The Tibetans have this nice idea of “Windhorse” as standing for Goodness. Iconographically, it is a horse with a bright diamond on the back of it. It is intended simultaneously the connote light shining, and the power of the wind as the horse runs through it.
Goodness, then, is something that is shining moving pushing out flowing like water all the time. It is a quality of being. Now, having felt it, I think you can expand it, but until you hit that particular groove, morality is what guides you.
As I see it, morality is not so much intended to put you on the right path, but to keep you from error. Once you can feel or see how to live with purpose, how to move forward in a positive way, you are confined to not moving AWAY from light, from Goodness.
All the days of our lives we are moving, here, there everywhere. Constantly, we are making decisions. Life is a chaotic system, in which we as individuals, and of course our social system, and even the physical conditions surrounding us like the weather are in constant chaos, held back from complete randomness by principles, which in the physical arena would be called “Strange Attractors”, which represent immanent order of a sort in what is outwardly fully random.
As you bounce about like a pingpong ball, if you don’t fall in the wrong slot, eventually you will find your way. You are helped tremendously if you know in advance all the wrong ways to do things. This, again, was the point of Buddha’s quite exhaustive 8-fold path. He wanted to give you a LOT of ways not to do things. But as he recognized, even if you give this to people, there is always the risk that you will stop moving, and when you do that, you can never find your way forward.
The way forward, to be clear, is not an idea, but a quality of perception, that cannot be gifted.
In my own conceptions, I think the essentials of my ideas of Goodness can be integrated into all religious–and even irreligious–traditions, with benefit. Let Muslims reject self pity, persevere in understanding their God, and accept that mercy and generosity are the important parts of their faith. Submission, then, means accepting these virtues without complaint. And to complete faithfulness to their Five Pillars could one not add a desire to want for others what is best for them? How could a doctrine of death and destruction be in conformity with the will of a benign deity? Surely if they want to spread their faith, they can do it by showing the superiority of their results in living in happiness and peace? Is peace–Salaam–not the goal?
This basic pattern of thought can be added to all religious traditions of which I’m aware, with the obvious exception of Satanism, which is the conscious pursuit of evil, and attractive to some because it is cloaked in novelty and deceit. Not until much too late will anyone foolish enough to follow this path realize what it is they have done. Nothing but pain and death lies there.