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"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
................Matthew 5:33-48 (NIV)
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Simplify
Love is the only thing that can bind us together again. But what if we both agree that there is such a thing as love in the world, but each of us has a different interpretation of “love”? What if there were six billion nuanced definitions of love? At the lowest level of meaning we can agree that such a thing can exist, but we quickly move apart when it comes to defining how it works within our own relative context. If the definitions are so different that they have no common ground, then even the agreement that such a thing as love can exist fades, and love itself disappears in a roar of lust. What was a common bond becomes a common threat. Harmony becomes chaos. Accord becomes discord, consonance becomes dissonance, light becomes darkness.
The relative viewpoint is necessarily singular in an ocean of plurality. We are all isolated in time and space, searching for resolution, searching for peace and safety, searching for love. But what if my search threatens the search of everyone around me? My definition of love, of resolution, of peace and of safety eclipses all others, and to get what I think is love and peace and safety I
make others, especially others who are different, mere obstacles to my happiness. Love to me then must be happiness at the exclusion of others. Once others are excluded from my perspective, nothing retains common significance—meaning is unmeaning. Diversity in this sense drives selfishness. The simplest rules that should hold us together (“Love God” and “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”) are meaningless. What is love? Which God? Who is my neighbor? Some people are neighbors, some are enemies. God is a tree in my backyard. Love is desire!
In a related sense, the absolute objectivity of science strives for common understanding. The freezing point for water is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, 0 degrees Celsius. This is good and true for all people in all times and in all places. It is a constant. But how does God fit into this paradigm? You cannot put God under a microsocope, nor can you put love in a tight, little box. What is love really? Is there a God? For that matter, what is “good art”? Science can't address these questions, so it wisely ignores them.
In other words, where science, the physical (body) and the intellect (mind), strives to be more objective, emotion (heart) and the spirit (soul) are more subjective, tied more closely to the subjective experience of living. The physical body is grounded in the physical reality in which we live, and so it is more easily understood from a universal perspective. A heart (the physical organ) functions the same in every human that has one. But the heart (the emotional metaphor) operates differently from continent to continent, from culture to culture, from person to person. And yet, though the emotions are different at the lowest level (e.g. love may mean different things to different people in different cultures), emotion itself exists and operates for all peoples (a mother loves her baby, a father loves his son). The emotion of love is universal, though not everyone has a very developed idea of what it is.
So the idea is that we are all designed the same at the lowest level (the physical), but we all develop differently within that common framework based on our location and experience. It can also be argued that the Soul is like the body, a thing that operates at the lowest level, and is therefore most easily seen across all peoples across all cultures. This is true, but the expression of Soul (like the expression of Body) is chained to the perceived realities of our circumstances (e.g. our cultural and emotional surroundings). So if we were to illustrate this, it might look like this, in which the lowest level is the most concrete, objective level and the highest level is the most abstract, subjective level.
This means that no matter what level or combination of levels of our make up you want to look at and focus on (whether the focus is on diversity or similarity), we are all fundamentally the same. A person is a person, no matter how small, and getting your head around the sameness of every person in the world, across all time and space, will allow you to understand what it means to be you.
SIDEBAR: The next several sections of this writing has a variety of models exploring the relationship of the four spheres that make up every human being—heart (emotion), mind (intellect), body (physique) and soul (spirit). They are models, ways to examine how we matter related to how we were built. They are not meant to be definitive or all-encompassing.
Compass—Micro
Since God made us in His image, we can then assume that we are made up roughly the same way (but at a vastly lower level) as God. All human activity falls into one or a combination of these four spheres—our nature. So then perhaps we look something like this:
In which the quadrants represent the four spheres that make up a human being and the values in the quadrants represent the corresponding attributes of each sphere and whose value is indicative of each attributes' influence on the other spheres. Emotion is the attribute of the Heart, and it is present to a degree in each of the other three quadrants. How the attribute of emotion represents itself within the realms of the Mind, the Soul and the Body are indicative of the maturity of the whole.
So if you put them all together in a single human being, say an artist who uses science as his point of interest and the source of medium for his art, it might look something like this:
You have to wonder (seeing where he is headed) what his art may look like if he gave greater attention to Spirit and Intellect. In the same way, if the person was both an artist and a philosopher, he may look like this:
Consider a faithful husband and an adulterer and compare them on two plains, Body and Emotion. The adulterer might look like this:
The locus of control for a person like this is centered mainly within the mind and body, and influences from the emotions and the soul are minimal. The farthest points from the center are Mind and Body, so he more easily tilts in these directions. This is how an adulterer can make such bad decisions and sleep so well at night. His actions are driven by physical desire and need and rationalized by the self-centered subjectivity of his intellect. The emotional connection to his wife is secondary (if there at all) and whatever pangs of conscience he may be getting from his soul are too tiny to make a difference, or worse, he is interpreting these as something he needs to further rationalize with his intellect. In other words, he is selfishly satisfying his body and rationalizing it with some kind of subjective logic, and both of these drivers obliterate whatever emotional commitment he made with his wife and that small voice of conscience he has become so good at ignoring. From viewing the person in this way, I understand that topics of emotion and spirituality will not be readily or seriously discussed with this man, since he puts so little emphasis on them. But these are the exact areas in which he needs training, maturing, in order to resolve.
