Your book of life has only two pages so as to your ‘living’: what you collect from outside and what you add from your side.
As the world enjoys a universal geometry so with your participation and engagement with the world. When you act in the world your conscience by default enjoys an ethical geometry. Your sense of right and wrong when you interact with the world is not a picked- up habit. Ethical conscience is intrinsic in nature.
There is a hidden code inside you. What is right for me is going to be right for you. What is wrong for me is going to be wrong for you. Why my right is also others right? My wrong is also others wrong? My norms and your norms for the appropriate behavior is the same. The reason is simple. Norms of ethical behavior is based on our existential reality. Because the existential reality of you and the world is, non-dual in nature.
If sense of separation and duality are real I would be happy when I hurt someone. Why I am not happy with that? It is against the non-dual nature of the world and me.
The reality which sustains your existence and my existence is one. That appreciation of oneness if it is absent for want of understanding that shows up in your act. How? Thinking of hurting someone hurts you. Your ethical conscience cannot accept it. You cannot be happy with yourself with that thinking because of that reason. You create a cognitive fragmentation in you with that exclusive thinking.
Dual thinking makes you unhappy and uncomfortable. Because you’re existential reality and ethical conscience are connected. That’s why reality in the form of universal order as it is all inclusive cannot exclude human conscience. All ethical norms in the form of ‘shoulds and shoudn’ts presented by religious texts as ‘behavior codes’ are based on this source. An ethical order binds you if your action doesn’t reflect your reality by leaving you with ‘guilt’. An ethical value which we preserve in the form of a code of behaviour is not a ‘deal’ born of mutual self-interest’. It is derived from the universal order which in fact is a reflection of existential oneness that being the nature of our reality and the world.