Introduction

We, individuals of the homo sapiens species, are thrown into our existence here on this beautiful planet lost in a vastness of nothing. Having been given reasoning, we are compelled to make sense out of our short journey between the time of birth and the time of death.

Our earliest dependencies on parents, family members, teachers, politicians, or outsiders imprints on us the certainty that we will be “good” and “safe” as long as we follow their views and advices. At the same time, those interior dependencies, originating from the need to survive and socially belong, create pressures and conflict with our need to find purpose, to “evolve” “spiritually” - to become sovereign and responsible individuals, who do not need to depend on others to make responsible choices.

We human beings are beginning to uncover and integrate within ourselves those two seemingly opposing sides, which in reality are but two different aspects of the same reality, in order to become undivided “whole” beings. It has been shown throughout ages, by philosophers and sages, that there are few fundamental ways to achieve this integration that ultimately leads to a fulfilled life.

One method is refining one’s awareness of the present moment through constant reminders to return to watching one’s current thoughts, body, emotions, actions, and environment without judgment. This mindfulness practice then becomes a habit, and eventually reduces the recurring worrying about our past and our future, which is the normal function of our mind.

Another approach is to become conscious about the things that are important to oneself, the values that define and create one’s purpose in this short life, the very meaning we find in our lives. The stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius nailed it by saying “waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one”.

In this article we will show how a valued life is central to the fulfillment of longings of individuals and societies since the earliest days of social organization to the present time.

Valued Life

We define the term “valued life” as the ability to act responsibly in accordance with one’s desire to create better future aspects of individual and communal life.

A “better future” is achieved when one or several persons effectuate reciprocally beneficial (or least prejudicial) changes that allow them to climb the pyramid of needs towards self-actualization as defined by Abraham Maslow.

Examples of valued life actions could be:

• accept another person’s obviously biased and uninformed belief while being conscious of one’s own cognitive biases that belief may trigger and as long as it does not prejudice oneself; or
• reducing waste and consequent environmental pollution from unused discarded goods by producing and selling commercial goods to order and forgoing inflated profit by enforcing goods offerings in large bulk quantities, or unnecessarily stocking goods that are not in demand; or
• responsibly enforcing caregiver roles by restricting children’s whims with the intention of educating and preparing them for a happier future.

Values Sustained By Religions

Religions absorbed social norms that assured group survival. Religions carried those norms forward in generations through moral teachings.

Values arose as social norms that regulated the communal life and arbitrated conflicts between fellow community members. In early tribal hierarchical structures, yet without fixed ranks and roles, chieftains or elders gained trust and prestige after demonstrating their wisdom through action for the good of the community. Those entrusted chieftains then arbitrated social conflicts between sovereign individuals according to their individual values. There were no absolute rulers or governments that with laws prescribed society members what and how to do things as we encounter it today. Individual members were responsible for their own choices, deeds, and community contributions, as well as the consequences of their actions. At times in which conflict arbitration was required, the wise elder was requested to judge, that is wisely determine how to resolve a conflict between group members.

The tribe members depended on helping each other and on every able group member to be contributing to the common “good” through sustainable use of communal property, sustenance acquisition, or assurance of safety. Cooperation between individuals developed because it has many advantages like work specialization resulting in higher efficiency, or the sharing of knowledge where mutual learning was benefiting all group members. Therefore social norms regulating peaceful cooperation developed as a standard governance method replacing those wise decisions earlier judged by chieftains. They not only helped regulate social life but also reduced unnecessary conflicts. Social norms reflected and became the values important for the continuation of the community.

As healers contributing to physical and mental well-being of group individuals, Shamans were regarded as “wise” and assumed not only spiritual and medical authority but also acted as advisers to rulers and elders. Those were the early “philosophers” also entrusted with the explanation of the world. Early myths explained the world around prehistoric human inhabitants. They were transferred between generations as stories, first orally then in written form. Soon the social norms that have proven useful in tribes and clans were incorporated into myths and then served a regulatory and also an educational role for current group members and generations to come, important for the survival and continuation of the social group. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches the protagonist Arjuna that selfless actions result in a life of freedom, and that ignorance is the source of all evil.

