Thoughts on Ethics
My personal ethics are a mess. I agree with most commonly accepted pagan principles, insofar as such things exist. The difficulty I’m having is in applying these principles to myself.
There are things I believe for no reason other than that they are the conclusions I have come to in my ponderings. I am certain of the following:
- honour is all we really have in the end, when everything else has been stripped away. No one can take it from us, but it is far too easy to let slide.
- what we put out into the world is returned to us, usually amplified. This is also known as consequence.
- the Earth is our mother, we are a part of her. If we wish to continue as a species, we must learn to honour her.
If we are a part of the Earth, and we must honour her, then it follows that we must also honour ourselves. This is extremely difficult for me. I engage in a lot of self-destructive behaviour. For example:
I smoke way too much pot. Tonight I told Brian (my husband) that I think we have a serious drug problem, and his immediate reaction was that “it’s time to dry out.” We’ve agreed to freeze the rest of our current bag. We haven’t set an amount of time. We intend for this to be permanent. The difficulty is that we’ve made this decision before, but have never held to it.
I also leave everything important to the last minute. I always get it done, but just barely. It’s like I need the pressure to be almost crushing me before anything can happen. This assignment is no exception. It’s Sunday night and I’m finally managing to put on paper some of the thoughts and ideas that have been stewing in my skull for the past two months. I don’t know why I treat myself this way instead of doing things ahead of time and saving myself the agony. There’s so much about myself that I don’t understand.
How did my ethics evolve?
They started out Christian. I believed very seriously in good and evil, God and the Devil, and the need to have faith in Jesus. Gradually though, the church and the people in it, as well as the Bible itself and the bloody, tyrannical history of the religion all combined to shift my perception of Christianity from good and right and the one true faith, to misguided, brutal and harsh. There was no definite point at which I turned my back on Christianity, but by the time I was 16 there wasn’t much of it left in me. Not that I’m conscious of anyways. I know that I have many ingrained habits and responses of which I am unconscious, which I need to learn about.
After leaving Christianity I drifted until 2006, when I became intensely interested in all things pagan & witchy, and started reading everything I could find on the subject. In the course of my studies, I came to the conclusion that while paganism and witchcraft are an excellent fit for my existing beliefs, I am not Wiccan. I simply cannot bind myself to “harm none”. I believe that one should never cause harm intentionally without just cause, but I also believe that rare situations exist where causing harm is necessary.
Witchcraft teaches that before we can start learning anything else, we must be conscious of ourselves and of our surroundings exactly as they are, with no illusions. This is difficult considering that the society in which we live is founded on illusions and glamour. We are not taught to examine ourselves in the plain light of day, or to acknowledge our faults. This is the challenge facing me. I act honourably in my relationships with others, but that makes no difference if I can’t hold to my principles in my own life.
Now is the time to choose new habits to replace the old.
Instead of smoking pot I should do something constructive.
- yoga
- meditate
- draw
- cook
- gym
- listen to music
- sew/knit/crochet
- clean
- etc.
I have been assigned this task, and will be assigned nothing more until it is complete.
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Weed is the point at which the beliefs I hold run into the life I’m living, and it’s like hitting a brick wall. I will not be able to advance until I resolve this.
