We all share the common concerns for life, truth, disclosure, worthiness, relationships, brokenness, and death. This charting of our choices highlights the egoistic, altruistic, and holistic attitudes by which we address them. Simply discussing this tabling of your guiding spirits will quickly orient you in some timeless issues that play out in your life and shape your joy both now and in the hereafter.
Talking It Through
You might start by reflecting on how you were encouraged as a child by parents and friends to win a race or come out on top in some other contest. Later, if you were caught up in interschool competitions as a teenager, you were probably encouraged to play in a manner that would help your team win. Some come to recognize that fair competition and well refereed rules were more important than which team won, as they grow older. Maybe you see why personal superiority, then social influence, and finally oneness with life change over time as one lives through youth, adulthood, and old age.
The natural shift in emphasis is captured in the saying that winning isn’t everything, it’s how your play the game. But what if the game is competing for a job, being successful at your job, and being fulfilled in your work? Can you see how a desire for personal superiority would morph into desire for social influence and finally change into a desire for oneness with life when thinking about vocations? Discussing these changes in the children you’ve watched, the parents and adults you’ve encountered, and the grandparents and senior citizens you’ve known will bring home the timeless relevance of these inner desires.
When a vital concern in the table lies at the heart of a personal question being addressed, the emotional consequences of the guiding spirit being heeded stands out. You need only think of the different feelings that swept over you when someone deceived you in a personal relationship or business transaction. Which of the three underlying desires do you feel inspired their deception? Contrast your emotional experience with the feelings pervading youth, religious, military, or civic groups when enthusiastically joined in voicing their beliefs and allegiances. What underlying desire might evoke their needing to agree. Now consider the feelings Copernicus might have felt when he directly and mathematically countered his church’s belief in the early 1500s that the sun revolves around the earth. What underlying desire would have given him the courage to disagree with his religious institution? What life concern do you see being emphasized in each of these vastly different contexts.
If you spend some time discussing a few personal concerns that really matter to you, the emotions associated with the vital concerns and attitudes by which you address them will jump to life. But was the important concern a choice or did it simply arise and you found yourself dealing with it?
Interestingly, we do not choose to address our concerns egoistically, altruistically, and holistically. If our actions are largely seen to stem from the attitudes in the first column, our self-orientations will be labeled egoistic; if from those in the second column, altruistic; if from those in the third, holistic. Those self-orientation labels, when appropriate, respectively reflect the prominence in our daily lives of our underlying desire for personal superiority, social influence, and oneness with life. You will learn much about yourself in discussing these deeper desires and how you see their consequences when prominent in someone’s life.
Reflecting Back
What aspects of this tabling of underlying desires, vital concerns, and guiding spirits most mesh with your understandings of how we look at life?
For what words of the table do you feel there are more appropriate synonyms?
