Our Ethics Are As Unique to Each of Us As Our Fingerprints

In an eco-centric human culture, one that operates as if all participants play a unique and critical role in the continued unfolding wholeness of the system, ethics are unique to each individual. Of course, there are still consequences for every action. Some of these consequences are brilliant and generative. Sometimes they are tragic. Sometimes they are generative and tragic at the same time. 

Even in eco-centric culture, we might find ourselves getting vigorously ‘checked’ by others whose boundaries we have crossed. But this is, itself, a process that generates more wholeness with the constant opportunity for all participants to pay attention, respond, and be implicated in the ever-unfolding process happening all around us. One of the great shortcomings of so-called ‘developed’ human society is that we have contracted out the enforcement of our ethics to remote, disembodied institutions. 

In our 12-week course Embodied Ethics, starting on August 31st, we explore the possibility that a diverse, generative culture requires us to acknowledge that our ethics are as necessarily and deliberately unique to each of us as our fingerprints.

In this exploration we are assuming a few things that go against the dictums of our current society––that at first might even feel unethical to assume, let alone explore! We are assuming that ethics are not simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing or even simply just doing the right thing. We are imagining that ethics are, more importantly, a matter of doing the particular thing that needs doing in this unique moment – the thing only you can do.

There are many bite-sized pieces in the whopper of the above sentence. And we will take the time to identify, chew and digest many of them in our 12-week exploration. For today I am going to point out the last phrase: a thing only you can do. 

In Embodied Ethics, we are starting from the ecologically correct awareness that you are an intrinsic, inextricable part of the moment that is happening around you, the one in which you might behave ethically or not. Our society, and its disembodied agencies of enforcement, tells us that we must do our work to make sure we don’t do the wrong things. 

But we, at the Institute for Erotic Intelligence, think this is simply the very first and least important of layers when it comes to developing an ecologically embedded ethical self. We believe that if there is a wrong thing, there must also, then, be an essentially right thing. And even more to the point, doing the ecologically right thing is often more important than merely not doing the wrong thing.

In Embodied Ethics we explore what an ecologically embedded ethics looks like.  This includes the possibility that, in any given moment, there is both a perfectly unhelpful (and even harmful) thing each of us might do as well as a perfectly helpful, even generative thing we might do. 

And we dare to take a step further, to wonder about the unique way we are each put together, that predisposes us to both the unhelpful/harmful behaviors as well as the helpful/generative behaviors. We acknowledge that developing our ecologically embedded ethical self means we not only accept the responsibility for not causing harm but also for causing good; for having a generative impact.

Exploring this terrain requires a bit of a map and we are fortunate to have one, thanks to Bill Plotkin’s Map of the Psyche. With his blessing we use this map to help us explore each of our unique landscapes. With the cross-cultural container of the seven directions of East, South, West, North, Above, Below, and Center, we explore those aspects within each of us that are obscured in shadow as well as our facets of wholeness.

From here, we are far more equipped to wrestle with the internalized narratives of the carceral model, as we step out beyond the field of right and wrong…(thank you Rumi for reminding us that such a place exists).

If this kind of exploration of ethics has your knees shaking and your eyes watering, we hope you’ll join us! We’ve been standing out here, in the field beyond right and wrong, quaking and shaking in our sandals for months now.

In case it helps to hear from one of the intrepid students of our previous class: 

“This course has encouraged me to look far beyond the cultural norm of ‘do no harm,’ to free myself from the prison this stance held me in, and to recognise both my impact and my ability to repair or create the space to enable others to heal. This freedom has allowed me to speak my truth and show up in the world far more as my true self, which in turn models this freedom for others. Thank you.”