THE SECRETS OF LIVING HAPPILY EVER AFTER

The sculptural trail on the grounds of the Wilburton Inn
presents Teleion Holon, the unit entity of behavior,
making behavior an exact science, the Moral Science.

THE WORLD NEEDS A NEW MORAL PARADIGM
AN ORDERLY MEASURABLE ENTITY FOR THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR

Every culture has evolved explanations on happiness, the purpose of life, and has identified the secrets to attaining it. Yet happiness, meaning and purpose, has eluded the entire world. Peace in the world has been a fleeting experience. Globalization has generated conflicts as new values have threatened old world cultures who have assumed a position of terrorizing the world of infidels. Political correctness neutralizing difference cultural differences in countries like America is inadequate a defense in dealing with cultural differences in the world at large. We are living in a modern age crusade when Americas a Judeo-Christian alliance is perceived to attack the holy lands, and the Islamic populations seem to rebel at the idea of democracy favoring theocracy.

The only remedy for the world to find peace is evolving moral consensus by shifting from the old Abrahamic paradigms to a new rigorous moral order. Our world can only confront its differences and reach moral consensus provided a new order is introduced reconciling the different religious perspectives. Order and peace will be reestablished only through conceptual correctness, that is, a model that explains morality beyond the realm of subjectivity. Only science could tell God’s honest truth.
Morality and Psychology, Behavior as a realm of study, is the last frontier of science. Crossing this frontier has stumbled upon science being able to identify a unit entity, the common denominator of all psychosocial reality. The object of scientific study of behavior has eluded prophets, philosophers, psychologists and plain scientists.

The 20th century, the century of scientific, technological and social revolutions, inspired by the ideologies of science, i.e. communism and psychoanalysis, precipitated two World Wars and ended with the bankruptcy of ideologies, disillusionment with science. Upon the beginning of the 21st century, people have returned to the old texts, the divisive scriptures, to find wisdom. Indeed fundamentalists have declared war against the infidels and the World Trade Center towers were attacked by true believers. They collapsed like the towers of Babel. The devastation has returned to Babel and the old Mesopotamian cities that gave us the Abrahamic religions.

The hope for sanity and progress in the world hinges on behavior become meaningful to all so that cultural differences can be reconciled. This is the time for a new paradigm. It is the time we desperately need to evolve a Moral Science but the field has defied quantification. To begin with we have had no unit to observe and quantify. How can we evolve science without an object of study? Is it the brain, is it metaphysics, or is it a social and economic entity? Scientific research needs to identify the model entity of this uncharted territory, the boundaries of a circumscribed universal orderly entity in the realm of the social sciences. We need an order that will allow us to measure phenomena like happiness.

The Formal Theory of Behavior represents a scientific breakthrough in isolating a clear and abstract entity, the creative process, as a conflict resolution mechanism and demonstrating an intrinsic moral order in it that is predictable, measurable and graphically portrayable. Aristotle identified this entity as the Teleion Holon, the unit entity for the abstract study of behavior. It is the foundation for a scientific theory of behavior

A Paradigm Shift

On the high point of the grounds of the Wilburton Inn there stands in front of a sanctuary, an Easter Island Head. This Easter Island Monolith has a tear of blood running down his cheek. This sculpture, named the Sad Wizard, is a good metaphor for our times of despair. The head, one of hundreds of these massive structures in an isolated uninhabited atoll in the Pacific Ocean is reminding us of the passionate universal quest for meaning the importance of spirituality. This monument reminds us of the many religions of the world presiding helplessly over our contemporary world, the many spiritual efforts that are ineffective in guiding us to peace. Are we any better than the inhabitants of the desolate Easter Islands?

The head then represents a monument to the sad authors of all our moral stories, all belief systems, theories and ideologies that have inspired people but divided the world and failed to deliver on their promises. The Wizard could be the Gods of Olympus, Kali and Shiva of India and Quatlique of Mexico, but also Abraham and sons, the Prophets in Israel, and our contemporary inspirational European thinkers like Marx, Freud and Einstein. By contrast to the massive head, a thin metal scale stands next to the Wizard. It represents science, measurement, predictability, the universal laws of the rigorous sciences.

