Like most people, I'm reluctant to discuss personal matters, but I take this rule very seriously—it's at the heart of my worldview and keeps me on the right path
"Almost everybody else will give you a pass—but the big problems begin when you give yourself a pass." - Great line. This takes great *courage* to execute.
This is the first time I have seen my worldview presented by someone else than me. It's a great relief to know that I'm not the only one who sees things like this. (I'm the weird one in my family.)
Thoughts of how everything is connected fill my head every day.
Thanks for posting about your 6 spheres. I'd love to read more of your thoughts.
I love how he says that a worldview has to be your own, not borrowed from another person. So many people want to find peace and enlightenment without doing any work themselves. We all know that's not possible. However, I still don't understand spirit. I'm almost 40 and I never have. In his little spirit triangle, he had faith at the top of it. For people like me who understand religion is complete nonsense, is "spirit" a hoax, or something people use to fill in the gaps they don't understand, a rock band with Jay Ferguson, or a crappy airline?
Who created all this? Why are we here? Where do we go after we die? If we had concrete answers to those questions, there wouldn't be hundreds of religions, just the truth. I love his rule of the six spheres; I just don't understand spirituality. Maybe I never will.
I'd be curious to hear your response to somebody who presented the following argument:
"I still don't understand all this talk of LOVE. No one has ever presented the tiniest bit of direct evidence that it exists. You can't measure it. You can't quantify it. You can't photograph it or film it or digitize it. You can't touch it with your hand, or offer any empirical evidence for it. All the evidence people give for LOVE is indirect, unverifiable, murky. So it's inevitable that logical people like me must conclude—quite sensibly!—that LOVE is complete nonsense. Maybe it makes others feel better, but it's easy to see they are just fooling themselves. I won't be deluded. I refuse to believe LOVE exists, and never will."
That's a very rock solid argument, no? It has all the empirical data on its side. At no point can it be refuted.
And then listen to the same argument, but with other words substituted for LOVE—things like friendship, trust, integrity, etc. They are all metaphysical concepts, every last one of them—with no direct evidence of their existence.
Sure, you can operate as a pure materialist, and decide none of these abstract things exists. Nobody can ever disprove your skeptical position. But what kind of life are you living at that point?
That's a long way of saying that I have no problem accepting metaphysical concepts. The fact that I can't measure them in a scale doesn't bother me in the least. All the most valuable things in life are, at bottom, a matter of metaphysics.
Thank you for your response. This has helped me clarify and understand my feelings. I don't take issue with spirit because it is unquantifiable. I guess it's because I've never experienced it. Like most people with decent parents, I've felt love from an early age. However, I've never had a spiritual experience.
Whenever I had to go to Church, I would just look at the clock until the hands pointed upwards and it was 12 o'clock and we could go home. Whenever I went to one of my Jewish friends Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, I was just killing time until they were done stumbling through their Torah portion so I could get out of my uncomfortable shoes. Whenever I see my Algerian friend kneel in prayer and say Alhamdulillah after he scores in our pickup soccer game, I think "even if god existed, he wouldn't care if you score or not."
Now that you've compared spirit to love I feel as if I'm missing out. I know the earth isn't 6000 years old and it wasn't created in a week. I know a human can't part the Red Sea. I know no one lived past the age of 900. I know the earth isn't the center of the solar system. I know Jesus didn't rise from the dead. I know the moon wasn't split in two. Do you have any advice for someone who understands that religion is a creation of man and not some divine mandate?
I never cared about spirituality until you compared it to love. It's hard to understand something that is unquantifiable and you have never experienced. But now I feel I'm missing out on something extremely important and incredibly rewarding. Can I experience faith and spirit? Or should I be content with 5 spheres?
Spirit is much larger than religion, which only taps into it. If you like intellectual approaches, perhaps broaden the area of your religious examinations, in your post you only mention western religions. The parable of the blind men describing the elephant by touch comes to my mind, each has their own truth, but they cannot fully grasp what is before them. I imagine they could hope to, if they took in what all the others describe.
As for love, love that you are experiencing this moment where you are alive and can ask hard questions, it is your spirit that is doing this.
