Written by Ethan Nichtern

I find that when the conversation shifts to ethics, people tend to have three basic reactions that complicate the exploration. I’ve been guilty of having all of them at different times. We either become (1) apathetic, (2) defensive, or (3) righteously judgmental.

When we are caught up in apathy, the world seems like an insurmountable fortress of greed, hatred, and delusion, a dark place where nobody seems to hold themselves accountable for the choices they make. If no one else thinks about the hard questions, why should I?

A discussion of ethics can also make us defensive, as though someone is personally attacking our lifestyle. Somebody starts asking simple questions about why we choose to eat meat, or why we hold the political beliefs we hold, and we don’t even want to hear the question.

We might also become righteous and judgmental. There is so much going on in this world that we don’t agree with, and we might not even agree with each other about what’s wrong. Without flexibility, we judge and condemn. Without trust in the goodness of the mind, mistakes cease to be occasions for learning. With this mistrusting mentality, we don’t allow space for learning from mistakes, and we certainly don’t allow room for the truth that the really hard questions in life almost always fall into gray areas, where righteousness can’t help us.

For any of these three habitual reactions to ethics, the solution is really the same. If we bring the same outlook that we have to formal meditation — making friends with our experience, while slowly working to cultivate positive qualities over a long period of time — then we can introduce curiosity and a sense of exploration to our life. This path is more about engaging in a learning process, being a lifelong student of cause and effect, rather than always doing the “right” thing.

To be contemplative means we are trying to think deeply about life, to grow more curious about the links between how we experience ourselves and how we act. To be a contemplative is to create a lifelong study of the interdependence between our views and our behaviors. If we want to step onto this path, we need to recapture the original purpose of both human philosophy and human psychology, which is to become a curious person, appreciative of our precious opportunity to be alive, exploring principles that have useful and specific applications.

From this standpoint, ethics is no abstraction; there is nothing vague about it. Practicing ethics is about making our lives tangibly better, because if we can learn to live fully in our own heartmind throughout the day, every day will feel infinitely more satisfying.