The Top Ten Ways Humans Approach Reality

As my own children near that time in their lives when they will have children yourselves, I wanted to share some thoughts to help them on that part of life's journey.

The first thought that came to my mind is one given me by my one hundred year old great Aunt Dixie. In her 1982 Christmas card, she wrote of the special and great joy that one can only know from having had children. She wrote that she'd not mentioned it to me before because I really needed to have already had my own children to truly understand such profound joy. It does seem to me that anyone who has enjoyed younger siblings, nieces and nephews, has already begun to taste such joy. Still, Aunt Dixie was right, of course, in that there is nothing quite like the fullness of the joy of birthing or adopting and then raising your very own children. What made her Christmas sentiment of 1982 so very poignant is the unspeakably sad reality that, not too many years before, she had lost her only daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters in a tragic car accident. The second of the granddaughters was seven months in the womb on that fateful day. As I have slowly come to learn, one never gets over such events; rather, we learn to live with them. With much suffering. And with great joy. Also, with a strong will to go on living, learning and loving ... for even a century and beyond.

So many in the world today (though clearly not all, not even most) are not confronted with the true scope of our human limitation, fragility and finitude earlier on life's journey. Oh, to be sure, as with joy, suffering is tasted, but not drunk deeply ... until ... until when? ... perhaps not even until one's twilight years, when the autumn of life gives way to such a winter as then cruelly and more indiscriminately exposes human limitation, fragility and finitude in their naked and raw reality.

I want to speak to you of our human limitations. And, I will cut to the chase. You are not God. Neither is anyone else. It is precisely that we are not God that gives rise to this our "human estate" and that recommends we not "deem equality with God something to be grasped at." Now, this may all seem to beg the question of why we must seemingly be SO limited, limitations admitting of degrees as they do. I can only say that, increasingly, I have come to appreciate that life's biggest mysteries so often seem to conceal the HOW and WHY of things leaving us to grapple mostly with the THATs of reality. So, while I do have my own hypotheses regarding reality's hows and whys, below I will address mostly it's thats.

It is because we are finite, fragile, limited, neither omniscient nor omnipotent, that we live always in pursuit of value. We need value not only to wonderfully thrive but also to merely survive. Hence, in so many different ways, we pursuit truth, beauty, goodness and unity. Everything from breakfast to supper, from soup to nuts, from conception to resurrection is thus ordered toward the human pursuit of value. Our existence is all about value realization. There are many ways to describe these value pursuits, whether in terms of evolutionary psychology or sociobiology, whether as theoretical, heuristic or normative sciences, whether as philosophy or religion. And I have written of it all, variously, in most of these terms. This has been my way of trying to understand reality.

You will approach reality in your own way. We know this from the science of personality psychology and the many studies of human temperament. There is nothing occult or magic about any of this. There is no special, definitive numerological description. Who knows? Maybe because we have four rather specialized brain quadrants and three rather clearly delineated brain layers we could devise twelve meaningful personality descriptions, twelve distinct approaches to human value realization (twelve apostles and tribes of Israel). Maybe there are not 144,000 that will be saved but 144,000 ways to be saved? Maybe be could come up with sixteen types by squaring four (Myers-Briggs). Or, maybe because most of us are, at best, able to use only three of the four quadrants in our lifetime, these three brain quadrants times the three brain layers yield nine types? most readily distinguishable by, on one hand, our resulting strengths, on the other, our crippling weaknesses? Like I said, though, this is not going to be about the hows and whys, just the thats. For my purposes, I will use the Letterman approach. Below I'll set forth The Top Ten Ways Humans Approach Reality. Perhaps later I'll devise a 40 Day Lenten Journey by meditating on how these ten approaches each interact with truth, beauty, goodness and unity, respectively, yielding forty distinct moments of human value realization.

The Top Ten Ways Humans Approach Reality (in no particular order)

1) Morally

2) Socially

3) Practically

4) Spiritually

5) Philosophically

6) Institutionally

7) Sensually

8) Politically

9) Peacefully

10) Religiously

For each of these approaches to reality, we can list both an existential style and a neurotic solution. The existential styles would describe our use of each approach on our journeys to authenticity and in ways that are life-giving and relationship-enhancing. The neurotic solutions would describe our inauthenticity in ways that are life-destroying and relationship-detracting. Such neuroses are habitual and predictable patterns of approaching reality, so easily seen in other people, so often comprising our own blind spots, which can be embarrassing and humiliating once discovered. (To think we can get embarrassed about not being God, humiliated even.)