You might try substituting the word 'awe' for spirit, and think about when and where you experience it. Do you feel awe in the presence of nature e.g. mountains, oceans, a sky full of stars, or the small universes contained within rockpools or the amazing life of mushrooms etc etc Or in the presence of art, music, etc; or with groups of people all collaborating together to achieve something bigger than themselves; or when individuals overcome obstacles to do amazing things; or when they live lives of quiet goodness, making a difference through their everyday actions. This is not a complete list, by any means, just a starting point. If you can identify what fills you with awe and wonder, then you can begin to cultivate it, and that is fundamentally the essence of spirituality.
Brett, I think of the spirit sphere like this. It’s the invisible part of a person. It’s connected to mind. It’s connected to emotions. Like in our body the heart pumps blood to the brain and to the hands. Spirit is like the heart of our invisible self. It pumps the “blood” to the mind and the emotions. So, spirituality is basically a person’s air. Narrow religious views like you described are like a person breathing from a diver’s oxygen tank or something. Someone like you, who hasn’t ever “experienced the spiritual” still has spirit. It’s just like you’ve never had an asthma attack so never had to tend to your lungs or something. If you believe this (admittedly belabored) analogy, you may want to understand “air” better by figuring what theology you think is truest. Or figure out your own lungs by writing down what you think is true about those big questions you posed. Cheers!
Try a daily meditation practice as a start on the spiritual path. I also bet that you already have and have had a spiritual life. Maybe you've been in nature, have children, read a great novel that touched you, poetry, music, friendship, a sunrise, or sunset and so it goes--
I think there are many ways to cultivate faith and spirit that do not involve believing supernatural things. Think of religious feelings as growing from limit experiences—where the human mind reels before the power of a storm or the ocean or before the vastness of a starry night sky or beside the death bed of a friend or loved one or before the vision of a simple tree on psychedelics! There is an interesting book by Friedrich Schleiermacher called On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers where he claims religion is essentially the FEELING for the Infinite. It always struck me as a more promising place to start than a belief in the supernatural.
We are captives of the enlightenment (which has created the modern world) and so we OVER VALUE things that can be readily quantified (measured). The most important valuable items cannot.
I don't want to get too personal, but this same line of thinking has occurred to me before, so I appreciate your insights.
You can call intangibles like love, friendship, trust, and integrity metaphysical - but other descriptors we might reach for are relationships, feelings, and thoughts. Is faith "just" a relationship? A thought? A feeling? And, if so, need it have an object? What if that something we have faith in doesn't exist? Is that faith still valid? Can you love an illusion?
I tell myself there's no such thing as "just" a relationship, a thought, or a feeling, and that my faith would matter even in the absence of what I have faith in. But is it so? Can you love an illusion?
I have *started* discovering spirituality only after turning 40; there is plenty of time.
My spirituality disdains all religions which have more than one member.
Most of my life I have been a materialist/existentialist/cynical/etc; I still am. But reality is just too beautiful and amazing to have no "meaning". So I make my own and call that spirituality.
Religion is a method to organize society; don't look for your own truth in there. It offers a truth that works (worked?) fine for society. But if you feel like you are slightly different from the herd, religion's purpose is not to nourish that in you, but to bring you back to "the middle".
My path to spirituality has been: burn-out -> improvisation dance -> solitude -> a dog. Painful and rewarding. Your mileage may vary.
I agree that spirituality is spirit twice removed, ie spirit>spiritual>spirituality. Spirit itself is a rearing horse, wild, free and natural. It's tangeble sweat. For me it's my primal force or motivation that disregards all my neat plans that try to tame it. Faith for me is the unsubstantiatable(?) knowing that it's there. Religions just try and fail.
I finally accepted in my 60s that organized religion was the source of many of the difficulties in my life. I chose the word “accepted” with strong intention because I had known it for years but was afraid to cut the ties. When I finally did a few years ago, everything in my life (you could say in my six spheres) immediately began to improve and it hasn’t stopped. Many of the teachings of the religions I left - Christianity and later the Baha’i Faith - still ring true for me and influence my thinking sometimes - but without any strings attached, or anything else that dishonors and undermines me as a glorious individual. It’s said that nature abhors a vacuum, and what filled the one I was left with initially was a book called 365 Tao: Daily Meditations, by Deng Ming-Dao. Not every page wows me. I don’t even understand every page. But many, many of them are so confirming of my inherent capacities as a human being, and so strengthening about living with the unknown such as what becomes of us after we die, and numerous other benefits as well, that this is my fifth year to make it part of my morning routine. Because for me it is a truly spiritual experience, more so than I ever experienced as a member of an organized religion.
