Risk, Morality and Ethics

The Kabbalists tell us that we can only see 1 percent of what is going on. The astrophysicists tell us that we can only see 5 percent (the rest is dark energy and dark matter, although no one really seems to know what either of them are). Kahneman and Tversky, in their work on how people respond to risk tell us that emotion always overrides rational thought (witness the rise in the stock market of hundreds of points on the smallest shred of information that might be considered good news).

So on a good day we are all in the tall grass. For the past 500 or 600 years we have been operating on the basis that rational thought separates us from the animals. Now we are being told â€" not so. What separates us from the animals is our consciousness and our ability to recognize that we are more than our thoughts. This idea comes to us from many teachers with an infinite variety of approaches (Ian Lungold, Albert Clayton Gauldin, Ester Hicks, Neale Donald Walsch and many others). It has become so mainstream that now Oprah and Eckart Tolle are in the midst of a worldwide weekly video conference designed to spread the idea that our minds and our egos are getting in the way of understanding what life wants from us.