Self, Love, and Wisdom: Three Interconnected Spheres

My wife recently had a serious bike accident.  She has since recovered, but she easily could have died. Such an event knocks the nonsense out of you.  I have been postponing writing this essay; I feared I was not up to the task.  That may be, but now more than ever do I understand Hillel’s famous words; If not now, when?

Three Interconnected Spheres: Self, Love, and Wisdom

1. The Self           

If I am not for myself, who is for me? –Hillel

In my long career as a pediatrician, I have seen many examples of troubled children who grew up to be troubled adults.  Houses without a firm foundation are at the mercy of unstable earth below them; if they don’t stand on solid ground, existence for their inhabitants is precarious. For human beings, a firm foundation refers to support and love during the crucial years of development.  A strong sense of self is not self-caused.

In many instances, children whom I have treated came from broken homes with little social support.  I can recall many examples of insufficient parental involvement, e.g. single mothers who slept late and expected their children to go to elementary school by themselves.  What should have been homes, were merely houses; meals entailed giving a child money to eat at McDonald’s alone. 

I am not blaming anyone, I am merely pointing out a psychological law: a healthy sense of self is necessary in order to lead a good life; without its formation in childhood, however, serious life-long problems arise.  Despite having endured a difficult childhood, even for that individual all is not lost: love that comes later can help a seriously psychologically injured person recover.  But in almost all cases, that person will never remove all the scars, and some of the injuries will remain as open wounds; we can presume that one would have had a much happier life if one had not been injured in the first place. 

Humans can hate, humans can love, but nature is always indifferent. If one falls into a ditch and cannot get out, gravity certainly will never ease up to enable the person to float to safety. Yes, a human being can lower a ladder, descend, and help the fallen stranger to get back into the world.  But that person has troubles of his own; that person has fallen into his own ditch, as it were, and is busy trying to extricate himself from his shallow pit and has little energy left over to help his neighbor out of a deeper one. 

I remember attending a Unitarian service in New York City over forty years ago.  Shortly after the service began, a seriously troubled man entered the church; he was poorly dressed, unkempt and probably homeless.  As is the case with many homeless people, he also appeared to have mental problems.  He walked up and down the central aisle without saying a word, obviously seeking help. Although he appeared to be desperate, nobody, including myself,  reached out to him in any way.  After a while, realizing that he would find as much support from us as he would from stones, he left.  The minister continued the service without ever having acknowledged the poor man, as if he had been merely static which we good Christians had tuned out.

“Nobody want you when you’re down and out” is as true now as when Bessie Smith sang the song so beautifully in 1929.  Another old saying is, "God helps people who help themselves".  
Self-reliance is certainly a good thing,  but this bromide is often used as a shaming insult to ditch dwellers.  If one lacks the wherewithal to help oneself; if one is lost in the labyrinth of an ill mind; if one lacks a functioning self,  God, that is nature, will provide no ladder to extricate the fallen individual from his prison.  Passers-by will pass by, self-absorbed with their own problems and cognizant of the enormous and time-consuming effort it would take to rescue one who has sunk so low; to assuage their conscience, many will demonize the fallen and attribute their descent to a free-will choice of depravity.  

We human beings must  be reasonably “self-fit” before we can fit in well with other selves. An important aspect of being self-fit is the development of empathy, including empathy for those who are quite different from ourselves.  Empathy for others as well as for oneself is more readily developed when one becomes more aware of the miracle of consciousness, the highest good in the universe that we know.  The realization which naturally follows,0 that one image of God, as it were, is not better than another, certainly fosters empathy.  Society demands that we must judge another’s behavior when that behavior is harmful to others; judging the person, however, is never warranted, despite the fact that this is the norm.  We don’t even know ourselves well enough to judge ourselves, much less the workings of a different mind raised in a different environment. 

Just because a person is different from us doesn’t make that person inferior or superior.  As Walt Whitman wrote, “Nor do I criticize the turtle for not being something else.”

You did not make the weed.  You did not make the redwood.  Nor did you create yourself.  The proper response to all three is awe.  Only one who has developed both self-respect and respect for others can realize, despite greed, despite hate, despite delusion, this essential inner fact: we are all intrinsically good; we are all who knows how? amazingly alive. The reality of a balanced self-hood should make us humble; if we had a different brain chemistry and a different environment, we would be a different person.  We are who we are largely due to factors beyond our control; once we realize this, how can we ever be in a position to judge others?

