The Presence and Activity of the Supra-Rational Faculty Gives Human Value to Our World
Have you ever paid attention to number ‘zero’? It has no value in itself. Even if we put a million zeros next to each other, the result is still zero. However, all it takes is placing number ‘one’ at the beginning of the sequence of zeros. Zero, which had no value until a few moments ago, gains worth and becomes valuable when we do this. Our worldly actions have no value in themselves either, and we wish to place an eternal and human value on them in our short lifetime.
We have done many things throughout our lives, but they have no positive effect on the balance of our soul as long as they are in line with our worldly goals, and they even cause more internal conflicts and restlessness. But if we do these things to reinforce our supra-rational or human dimension, all of them will find human value, and as a result, we will find peace and happiness or balance in our souls; in fact, even our small actions become valuable.
The Condition Which Gives Value to Our Deeds
As we said, our supra-rational faculty determines if we are a human or not. As long as we live our life according to the lower dimensions of our being, i.e., our sense perception, imagination, and estimation, we are nothing but animals. That is because in these dimensions, we have nothing more than animal qualities, and we do not surpass the capabilities of animals. Our intellective qualities are also neutral, and if we seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself, we will be ultimately good angels. But if we use the intellect to achieve social status or other estimative perfections, intellective qualities will be at the service of our estimative and animal dimensions, and we become losers.
When our actions are under the control of our supra-rational or human dimension, we are truly successful people, and we benefit from all the perfections we achieve. In fact, if we want our actions to find human value, our supra-rational dimension should determine our relationships, decisions, behaviors and thought patterns.
Imagine that each of our body organs decides to pursue its goals independently; our digestive system starts working untimely, our hands and feet have involuntary movements, our eyes open and close automatically, our heart adjusts its rate and rhythm regardless of the conditions of other organs, our circulatory system stops delivering oxygen and nutrients to cells at will, the brain activates and deactivates the release of hormones by itself, etc. Even imagining this situation makes us realize its chaos. It is a mess in which there is no result other than wasting time, the disability of the body as a whole, and in short, complete disruption in our lives.
The true commander of our existence is our heart, supra-rational faculty, or human dimension. If the other dimensions of our existence accept the governance of our supra-rational faculty and follow its commands, our soul will be calm and balanced like a healthy body. But if any of these dimensions attempt to rule on their own and disobey the human dimension of our existence, chaos will prevail within us, a chaos that would result in nothing but wasting time, the overall disruption of the soul, and, in short, complete disorder in our lives.
The Governance of the Supra-Rational Faculty
So far, we have learned that if we want to take advantage of our short lifetime and live a peaceful and happy life, we have no choice but to bring all our deeds under the control of our supra-rational or human dimension to give them human value. This is impossible without the governance of the supra-rational or human dimension over our existence. But even with the dominance of the supra-rational faculty over other faculties, we cannot be at ease forever. Our sensate, imaginal, estimative, and intellective dimensions, that are the rivals of our supra-rational faculty, constantly seek to surpass this faculty and establish their own rule. We must always be careful not to trade the governance of our supra-rational dimension over our soul for things like social status, prestige, estimative matters, desires, and power.
In fact, a bad decision, an unhealthy relationship, a bad marriage, a wrong job, or choosing a wrong place to live are enough to upset the balance of our soul and make us move away from our main goal. But if we want all our decisions, relationships, thoughts, and behaviors to find human value, we must not only establish the sovereignty of our supra-rational faculty, but also keep it at its peak. In order to achieve this goal, we must always feed our supra-rational faculty more than our intellective, estimative, imaginal, and sensate dimensions. It is obvious that the more we take care of a dimension, the more we receive from it.
In order to strengthen the supra-rational faculty, we must connect with everything that gives us strength in this regard. In the same way, we should distance ourselves from negligence because overfeeding other dimensions of being or negligence in feeding the supra-rational faculty drags us into a sea of decisions, relationship, behaviors, and thought patterns that are not compatible with us. In such a situation, we will be extremely vulnerable and not be able to gain eternal and human value from our worldly actions.
In this article, we discussed the shortness of our life and the importance of gaining human value from our worldly deeds. We stated that we can only truly benefit from worldly perfections to achieve eternal happiness and peace if we bring our perfections under the control of our supra-rational dimension. In the end, we mentioned that not only should we make our supra-rational faculty the king of our life, but we should keep it at its peak. That is because our sensate, imaginal, estimative, and intellective dimensions are the rivals of our supra-rational faculty, constantly seeking to surpass it and establish their own rule. So the governance of the supra-rational faculty requires attentive care, proper nourishing, and the avoidance of negligence.
The supra-rational faculty is the main dimension of our existence. If you want to know more about it and the role it plays, it is best to read the articles sequentially, starting from the first lesson of the basic course.