Balance: Temperance, Order, Control
Humans beings are nothing if not passionate, nothing at all. We are fueled by the innate desires within us. These feelings drive our ethics, lifestyle and all that we know to be right in the world. But within this we are impressionable, both our senses to perceive the outside world, and the appraisal of the significance of our internal emotional state can be clouded. We oscillate between poles of happy and sad, hungry and full, love and hate. These binaries are not so simple, in fact nearly all of the nuance in our world come from the gradations of these states. This brings us incredible beauty and complexity. The sophistication of our emotions is as vast as the variations all the shades of color.
The fall back from all this is color and complexity that is becomes difficult to find neutrality. We are unsure if the human mind is even capable of truly being subjective. As we look out in to the world of all these colors how can we not qualify them as “good” or “bad”? We are built with psycho-emotional resonators that help us navigate the world in our search for pleasure, food, and safety. This ever present quest for homeostasis leaves us bound to our own bias.
This is why we must speak about this. If we are to ever learn empathy, compassion, and find truth and justice, we must learn to recognize these things for how they appear beyond our powers of sensation. To know truth, we must know not only our own truth, but be able to recognize where our perspective reduces our ability to see clearly. I personally wear prescriptive glasses to help refocus the way I see the world. I know that my vision is not as clear as it could be so I take actions to augment my view of things to something that is more consistent, reliable, and accurate.
We must be pro active about augmenting our sense of cognitive perception as well. Through out this month we will be engaging in conversations, thought exercises and researching how best to bring ourselves to a place of temperance. Where we can both acknowledge out passions but not let them override our judgement.
How can we learn to share our feelings in constructive ways that contribute to our understanding and quest for wisdom instead of hindering our ability to accept what is before us? These are things we will hope to uncover and we will most certainly fall short, but I implore you to join us as we attempt it.
Enjoi
-Maceo Paisley-
