Part 3 - Life in Awareness

External Order

Wherever many human beings live together, rules and laws naturally arise. Life together becomes complex for various reasons. Agreements sometimes fail, promises are disputed, property can be damaged, and responsibility may be unclear. Every society therefore develops some form of external regulation. What cannot be settled through goodwill alone may require the help of an elder or a council. Elsewhere, that role may fall to judges or courts.

This chapter is not about the practical administration of life together, but about the more basic rules.

Throughout history, human societies have had elementary rules. They appeared as tribal taboos or religious commandments, and in other contexts as moral codes or civil law. The wording and form changed, but the essentials kept returning. Human beings had to be told not to kill, steal, or lie.

That repetition tells us something.

These are very basic rules. And yet they had to be stated again and again, across cultures and across centuries. This shows how deeply unaware human life has often been in this regard.

Rules and laws do not arise because human beings are evil. They arise because most human beings live in identification with a mind-based sense of self.

When identity is bound to form, the body begins to feel like the whole of who we are, and thoughts are mistaken for the ultimate truth. Emotions are taken as proof of who we are, while personal history becomes the story we keep defending.

Life is then experienced through division. There is me and there are others. There is mine and yours. From that division, fear of loss appears almost automatically. The desire for more follows closely. Envy can arise when another person seems to have what we lack. Aggression can become a form of defence, and self-protection begins to organise the way we relate to the world.

These are not primarily moral failures. They are consequences of misidentification.

When the self is experienced as separate, harming another does not immediately feel like harming oneself. The inner sense of unity is absent, and so society must intervene from the outside. Laws exist as an external support. They compensate for missing inner alignment.

What instances can you think of where inner clarity makes an outer rule less necessary?

This is why moral systems across cultures often resemble one another. They all point back to the same simple fact: unchecked identification with form destabilises the human world.

Rules do exist to limit the damage of unawareness.

A society made up largely of disconnected human beings cannot rely on inner clarity alone. Without rules, much of human life would slide into disorder, because people are inwardly divided, and that division expresses itself outwardly.

Seen from this angle, rules are a mirror of where humanity currently stands.

But once inner coherence begins to become more stable within human beings, something shifts. And once awareness of life itself is no longer merely an idea, but part of lived experience, the whole basis of action begins to change. Then the question, “What should I do?” begins to lose some of its force.

Harm becomes less a matter of prohibition and more a matter of clarity. One does not refrain only because something is forbidden. One sees more directly what harm is.

Hurting another begins to feel irrational, not as a moral slogan, but as something obvious.

From this place, care may arise more naturally. Other people are no longer seen merely in terms of their usefulness to us. The natural world begins to matter because we recognise that our lives are part of it. Even ordinary objects may be treated with more respect.

This does not come from an idea of how we should behave, but from feeling less separate from the world around us.

Where inner coherence and awareness are active, rules matter differently. Less outer enforcement is needed because more order is already present within.

This is where some people become confused.

We have all heard someone say, “I do not need laws. I have my own morality.” From the outside, this may sound similar. But it is not the same when the person saying it is still strongly identified with the mind. The sentence may be the same, but the place it comes from is not.

Personal morality is often shaped long before we become aware of it. What feels like our own sense of right and wrong may still reflect the home we came from, the pain we have not understood, and the assumptions of the society around us.

Self-interest can also make a convenient judgement appear noble. Our morality may therefore be sincere and still selective, certain and still easily altered by pressure.

Clarity is different because it is not organised around what protects or benefits us.

Does your personal morality arise from awareness?

So yes, it may be true that a deeply aware human being does not need laws in the ordinary sense. But it is also true that most people who reject laws do not do so from clarity. They do so from resistance, and that is quite a difference.

Rules reflect humanity’s present level of development, and they remain necessary until awareness is not merely spoken about, but lived.

And perhaps one day, as awareness matures more deeply in human life, these laws will not need to be abolished.

They will simply become unnecessary.