The Top Ten Ways Humans Approach Reality - our Existential Styles, striving

1) Morally, to be good

2) Socially, to love

3) Practically, to be useful

4) Spiritually, to transcend

5) Philosophically, to be right

6) Institutionally, to be loyal

7) Sensually, to be joyful

8) Politically, to engage

9) Peacefully, to be peaceful

10) Religiously, to be holy

The Top Ten Ways Humans Approach Reality - our Neurotic Solutions, needing

1) Morally, to feel perfect

2) Socially, to feel needed

3) Practically, to feel successful

4) Spiritually, to feel special

5) Philosophically, to feel independent

6) Institutionally, to feel guided

7) Sensually, to feel good

8) Politically, to feel in control

9) Peacefully, to feel connected

10) Religiously, to banish mystery

In the next section, The Top Forty Ways Humans Approach Reality in Pursuit of Value, I use some technical jargon as shorthand, as mental placeholders, until I can come back and flesh out these approaches in a more accessible form. It is not so very important though that you understand the words as it is that you get a general idea of what is happening. In each of these approaches, below, the descriptions I have provided represent different philosophical schools, for example, such as in moral theory and art theory, such as in epistemology - which considers how we know what we know, and so on. Interestingly (and distressingly), to some extent these represent positions and schools that are often presented over against the other, which is to say as dichotomies or either-or choices rather than as useful distinctions describing different moments in an otherwise integral act of approaching reality. Now, I am not advocating a wimpy relativism but only am pointing out how one's temperamental preferences might often get "elevated" to the status of fetishes in one's approach to reality in pursuit of value.

Now, truth be known, what I have listed above represents forty distinct opportunities for conversion, for human development and redemption. These have otherwise been characterized positively, such as by Lonergan revised by Gelpi to include 1) intellectual 2) affective 3) moral 4) sociopolitical and 5) religious conversions, such as by Enneagram practitioners to include their nine capital sins. The astute observer will notice that my first nine categories correspond rather well (and in numerical order) to the nine enneatype "trances." This is perhaps most noticeable in my inventory of "neurotic solutions."

Not necessary --- but one can view The 40 Ways here:
http://bellsouthpwp.net/p/e/per-ardua-ad-astra/rogation/Rogation%20Days.htm

I am certain that for each of these forty ways of approaching reality --- and of growing and harvesting its values that it has in store for us --- that there are many anecdotes, many psalms and prayers, many opportunities to religiously convert and many ways to psychologically individuate. Maybe I'll compile same for a Lenten journey some day. My counsel is to keep your mouth shut, your eyes open and your ears to the ground, always mindful that the above-described dynamic is always at work in yourself and others, always dedicated to ongoing individuation and conversion while touching every base, all 40 of them. Use this list, self-critically, to take a fearless self-inventory. Observe others and try to see both their strengths and foibles in yourself. Some offer you the gift of a cautionary tale. Others are exemplars. All are your teachers. Few will be your students, at least eagerly and willingly. You'll be busy enough on self-improvement your whole life and, God-willing, with parenting. Leave others alone. Love them but don't endeavor to change them. Reality has an uncanny way of taking care of that, even if only in old age.

So, I commend the work of Scott Peck, Richard Rohr, Thomas Merton, Charles Curran, Hans Kung and others whose works populate my bookshelves. I commend both Myers-Briggs and Enneagram works of Catholic authors. It isn't an occult science of New Age provenance. It's just good old-fashioned, well-trained phenomenology, superb observation of the minutiae of human behavior well-describing the thats of human behavior long before the hows and whys of evolutionary psychology and modern neurology became known. The Enneagram is thus more than a parlor game, still moreso an art than a comprehensive science, ergo, don't make more of it in a casual application of it than is warranted without considerable attention to good neuroscience, however popularized such as by Andy Newberg, and modern psychology and psychiatry, such as by Rohr and Peck (and read his works re: the Devil).

Well, there you have it ... the outline for the book I'll most likely never write and for the thoughts that will thus only comprise my legacy in the way in which YOU will live and move and have your being ... in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, world without end. I’m not working on my legacy; YOU'RE IT!

God Bless,
jb

I did not address PRACTICAL solutions, other than becoming familiar with certain authors. Clarence Thomson is ALL ABOUT practical solutions, SO

Please see this NCR Podcast: http://ncrcafe.org/node/801
Enneagram for Catholics, a Tom Fox interview with Clarence Thomson