Merry Christmas!

But the ethics inform the politics, not the other way around. And our experiences inform the ethics, and (where we came in) determine different priorities or even entirely different courses for each of us us. And that, again, makes mutual respect, even (or perhaps especially) for those we disagree with essential for those who face these issues.

Agreed. But ethics go down to the bone.

But when you start talking about “right thought”, you start to lose me. Our culture imposes its norms by profoundly impersonal and violent means. We live, as Rupert Ross memorably put it, in “a society of strangers.” Even those who try to resist the ugly side of our mass society fall victim to its assumptions and obsessions. Under these circumstances, boundaries play an essential role in our lives. And I insist that boundaries include, and ought to include, a separation between mass movement politics and our thoughts and feelings. Politics, as we understand the word in the twenty-first century post-enlightenment West, stops at my skin.

Although I don’t know why eight, instead of ten. It just seems like eight is about the number of survival aphorisms I have.

After all, Buddhists get it — Right Thought is an important part of the Eightfold Path for a reason!

And I’m comfortable exhorting others to be equally mindful, even if they end up seeing the “next right thing” as something very different.

Right on.

I’d like to take that a bit further, and talk how we approach ethical conduct. Our discussion of ethics depends on a shared reference, a meeting place. And that meeting takes place in the physical world. Only there can we truly come together. What goes on in my mind, or yours, does not take place on this meeting ground, and though we can, and should, exhort each other to stay mindful of the way our actions affect others and our thoughts affect our actions, I don’t agree that we can presume to know what goes on in each other’s thoughts. By all means, let us remind each other that what we read, reflect on, think and feel matters, but let us all have the humility to accept, as you appear to above, that we truly cannot know, and cannot judge, what goes on in someone else’s mind. By any principle, whether economy of effort or respect for the autonomy of other people, I believe it makes sense to not try to control, by any means, what we think and feel about what we see and experience.

Like I said I agree with you on the concept, but different personalties express principles in a different manner.