The Sculptural Trail on the grounds of the Inn starts with a dialogue between the Sad Wizard, the humanities, and the scale, Science:
Our Wizard asks:
“How come the World is not living happily after all my stories?”
The scale responds:
“The secrets to happiness are in all stories, but you have to shift your focus from the content of the stories as believable to the elusive but ever present plot of all stories. Notice that all stories resolve conflicts. Scientists can find the secrets in the plot of stories,the conflict resolution process. If they examine it as the object for the scientific study of the unconscious mind you sad wizard you might soon feel like laughing again looking as the world indeed living happily ever after.”

The dialogue between the crying Wizard’ and the scale is a metaphor of the conflict resolution process. The Wizard transformed from tears to laughter represents the boundaries of the circumscribed entity we identify as a conflict resolution process, the object of our quest for the rigorous study of behavior.

The Formal Theory of Behavior has recognized an entity present in all samples of creativity, the conflict resolution process; this is the holistic perspective in the study of behavior. This entity has dimensions; it is a measurable and predictable natural science and at the same time a moral order phenomenon; it is a simple and lofty, all encompassing and uplifting, meaningful and useful entity. This order simplifies the language to understand behavior by introducing constructs and formulas into the study of behavior. Formulas allow us both abstraction and objectivity in matters of subjectivity. The conflict resolution entity is a measuring rod to all phenomena of behavior as alternative conflict resolution processes. It makes it possible to evolve consensus on the nature of behavior and be clear on what is happiness as a definable and attainable goal.

The exhibits at the Museum of the Creative Process at the Wilburton Inn introduce Teleion Holon, Aristotle’s measuring rod of behavior, as the overarching mental and moral order, as the scientific unit of behavior. We may welcome it as conveying the ‘secrets to living happily ever after’. Unlike the traditional paradigms telling the secrets to happiness as stories that people believe in as the truth, the new paradigm is finding the truth not in the content of stories but in the weave of all stories, the plot of stories. The secret order of the unconscious manifests it self organizing the weave of thoughts as the interrelation of thoughts and feelings predictably leading from a conflict to its resolution. This mental dialectic, the holistic structure of stories, follows a set path, six steps, completing three emotional transformations. Any stress elicits a response and generates an anxiety. Anxiety determines the defense which begs a response from others and the reversal of the hero who completes the story with a compromise, or a resolution, and then the story ends and we all enjoy the rest of a moral lesson.

This thought process may be viewed as an energetic transformation; chaos of a stress leads to the order of a resolution. As an energetic transformation this is then a scientific phenomenon, an entity abiding by the laws of conservation of energy; it is also a moral order entity pertaining to spiritual matters, a resolution is desirable, while a conflict is not.

The creative process then is a natural science moral order phenomenon with a distinct structure and function: its structure is a three turn helix, it has the shape of the tendril of a vine and its function is for the person to make adjustments in his her environment fueled by occasional stressors. Humans with their thought process as tendrils find support to reach upward toward the sun, the source of all terrestrial energy.

This perspective has conceptual advantages; it defines behavior as the scientific unit of emotional growth and adaptation. This unit entity is circumscribed, it is the conflict resolution process; the two end states of the process are in a particular formal relation to each other and the two define this totality as a measurable system. This delineation as an entity with a structure and a function is a natural science phenomenon which we can study to chart the simple order that is present in all the complex phenomena of behavior.

The Museum of the Creative Process has four exhibits serving a complementary function in defining the Conflict Resolution Process, its structure and function.

• The Sculptural Trail, addresses identifying the history of moral developments devising conflict resolution approaches to behavior, leading gradually to becoming conscious of the unconscious as a Conflict Resolution Mechanism and to identify the scientific secrets of living happily ever after.
  