Now consider the faithful husband, who might look then like this:
A person like this is more balanced as the attributes within each quadrant are more developed and can therefore exert greater influence on the other quadrants. It's not so easy to put an arrow in the direction this person may go as he is more balanced, and therefore more inclined to stay centered. This person is less likely to hurt his spouse because the emotional and spiritual cause and effect of actions driven from the intellect and physique are more apparent to him. In other words, he is less capable of rationalizing destructive behavior to his wife and children driven by Body and Mind because of the pull by the more developed quadrants of Heart and Soul. There is no arrow that indicates a directional drag out of balance, since he is much more balanced.
Think of it this way—when you have a terrible headache, or if you have a terrible nagging ache in you back that no medicine can cure (this is the physical input), it is very hard, if not impossible to be emotionally attentive to your spouse, to be intellectually attentive to your job, to be spiritually attentive to God. The one quadrant holds the others captive as you tilt farther from the center and closer to any one influence. The farther you tilt out of balance, the less likely it is that any of the spheres will grow, let alone mature.
So the dynamic is all about the force (pull, influence, whatever you want to call it) that the attribute of each quadrant exerts on the other three quadrants (e.g. How the attribute of Emotion influences and functions within the other quadrants of Mind, Body and Soul).
If this is the model of how we exist, then perhaps we can reverse engineer God's make-up, which may look something like this:
God is perfectly balanced, perfectly developed. We are like God, but He is complete. He is balanced. We are incomplete and imbalanced. We are a work in progress. So let us then consider this to be the basic building blocks of our nature—four spheres, four attributes—
.......... • heart > emotion
.......... • mind > intellect
.......... • body > physique
.......... • soul > spirit
—seeking full maturity and balance.
At any time we are likely out of balance, as perhaps we are more interested in satisfying the body by sacrificing our emotions (for instance the adulterer seeking out a prostitute at the sacrifice of his relationship with his spouse), or perhaps stimulating the intellect while ignoring the soul (for instance, ignoring the human soul because it cannot be proven in a laboratory).
Compass—Macro
So let's take a step out from the self and take a look at all of human endeavor. That's not such a huge leap! The corollary spheres of human endeavor are
What is the point of viewing humanity this way? It gives us a simple structure with which we can step back and look at others at a deeper level of understanding. It gives us a way to
Do not look for the things that are different in people, but rather look for the things that are the same in everyone. Make it your habit. Do not suffer culture shock, but rather pursue family shock. Do not be surprised that a man in Asia eats deep fried bugs for dinner, but rather focus on the way he sits with his family at the dinner table, the way they talk to each other, the way he talks to his children. Do no look at the food going into his mouth, but rather listen to the emotion or intellect or wisdom that comes out of his mouth. Understand that people are fundamentally the same everywhere in the world and culture shock will disappear in an instant. Children playing in a park are the same everywhere in the world. This is invaluable, as it is a kind of compass you can use to relate to others and better understand yourself.
"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
................Matthew 5:33-48 (NIV)
_____________________________________________________________
| The long and short of it.... God is perfectly balanced, perfectly developed and complete. We are like God, but we are imbalanced and incomplete. We are a work in progress. The basic building blocks of our nature, the four spheres or attributes are .......... • heart > emotion .......... • mind > intellect .......... • body > physique .......... • soul > spirit Developing these, all of these, so they are balanced and mature is a key purpose to our existence. |
Simplify
Love is the only thing that can bind us together again. But what if we both agree that there is such a thing as love in the world, but each of us has a different interpretation of “love”? What if there were six billion nuanced definitions of love? At the lowest level of meaning we can agree that such a thing can exist, but we quickly move apart when it comes to defining how it works within our own relative context. If the definitions are so different that they have no common ground, then even the agreement that such a thing as love can exist fades, and love itself disappears in a roar of lust. What was a common bond becomes a common threat. Harmony becomes chaos. Accord becomes discord, consonance becomes dissonance, light becomes darkness.
