Where to find the picture for the Puzzle that I am?

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“It’s like I was trying to build a puzzle without a reference picture, the puzzle of who I am. I was trying to draw that picture with the stories of my inner dialogue.” – From my previous article: To “Go Deep” is to Go Through Your Noise.

How difficult it is to discern our way to conform our identity when attempting to be conscious! Because it is fairly simple to do it while we sleep.

In the “Go Deep” article, I investigated how we discern our way through reality’s layers and find that our own layers are interconnected or are interwoven with reality’s. It is a maze we must undertake and draw our own conclusions. But how can we make sense of the fact that animals and nonrational beings have all they need to live and evolve, and we must strive to do the same? Wasn’t this the main subject of the tale of Adam & Eve in Genesis (2:4-3:24)?

So, are we connected or disconnected from reality? And if so, how?

The tales we tell ourselves are key, they reveal who we think we are, and they can envision our way forward to what we can become. Stories are a succession of ideas that make sense and have a purpose. What reveals the layers of reality is the meaning we seek through those stories and discern our path forward to achieve the proverbial “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Functionally we were given this “command” with the revelation of our conscience – or should we say, “revealed by our choice when we used it?” Because, like it or not, we have an inner program running that pushes us to strive for achievement – unless something is wrong with us.

That drive clashes with our ideas of the world creating a continous tension. It is funny how we tend to think the “world is bad”, it is filled with deceit, injustice and betrayal. But in Genesis, the scripture writer goes out of his way to state that creation is Good. It repeats it seven times (Genesis 1) and in ancient Hebrew, seven is the number of completions, the number of irrefutable completeness. So, there is nothing evil in creation, darkness in the world is the result of our choices and actions.

The human dilemma is set: if identity is crucial for our transition towards achieving humanity’s fundamental aim, and our actions and choices entangle our capacity to discern our path forward – being the world as we made it what it is – are we doomed never to free ourselves from the consequences of our actions?

“Beauty will save the world.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869)

This longing for orientation is not new. Since ancient times, thinkers have tried to name the forces that call us forward. It was likely Socrates who first proposed that virtue and the pursuit of Truth and Goodness pull us toward human fulfillment. Plato later expanded this into a triad — Beauty, Goodness, and Truth — the eternal ideas that shaped our becoming, like gods drawing us to our telos (our ultimate aim or purpose).

There is beauty in Truth, goodness in beauty, and truth in goodness… they are all interwoven into one encompassing revelation of nature and even maybe of humanity. I guess this is what I want to investigate in this article. Are they character traits of something Other?

But why can we sense and are swayed by these three if we are meshed into reality by deceit, half-truths and self-disorientation? One likely answer is because the layers of all reality are structured and constituted by Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Also, our conscience seems to share and be constituted with the same structure as the layers of reality. However, we were given some special trait that enabled us to be will-oriented by our decisions – and thus we have to feel through our way this meshed-creation we have created interwoven with the special triad.

If where we focus expands, how do we set our mind’s inner dialogue to center around these three great characteristics of the layers of reality? How can we avoid being pulled back towards the darkness we have created through our ignorance and willful blindness?

What prayer isn’t

Humans cannot help but have faith at the base of everything they do… Without it, life would become an unbearable cascade of choices and doubts that would overwhelm and paralyze us. We explored this more deeply in the article The Frame Problem.

You couldn’t sit in a café and enjoy a conversation if you constantly doubted that the coffee was poisoned or that the chair wouldn’t hold your weight. You couldn’t drive your car if you didn’t believe the brakes would work when needed. You couldn’t send your child to school if you didn’t trust, at some level, that the teachers would care for them or that the environment was safe. Even opening a tap to drink water assumes faith in a vast and invisible infrastructure that supports our world.

Every action, from the most mundane to the most ambitious, is sustained by the quiet trust that things will work as expected; that people will act roughly within moral bounds, that systems will hold, and that our efforts will produce results.

Faith is not an abstract virtue… it is the operating principle of human life.

It gives us the vision we need to navigate the complex layers of reality… to sift through what is and what is not. Our identity uses faith as eyesight, and our identity benefits from the outcome of our path forward confirming its cohesion and integrity.

The dilemma lies in that identity is not set in a cast and has no solid constitution, it is a malleable uniqueness that is molded by our beliefs, the ideas we hold as our own, by circumstances that bounce back from our actions, by the interaction with others and how they perceive our identity – all those layers are interwoven in a subtle interaction that runs with such speed that our mind does not perceive it and so it does micro-adjustments to make sure the “identity” does not crack or is sent in disarray – and so we use our faith to keep going on.

There are instances when all this mesh of dynamic interaction stops. One is when we encounter Beauty, Goodness and Truth. We are brought out of our identity-whirlpool and we are absorbed into something other that reminds us we are meant for more.

