Authors: Romuald B. Simeone and Chiara Simeone-DiFrancesco, Ph.D.
As I gaze out at my audience or visualize those clicking onto my website. My eyes see not just the people present, but a metaphoric crowd of “human books“. They are all bound in identical covers listed under “human species” and are indexed by “auto-bio authored”. And so it is with any and all of the 8-9 billions inhabiting home-earth today and those of ages past. Yes, each of us daily, yearly unwittingly write our own memoir-ed autobiography on diary pages and stage-of-growth chapters what we culturally receive, believe and act on….what we experience, endure, accept, reject and make us to be what we are today. Each bio-book you are, contains stage of life chapters with common and distinct positive and negative experiential circumstances that are etched in your conscious and unconscious memory files. What a complex story each of you can narrate! If each significant event undergone were printed in factual detail and the effect it made in your life, it would produce a veritable encyclopedia of information running the entire gamut of human experience and circumstance. Every stage and variable evolution of personal growth, every relational and cultural experience passing and stable would emerge even to the author’s surprise!
I have noted a phenomenon that seems stranger yet. The predominant plots that interweave the warp and woof of every human bio are a dual complexity that patterns every human life, one of material-physical content and the other of the spiritual-rational. In each stage of life (initiating childhood, developing youth, independent adulthood and goal-attaining maturity) each circumstantial experience and each mode of action gives us indefinite applications and effects that make each person as distinct as a unique subspecies. One’s Humanness of common faculties of rational animal with all that entails of needs and rights is universal and constant in all… a unity that is designed to fit all in peaceful possession and mutual recognition.
But one’s variables, the experiences and circumstances of multi-relational contacts and effects are personal and not applicable to all…. Diversity is only applicable to individuals and as such may clash against the whole.
To elucidate: the above distinction presents foundational information to understand the Nature of Morality. Human Morality must be a Universal-Relational Law of Moral Behavior. It must be inherent to the spiritual-rational elements in humanity and as constant to the species as the Laws of Physics apply to all material elements. Since it is substantive it cannot be self-generated by the species itself but must be placed by the Designing Being that patterned its nature and goals. No being can ever pattern its own nature, but can only fit into its own species or perish.
The Human has in its nature (essence) the faculty of free-will Choice. This is unique in all observable essences, the ability to reverse the predominance of one’s common spiritual-goaled rational Humanness for unity of peaceful relationship. There can be no common morality in chosen diversity. Its prioritizing only belongs to the experiential and circumstantial, the personal, and the promotion of clash diversity cannot be universalized. It contradicts the essence of Substantive Design or Law. Moral means “Law”: universal, common, harmonious and non-self creating.
This distinction marks the two principal ways of life’s mold-models. You will understand and see that these two influence and determine the past present and future formation of every individual in every human generation. Examine how they affect and effect your own bio. See how these 2 modes factually blend yet vie for supremacy in the molding of each human life bio. We can metaphorically speak of these in one’s personal book of life as what defines oneself. Together they accent the reason for existence, one’s way of life, the harmonious implementation of the span of each one’s life that gives it purpose, the active movement to a goal and satisfying fulfillment.
Back to your Bio-Book. It is always an ACTION BOOK OF LIFE -yours. But which way of Life’s Mold-Models does it fit? In a word… there are BASIC 2 WAYS OF LIFE…
ONE: THE SECULARIST MODEL:
● defined by the here and now; the one of time limits marked only by dates (b. 1995, d.2045).
● defined by cultural compliance like identical coins stamped with a different date… created and controlled by the role-makers of the era (Hippies, Boomers, Rockers, Yuppies, Millennials, Yuppies, Progressives, Conservatives, Sporties, Druggies, the Liberated, Abortionists, Feminists, the pro the anti and the neutrals, the Go-alongs and the Selfies). And so on and on and on ad inifinitum…)
● defined by solely idiosyncratic decision &choice… Present Secularism… under many names like Modernism etc, basically self-centered atheist, agnostic, Gnostic, humanist, illuminist, evolutionary, etc. …mandated & implemented by those in self-centered, self-choice determining, self-interpreting, self-implementing Role-Control of one’s cultural system… whether political, national, educational, social, recreational, moral, commercial, or personal. All these control and relate to one’s specific place of habitation and time.
TWO: THE ONE THAT RESTS ON THE SUBSTANTIVE NATURE OF THE HUMAN:
●that pre-determined by Nature and its Designer
● that which joins the animal, the rational, the moral and the relational.
● that based on the fulfilling of Needs’ systems that are universal and equal in the species.
● that where Needs are filled according to design, attain their common end.
Practical Exercise: #1:
Look into each Chapter of your Bio-Book and discover who you were/are… Who, why and to what extent were you effected by Controls, Influencing Directives, Outside Cultures, Inner Rejections and Applications, Personal Responses, Talents and Goals, Schema Lifetraps Inflicted, Relationships, Interests, Self-comforting Modes, etc. Apply these in affecting one of your four stages of life…. controlled Childhood, emerging Youth/Growth, independent Adulthood and accomplishing Maturity.
Practical Exercise # 2:
Continue your Bio-Book and like a new re-born child deliberately re-parent oneself. Deliberately follow not the physical model of existential animal-want instinctive existence and life-style, but by giving priority to the substantive rational/mindful Spirit element and model. That is, to think, judge and behaviorally act according to universal nature-conforming reality that is validated by attaining a human’s natural goals. This limits physical/animal goals in balanced subservience. Nature’s direction is given by the non-manmade laws of physics, by inherent universal human conscience of peaceful fulfillment (justice), and Creator revelation, teaching and modeling.
Practical Exercise # 3:
Re-edit and re-write by experiential modeling a more desirable narrative worthy of valid human witness. With deliberate effort one’s following pages can better fit one’s parent-predicted childhood imagination and hopeful expectations. One can then move on to re-establish one’s youthful talent-provoking exaggerations with realistic goals, and with independent collaboration and adaptation, attain mature accomplishment. It takes maturity to experientially evaluate in order to correct and re-form unto completion. Only then can the Bio-Book be worthy of healthy adult accomplishment and determine one own life a memorable legacy worth the living, and a life fulfilled. .
Your Final Chapter: The best self-help Book, the most successful well-monitored for the seeking and needy, with added personal tutoring and modeling is the New Testament. Get Jesus-centered help that is given by teaching and modeling throughout His Bio on every page and every circumstantial variation. Go to Jesus and try His way and life. Read His Father’s Book, the one of His self-revelation through His creation of the physical universe, (exposing the oxymoronic contradiction of “pre-existent matter”) and of His placing of universal Morality of Conscience, the conviction of good and evil in the human brain, and the division-clashes in human history when conscience is denied.
Note that all who follow Jesus’ Image of Word and Model always improve their own book-bio even when it is done imperfectly and partial. It becomes a new bio that even God delights to read… your eternal Book of Life!
©Dialog International Press, LLC, October 15, 2015