WHO SETS THE BOUNDARIES FOR HUMAN BEHAVIOR?

As I look out at what is going on in the transactions of human events around me, doing so with my unique set of skills peculiar to me (you have your own set), I can’t help but think that human beings are adrift in a sea of casuistry and rationalism, picking up the behavioral flavor of the month, deluding themselves into thinking that what is easy is the truth rather than was is right.

The problem with this thinking is that, for me to believe in a way of thinking that leads to the truth about life as it presents itself to me each day, I must give up my human predilection to be the arbiter of what is good or evil and abandon my free will in favor of a way that is difficult and overshadowed by the image of the cross.

No one in their right mind wants to do this if you hold B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theory that all animals (“and I am one”) must behave in a way that reacts to pleasure and pain automatically, the hypothesis being that no one wants to choose pain. When Christ comes along (making the trip from divinity to humanity), and introduces a seemingly contradictory paradigm that is almost (but not entirely opposite) of the pleasure/pain duality, He does so by actually living out the behaviors he proposes through a lifetime of examples. As The Christ Principle, the Hero of Humanity, the message is clear to those who have the correct assumptions. If you want to reach the next level of your humanity, you must choose what is right over what feels good and is consistent with human reasoning. Who would want to do that? It seems that the vast majority of humans fall into the latter category.

When I ask the question, “Who sets the boundaries for human behavior that propels us to the higher potential of our species?” I get two possible options for knowledge, love, and what is absolute truth.

1. The first possibility is. “I am the way that leads to what is true, and so what I do in my life is correct, because it comes from me.” In one sense, this is correct, according to the thinking of a citizen of this world alone. I am indeed the only one who can say YES or NO to anything. The problem comes when everyone else has the same characteristic of having reason and the ability to choose what is good or bad for them. I can say YES or NO to God as the template of absolute truth if I think about it.
2. The second option is painful for my human instincts and reasoning and goes against the innate struggle within me to resist anyone who disagrees with me. I don’t like anyone, including God to tell me what to do. The only solution is to give up my inherent human charisma of free will and say that I will use something outside of myself as the mindset in which I make choices. To be fair, God is not the only exclusive choice here. I can be Democrat or Republican, pro-life or pro-choice in my thinking about the sanctity of life, or even another set of religious assumptions to which I give assent. Because my assumption about God is that of absolute truth, there are no competing ideologies that supersede God. God’s paradigm becomes my own at Baptism when God adopts me as a member of the family. I have the rest of my life to discover what that means and how I can deny myself of what seems to be my humanity in favor of a deeper dimension of my evolution, not the result of natural selection or mental reasoning.

GOD AS SHEPHERD OF HUMAN BOUNDARIES

The Book of Genesis, that marvelous commentary on human nature and the consequences of free choice, sets a boundary for human behaviors when Adam and Eve (prototypes of humanity) were given a choice to choose from the tree of the knowledge of good or evil and it was “Don’t eat of the fruit of this tree.” This first archetypal boundary demonstrates the interrelatedness of God as a benevolent Father trying to help Adam and Eve do what is right versus what is easy.

Adam said NO to this advice from God. Remember this anthropomorphic language is for humans to grasp a glimmer of what is going on. As we, in our seemingly sophisticated century look at this human interaction, it is important to note that the consequences of this archetypal choice affect all humans and is the source of trying to struggle with a) What is good or evil in our age? b) Who is the absolute standard against which all truth becomes real?

The Boundaries of reality are contained in the Map of Teilhard (unattributed) as a way I use to see the boundaries of time and matter and the natural movement of it all by complexity and consciousness. Divine Nature intervened into chronological time on three occasions (See Teilhard map).