I remember the piece you wrote about Nick Drake. It stayed with me because of the compassion and humanity in your insights into a very talented artist who was not able to find his place in the world. Seeing your framework here shows where that piece came from.
Thank you, Ted. What you write seems kind of obvious to me - which I write not in depreciation, but more in surprise that anyone could take offence at your post. Anyone who hasn't worked this out for themselves is seriously flawed. But well done for exposing your values, for the human race does have a mean streak and it takes nerve to make a stand on anything that might be construed as "old fashioned values", "New Age" or "spiritual". I think this year is a time for making a stand for what is right because the human race currently seems confused and more than a little demented.
What a wonderful distraction on a Friday afternoon as the workweek winds down! To my benefit, this interrupts a (Teams) discussion I was having with my exceedingly literate VP of content (that's a modern-y title for one responsible for herding writers) about great fiction first lines. I say this to remind myself I'm kinda all right with where I am. The question (as I'm Ted's age) is how to best finish strong? Many blessings, few stresses (or I'm oblivious EDIT: except for relentless doom scroll over US political ... trends) but I do wake too early now and wonder where to focus the last 5-10 years of semi-fullspeed abilities. Seems like, at this point, my balance is pretty good. Do I pick a sphere for a last swing at the fences?
Thank you for making this free for all subscribers. I agree 100 percent with everything you had to say. I also made my own code of laws but I’ve always just thought it was the personality that I was born with.
Side note, your essay reminds a lot of a short book that I think is now out of print called a lazy man’s guide to enlightenment. I haven’t read it in long time but I think it has a lot in common with what you are saying.
Lol I just revisited a pdf of that book online and no, I do not think my memory is correct. Perhaps I was thinking of Deepak Chopra’s classic The 7 Spiritual Laws of success.
I cannot thank you enough for both the humility and the generosity of your posts. They are artful. They are pastoral. In the noblest sense of that descriptor. They are exemplary of and facilitators of human flourishing. And, yessir! I believe that is A Thing and testify to the reality, elegance and excellence of that thing.
Your entries, whether educational, fanciful or confessional are golden and so much appreciated. Long may you run, sir!
This was wonderful--a real public service. Akin to your post some time back on your lifetime reading plan. I've now implemented one for myself, and my life is so much richer already. I look forward to the results of doing a personal review of my strengths and areas for improvement within the remaining spheres as you've outlined them here. An aside: would you or your wife ever be open to writing about her journey to a PhD in her fifties? Her motivations for doing so, her choice of which program, her experience as a "non-traditional student," and her goals for the degree would all be fascinating to many, I'm sure. I'm particularly interested because I'm a middle-aged lawyer who's considered going back for a PhD in an unrelated field, and don't know a single soul who's done it after their 30s. I'd love to hear from someone a bit older who did so!
This is wonderful as an ideal. But such an ideal can only be approached in extraordinarily fortunate circumstances. If one is fortunate to live in a time of peace and plenty where you can earn the daily necessities of life and have energy and resources left to pursue all of the others, you are truly fortunate. Historically, and globally, however, such conditions are rare. For so many people in so many times and places, circumstances have required them to put all their time and energy into one aspect of life, either for their own survival or for the survival of those they love. To be able to pursue a life of perfect balance of this kind is a matter of great good fortune. But both ordinary necessity and the wider moral good have often required people to put their time, their energy, and the devotion into one thing or another. What you describe here is a life of self-fulfillment. What so many have been called to, and so many are still called to today, is a life of self-sacrifice in which everything must be devoted to a single cause, for the sake of all.
I couldn't disagree more. Sure, there are starving children in Africa and other places. But for billions of people today, a balanced life is very much within reach.