Some experiences move us so deeply that we try to recreate them. For some, this becomes addiction or compulsion — a desperate attempt to escape the weight of everyday life. For others, it leads to seeking, to prayer, to a desire to make that moment of clarity or transcendence part of daily life. In all cases, the Self glimpses a way out… and wants more. All of them have a perception delusion: it wasn’t created by our actions. We were awakened from our inner story as a free gift, it was grace – it was the structure of reality moving you towards Meaning, trying to wake you up and humble you to receive more… much more!

Just maybe it compensates the force of animal instinct we lost with the resurgence of conscience… a mystery for sure!

Stories outside that model our own stories

The Bible stories have great wealth of these type of tales, and yet we have so dismissed them. We got so accustomed to these narratives, that their Beauty, Goodness and Truth no longer awaken us from the dreamlike life we carry.

And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
– Exodus 3:2

Moses found something that defied reality’s rules, something Other that did not fit his understanding of the facts of reality. It stopped him on his tracks. Moses’ attention was drawn close to investigate…

And Moses said, “I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.”
And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, “Moses, Moses.” And he said, “Here am I.”
– Exodus 3:3-4

In this story in particular, it is Moses’ interaction with this reality that ‘stopped him on his track’ that ends up revealing to him, in due time, who he really was, not what he told himself who he was.

Beauty, Goodness and Truth calls on us at all times, but we are entangled “attending” our business. It is the flames of the primordial essence that constituted reality at the beginning of time. But we are so overwhelmed by stimulus that has made us dormant before Beauty, Goodness and Truth… we’ve become so cynical that we believe they are a construct of culture. If they were, they would last in our mental space like commercial spots do. No, they are the columns that hold the edifice of all that is, the main characteristics of Meaning, the essence of what we seek – they hold who we are to become. They are the call to adventure, to come out of our slumber and discover into who we are to transform.

Another Biblical Story reminds us of our call

In Genesis we find an old man who still lives in the house of his father and is content with affluence and the coziness of life… he dwells in his comfort-zone.

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”
– Genesis 12:1

The call to adventure is ever calling on us to go forth and be more. It is the instantiation of “be fruitful and multiply.” Our instincts may not provide all we need to push forward towards who we need to become; we need a different relation with the layers of reality.

When we chose to follow the call, nothing guarantees that things will go perfect and no problems will arise. In fact, the contrary is true. The adventure of our lives is to travel to where we don’t know to become who we were to be since we were born.

“There are two great days in a person’s life:
the day we are born and the day we discover why.”
– Mark Twain

You cannot escape it, and even if you do, you do it at your own peril. We seek meaning as the fuel to empower us to push forward, and we use faith to vision where we are going. Tales of all types captivate our need to “be fruitful and multiply”. And there is more, there is a promise in the following of the adventure-call, in the Bible God confirms to Abram:

I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
– Genesis 12:2-3

That is a relation with reality that is the ultimate goal of life – not to “be happy”. To put into context the meaning of this promise: the assurance of survival for people who live in the desert is numbers, “I will make you into a great nation” is the most important value for a family who lives in the desert. The rest of the promise is an ideal relation with the structure of reality.

In Christian circles the change that is caused by directing our faith to Him who is the Source and Foundation of all, The Christ, enables the person to be born-again.

Whatever is hidden in the layers of reality calls us to awake

True, our instincts are not enough to guide our lives; true, there is beauty in following the call to adventure… we are meant to find the hidden goodness in our layers and discard the cynic and inner fool who attempts to have his whim at every turn. Being happy is not our aim, being happy is fleeting, it’s a smoke-like aim. Joy is the result of an attitude, what we are granted when we have faith in Him who calls on us to follow Him.

‘Ideas in motion’ teach us the path forward. Profound tales show us how to act, be and share our path towards our destiny. Hold those ideas that edify you, seek the stories that remind you who you truly are. You know you need to sacrifice, you know you need to risk the safety of your comfort zone. In this world of time-space continuum, the greater the volume, the more attraction it poses on all satellite people and situations… Beauty, Goodness and Truth are the heaviest and most powerful elements that transcend our instincts and are tying to awaken us – it is like the sun that pulls us to itself, attempting to keep us close so we can have the warmth and life we need to fulfill our fundamental aim: “be fruitful and multiply.”

It turns out… the reference picture was always there, just waiting to be seen.

For me they are embodied in Jesus The Christ, and when I have faith in Him, He emboldens me to step into the adventure I am meant to assume, and His grace changes my thoughts, the stories I tell myself, and empowers my will, awakening every aspect of my conscience and transforming me from within.

Try it and see what happens!