Five Essential Human Qualities

So Simple to Understand, So Difficult to Live

In my experience, while we are striving to live the life we desire to live, one of the main things that gets in our way is not keeping our definitions of the essential things simple.

Five qualities are especially important for us in life. Love. Wisdom. Goodness. Intelligence. And Creativity. Sprawling or fuzzy definitions of these four qualities hold us back in life. Clarity helps us move forward toward our ideal life.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been determined to understand these five qualities of soul and mind. Since my twenties, I’ve read hundreds of books covering one or more of these five topics. I’ve looked at these traits from every angle.

In 2007, I even wrote a whole book — and spoke and signed 1,000 copies at 45 bookstores in 10 states — entitled Visionary Behavior: Creative Intelligence in Action. Sat with former and current Microsoft executives in Seattle talking about David Bohm and creativity. Talked with hundreds of people in a few dozen audiences about the sources of creative genius. I had a blast, yet even then my definitions of these five essential qualities was too complicated.

I’ve studied all five of these things hundreds of hours each. And eventually. in my forties, I decided that each of the four is quite simple to define and understand. And I woke up this morning and realized that this might be helpful to you.

LOVE. Love is pure motives. We are showing love to someone every time we communicate or act toward another human being with pure motives. Yes, we do this out of a desire to bless another being from our being. So that’s love too. But it’s as simple as this. Pure-motived communications and actions are acts of love.

(I’d say that our motives reside in our will, but that’s a separate question.)

The other three essential qualities are in our mind:

WISDOM. We are being wise every time we perceive or think from love — from pure-motives. We are being wise every time we figure out how to communicate or act from pure motives. Of course, wisdom involves understanding our motives by analyzing and assessing them.

(Thus wisdom arises as we allow the pure motives in our will to “enlighten” or radiate through the perceptions and thought processes in our mind.)

GOODNESS. Being a good character, then, involves every useful communication and action that flows from love and wisdom. Having a good character is communicating and acting usefully from pure motives.

Everything that we do from pure-motived wisdom is morally and spiritually good — although it’s better (and more likely to be successful or effective — if it’s also done with intelligent.

Which is the most complex of the four, but not nearly as complex as our friends in the fields of psychology and education make it:

INTELLIGENCE. Intelligence involves four qualities of our mind:

(1) Attention: our perceptiveness, the keenness of our observing and observations.

(2) Memory: Our enduring observations, memorized knowledge, and mastered skills.

(3) Our reasoning and analysis. The way we evaluate and interpret both information and meaning. The way we infer, deduce, and draw conclusions — especially about the causes and effects of events. And

(4) Situational judgment / common sense. How we spin scenarios, come up with likely stories, and make plausible guesses — all based on what we’ve learned from experience, including our interactions with a sprawling, untidy. and ambiguous world.

CREATIVITY. Creativity is simply this: thinking with an open, flexible, and fluid mind. Every time we think in a way that is open, flexible, and fluid, we are being creative.

Notice that to be a pure-motived and wise person, you must subordinate both your intelligence and your creativity to your pure motives and you wisdom. Evil, too, can be both intelligent and creative. So our motives are the most important thing about us, followed by thinking from pure motives and then being useful (good). Intelligence and creativity come fourth and fifth and pure motives from will should guide our communications, our actions, our perceiving, and our thinking.

Easier said than done, of course. Easy to understand, still a challenge to live. But much easier to live when we keep it simple.

Is it this simple? If not, what did I miss?

All my best,

Mike