And I am very skeptical of the suggestion that some people have better things to do. They may think they do, but they are likely to be mistaken. I think this is Ted's point.
I suppose it depends what you mean by “extraordinarily fortunate circumstances.” I started life in an immigrant community that was by no means wealthy but did have commitment to work and study, building families and friends, helping one another and nurturing the spirit nailed down. Imperfectly, of course.
Now I live in a big city with a job that keeps me and my (immediate) family comfortable. But I’m constantly straining against the pressures of hyper-specialization, superficial friendships and moderately isolated lives among neighbors living the same sort of alienated existence.
All that’s to say, I think one is more likely to find this balance in networks of committed interdependence, where peace is hard-won and plenty means “enough” for everyone. And perhaps such conditions are less rare historically than our seemingly advanced society, revelling in its 15 minutes of going to and fro on the world stage, would allow for.
Such a wonderful thought, and so well expressed. Everywhere we look in nature, we see “networks of committed interdependence”. Where in the world did we get the idea that man is the measure of all things, and that each of us, unlike every tree in every forest, can stand alone?
Agreed. But someone in that fortunate position, who is actively working to understand this challenge of joining these life aspects together, is to be commended. We all work from where we are. Moreover, what little I know of Ted's early life tells me he's been working on this stuff a long time, and whatever fortunate life situation he's attained is a result of that work.
The great practical metaphysicist, Dr. Alphonse M. Tatarunis, had a definition of Love that I think is quite tangible - though not mathematical - Love is Patience, Kindness, Forgiveness, Understanding, and Honesty. We all know precisely what each of these elements is. In this worldview even the materialist skeptic must concede.
"Almost everybody else will give you a pass—but the big problems begin when you give yourself a pass." - Great line. This takes great *courage* to execute.
This is the first time I have seen my worldview presented by someone else than me. It's a great relief to know that I'm not the only one who sees things like this. (I'm the weird one in my family.)
Thoughts of how everything is connected fill my head every day.
Thanks for posting about your 6 spheres. I'd love to read more of your thoughts.
Ted, never stop writing. Even the awkward stuff.
I love how he says that a worldview has to be your own, not borrowed from another person. So many people want to find peace and enlightenment without doing any work themselves. We all know that's not possible. However, I still don't understand spirit. I'm almost 40 and I never have. In his little spirit triangle, he had faith at the top of it. For people like me who understand religion is complete nonsense, is "spirit" a hoax, or something people use to fill in the gaps they don't understand, a rock band with Jay Ferguson, or a crappy airline?
Who created all this? Why are we here? Where do we go after we die? If we had concrete answers to those questions, there wouldn't be hundreds of religions, just the truth. I love his rule of the six spheres; I just don't understand spirituality. Maybe I never will.
I'd be curious to hear your response to somebody who presented the following argument:
"I still don't understand all this talk of LOVE. No one has ever presented the tiniest bit of direct evidence that it exists. You can't measure it. You can't quantify it. You can't photograph it or film it or digitize it. You can't touch it with your hand, or offer any empirical evidence for it. All the evidence people give for LOVE is indirect, unverifiable, murky. So it's inevitable that logical people like me must conclude—quite sensibly!—that LOVE is complete nonsense. Maybe it makes others feel better, but it's easy to see they are just fooling themselves. I won't be deluded. I refuse to believe LOVE exists, and never will."
That's a very rock solid argument, no? It has all the empirical data on its side. At no point can it be refuted.
And then listen to the same argument, but with other words substituted for LOVE—things like friendship, trust, integrity, etc. They are all metaphysical concepts, every last one of them—with no direct evidence of their existence.
Sure, you can operate as a pure materialist, and decide none of these abstract things exists. Nobody can ever disprove your skeptical position. But what kind of life are you living at that point?
That's a long way of saying that I have no problem accepting metaphysical concepts. The fact that I can't measure them in a scale doesn't bother me in the least. All the most valuable things in life are, at bottom, a matter of metaphysics.
Thank you for your response. This has helped me clarify and understand my feelings. I don't take issue with spirit because it is unquantifiable. I guess it's because I've never experienced it. Like most people with decent parents, I've felt love from an early age. However, I've never had a spiritual experience.