• The Gorski Retrospective is examining the formal and physical language of the process as an abstraction.
  
• The Metaphoria exhibits address the unit process as a universal and integrative entity.
  

The new order is universal; it is present in the thought system of a person thinking as well as in the completed story recorded outside the person. The order pertains to both the personal unconscious order, the psychological realm and to social or cultural realm.

Science then reconciles the divisive moral perspectives fragmenting our sense of psychological order and the cultural diversity of values shifting the paradigms from the belief of stories to the reason structuring the unconscious process of meaning. The natural science unit entity, the new order, unites the humanities and the rigorous sciences; it transforms behavior from a speculative domain into the Science of Conflict Resolution, the Moral Science.

Visitors of the sculptural trail walk the path of five stories shedding light to this phenomenon as a series of moral scientific discoveries that have enhanced living happily ever after they are also walking the path to science as a series of abstractions, that is attributions of moral order to ever redefined deities. Walking this path one recognizes the advantages and rationality of new institutions and covenants, but also the shift of attribution of responsibility for these moral developments.

The sculptural trail as an educational device consisting of five cycles of sculptures that clarifies the nature of the unit order, the Teleion Holon by retracing the history of the family institution. It retraces the history of moral paradigms as a sequence of abstractions that was achieved gradually around the world during the evolution of civilization. The five cycles not only retrace history but clarify the elusive holistic unit order as levels of increased abstraction.

Cycle one presents the process as an orderly phenomenon, coinciding with the plot of all stories.

Cycle two presents the anatomy of the plot of stories, as six cultures connected along the six part conflict resolution process. Six epic stories illustrate the six part-totality of the unit process. The totality is the progression of a set of necessary transformations.

Cycle three presents the transformations as a drama within one culture accounting for the developments in the Abrahamic family as a single and continuous drama. We understand the developments as a system in balance and the inner process becomes more meaningful than the many goddesses as the protagonists with their diversity of moral messages. The moving force is the making of a distinction leading to the creation of a conflict to be corrected by a formal and necessary reversal of the distinction. The conflict and the resolution are integral parts of the moral drama of power management.

Cycle four presents the spontaneity of formal relational reality as manifested in the realm of the arts. Any distinction in the course of spontaneous creativity runs a predictable course to its resolution. The cycle of justice features how this process may be reproduced readily through an exercise of creativity. Passivity is transformed to activity, antagonism to cooperation, alienation to mutual respect, generating the structure of the creative process.

Cycle five presents tapping the creative process for self discovery. We are dealing here with the story of a client, we will call him the Donald sharing his journey of personal self discovery and conflict resolution.

The trail ends with an overview of the cycles as a series of steps in abstract thinking is examining each of the five cycles as formal relational distinctions of the universal order. Each of the cycles of the trail is shown to be a perfect relational universe that clarifies the aspects of the Teleion Holon.

Talking Metaphorically, but Thinking Abstractly

The sculptural trail utilizes the simple language of familiar stories to present a progression of abstractions leading to the scientific understanding of the Teleion Holon universal entity: The familiar stories are metaphors; we talk metaphorically but think abstractly. Metaphors are the easy language of simple stories; they bypass the brain and reach the heart, but they also generate a thought provoking surprise at every step. The metaphors are familiar stories in which we sense the new abstractions: The metaphors convey the holistic notion in cycle one; they present the abstract structure of the process as six parts in cycle two; they illustrate the importance of a critical distinction in generating a conflict and resolving it in cycle three; stories are helpful in recognizing formal distinctions in any sample of creativity integrating parts into the totality of a conflict resolution in cycle four; finally the stories or metaphors of the four cycles of the trail validate the integration of all elements into the formal pattern of the unit process in cycle five.

• The first sculptural cycle is a fairy tale; it is about the times of myths and magic. But the fairy tale is the metaphor of the holistic unit of conflict resolution, the path from unhappiness to happiness and from art to science. The first cycle confirms that all stories evolve in a predictable manner from a conflict to a resolution, that somehow boy meets girl and that they live happily ever after. This resolution corresponds to the predictable outcome of all fairy tales.
  
