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Not only is all morality relative but all knowledge whatsoever is
relative as known by the mind. There is no such thing as certainty in
the universe. Certainty exists only in geometry and mathematics -
idealizations.

There are fundamental problems with attempting to answer any question on
morality. One must first agree on the same basic underlying ass umptions
of the belief system of the other person. Otherwise, questions on
morality might be easily answered but tons of time spent attempting to
provide evidence for underlying assumptions and evidence for the
warrants for the inferrence of those assumptions. Fortunately you are
talking about a general idea about morality itself without anything
specific.

Since, as you say right and wrong are relative, attempting to arrive at
any notions of an absolute set of rights and wrongs is the wrong
project. All reality is based on agreement. If I say something is a
chair, chances are people will agree with me if it half way looks like a
chair - until such time as the things being a chair is called into
question. Same with what you say is right. At some point we will
disagree on something about the chair, and at some point we will
necessarily disagree on what is right. This is because both our minds
have been programmed by different experiences in life and our versions
of right and wrong must necessarily differ at some number of places past
the decimal point so to speak. To disagree however implys we agree up to
a certain point. This agreement is the only means there is in the entire
universe for a mind to know ANYTHING.  It is the agreement of
attributes/qualities of a phenomena (morality/chairs - you name it) that
makes it 'real'.

Justice is an abstract idea. It has no spatiotemporal existence/does not
occupy space and time. But if a community votes a law of 35 miles per
hour for traffic in on a street, justice is reified into existence in
that way (the wave function is popped in that way). If someone is caught
speeding by the police, they will be pulled over and have to pay a
ticket. Physical reality is changed. Justice of the version of 35 MPH is
reified into existence as a particular form. So if you deemed 40 MPH was
better and got voted down, your reality would be that you must drive 35
or get a ticket whether you believe it is 'right' or not. Someone
over-rode your version of right with their own by empirical vote of the
community for 35 instead of 40. Right and wrong are reified into
existence as the set of laws where you live (either democratically or by
other means). Right and wrong are democratically accomplished by vote of
the people. This makes the laws they have their reality. Those laws can
not be in conflict with a higher authority. Local laws can not legalize
state laws for example and state laws can not override federal/national
laws.

However, right and wrongs are simply conceptions held by minds. They are
abstractions reified into law as self-imposed restrictions. When an
airliner flys into the World Trade Center, Americans say this is wrong.
Osama claps his hands and to a bird flying by - something violent
occured. What is right and wrong depends on who's shoes you are standing
in. In reality there is no such thing. There is only karma. Karma is
action that begets action. The action is neither good nor bad. All
things that happen to you are self-caused. All suffering is
self-inflicted. The reason you do not know what is happening to you is
because you can not remember what causes you set in motion in the past
that resulted in what is happening to you this very instant. All things
in the entire universe are always as they 'should be.' Not a single
electron on the other side of the universe is doing otherwise.

You can not remember your past lives so you can not remember your past
causes. So it appears in this life lots of things that happen to you are
by chance. It looks like things are beyond your control. In reality,
there is no such thing as past, present and future. Nor do you have free
will. The mind appears to be making choices all the time because it does
not know what the future will bring. But that is a limitation of the
mind only. Atman has no such restrictions. It knows all things all the
time. It is omnicient. The past, present and future are an open book to
it. We are nothing more than actors on a stage playing out what was
determined long ago. In the same way in a drama on TV the actors appear
entangled in it and the set of things/choices available to them appears
to be limited/they act in context with the characters around them - we
also act in this way. But the director or producer operates at a
different level of reality than the actors do. Yet he can influence the
course of events/step in at any 'time' and change things.

One of the favorites of atheists is to ask the question 'Can God do
anything.' The religious person will say yes. Then the atheist says - No
He cannot, for a thing can not both 'be' and 'not be' at the same time
(the law of non-contradiction). But God can do anything - including both
being and not-being - but not in this universe because if He did it
might have catastrophic conditions for the universe itself. Even God
must abide by His own rules in His universe if He wishes to not destroy
it. Vishnu uses a spider as God and the web as the universe as an
anaolgy. In theology this is know as the 'ordained power of God' vs the
'absolute power of God.' We as Atman are basically the same as God. (see
what I mean about getting into assumptions of belief systems. So far I
have assumed the existence of God and Atman and Karma and Reincarnation
and other things implicitly. I am going on here because this is a yoga
NG and the assumption is reasonable here.)