Whenever I had to go to Church, I would just look at the clock until the hands pointed upwards and it was 12 o'clock and we could go home. Whenever I went to one of my Jewish friends Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, I was just killing time until they were done stumbling through their Torah portion so I could get out of my uncomfortable shoes. Whenever I see my Algerian friend kneel in prayer and say Alhamdulillah after he scores in our pickup soccer game, I think "even if god existed, he wouldn't care if you score or not."
Now that you've compared spirit to love I feel as if I'm missing out. I know the earth isn't 6000 years old and it wasn't created in a week. I know a human can't part the Red Sea. I know no one lived past the age of 900. I know the earth isn't the center of the solar system. I know Jesus didn't rise from the dead. I know the moon wasn't split in two. Do you have any advice for someone who understands that religion is a creation of man and not some divine mandate?
I never cared about spirituality until you compared it to love. It's hard to understand something that is unquantifiable and you have never experienced. But now I feel I'm missing out on something extremely important and incredibly rewarding. Can I experience faith and spirit? Or should I be content with 5 spheres?
Love is a rock band with Arthur Lee.
Or Geddy Lee.
Spirit is much larger than religion, which only taps into it. If you like intellectual approaches, perhaps broaden the area of your religious examinations, in your post you only mention western religions. The parable of the blind men describing the elephant by touch comes to my mind, each has their own truth, but they cannot fully grasp what is before them. I imagine they could hope to, if they took in what all the others describe.
As for love, love that you are experiencing this moment where you are alive and can ask hard questions, it is your spirit that is doing this.
You might try substituting the word 'awe' for spirit, and think about when and where you experience it. Do you feel awe in the presence of nature e.g. mountains, oceans, a sky full of stars, or the small universes contained within rockpools or the amazing life of mushrooms etc etc Or in the presence of art, music, etc; or with groups of people all collaborating together to achieve something bigger than themselves; or when individuals overcome obstacles to do amazing things; or when they live lives of quiet goodness, making a difference through their everyday actions. This is not a complete list, by any means, just a starting point. If you can identify what fills you with awe and wonder, then you can begin to cultivate it, and that is fundamentally the essence of spirituality.
Brett, I think of the spirit sphere like this. It’s the invisible part of a person. It’s connected to mind. It’s connected to emotions. Like in our body the heart pumps blood to the brain and to the hands. Spirit is like the heart of our invisible self. It pumps the “blood” to the mind and the emotions. So, spirituality is basically a person’s air. Narrow religious views like you described are like a person breathing from a diver’s oxygen tank or something. Someone like you, who hasn’t ever “experienced the spiritual” still has spirit. It’s just like you’ve never had an asthma attack so never had to tend to your lungs or something. If you believe this (admittedly belabored) analogy, you may want to understand “air” better by figuring what theology you think is truest. Or figure out your own lungs by writing down what you think is true about those big questions you posed. Cheers!
This is great. An article about this would help many who struggle with this.
Try a daily meditation practice as a start on the spiritual path. I also bet that you already have and have had a spiritual life. Maybe you've been in nature, have children, read a great novel that touched you, poetry, music, friendship, a sunrise, or sunset and so it goes--
I think there are many ways to cultivate faith and spirit that do not involve believing supernatural things. Think of religious feelings as growing from limit experiences—where the human mind reels before the power of a storm or the ocean or before the vastness of a starry night sky or beside the death bed of a friend or loved one or before the vision of a simple tree on psychedelics! There is an interesting book by Friedrich Schleiermacher called On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers where he claims religion is essentially the FEELING for the Infinite. It always struck me as a more promising place to start than a belief in the supernatural.
Maybe one of your spheres can be labeled metaphysical?
We are captives of the enlightenment (which has created the modern world) and so we OVER VALUE things that can be readily quantified (measured). The most important valuable items cannot.
That’s so true. Those who put a price on everything don’t know the value of anything.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that I meet angels every day.
This reminds me of the main character in the TV series Bones. Have you seen it?
I've never seen it. But maybe I should—especially because I was mentioned in one of the episodes. https://trailers.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7bd15c4f-e6fa-4d39-b26d-547646e46c6c
I don't want to get too personal, but this same line of thinking has occurred to me before, so I appreciate your insights.
