Encyclopedia of Spiritual Knowledge

The main ethical principle of one’s relationships with God must be love for Him. “Love your God!…” — this precept of the Old Testament Jesus made the most important one in His Teachings (Mark 12:28-34).

“Only Love can contemplate Me in My innermost Essence and merge with Me... Steadfast and pure love for Me… — this is truth,” said Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.

About Attitude toward All Living Beings

Compassion is the main ethical principle of one’s relationships with other people and with all living beings, even with non-incarnate ones. Compassion implies a caring attitude toward all forms of life, including plants, animals, and humans. Making animals suffer and killing them for the sake of one's own egoistic gluttony (see Killing-Free Nutrition) or for the sake of no less vicious fancy of dressing in articles made of fur or leather — all this is incompatible with the true Love.

About Attitude toward One’s Own Life Path

God suggests that we consider our lives as the possibility to approach the Perfection by constantly making efforts on transformation of ourselves, as well as through active creative love-service to God, which is manifested as service to people.

Ethical self-correction also implies total elimination of all qualities of the soul that are incompatible with the principle of Love: i.e. various forms of anger, violence, arrogance, self-admiration, egoistic sexuality, and other manifestations of human egocentrism.

On the contrary, one should by all means cultivate Love in its various aspects: care, tenderness, willingness to give, rather than to take, as well as self-sacrifice for the sake of the evolutionary progress of others.

Difference between Morals and Ethics

Quite often, the concepts of ethics and morals are mixed, though they are not the same thing.

Morals are the concepts of what is “good” and what is “bad” and how one should behave given this; they get formed and become a tradition in a certain society for a certain period of time. The moral rules may be very different in different countries or even in the same country in different epochs. Morals are a subjective phenomenon, since most of their rules do not follow from the objective necessity and advisability. The moral rules are about how to dress, where and how much one can bare the body, what turns of speech are decent and what are not, what one should be ashamed of, what is “appropriate” to do and what is not, etc.

The ethical principles are objective ones. They follow from the real necessity and advisability. They are based on one’s understanding of the Path to the Perfection, to God.

Ethics is the core of the spiritual development. It is around this core that everything else constituting the essence of the spiritual seeker — knowledge, skills, psychoenergetic abilities, other qualities — forms and grows.

The basis of ethics is Love.