The relative viewpoint is necessarily singular in an ocean of plurality. We are all isolated in time and space, searching for resolution, searching for peace and safety, searching for love. But what if my search threatens the search of everyone around me? My definition of love, of resolution, of peace and of safety eclipses all others, and to get what I think is love and peace and safety I
make others, especially others who are different, mere obstacles to my happiness. Love to me then must be happiness at the exclusion of others. Once others are excluded from my perspective, nothing retains common significance—meaning is unmeaning. Diversity in this sense drives selfishness. The simplest rules that should hold us together (“Love God” and “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”) are meaningless. What is love? Which God? Who is my neighbor? Some people are neighbors, some are enemies. God is a tree in my backyard. Love is desire!In a related sense, the absolute objectivity of science strives for common understanding. The freezing point for water is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, 0 degrees Celsius. This is good and true for all people in all times and in all places. It is a constant. But how does God fit into this paradigm? You cannot put God under a microsocope, nor can you put love in a tight, little box. What is love really? Is there a God? For that matter, what is “good art”? Science can't address these questions, so it wisely ignores them.
In other words, where science, the physical (body) and the intellect (mind), strives to be more objective, emotion (heart) and the spirit (soul) are more subjective, tied more closely to the subjective experience of living. The physical body is grounded in the physical reality in which we live, and so it is more easily understood from a universal perspective. A heart (the physical organ) functions the same in every human that has one. But the heart (the emotional metaphor) operates differently from continent to continent, from culture to culture, from person to person. And yet, though the emotions are different at the lowest level (e.g. love may mean different things to different people in different cultures), emotion itself exists and operates for all peoples (a mother loves her baby, a father loves his son). The emotion of love is universal, though not everyone has a very developed idea of what it is.
So the idea is that we are all designed the same at the lowest level (the physical), but we all develop differently within that common framework based on our location and experience. It can also be argued that the Soul is like the body, a thing that operates at the lowest level, and is therefore most easily seen across all peoples across all cultures. This is true, but the expression of Soul (like the expression of Body) is chained to the perceived realities of our circumstances (e.g. our cultural and emotional surroundings). So if we were to illustrate this, it might look like this, in which the lowest level is the most concrete, objective level and the highest level is the most abstract, subjective level.
This means that no matter what level or combination of levels of our make up you want to look at and focus on (whether the focus is on diversity or similarity), we are all fundamentally the same. A person is a person, no matter how small, and getting your head around the sameness of every person in the world, across all time and space, will allow you to understand what it means to be you.SIDEBAR: The next several sections of this writing has a variety of models exploring the relationship of the four spheres that make up every human being—heart (emotion), mind (intellect), body (physique) and soul (spirit). They are models, ways to examine how we matter related to how we were built. They are not meant to be definitive or all-encompassing.
Compass—Micro
Since God made us in His image, we can then assume that we are made up roughly the same way (but at a vastly lower level) as God. All human activity falls into one or a combination of these four spheres—our nature. So then perhaps we look something like this:
In which the quadrants represent the four spheres that make up a human being and the values in the quadrants represent the corresponding attributes of each sphere and whose value is indicative of each attributes' influence on the other spheres. Emotion is the attribute of the Heart, and it is present to a degree in each of the other three quadrants. How the attribute of emotion represents itself within the realms of the Mind, the Soul and the Body are indicative of the maturity of the whole.
So if you put them all together in a single human being, say an artist who uses science as his point of interest and the source of medium for his art, it might look something like this:
You have to wonder (seeing where he is headed) what his art may look like if he gave greater attention to Spirit and Intellect. In the same way, if the person was both an artist and a philosopher, he may look like this:Consider a faithful husband and an adulterer and compare them on two plains, Body and Emotion. The adulterer might look like this:The locus of control for a person like this is centered mainly within the mind and body, and influences from the emotions and the soul are minimal. The farthest points from the center are Mind and Body, so he more easily tilts in these directions. This is how an adulterer can make such bad decisions and sleep so well at night. His actions are driven by physical desire and need and rationalized by the self-centered subjectivity of his intellect. The emotional connection to his wife is secondary (if there at all) and whatever pangs of conscience he may be getting from his soul are too tiny to make a difference, or worse, he is interpreting these as something he needs to further rationalize with his intellect. In other words, he is selfishly satisfying his body and rationalizing it with some kind of subjective logic, and both of these drivers obliterate whatever emotional commitment he made with his wife and that small voice of conscience he has become so good at ignoring. From viewing the person in this way, I understand that topics of emotion and spirituality will not be readily or seriously discussed with this man, since he puts so little emphasis on them. But these are the exact areas in which he needs training, maturing, in order to resolve.Now consider the faithful husband, who might look then like this:
A person like this is more balanced as the attributes within each quadrant are more developed and can therefore exert greater influence on the other quadrants. It's not so easy to put an arrow in the direction this person may go as he is more balanced, and therefore more inclined to stay centered. This person is less likely to hurt his spouse because the emotional and spiritual cause and effect of actions driven from the intellect and physique are more apparent to him. In other words, he is less capable of rationalizing destructive behavior to his wife and children driven by Body and Mind because of the pull by the more developed quadrants of Heart and Soul. There is no arrow that indicates a directional drag out of balance, since he is much more balanced.Think of it this way—when you have a terrible headache, or if you have a terrible nagging ache in you back that no medicine can cure (this is the physical input), it is very hard, if not impossible to be emotionally attentive to your spouse, to be intellectually attentive to your job, to be spiritually attentive to God. The one quadrant holds the others captive as you tilt farther from the center and closer to any one influence. The farther you tilt out of balance, the less likely it is that any of the spheres will grow, let alone mature.