With the strengthened cohesion of nuclear families into tribes, clans, kingdoms, and nations, religions replaced the role of myths. Religions incorporated social norms for cooperative communal living as commandments and moral norms and thus maintained and strengthened the educational and cohesive roles in society. As such, religions carried the utilitarian importance of valued living forward through generations.

Values As Life’s Purpose

The purpose, our sense of meaning, and happiness of life are enhanced by our awareness of values.

Although there is much academic discussion about the objective nature and definition of values, for ages occidental and oriental myths and philosophies all underline the importance of values for a happy and fulfilled life.

Greek philosophers of the Stoic tradition emphasized values like wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance as being crucial for a happy life. Seneca the Younger noted that we need to “call ourselves to account” in order to acquire virtues as an “antidote against all calamities”. Utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham saw virtues as moral precepts for self-realization (“action that contributes to the happiness of the party whose interest is in question”). Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ethics claims that life and happiness are the rewards of living a virtuous life (“Happiness is a state of … achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.”).

With increasing secularization, psychotherapies are continuously replacing the educational and value guiding roles of religions and philosophies. Modern psychotherapies like the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy continue emphasizing the finding of one’s individual values and purpose to life as a treatment for anxiety, neuroses, depression, and other types of disorders.

Many definitions of wisdom unite values or valued action with knowledge and thus indicate the role of values as an essential component of wisdom. Wisdom is a combination of the right - good, ethical, moral - judgment together with the application of acquired knowledge. As such, wisdom can only be attained when knowledge fuses with personal character traits upheld by values and virtues.

From Fireside Stories To Literature

Ethical values are deeply ingrained in the narratives that accompany us through our entire life, from childhood until old age.

While fireside stories were being told in the old times, or even still today, they recounted those morals that were important to the continuation of the group survival. Naturally, values play a central role in the story telling of good against evil, heroic successes and failures, and the prevalence of the virtuous character. They are important to encourage community members in the right selection of their actions and provide reassurance as to the future success of the group.

The best oral stories continued spreading as folk tales, or fairy tales which educate children and adults alike in ethical values and teach them how to integrate valued living into the realities of life. For example, the fairy tale “Puss in Boots” illustrates how justice is restored by a zealous alter ego of a young man prejudiced in his heritage.

As oral stories were written down with the spread of writing, the readership grew and new genres of literature evolved. Many theater pieces, and notable literature works make values a fundamental, if not always directly apparent, part of a narrative. The famous story of “Romeo and Juliet” shows the dangers of prejudice and intolerance, and thus not only reinforces the need for living by values but also underlines the consequences of not doing so.

Thus, ethical philosophy is indirectly but deeply ingrained into the narrative textures we encounter in our life, from childhood through fairy tales, during school years by studying mandatory literature, until adulthood and throughout all of our adult life when reading classical and contemporary stories, novels, and other types of narratives.

Social Mirror And Protest

The adoration of evil is a social mirror. Wanting to appear evil is also a protest against the deterioration of exemplary ethical living in contemporary society.

Along stories of values, virtues, and valor, and the consequences of their counteractions framing our lives through the stories that encounter, concern, and touch us, there are certain societal trends that are becoming apparent.

With news from all corners of our world and beyond becoming ubiquitously accessible, and our innate bias to being more attentive to danger and thus to “bad” stories of wars, crimes, poverty, climate catastrophes, corruption, or deception, we may tend to be more perceptive of bad stories than we were in the pre-globlized-media past. It can be disputed if “the world” is actually becoming better or worse, because in reality it is impossible to objectively measure. Humans tend to remember things that cause them physical of psychological pain better than those that bring them happiness. This is an evolutionary cognitive bias that helped homo survive and prosper in the savanna. With news channels sustained by sensationalism, it would be natural to think that things are getting worse. But it may well be that due to continuous population growth, there are just more things happening to more humans, which are reported by more news channels and more reporters, social media participants, bloggers, and other individuals needing something to say, and not necessarily that more bad things per capita are actually happening.