1. THE GENESIS PRINCIPLE — Creation itself is a boundary in that macro sense (there is a beginning and an ending. The creator is pure knowledge, pure love, and pure service or energy. To sign this masterpiece of creation, the creator left a signature on each atom or molecule, a fingerprint or DNA that, similar to magnetic poles, seeks its own level. Life began as a result of this revolutional evolution going from matter to mind, following a predetermined pathway that might be called boundaries. Nature is the natural progression from inanimate to animate lifeforms. It happens automatically without intervention from matter or mind. We react to this natural, intelligent progression by learning, a lifetime at a time, what it means to be human. If the gulf from matter to mind seems great, what is even more astounding is that anyone evolved self-awareness from this seeming hodge-podge of movement through time. The transition from animality to rationality seems to have been a rocky one for the human species. The Book of Genesis couches it in terms of a Garden Paradise with a before and after testing to determine who would set the boundaries. The archetypal literary form of Genesis gives an answer to the longing of the human heart to “know” how to act as a human being, given that the default of our nature inclines more to animality than rationality. This “yo-yo” effect is the subject of human thinking and behaviors from the very beginning. The first example is Cain killing Abel because of anger, hatred, jealousy, envy, etc… In this period from the first Adam to the second Adam, humanity was floundering in a sea of this or that ideology. Does movement from one form of human consciousness derive from within humanity or outside of it from that very one who started all of this intelligent progress? If The Genesis Principle raises the question about what it means to be human at a deeper level, having been recorded in the Books of the Old Testament, and piloted by the Twelve Tribes of Israel, then the answer comes from the next cosmic paradigm shift, The Christ Principle.
2. THE CHRIST PRINCIPLE — The longing of the Jewish people for someone to set boundaries for them is evident from the Old Testament prescriptions which the Tribes placed as core to what it means to be a people of God, notably the Ten Commandments and other laws designed to set limits to the human tendency to revert back to its animality rather than forward to the next level of evolution. Much of the New Testament reflects the transition from Old to New Testament boundaries. Read the 613 Mitzvot of the Jewish Tradition. https://www.jmu.edu/dukehallgallery/exhibitions-past-2018-2019/the-613-mitzvot.shtml Enter Divinity into Humanity for the second time. This time Divinity became humanity because boundaries had to be expanded to include all humanity and set human nature back on course that would lead to our revisiting the Garden of Even before the Fall and assuming our nature’s intent, to be now adopted sons and daughters of the Father, to have the ability and the energy to move from corruptibility to incorrutibility, taking with us what each of us has learned about what it means to be human. Love is the answer to this next longing of the human spirit, but not love as the world gives it. Profound love is dying to that false self that seems to hold humans back from their destiny by making them hostages to their own whims and emotions. Nothing here exists past death. Not only did Christ tell us the way, but showed us by dying on the cross in ignominy only to transform into that mystic Hero that led the people (Israel and all humanity) out of the desert of mind and matter and into the promised land of knowledge, love, and service of others. This is the WAY that each of us must tread, unique to our life experiences. I am not you and you are not me; God is not us, nor are we God. Nature proceeds to move down this path of reality using the boundaries set by its creator and redeemer. If creation is the why of our human condition, then redemption is both the why and the what of being at that next level of our human nature. But, there is a problem. We must make an individual effort every day to keep that grass of our life mowed, lest it grow beyond its boundaries and choke off life. This is the next level of our evolution, The Spirit of Truth.
3. THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH — This is the template that overlays all that is and determines not only who makes the boundaries of what is good or evil but what those boundaries are. The Spirit of Truth is not a concept or idea formed by the adequation of what is real to what is true, but rather, it is the living expression of the why of creation to the what and why of redemption. The Spirit of Truth is the result of the knowledge of the creator of life loving The Christ Principle with pure energy (100% of its nature, in this case, divine nature). Humans have neither the capability nor the capacity to know what this pure knowledge, pure love is. The Spirit of Truth is energy that permeates all matter and the mind and allows humans to be adopted, sons and daughters. Another way to look at this is, that we are given access to the kingdom, the power of the Divine Nature, and to offer glory of human thanks for this gift to be able to live at a level of our humanity that leads to the fulfillment of what nature intended all along but humans thwarted by being unable to learn how to control their instincts and emotions. The one who is the creator, the one who is the redeemer, and the one who is the product of their love is the spirit of truth are one nature, yet three distinct energies that, just exist because they exist. Human reason is not built to grasp a reality of this nature. Because of the love of The Christ Principle for all humanity, individual humans are afforded the gift of dying to that humanity that keeps us from moving to the next level of our evolution, to be lifted up, once again, by a nature outside of our humanity, to not be another nature, but to be the fulfillment and the next level of humanity’s intelligent progress and move toward the Omega point with Faith that the world of the Spirit of Truth is true. We do not deserve such an opportunity because of anything we did but only because of what Christ did as a ransom for many to buy back that which was pawned by humanity’s human nature and to restore our life’s experiences, whatever they might be to packing for the journey to Heaven. This is not truth as the world sees it, but absolute truth that can and does transform each individual into a collective gathering with One Faith, One Baptism,

Because we want to play in God’s playground, God sets the boundaries. The problem humans face is “What are those boundaries?”

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