You can call intangibles like love, friendship, trust, and integrity metaphysical - but other descriptors we might reach for are relationships, feelings, and thoughts. Is faith "just" a relationship? A thought? A feeling? And, if so, need it have an object? What if that something we have faith in doesn't exist? Is that faith still valid? Can you love an illusion?
I tell myself there's no such thing as "just" a relationship, a thought, or a feeling, and that my faith would matter even in the absence of what I have faith in. But is it so? Can you love an illusion?
The spirit in you is asking these questions. Give it some room.
I have *started* discovering spirituality only after turning 40; there is plenty of time.
My spirituality disdains all religions which have more than one member.
Most of my life I have been a materialist/existentialist/cynical/etc; I still am. But reality is just too beautiful and amazing to have no "meaning". So I make my own and call that spirituality.
Religion is a method to organize society; don't look for your own truth in there. It offers a truth that works (worked?) fine for society. But if you feel like you are slightly different from the herd, religion's purpose is not to nourish that in you, but to bring you back to "the middle".
My path to spirituality has been: burn-out -> improvisation dance -> solitude -> a dog. Painful and rewarding. Your mileage may vary.
Can I take the dance and the dog and leave the rest of it? Reality is pretty dammed amazing.
I agree that spirituality is spirit twice removed, ie spirit>spiritual>spirituality. Spirit itself is a rearing horse, wild, free and natural. It's tangeble sweat. For me it's my primal force or motivation that disregards all my neat plans that try to tame it. Faith for me is the unsubstantiatable(?) knowing that it's there. Religions just try and fail.
I finally accepted in my 60s that organized religion was the source of many of the difficulties in my life. I chose the word “accepted” with strong intention because I had known it for years but was afraid to cut the ties. When I finally did a few years ago, everything in my life (you could say in my six spheres) immediately began to improve and it hasn’t stopped. Many of the teachings of the religions I left - Christianity and later the Baha’i Faith - still ring true for me and influence my thinking sometimes - but without any strings attached, or anything else that dishonors and undermines me as a glorious individual. It’s said that nature abhors a vacuum, and what filled the one I was left with initially was a book called 365 Tao: Daily Meditations, by Deng Ming-Dao. Not every page wows me. I don’t even understand every page. But many, many of them are so confirming of my inherent capacities as a human being, and so strengthening about living with the unknown such as what becomes of us after we die, and numerous other benefits as well, that this is my fifth year to make it part of my morning routine. Because for me it is a truly spiritual experience, more so than I ever experienced as a member of an organized religion.
I remember the piece you wrote about Nick Drake. It stayed with me because of the compassion and humanity in your insights into a very talented artist who was not able to find his place in the world. Seeing your framework here shows where that piece came from.
Thank you, Ted. What you write seems kind of obvious to me - which I write not in depreciation, but more in surprise that anyone could take offence at your post. Anyone who hasn't worked this out for themselves is seriously flawed. But well done for exposing your values, for the human race does have a mean streak and it takes nerve to make a stand on anything that might be construed as "old fashioned values", "New Age" or "spiritual". I think this year is a time for making a stand for what is right because the human race currently seems confused and more than a little demented.
"A man's got to have a code." - Omar, the unexpectedly moral center of "The Wire"
It’s a good six, nicely fleshed out. Thanks.
What a wonderful distraction on a Friday afternoon as the workweek winds down! To my benefit, this interrupts a (Teams) discussion I was having with my exceedingly literate VP of content (that's a modern-y title for one responsible for herding writers) about great fiction first lines. I say this to remind myself I'm kinda all right with where I am. The question (as I'm Ted's age) is how to best finish strong? Many blessings, few stresses (or I'm oblivious EDIT: except for relentless doom scroll over US political ... trends) but I do wake too early now and wonder where to focus the last 5-10 years of semi-fullspeed abilities. Seems like, at this point, my balance is pretty good. Do I pick a sphere for a last swing at the fences?
Thanks for this. Haters always gonna hate. HB is the good stuff.
Thanks from here also. This is a far cry from this world of blame that never takes any responsibility.