Lets go further into karma and reincarnation. You say, I won the
lottery! I got lucky. Karma couln't have anything to do with that. But
this is simply not true. First of all 'we are all connected' is not a
vague expression in religion. It is a scientific fact - even before
quantum physics and general relativity - gravity on all particles act on
all other particles in the universe no matter how distant. The universe
itself was created from the Big Bang. Space and time came into being
with the Big Bang. (Space is not empty either.) At one time we were all
sqeezed into 100 billionth of a billionth the size of a proton - a
Planck Length singularity. Non-Locality has been proven - this means
that a particle 15 billion light years from Earth can be acted upon
instantaneously. (Search on Bell's Inequality Theorem/Alain Aspect and
John Clauser)

So - how did Abraham Lincoln die? John Wilkes Booth shot him is the
simple answer - but we might also say that due to the reliablity of the
particular manufacturer of the handgun he use played a role in the
successful assassination of Lincoln. Had he used a lesser reliable
model, chances are Lincoln might have not been assassinated. You could
say that it was due to the highly motivated people that work in the
plant that manufactures that gun he used. You could say, well, had it
rained, Lincoln wouln't have given the speech and may not have been
assassinated. In fact, not only is there no single event that led to
Lincolns death, but in fact the entire universe contributed to his
death. An asteroid that marked its path 7.4 billion years ago had a
chance encounter with a particular moon that stayed its course and wound
up not striking earth that day where as had it not been set off course
it would have crashed into the earth and ended all life on earth. You
could say it was because God made protons with a decay period as long as
He did that Lincoln was assassinated. Had God made the decay life of
protons 6 million years, there would never have been life had time to
evolve on earth and so forth. The entire universe in a way played a role
and the entire universe plays a role at every single instant. All things
cause all things.

That science is unable to associate causes of physical matter with mind
and so forth is a technological problem. David Bohm and David Peat,
Michael Talbot, Karl Pribram and even Nobel Prize winner John Eccles
(Neuroscience/the brain)  do have an explanation how mind is connected
to matter. Bohm calls it the Implicate Order and has to do with the
universe as a 3-D hologram. It is not that they have a testable theory
but rather a theory looking for a means to be tested - much like
Einstein had to wait 3 years for a total eclipse of the sun for his
general relativity theory. Today theoretical physicsists have the lead
in superstring theory. They construct thought experiments (Gerdanken!)
and hope something testable falls out of them. We do not currently have
either the technology (particle accelerators) nor the mathematics (E.
Witten quantum geometry) to move forward very much in superstring
theory. So it is not surprising we do not know what the mind is because
the mind is a quantum physics entity. Much to my surprise and delight
the famous Neuroscientist John Eccles - a Nobel Pize winner also I found
out believes this as well. That makes up for the other 95 percent of the
idiots in neuroscience.
I have his book Evolution of the Brain. Neuroscience thinks we are a
brain. Stupid city. The mind is the cause of the brain.

All of science and all of religion is based on causality. If you stick
your hand in a fire, you get  burned. Cause and effect. If you smoke 2
packs of cigarretts a day for 30 years you get cancer. In the later case
the effect is delayed but still manifests. Desires unfulfilled by you at
death are like rocks on a mountain. The rocks contain potential energy
and when the right conditions come along they fall and release this
energy. In the same way, the desires you have at death are stored and
when the right conditions come along, you are pulled into another birth.
I don't figure you wrote this to be convinced of reincarnation but my
comments are along those lines.

