Value for Friday of Week 28 in the season of Ripening

Being Comprehensive

There is no precision without comprehensiveness – things would be missing.

  • No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory than that it should itself point the way to a more comprehensive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case. [Albert Einstein]
  • There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for. [Saul Bellow]
  • Democrats believe we must have comprehensive health care reform that includes giving the federal government authority to negotiate lower prices with drug companies. [attributed to Jim Clyburn]

Another characterizing feature of transcendence is comprehensiveness. The transcendent person leaves no stone unturned.

Real

True Narratives

(Leonardo) filled the opening pages of one of his notebooks with 169 attempts to square a circle. In eight pages of his Codes Leicester, he recorded 730 findings about the flow of water; in another notebook, he listed sixty-seven words that describe different types of moving water. He measured every segment of the human body, calculated their proportional relationships, and then did the same for a horse. He drilled down for the pure joy of geeking out. [Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, (Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 521.]

Our narrative includes impressive bodies of work, which took years or decades to create. It also includes stories of people who invested the time and effort to appreciate them fully.

Technical and Analytical Readings

Encyclopedia of Life is a site created to chronicle every living species.

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Poetry

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Several musical artists have recorded a composer’s complete works, of a kind. Many artists have performed/conducted complete symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, concerti and other works by great and lesser composers. This listing will be limited to a few massive artistic outputs. Some of the great intensive traversals of the musical arts are:

Works in which the composer aimed at completeness:

Music: songs and other short pieces

Visual Arts

Film and Stage

The Noel Coward Collection;

This Is Our Story

A religion of values and Ethics, driven by love and compassion, informed by science and reason.

PART ONE: OUR STORY

First ingredient: Distinctions. What is the core and essence of being human? What is contentment, or kindliness, or Love? What is gentleness, or service, or enthusiasm, or courage? If you follow the links, you see at a glance what these concepts mean.

PART TWO: ANALYSIS

This site would be incomplete without an analytical framework. After you have digested a few of the examples, feel free to explore the ideas behind the model. I would be remiss if I did not give credit to my inspiration for this work: the Human Faith Project of Calvin Chatlos, M.D. His demonstration of a model for Human Faith began my exploration of this subject matter.

A RELIGION OF VALUES

A baby first begins to learn about the world by experiencing it. A room may be warm or cool. The baby learns that distinction. As a toddler, the child may strike her head with a rag doll, and see that it is soft; then strike her head with a wooden block, and see that it is hard. Love is a distinction: she loves me, or she doesn’t love me. This is true of every human value:

justice, humility, wisdom, courage . . . every single one of them.

This site is dedicated to exploring those distinctions. It is based on a model of values that you can read about on the “About” page. However, the best way to learn about what is in here is the same as the baby’s way of learning about the world: open the pages, and see what happens.

ants organic action machines

Octavio Ocampo, Forever Always

Jacek Yerka, House over the Waterfall

Norman Rockwell, Carefree Days Ahead

WHAT YOU WILL SEE HERE

When you open tiostest.wpengine.com, you will see a human value identified at the top of the page. The value changes daily. These values are designed to follow the seasons of the year.

You will also see an overview of the value, or subject for the day, and then two columns of materials.

The left-side column presents true narratives, which include biographies, memoirs, histories, documentary films and the like; and also technical and analytical writings.

The right-side columns presents the work of the human imagination: fictional novels and stories, music, visual art, poetry and fictional film.

Each entry is presented to help identify the value. Open some of the links and experience our human story, again. It belongs to us all, and each of us is a part of it.

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The Work on the Meditations