So the dynamic is all about the force (pull, influence, whatever you want to call it) that the attribute of each quadrant exerts on the other three quadrants (e.g. How the attribute of Emotion influences and functions within the other quadrants of Mind, Body and Soul).
If this is the model of how we exist, then perhaps we can reverse engineer God's make-up, which may look something like this:
God is perfectly balanced, perfectly developed. We are like God, but He is complete. He is balanced. We are incomplete and imbalanced. We are a work in progress. So let us then consider this to be the basic building blocks of our nature—four spheres, four attributes—.......... • heart > emotion
.......... • mind > intellect
.......... • body > physique
.......... • soul > spirit
—seeking full maturity and balance.
At any time we are likely out of balance, as perhaps we are more interested in satisfying the body by sacrificing our emotions (for instance the adulterer seeking out a prostitute at the sacrifice of his relationship with his spouse), or perhaps stimulating the intellect while ignoring the soul (for instance, ignoring the human soul because it cannot be proven in a laboratory).
Compass—Macro
So let's take a step out from the self and take a look at all of human endeavor. That's not such a huge leap! The corollary spheres of human endeavor are
- Religion (Soul > Spirit—what does it matter?) Religion is broken into two categories: Prophetic and Wisdom (made up of Theism and Atheism). Prophetic religion is a religious paradigm revealed by God to prophets. Wisdom religions are those developed by moralists and philosophers over time, or are based on observation of nature, and no unique claim is made to revelation. The major religions in the world are (in order of size): Prophetic Religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Bahá'í Faith. Wisdom Religions: Hinduism, Chinese Folk Religions, African-Asian-American primal indigenous and diasporic religions, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Caodaism, Chondogyo, and Yiguandao. There are nearly countless other religions beyond these.
- Art (Heart > Emotion—how do I feel?) Art explores the depth and heights of human emotion, thoughts, passions, and the human experience using visual, language, performing, culinary, and physical expression, including architecture, the visual arts, cartoons, crafts, food, dance, common and not so common decoratives, design, drawing, fashion, film, language, literature, music, painting, photography, poetry, sculpture, theater and on and on.
- Philosophy (Mind > Intellect—what is real?) Philosophy is concerned with questions of the nature of reality, such as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and logic, and is made up of such doctrines as Realism and Nominalism, Rationalism and Empiricism, Skepticism, Idealism, Pragmatism, Phenomenology, Aesthetics, Existentialism (my personal favorite) and the analytic tradition.
- Science (Body > Physique—how does it work?) Science, or Etymology, seeks to better understand how nature and the physical universe works by observing physical evidence and using logic to manufacture repeatable predictions and theories that become, over time, acceptable fact. This is the Scientific Method, which is reduced roughly to Knowledge = Observation + Logic. You can divide Science into three sub-categories: Natural, Social and Formal (Mathematics), and these include fields of study such as Physics, Biology, Mathematics, Chemistry, Economics, Psychology, and each of these can be broken down into a nearly countless number of sub-doctrines and studies.
What is the point of viewing humanity this way? It gives us a simple structure with which we can step back and look at others at a deeper level of understanding. It gives us a way to
- listen to people instead of tuning them out
- watch the things they do with curiosity instead of judgment
- appreciate what is important to others instead of dismissing their needs
- perceive how they are balanced instead of labeling them as hopeless
- help others to grow instead of chaining them to their failings
Do not look for the things that are different in people, but rather look for the things that are the same in everyone. Make it your habit. Do not suffer culture shock, but rather pursue family shock. Do not be surprised that a man in Asia eats deep fried bugs for dinner, but rather focus on the way he sits with his family at the dinner table, the way they talk to each other, the way he talks to his children. Do no look at the food going into his mouth, but rather listen to the emotion or intellect or wisdom that comes out of his mouth. Understand that people are fundamentally the same everywhere in the world and culture shock will disappear in an instant. Children playing in a park are the same everywhere in the world. This is invaluable, as it is a kind of compass you can use to relate to others and better understand yourself.
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