A homeostatic triad for anxious times
Why love↔wisdom↔health? Because it is not and cannot be a religion. It cannot be forced on anyone. It cannot be taught rote. It cannot be analysed and codified into detailed rules; the wasted effort would corrupt it into something else entirely.
No instructor can teach you what love is, or what wisdom is, or what health is. You learn them as you live, whether or not you’ve been made aware of this triad. I happen to believe that seeing and respecting the triad’s aliveness will make a positive difference. It can do no harm, because its faces keep each other honest; none can be bent toward harm without the other two noticing. It’s not against anything, it is for life.
The arrows marking the triad’s flow are eros. The interweaving of its faces through eros homeostatically regulates how we learn grace on Earth; love↔wisdom↔health serves earthly existence. It cannot sustain escapism.
Love↔wisdom↔health evolves through each of us as our evolution.
Religions have books. Adherents must read and properly understand their content. But disagreement about what’s said is as old as any given religion. And there are many religions, just as there are many cultures. Should assessing their relative merits be a competition, a source of mistrust and violence? No. Disagreement is as natural as anything else, that’s not the issue. It’s how lovingly, wisely and healthily we handle disagreement that matters. The attempt to end disagreement is as tyrannical as it is doomed to fail. Love↔wisdom↔health could never try.
Isn’t it fair to ask whether humanity needs something deeper than religion, and than ideology? A root X that makes no claim. That’s what I hope love↔wisdom↔health offers: a foundation. The triad itself makes no claim: it is three nouns, a conceptual graphic as eternal invitation. The claims in this piece are mine, about what living it might accomplish.
And yet from this simple triad, from its ever-evolving base, humanity could develop an impartial and unbiased way of going about its business. Not heartless and mechanical: organic and adaptive. For example, we would be freed to deliberately consider how to establish subtler and suppler value hierarchies. Value hierarchies govern how we decide what to prioritise in our lives, both as individuals and as societies. Currently, our value hierarchies are almost entirely governed by price (money).
Is that healthy? Would a society of truly healthy citizens be financially profitable? How much power does money-as-value give to banks? Shouldn’t we work to foreground this, get to know it really well, discuss how we might do things differently?
People worry about robots stealing their jobs. I think we should ask what a job is. Is it perhaps how you value yourself? How much influence does money have on your thinking when you assess your own value? My guess is that the answer is a lot, and much flows from this a lot.
What is the value of allowing banks and markets to price our value to reality? We should try to discover what lies on the other side of that question. Can a price calculated by a system that cannot care about you fairly define your value to reality? Once you’ve felt the difference between money and value, you can’t unfeel it.
Actively living love↔wisdom↔health frees individuals and societies. Its resistance to formula disarms the intellect and invites the intuition to speak. The triad consists of three faces, but understanding them isn’t as easy as you might suppose. To learn what one means, you must first learn the others. Which cannot work separately. This is a triad you learn by living. Its visible faces inter-define in a homeostatic flow. Each flows through the other as if alive, and in so doing becomes what it is more and more, endlessly.
If an image helps as a first foothold, think of a garden. Love is a garden we tend forever. The wisdom with which we tend deepens as we tend. The garden’s ability to sustain diversity and flourish is its health. Love: garden. Wisdom: tending. Health: flourishing.
At first glance, the triad looks like a new-age frippery. In fact it is a pragmatic foundation both open and constrained enough to free everyone who honours it into full maturity and sovereignty. Which is another process that never ends, another process that destabilises the established order.
We close by revisiting the double-headed arrows. I understand them as the unquenchable flow of eros. Eros is the life force, an irrepressible, inexhaustible urging into every next moment of the Now. With eros driving this triad, which it cannot not do, the whole becomes an endless celebration of earthly existence.
Love↔wisdom↔health is no facile, ivory-tower esotericism; it is earthly sensuality and sensuousness kept sane – which means healthy, which means graceful. Grace is thus the emanation of the triad’s eternally evolving perichoresis.