Thank you for making this free for all subscribers. I agree 100 percent with everything you had to say. I also made my own code of laws but I’ve always just thought it was the personality that I was born with.
Side note, your essay reminds a lot of a short book that I think is now out of print called a lazy man’s guide to enlightenment. I haven’t read it in long time but I think it has a lot in common with what you are saying.
Lol I just revisited a pdf of that book online and no, I do not think my memory is correct. Perhaps I was thinking of Deepak Chopra’s classic The 7 Spiritual Laws of success.
I cannot thank you enough for both the humility and the generosity of your posts. They are artful. They are pastoral. In the noblest sense of that descriptor. They are exemplary of and facilitators of human flourishing. And, yessir! I believe that is A Thing and testify to the reality, elegance and excellence of that thing.
Your entries, whether educational, fanciful or confessional are golden and so much appreciated. Long may you run, sir!
Darrell, what a wonderful choice of a word. Pastoral
This was wonderful--a real public service. Akin to your post some time back on your lifetime reading plan. I've now implemented one for myself, and my life is so much richer already. I look forward to the results of doing a personal review of my strengths and areas for improvement within the remaining spheres as you've outlined them here. An aside: would you or your wife ever be open to writing about her journey to a PhD in her fifties? Her motivations for doing so, her choice of which program, her experience as a "non-traditional student," and her goals for the degree would all be fascinating to many, I'm sure. I'm particularly interested because I'm a middle-aged lawyer who's considered going back for a PhD in an unrelated field, and don't know a single soul who's done it after their 30s. I'd love to hear from someone a bit older who did so!
Would love to hear this as well.
This is wonderful as an ideal. But such an ideal can only be approached in extraordinarily fortunate circumstances. If one is fortunate to live in a time of peace and plenty where you can earn the daily necessities of life and have energy and resources left to pursue all of the others, you are truly fortunate. Historically, and globally, however, such conditions are rare. For so many people in so many times and places, circumstances have required them to put all their time and energy into one aspect of life, either for their own survival or for the survival of those they love. To be able to pursue a life of perfect balance of this kind is a matter of great good fortune. But both ordinary necessity and the wider moral good have often required people to put their time, their energy, and the devotion into one thing or another. What you describe here is a life of self-fulfillment. What so many have been called to, and so many are still called to today, is a life of self-sacrifice in which everything must be devoted to a single cause, for the sake of all.
I couldn't disagree more. Sure, there are starving children in Africa and other places. But for billions of people today, a balanced life is very much within reach.
And I am very skeptical of the suggestion that some people have better things to do. They may think they do, but they are likely to be mistaken. I think this is Ted's point.
I suppose it depends what you mean by “extraordinarily fortunate circumstances.” I started life in an immigrant community that was by no means wealthy but did have commitment to work and study, building families and friends, helping one another and nurturing the spirit nailed down. Imperfectly, of course.
Now I live in a big city with a job that keeps me and my (immediate) family comfortable. But I’m constantly straining against the pressures of hyper-specialization, superficial friendships and moderately isolated lives among neighbors living the same sort of alienated existence.
All that’s to say, I think one is more likely to find this balance in networks of committed interdependence, where peace is hard-won and plenty means “enough” for everyone. And perhaps such conditions are less rare historically than our seemingly advanced society, revelling in its 15 minutes of going to and fro on the world stage, would allow for.
Such a wonderful thought, and so well expressed. Everywhere we look in nature, we see “networks of committed interdependence”. Where in the world did we get the idea that man is the measure of all things, and that each of us, unlike every tree in every forest, can stand alone?
Agreed. But someone in that fortunate position, who is actively working to understand this challenge of joining these life aspects together, is to be commended. We all work from where we are. Moreover, what little I know of Ted's early life tells me he's been working on this stuff a long time, and whatever fortunate life situation he's attained is a result of that work.
The great practical metaphysicist, Dr. Alphonse M. Tatarunis, had a definition of Love that I think is quite tangible - though not mathematical - Love is Patience, Kindness, Forgiveness, Understanding, and Honesty. We all know precisely what each of these elements is. In this worldview even the materialist skeptic must concede.