6 ASPECTS OF THE SELF

What aspects of ourselves are important to consider if our goal is full flourishing?

VERY BRIEF OVERVIEW

We can start with
- 1. our DNA,
then move to:
- 2. the inner self,
- 3. physical health,
- 4. the personal world,
- 5. the social/civic/political world,
- and 6. on to the cosmic.

I'll go over this twice more, each time with a bit more detail.

BRIEF OVERVIEW of the 6 ASPECTS

1.
Once again, we start with DNA, recognizing this is not fixed, but that various genes can be turned on and off.

2.
Then there is our inner self, which includes personal characteristics as well as feelings, beliefs, thinking, perceiving, evaluating.

3.
From there we move to our physical health, our physical well-being.

4.
Next there are close connections, from personal relationships to work to hobbies and travel and education to personal finances.

5.
From there we move outward to our relationship with the larger world, including civic, social and political forces, as well as our giving to the world: time, skills, money.

6.
Finally there is our relationship with the spiritual, cosmic, religious.

OVERVIEW WITH MORE DETAIL

1. STARTING FROM THE CORE: DNA

At our core is the DNA we're born with. This is far from rigid. Some genes are activated. Others have been de-activated, because of occurrences from one generation ago or even from many generations ago.

2. INNER SELF

As for our inner self, there's so very much to explore, including: - personal characteristics, including integrity (or lack thereof), curiosity, persistence, courage, honesty, sense of humor, patience, and so on - always with some people having a lack of the characteristic:

- feelings, including love and fear, trust and distrust, joy and indifference and grief, rage and hatred, adoration and elation, and more - feelings which come from and also lead to

- beliefs, some of them self-limiting and even destructive, and some life-enhancing; some assessing situations accurately and some not;

- thinking ability - that is our capacity to deal with information (to seek it, verify it, etc), and use logic;

- inner constructions, from blocked to free flowing areas, from areas with limiting and even crippling barriers (perfectionism comes to mind) to life-enhancing limits (a sleep schedule, for instance).

Those are some huge areas, but there's ever so much more: attitude, memories, learned information, imagination, creativity, creative impulses, intuition, dreams.

And then there's our perception system - from extreme over-trust and complete distrust; from reliance on a few sources to wide-ranging searching; from engaging in a lot of verification to going with group consensus; from intense emotional fear or rage response to anything dissonant with (different from) our beliefs, to comfort with and even pleasure in dissonant viewpoints, information.

In so many ways, our inner world is vital in how we interact with the world around us.

3. PHYSICAL WELLNESS This includes:

- where our bodies are on the continuum from full vibrant health to very ill;
- what we eat from extremely nourishing and as non-toxic as possible to dangerous to our health;
- exercise, from excessive for health, to moderate, to non-existent;
- mental state, from stressed to serene; from anxious to numb;
- and sleep.

4. PERSONAL WORLD - RELATIONSHIPS, WORK, ETC

Our personal world includes:

Personal relationships: family, friends, couple, colleagues, pets, non-pet animals (work animals on farms, animals to be used for food, etc).

Relationship with work: from passion work (work we love to do) to income work (work we need to do). It includes home-maker work, parenting work, and non-renumerative work like volunteer work. All these may be mixed, so we may, for instance, love parenting and yet sometimes do it because we need to do it.

Relationship with money, which includes financial inflow, such as income from work, savings, inheritance, real estate, investments, trusts; to wealth creation and destruction which includes spending and saving patterns; and finally financial outflow, from essential spending, to non-essential spending (extra clothes, restaurants, holidays, etc); to giving/charity.

Relationship with education/learning, from the formal to the informal, from classes to readings and viewings, to workshops and masterminds, etc.

Relationship with creativity, from expressing it in traditional forms (stories, paintings, etc) to expressing it in other ways (ideas coming together, gardening, etc), and very important, our intake of creative things, from music, to stories, to images, from enjoying it to relax to getting lost in it so we live more in created worlds than the everyday world.

Relationship with groups (religious, charitable).

Relationship with nature.

5. CONNECTION TO THE LARGER WORLD -
THE SOCIAL, CIVIC, POLITICAL WORLD

Plato wrote, about 2500 years ago, "If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools."

Yet so many people feel helpless or hopeless, or believe it's too late, or shrug and say, why bother. The media. The education system. Energy. The environment. Medical forces. Local governments. National governments. International bodies. Corporate powers. So many people are underinformed, unknowingly brainwashed, easily enraged, and yet largely not involved.

I hold that, to be a fully flourishing person, we need a strong awareness of, and connections with, the social, civic, political world. For this we need a strong inner self so we can engage well with it. And with the current entirely contradictory "facts" being fed to us, we need very strongly developed perception and evaluation skills.

6. CONNECTION TO SPIRITUALITY AND THE RELIGOIUS -
TO GOD, GODS, SPIRITUAL FORCES,
TO THE COSMOS, COSMIC FORCES, THE UNIVERSE

Some people value being part of a traditional religion. Others prefer a more personal private spirituality. Still others feel a connection to life, the world, the past and future.

We need to make the time and space for the spiritual in our lives.

NEEDED - SOME BALANCE

My sense is that we need a balance - not a rigid one, but not a severe imbalance, where there may be a total focus on, say, the material or the spiritual or what going on in the world, with no attention to anything else.

This is part of aiming for FULL flourishing.