The Ten Ecstatic Commandments

א Know that everything is one and that nothing is truly separate.

ב Answer only to the infinite and you will not become oppressed by the finite.

ג Use caution when using the limitations of language to invoke the limitless.

ד Supplement Earth with Heaven by cycling between effort and effortless ecstasy.

ה Seek the wisdom of duality in order to transcend it.

ו Respect life.

ז Respect one another.

ח Do not become attached to the impermanent.

ט Do not distort what you know to be true.

י Be grateful for everything.

"You are flung into other levels of reality so visceral, so tangible, so all-enveloping, that they become your sense of the real world. And you suddenly realize that the relatively mundane realm of ordinary consciousness is a crude facsimile of what awaits in the psychotropic trance. This and other experiences in the presence of people taken by the spirit left me with visceral evidence that cultural beliefs can really make for different human beings, that there are other ways of knowing, other levels of intuition, that cannot necessarily be understood through the filter of Cartesian logic."

-Wade Davis on Ayahuasca

Have Your Baby and Eat it Too

The most reliable 'universal moral compass' anyone can have is their ability to be fully aware of the present moment. Mindfulness wields attention in the battle against the potential entropy of the momentum of our thoughts.

When, for example, a parent is exasperated by their unmanageable daily tasks and begins to neglect their child, the damage often manifests indistinguishable from deliberate abuse. In such a case, the problem common with both neglect and abuse is selective attention.

When an individual is regularly flooded by their banal routine and are unable to adequately adapt to a new situation, such as a new child in the household, their routine becomes threatened, invoking a negative emotional reaction, and culminates in either a defensive ignorance of the new situation or an offensive overreaction.

Obviously both of these are moral choices to some degree, but the fact remains that what is being reacted against is not fully understood and allowed to penetrate the consciousness. If parents knew what sort of damage they were doing to their children, they would stop. Unfortunately, they do not allow themselves to surrender to the exquisite details of the tragedy they are either 'allowing' or 'forcing,' both equally reprehensible to, and unconsciously hidden from, the consciousness.

The world is brimming with people who bestow the neuroses which infected them as children onto their own children. Sometimes this manifests as malevolent crime, sometimes as passive ideology. Both through small moments of interpersonal terrorism and both do equal damage.

You love what you know and you know what you love. Ignorance is suffering because good is a direct manifestation of sufficient consciousness applied to a particular situation. To love your children is to feel even their suffering inflicted by your own lower self. This is your higher self, 'God,' acting in unconditional love and allowing a personal crucifixion in the moment, in order to clean the slate for the future moment, which has now arrived in its perfection.

The universal moral compass closest to the presence of 'God' is the full experience of the present moment without judgment. I fear that words are never powerful enough to shake the etch-a-sketches of our minds into the reality of our Heaven on Earth. We must seek the ancient clues and tools of our natural environment as divine gifts from 'God.'