pretty sight. The bottom line is that we are a unique species in that our existence as humans is based on consciousness. Not only is morality mind-made, but so is everything about the reality we inhabit. Without the capacity to know, perceive, interpret, create models, make free choices, and self-reflect, we are nothing.

Even though it is painfully difficult to see beyond human perversity, violence, and self-destruction, they aren’t the ultimate foundation of human life. Consciousness is. To the extent that we can sort out what is good and true in ourselves, we live up to the moral impulses that we value. It’s also human to fall short and to devolve into cruelty and violence. But a fixed set of moral laws and principles carved into a new set of tablets from the mountaintop isn’t the answer.