In summary.  to do well for ourselves and for others requires a firm foundation, a healthy sense of self.

2. Love              

If I am only for myself, what am I?

                                                           --Hillel

In nature, inanimate entities such as stones are perfect; seen from above with a transcendent eye, self is perfect as well. Seen with a human eye, however, things are different: from a humane perspective, much of our behavior is far from perfect, and, when it inflicts harm on others, even evil. No doubt about it, a cosmic eye sees perfection everywhere; from an earthly perspective, however—and we all live on earth—a self without love is, to put it mildly, deficient.

“Love, then do what you want,” ("Ama, et quod vis fac"), is an adage Augustine famously wrote well over a thousand years ago.  It is generally true, but Leviticus 18:19 is more accurate: love your neighbor as yourself.  If love is not grounded in Leviticus 18:19, love can lead one astray, as we shall see.  The biblical injunction implies a combination of a beloved self and a loving self.  As we have seen in the previous section, without a functioning sense of self, love is well-nigh impossible.  Note that the commandment does not enjoin loving your neighbor more than yourself but as yourself. 

Jesus of Nazareth taught that one should always “turn the other cheek”.  If this commandment is followed literally, one would not survive for long.  “He who lives by the sword, shall die by the sword.”  Simone Weil agreed, but added that he who puts down the sword, dies on the Cross. The middle-road interpretation of Leviticus 18:19 includes justification for legitimate self-defense.

One is perhaps closer to the truth when one interprets Jesus’s statement as a deliberate exaggeration to reduce  greed, hate, and pride.  If it is interpreted literally, it is not in accord with the Golden Rule.  Taken figuratively, however, Jesus’s advice enjoins us to significantly reduce the desire for revenge and to significantly increase the practice of love and wisdom, much-needed advice indeed.

Of the three rungs discussed in this essay, self, love, and wisdom, love is by far the one most sung about and written about.  Love is indeed a powerful emotion, but is more than a matter of feeling; it is a course of action that often requires hard work.

All of us at least on occasion worship an idol that tells us, “You’re good and they’re bad”--“they” being members of another race, class, or nationality, all neighbors whom we refuse to accept as equals.

Love must begin locally—with oneself and one’s family—If it stops there and doesn’t radiate to include others, and doesn’t continue to radiate to include the whole world, it is a poor version of love indeed.  The wonderful Native American saying that teaches us not to judge another until we walk a mile in that person’s moccasins, illustrates an essential combination of love and wisdom, that, unfortunately, is not the way of the world.

A recent example of a lapse of judgment, a failure to internalize the aforementioned Native American adage, is a recent quote by the retired neurosurgeon, Dr. Benjamin Carson.  He said that if you took everything away from a successful man and plopped him down in a ghetto, he would be back on his feet in no time.  Similarly, if you took a "typical” person from a poor neighborhood and provide him with a lot of material support, he would never get to Gold Town—his attitude would confine him to Lead Town forever.

No, Dr. Carson; you rose from the ghetto, but you had a lot of advantages: intelligence, and a mother who insisted that you work hard. One isn’t even in a position to judge oneself, much less the effect that a specific environment and a specific internal environment has had in making a person who he currently is. 

Dr. Carson is also forgetting an essential fact: if the advantaged had practiced Lev. 18:19, there wouldn’t be any ghettos in the first place.

One of the greatest moral errors is the haughtiness that arises when one compares one’s own success to the perceived failure of others.  In Dr. Carson’s case, the faulty reasoning is as follows: ‘I succeeded and came from the same neighborhood.  The reason why many have failed is simply due to laziness, etc.'  Judge not lest ye be judged, taught a wise man whom Dr. Carson worships, but not always follows.

Love is a noble emotion, yet it can lead one astray when combined with ignorance and egotism.  One of my favorite examples of this is a poem by Baldur von Shirach, the notorious Nazi of Vienna who “loved” Hitler.  (Granted that some Nazis were far worse than he, but being a rotten piece of fruit among even more rotten pieces of fruit is hardly complimentary).  He wrote a love poem to Hitler, called “Er,” (“He”) extolling in a dreadfully bad poem the virtues of a dreadfully bad man.