Nevertheless, those news stories featuring immoral events of predatory capitalism, human abuse, crime, extortion, disregard for life, environment, and individual dignity, make unethical and immoral actions seem like the new normal. Although the majority of people are not interested in committing immoral acts, mirroring this trend of perceived increase of evil, there arises a certain fascination and need to experiment with how it may feel to actually “be” evil, but in a protected safe and steam-offish manner, rather than for-real. This is exemplified by the game industry’s offering of character choices for good and evil sides, where we are at liberty to chose and pretend being an evil character. The advance of the internet already permitted the rise of the non-mythological trolls of the internet age - people deriving personal pleasure from annoying members in discussion groups - who under the disguise of anonymous user names or avatars were free to live the evil character in real life protected by anonymity. Thus, playing evil becomes a compensation and a cure for our biased perception towards the prejudicial and our angst of the morally deteriorating world.

At the same time, showing off one’s “evil side” may be understood as a display of protest or revolt against the pain and suffering caused by some human beings against other human beings, against our own ego, or against our common environment. With our innate psychological distinction between the “I” and “the others”, the impotence to stop the other’s inferior attitudes to life leads to a thinking marked by the motto “when you can’t beat them, join them”. And so the demonstrative display, the “punk” appearance and unethical attitude show, becomes the archetype of protest.

Loss Of Vitality

Guilt is a feeling that incentivizes us to live by our values. Guilt repression results in behavior that creates suffering. Finally, we lose the vision of our life purpose, and die internally. Fear of death and fear of life are the tragic consequences.

Living a purposeful life is only possible when we live by our values. It is a conscious way of maintaining a healthy psyche and forgo the premature “death in life”.

When we act, consciously or unconsciously, contrary to our ethical values, when we pursue unethical actions, be it by choice or by the force of circumstance, we are abandoning that which brings vitality, meaning, and purpose - the very justification of our lives. As a result, we may be feeling guilty of not aspiring to those values we are aware of. Guilt is a very powerful incentive for living by one’s values. Therefore, not following this inner compass may lead to a downward spiral from repression toward depression. The extreme outcome of this guilt spiral can be a loss of the will to live. The affected person may then become an empty hull, automaton, instinctive animal, microbe, or a zombie, only driven by unconscious biological programs and blind passions.

Blame, judging, condemnation, resentment, hate, aggression, or envy against “the other”, against those that we “scent” are better off or happier, are intermediate mechanisms applied to repress guilt, and thus to “feel alive”. Anyone in our environment can become the target and victim of our projected anger or rage. We then rain suffering on others, and because we cannot fully turn off the guilt mechanism, we consequently rain suffering on ourselves. With time, because there is nothing that can make us happy or that we consider worth living for, we become habituated to the repetitive infliction of suffering on others, which eventually loses its appeal and finally does not render anymore repressive satisfaction. Eventually, we die inside.

This inner “death in life” makes life feel unworthy, and the purpose of life becomes lost to our consciousness. We transfer this unworthy purposeless life experience onto our desire for endless life and eternal permanence, our idea of death. As beings longing for eternity, or at least transcendence of the physical annihilation, without purpose we become afraid of death and therefore we become afraid of life. As Mark Twain wisely remarked: “A man who lives fully is prepared to die any time”. A person that lives by her values lives a full life and therefore does not fear death.

Becoming Gods

We are one with the universe, and through the divinity we attribute to natural creation we are gods, too. By living according to values, we are striving to become the very gods we have created in our collective consciousness.

Nature is complex, so complex that we can really only capture small parts of the marvelous divine wonder of this immense complexity. From the birth of the universe, through formation of stars and planets, the primordial creation of organic life, to the evolution of complex life forms and rational conscious animal species like the homo sapiens, we ourselves are a continuation of the evolutionary transformative cycle of destruction and creation. We are embedded in nature, cosmos, and the universe. We are an inseparable part of this universe. We are connected with other life forms through a complex web of mutual dependencies, and we depend on environmental and cosmic phenomena for our survival. Directly or indirectly, we are one with everything that our mind sees as “outside” of the self.

