Submission to the Logos and Self-Assessment/Reflection

I voluntarily submit my thinking, and therefore myself, to the Logos, aka to the primordial blueprint of divine reason, humility, and empathy—I see the Logos as an objective process and principles, rules of thinking that act as my foundation that govern my thought processes, and they govern my conversations with other thinkers too. These are objective principles of thought that are now embedded deeply in my heart via my intentional development of my inner character, so in my opinion we should submit to objective and divine principles that lie beyond subjective human perception, but not to externalized systems that claim divine or other authority.

According to Richard Paul at CriticalThinking.org:

Eight intellectual standards:

clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, fairness.

Eight intellectual character traits:

humility, courage, empathy, autonomy, integrity, perseverance, confidence in reason, and fairmindedness.

These objective standards give us the ability to assess our thinking and creativity step by step, and I submit myself to them, and this process of submitting to them on a daily basis, especially when I point them inwards in self-assessment and reflection to find the causes to my emotional upsets, irrationality, and blind spots (aka, shining the light of conscious rational thought on any unconscious irrational thinking, feeling, and behaviors still within me), develops my inner character further, so that I can be even more humble, courageous, empathetic, autonomous, have integrity, persevere, be more confidant in reason, and become ever more fairminded.

“Human rationality is fair-minded and self-developing while irrationality (or egocentrism) is selfish and self-validating. All irrationality presupposes some degree of unconsciousness in order to function self-deceptively. Most rational thought functions consciously. Because irrationality appears to the mind as reasonable, we must develop strategies for disclosing irrational thought.” ~Richard Paul & Linda Elder, “The Miniature Guide to the Human Mind”

In my reasoned estimation and personal experience, to submit to these standards, and to apply them to one’s own thinking in order to develop their inner character, is submission to the Divine Logos; it is inviting Jesus into one’s own heart and allowing him to transform their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which empowers them to live an objectively moral life.

“A mind that does not systematically and effectively embody intellectual criteria and standards is not disciplined in reasoning things through. Such a mind is not creative. There is, in other words, a reciprocal logic to both intellectual creation and critical judgment. There is an intimate interrelation between the intellectual making of things and the ongoing critique of that making. Let us examine this reciprocal logic more closely, through some examples.

Painters alternate the application of small amounts of paint to a canvas with the act of stepping back to appraise or assess their work. There are hundreds of acts of assessment that accompany hundreds of brush strokes. In a parallel fashion dancers use mirrors in the studio to observe their dancing while they are dancing. They use what they see in the mirrors as data to assess their performance. They engage in hundreds of acts of assessment in the light of images their minds form as they dance. They practice with a conception in their minds of what they are striving to create. They then assess the gap between the conception they are aiming at and the performance they see. They both create and assess their dancing.”

~ Richard Paul & Linda Elder, “The Nature of Critical and Creative Thinking”

Self-assessing rationality, as a means of developing one’s inner character, is objective morality, and makes those who do so moral individuals. Morality is not found “out there” in a religious code, but rather it is found through the exercising of the will by loving, submitting to, and serving the processes that allows one to arrive at Truth above all else, especially above one’s own egocentric pride and need for survival.

“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest – but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.” ~Ayn Rand

EDIT: Adding this quote by Bruce Lee on self-assessment, as relationships are the perfect tool and mirror to assist in our growth process, and how our relationships can help us to become even more aligned with the Logos.

“Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself — to be is to be related.” ~Bruce Lee

THE UNITY PROCESS: I’ve created an integrative methodology called the Unity Process, which combines the philosophy of Natural Law, the Trivium Method, Socratic Questioning, Jungian shadow work, and Meridian Tapping—into an easy to use system that allows people to process their emotional upsets, work through trauma, correct poor thinking, discover meaning, set healthy boundaries, refine their viewpoints, and to achieve a positive focus. You can give it a try by contacting me for a private session.

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