About Humans: Balance and the Four Realms

4. Balance and the Four Realms

Author: Herb Bowie

Balance is perhaps the preeminent human virtue.

This is hard to appreciate, because we so often take our balanced state, and our perpetual balancing act, for granted.

But leaders and pundits and authors are often trying to rebalance things a little (or a lot), to emphasize one thing more than another, and so these influencers generally find it convenient to focus on one thing at a time, which can give the impression that their current area of focus is the only thing that matters.

But this is rarely, if ever, true.

Let me throw a quote your way to give you an example of what I mean.

Mastery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophe. Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the demonic forces of the latter, and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture.

Cary F. Baynes, 1931, from the book The Secret of the Golden Flower

Here’s the way another author describes the same sort of balancing act.

At the personalistic level, man becomes centrally concerned with peace with his inner self and in the relation of his self to the inner self of others. He becomes concerned with belonging, with being accepted, with knowing the inner side of self and other selves so harmony can come to be, so people as individuals can be at peace with themselves and thus with the world. And when he achieves this, he finds he must become concerned with more than self or other selves, because while he was focusing on the inner self to the exclusion of the external world, his outer world has gone to pot.

Clare W. Graves, 1974, from the article “The Futurist”

And so both authors point out that we must balance a focus on our inner selves with some comparable attention to the outer world.

But I’ll even go a step or two further, to assert that we must actually balance four interrelated realms:

Our own inner worlds of memories, dreams, beliefs, attitudes and feelings;
Our own physical bodies;
Elements of the outer physical world around us;
Our social relations with others.

Now of course all of these realms are interrelated: they all influence one another.

But it’s certainly possible to imagine, or recall, periods when we’ve observed, in ourselves or others, an imbalance favoring one of these realms over the others.

And, when this happens, as the quotations above indicate, the realms we are ignoring tend to go to pot.

This is just one example of the importance of balance in human lives, and there are certainly many others.