Love of oneself is good; love of one’s family is good as well.  But if that love is not extended to include the stranger—as Hitler’s certainly wasn’t—that love can cause a great deal of harm. When Lev. 18:19 is put into practice, however, the individual is transformed, and if enough people follow suit, society will be redeemed.  Who has ever known the meaning of life without experiencing love for oneself, one’s family and love for one’s neighbor?

We now have the image of the second sphere, love, and the combination of the two, self and love.

                 

We should strive to live in the area that is a combination of each.  For self without love is selfish; for love without a well-developed self is like sowing the seeds of happiness among thistles. We still have an essential sphere to add, however.

3. Wisdom        

                                    --Tat Tvam Asi, Thou art that

                                               --The Upanishads

In general, Western religions emphasize love, while Eastern religions emphasize wisdom.  Meditation, perfected in Buddhism, is a way to transcend oneself by objectifying personal thoughts.  Meditation thus fosters wisdom, the realization that everyone and everything are connected.

This is well expressed by a poem by Michael Ende, which I translated form the German several years ago, “The Actual Apple”.

A writer and a  realist, well known

for his literality,

searched for something found at home

to delineate from A to Z:

an apple, for instance, an organic bit,

and all that goes along with it.

He described the core, the pulp, the skin,

the stem, the leaves, the branch, the tree,

the roots, the ground the roots grew in,

and Newton's Law of Gravity--

But that wasn't the actual apple at all;

he must include spring, summer, winter, and fall,

the sun and the moon and the stars--

He filled enough paper to paper a wall,

yet the ending seemed farther than quasars:

for actually he belonged there too,

this man of prose who hated verse,

and Adam and Eve and I and you

and God and the whole universe--

Finally he became fully aware

that apples are just indescribably there;

neither he nor another shall ever define

something so common, something so sublime--

He lifts his apple to the light;

smiling now, he takes a bite.

Love and wisdom can and should work together, as they do in the Great Commandment.When we love our neighbor as ourselves, our self-orientation can no longer be selfish—We learn that the center of creation is outside ourselves—in others—as well as inside ourselves.  Just as the center of the Big Bang is everywhere, the center of an inner universe is everywhere as well. We need to realize, if we are to lead full and just lives, that everyone is central to the universe.

Wisdom provides guidance for love that has gone astray.  Let us return to Baldur von Shirach’s love poem to Hitler  Hitler’s violent antisemitism is incompatible with wisdom, the knowledge that everything is connected, and that every human being deserves respect. In the eye of wisdom, the worth of a Jew is not in any way less than the worth of a Christian.  Love that only extends to one’s group--and in Hitler’s case, that was a perverse love as well—is like comparing the light of family hearth to the light of the sun.

I do not claim that love or wisdom has a supernatural origin; they originated via evolutionary adaptation to the environment.  Both of these virtues helped the individual and the group survive—and be happy.  I am not claiming that wisdom and love are merely biologically derived, either.  One cannot deny that both feel divine.

Now we can present the venn diagram that represents the best way to live:

It is in the area that is common to all three circles where self is not selfish; where love is never foolish and where wisdom is never dry.

When we go astray, the union of love, wisdom, and self acts like a magnet to draw us back to where we should be.  For instance, if we love our family but disparage those of another culture or ethnic origin, our diagram elicits the following questions: Is that love?  Is that wise?  Is that all we are? Similarly, if we enrich ourselves while depredating the environment, our diagram reveals that we have gone beyond where we should be at all times. 

Now we can return to Augustine's famous quote: love, then do what you want.  This, as we now can see, is valid only when that love resides in the common area of self, love, and wisdom.

I invite you to internalize this diagram and use it to monitor your behavior as well as the the behavior of others.  Should a wall be built between Mexico and the United States?  If we are speaking from the joint area of the three circles, the answer is obvious.  Should we accept capital punishment; should we break up families by deporting a mother or father who has lived here for a long time; should we continue to jail people for marijuana possession; are we doing enough to decrease racism and to foster peace, etc.  The questions are endless.  If we live where we should be, however, the answer to every one of them, however, is the same.

I would be pleased to receive comments from those who live where they should be, as well as from those who are moving, or at least desire to move, in the right direction.

If not now, when?