Human and spiritual values

Abstract

This paper starts with some perennial questions like “What does value mean?”, “What determines value?” and “Is there a general code of human values?” and presents the results of a long research work, both scholarly and practical, on these and further questions. Although all individuals are exactly alike in their fundamental structure, they differ in their mental, emotional and physical impressions. Nevertheless there seems to be an evolutionary course, based on a strict logic, and each individual “chooses” his personal path withing this general stucture. This personal path is related to the deep individual hierarchy of values (as opposed to a superficial one, that is used as a mask), whose first items contribute determining the personality and creating the life style. Hence, values have a very important role, establishing the direction and goals of individual and social actions and inducing the conception of possible gains out of given situations. Human and spiritual values are evolutionary forms, means by which one's consciousness evolves. Evolution is the moving towards values that an individual (and/or a society) senses, judges and values as superior, and the forgoing of perceived lower ones. In this process all higher values will become, one day, present ones, leaving their space for newly perceived higher values, and further on they will be our lower ones, until we will cast them off. Values cannot be enforced from the outside, and everybody should be allowed to freely choose the system of values governing her/his life. There are, though, forms of ethics that are deeply rooted into the human structure, parts of a universal and impersonal ethical code that we can try and detect. The paper presents some clues for pursuing this personal search, describing the so‐called “survival dynamics” and their interactions with five life categories and four phases of life. It then highlights the ethical code that is present and common in all religions and in all the more developed civilisations, whose starting point is that “we are all one family”. From this standpoint some considerations are then discussed with respect to the present day world situation.