In times when we are relaxed and are able to feel the presence and beauty of the surrounding nature, we feel connected to our environment and the cosmos, because subconsciously we know that we are part of it. Many artists describe the beauty of nature as divine. This divine feeling of oneness and mutual dependency is what makes us revere nature. This reverence is a virtue that mirrors many of our values like mutual respect and cooperation, environmental protection, or animal welfare. Those values allow us to feel divine, to become one with the universe which is the god in whose image we have been created, because we are made of the very same elements that constitute stars, planets, and all of known life.

Being rational creatures, we created gods in our physical and psychological image, endowed with all our positive sentiments like love and care as well as our darkest feelings like anger and rancor. And we also created the idea of god as something perfect and just, which we can look forward to in order to bring forth a better future. Our natural longing for a better future entwines valuable living with divinity. Those very values that we invest our gods with are the values we are aspiring to achieve through our daily struggles. We are striving to become like gods - to become gods through living our values.

The Future Begins Now

Complete awareness and consciousness of the present moment, without the self-centered mind-noise and combined with value based action, not only makes us into gods but also provides for a fulfilled and purposeful life.

Our longing for spirituality, transcendence, and a fulfilled life, through being aware of and acting according to our values, sets a goal for our becoming as gods. We regard this goal as being situated sometime in the future. However, every journey starts with a first step, and it starts with us taking this step with our consciousness willing to take it in the present moment in which we decide to actually do it.

The present moment is the only moment where we are rooted, where we can make decisions, and where we transform our emotions into actions. Oriental Zen masters advise that “the goal is the path” and mean to express that there is only the present action (“the path”) that determines the quality of our journey and how we reach our destination.

Therefore, we can only achieve this happiness that is able to lead us to “spirituality” by transcending the ego, which manifests itself through a constant background thinking-noise in our minds. The ego learns from the past and models the future, and is only sublimed by acting consciously in the present moment and in harmony with our values. This consciousness in the present moment is what is nominated as the “Tao” by the “Old Master” Lao Tzu, or in modernized words of Eckhart Tolle that self which is our “god-essence as pure consciousness”.

In those moments of “flow”, when we are absorbed in the present, when we work hand in hand with our values, we know how it feels if we are able to propel this kind of reality into all our future endeavors. It is this “divine” consciousness that has the power of transforming our understanding of life and instilling it with “divine” purpose.

Conclusion

Values are needed everywhere, yet are often lacking. We observe daily destruction of the environment, or legalized crime against person, possession, sustenance and peace, committed across the world on a continuous basis.

Some members of society become accustomed to the valueless dealings of others. To identify themselves with the larger group, or due to survival pressures, they imitate evil behavior for their own advantage or to avoid being “left out”, often against their own conscious or unconscious values.

Groups, organizations, communities, or societies are not abstract constructs. They are made of people. The group collective behavior is determined by individuals. We are cogs in the wheels of society’s doings. Behaving in conformity with the majority is often a safe choice for belonging to the group. However, when a group conduct becomes unethical or unsustainable, it is our values that allow us to become the grains of sand in the gears of devious machinations. For many, it may be a very difficult choice to act in non-conformity with unethical actions, although the upside of such behavior choice is much more powerful that we are often aware of.

Living a valued life contributes to one’s own sense of purpose and happiness, as well as the positive progress of societies, the evolution of the human race, and sustainability of the environment those societies depend on. The contrary choice, a journey into personal degradation and suffering of self and environment, is easier in choice but exacts much higher overall sacrifice.

To achieve “heaven”, we only need very few mental ingredients to make the step towards valued life: the consciousness of our personal values and decisive action in the present moment.

Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell

There God is dwelling too.

– The Divine Image, William Blake.

References

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