If you are looking for reincarnation arguments I will provide a few
examples but you should try to get hold of Through Time into Healing by
Brian Weiss MD. I have not read it because I already believe in
reincarnation but an authority recommended it to me - Darshan Kaur
Khalsa who is a 30 year Kundalini Yoga Instructor and does regular
regression therapy through hypnosis in Herndon Virgina. She takes her
patients into past lives and removes repressions. Repressions are
blockages of energy and is a practice hypnotherapists do today routinely
for this life regression therapy. Some things we store in our
subconscious (this life) - we supress them as unpleasant memories out of
reach of our conscious encounter with them. For instance, a person
attends a Prom for high school and is so nervous about asking someone to
dance, he knock over a whole table of food and the punch bowl crashes to
the floor. He is so embarrased he leaves. He avoids situations where
dances are such that he will not have to deal with dancing. He knows it
is a problem, but it is a minor one and just assume bury it. But if you
bury enough things like this they do show up as real live problems such
that you can not get a job or keep one and so forth so regression
therapy helps you understand your repressions and deal with them with
suggestions given to the subconscious when the subject arises in the
future.

Darshan goes further. Some people are born afraid of spiders and snakes.
No reason to be afraid of them but they are. Others heights (although
there are other reasons for these fears agoraphobia/panic attacks etc).
Darshan has a patient/doctor relationship so she does not tell anyone
anything about who said what, but she does tell us about things people
have told her in the past without giving any names. Guess what? There
isn't a king or queen or even Napoleon among them. Instead they tell her
about things like the utinsels used for food in the 15'th century say -
describing them in detail because they worked in the kitchen or
whatever. You can find her page on the web most likely. Thanks to
Darshan I got my first white light experiences from techniques she gave
me for pranayama - although it was not intended for that purpose.

Why are some people gifted at playing the piano with no lessons and
others struggle for years? Why is it that when born chickens immediately
start pecking the ground? If a duckling is hatched by a chicken it will
run for the water when it is born. Why? Modern science says this is
instinct. But instinct is just a word. It explains nothing whatsoever.
It is like a doctor giving you the name of an illness he can not
actually help you with. The name is nice but it is equally useless.
Transmigration of the soul was believed by Pythagoras (who was also a
vegetarian at a time when Agamemnon was sacraficing 100 bulls to Apollo
in the Illiad) as did Parmenides as did Plato. As did the Bible until
about 400 AD. Indeed Jesus refers directly to it. (See Swami Vishnu
Meditation and Mantras) What comes around goes around. What ye sow, so
ye shall reap. What you fear shall come upon you. Lots of expressions
that have come along from this notion. As a man thinks so he becomes.
Those who live by the sword (kill) die by the sword. All of science and
religion are based on cause and effect. Not knowing the cause of an
effect is no reason to dismiss it having no cause. That is a
technological problem.

If you do something nice for someone, they will be impressed and in turn
create the karma to do something nice for someone else. They in turn
will do the same. You send out a wave of good into the world. It is the
same with bad. Like a ripple in a pond effects all the surface in it, a
ripple of good spreads out also. Lets say a man murders someone and gets
away with it. He does not really get away with it at all. He has created
karma for himself in the form of requiring him to be killed. Karma is
not that simple but the action will be reflected back on the man one way
or another. Action begets action. It is irrelevant whether you choose to
call something good or bad. It is action that results in action
irregardless of what you call it. Minds can slap labels on anything as
this, that or the other. But irregardless of what minds call it, the
action will result in further action. That you do not know the subtle
cause reflected back from that action does not negate it.

A better example. 2 hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom combine to form a
water molecule H2O. By watching even millions of H2O molecules, you
would never suspect in your wildest dreams things like waves - with of
all things - ripples on them. By studying atoms the phenomena of waves
is not apparent. By studying silicon atoms, sand dunes with ripples is
not apparent. These are today in physics called 'emergent properties.'
Unguessed at properties that arised from aggregates. They are 'subtle'
properties. I can't really go any further with this without explaining
things like holography and other dimensions and how mind is part of the
Implicate Order - it has the same underlying basis as the universe/they
are not separate but you can not see the connection any more than a
shadow on the wall can understand another shadow on the walls movement
by studying the shadow. There is a deeper cause of the motion of the
shadow on the wall, and there is a deeper connection between karma and
actions reflected back.

I am going to add alt.meditation and alt.meditation.transcendental

You are the creator of all you attract. Everything is as it 'should' be
at all times.
The Eternal Now is the only reality

Mike Dubbeld