Plesae read this as an independent reader. What makes sense to you and what not please share it with me. Although I tried to define and articulate some thing here, I just could not do that completely. Let me know about your feedback. I read your mail on Values. It was pretty good. You tried to articulate based on the lessons based out of your experiences. Your article was very much an open individual commentary, but may not be quite academic in articulation and hence it can't be easily considered as knowledge. I think this we all should agree as academic knowledge is created for future humanity as you and I will leave this world after a while, but intellectual human beings shall exist and let me try to make a good effort to draft this as academic knowledge of these thoughts Fundamentally, experiences are primitive sources for our lessons. In order to get a true (a better than one through experiences based) understanding, is to culminate a skill of true observation, without any bias or prejudices or conditions. That gives you an ability to observe to thing as it is, a person as he is, an event as it is, a place as it is and stuffs like that. True observation skills could be cultivated and that is the foundation stone for an open - clear - learning mind and is continual in nature. A consensual assumption here is experiences are random events and we don't have a control over those. So experiential based wisdom could be proven wrong at a different point in time to individuals. Here the challenge is to acquire that ability to see things as they are. Quoting, Mahatma Gandhi and take a look at the flap of any books written by him, you will come through a statement by him that idea almost goes like this "The lessons here I write are based on my experiences with truth till today, and this may be changed at a different time instance and this has occurred to me in the past as well". He was mentioning about the same thing of the importance of a true observing un-conditional mind. In my perspective, values, guiding principles, ethics, self convictions etc are relatively solid and permanent nature of beliefs, with which we make decisions and judgments and move on. So these operates in the background when friends casually engage in an easy going talk with a state of mind in which we "make fun" of the other with consciously un-affecting the other. Here we are conscious in not affecting the morale of the other even in an easy going talk. This serious and live conscience that works in the back of the mind with which we keep a check of our jokes about others is the same base of values, guiding principles, ethics etc. So these are in a way relatively fixed and permanent guiding principles in life that each one of us keeps. These are also the same premises in which we base actions or delivery in which our integrity can't be questioned. So in many ways when you were trying to articulate your thoughts, it was trying to talk about INTEGRITY concept rather than just values. Values, guiding principles and ethics are those that measures how INTEGRAL one individual is. So Integrity in many ways is the guiding action verb for an individual and values are an ever growing or ever altering kind of stock of guiding principles, ethics and self convictions. Concepts of Integrity are the ones that are appreciated by people around. Gandhi will fit into this framework of Integrity and even Bin Laden as well fit into this framework. He is integral to whatever the permanent nature of values that he carries with him. This enables both of them (Gandhi and Laden) to grow up to their followers. Rigid, experiential lessons are the ones that will limit us by becoming part of individual beliefs. Open, dynamic, experiential lessons that Gandhi recommends are part of those concepts that will be appreciated by an unconditional, truly open minded and an ever inquisitive mind. So in the lessons of Spirituality, as per Hindutva, people refer this as a stature of TRUE SEEKER. So I think we need to boil down our discussion into Concepts of Integrity, rather than dissimilar notions or unequal numbers of values and thus are quite relative in nature and are individual dependent as you rightly told mostly culture (custom or community practice or norms) dependent. This stock gets piled up as operating principles based on the individual exposure and experience. This will lead us into making arguments in turn to CULTURAL CONFLICTS, which are bound to occur you know! In magnitude and scale these are different. Morality or Moral Values also which you wanted to discuss here are also having the same problem if we are trying to approach in that way. Do you have the same stock that I have? But the only thing you and I can show to the world is by keeping integrity to these stocks. But the stock should be like a river flow that is afresh and live with a cultivated open mind. So let’s discuss concepts of Integrity rather than just a pile of values!!!
Thanks and Cheers,Krishnan
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