• The second cycle is about the heroic times of the epics of the Goddess as a cycle of justice. The epics and respective cultures, the wars of the genders involving parent child relations as well, deals with the issue of thinking through domestic relations. Humankind is learning to manage its children evolving progressively from the times of the Aztecs to the times of Judaism and the Messianic religions. The cycle is presented as the many faces of Eve, a smooth transformation of the images of the idolized woman. These Goddesses also introduce the sequential and formal progression of six emotional states within the continuum of completing the task of one conflict resolution, the progression of six mental states in the transformative process of relations in the family from the state of unhappiness or conflict to that of resolution or bliss.

The secret to happiness is an entire spectrum of conditions for successful relationships. We observe the evolution of beauty as a series of heroic women and love stories, conflicts or gender wars presenting how cultures advanced specific resolutions sequentially towards the ideal marital relationship. The stations portray in slow motion the step by step unfolding of the conflict resolution process from one emotional state to the next.

The process is presented as a roller coaster. The succession is addressing the struggles between men and women, then between generations in sharing power. The cycle of the epics represents conflict resolutions as philosophies, attitude changes in dealing with power and desire in both genders and across the generations. It presents the sequence of transformations as dramatically interrelated, connecting one culture to the next. The drama starts with the eternal mother earth. It continues with war stories of heroic action, the mother transformed to the incestuous lover, resisting but becoming a spouse. Gradually the drama shifts to the powerful father in an incestuous relationship with his daughter, men eventually surrendering power to the Moon Goddess reclaiming it as Sun gods, eventually women becoming domesticated lifetime partners, a drama completed with the emergence of Monotheism, the religion of the Father Son Covenant oppressing women to a subordinate status. Eventually women regain status as the mothers of God in the Messianic religions.

• The third cycle is focusing on a major historical breakthrough, the Biblical Father Son Covenant as a conflict resolution in the father son relation, but as a distinction generating a new conflict in the family regarding the role of women as mothers in their power relation to their sons. The consequences for the family and the culture unfold in this sculptural cycle presenting an explanation for the Abrahamic drama and the nature of conflicted realities. The cycle of the scriptures of one God leading to the Messianic Trinity relation is a metaphor for the necessary outcome of any distinction making in any behavioral realm.
  

The third cycle is the Bible Walk, the story of the Biblical family and its tribulations; the secret to happiness is being united as a family and a nation by the profound faith in the One God. In this phase of the evolution of relationships between genders happiness is not in the love of women, but in the love of the one God; women are seen as source of conflict and their role is to be self effacing, humble and supportive; this imbalance is an injustice perpetrated by the Bible as women are discriminated as second class citizens. Women during this cycle generate conflicts as mothers seeking alliances with their sons, leading to the conflict resolution of the third sculptural cycle the reality of the Messianic scriptures, the Mother Son Covenant manifested discretely as the Trinity.

The third cycle presents the secrets to happiness as a distinction and the ensuing drama. The choice of allegiance with the father son alliance versus the mother son alliances: Moses, the adopted prince of Egypt found floating as an abandoned Jewish baby, emerging to become a leader challenging the Pharaohs, versus Christ, the child of the Virgin, and Mohammad, heir to Hagar’s Ishmael, are men children in alliance with a mother figure; the Messianic stories promote alternative conflict resolutions. The three approaches have led to the three major cultures and their respective contributions. Israel, Islam, Christianity are reconciled as formal injunctions on how to respond to the stressors of life, to temptations for sex and power.

• The fourth sculptural cycle uses abstract contemporary art to convey the formal distinction underlying modern art present inherently in any symbolic system or symbolic universe. The new heroes or divinities of the artists are not representational art, Venus or classical beauty and David, a religion related representation, but the celebration of relational principals, balance and energy, process, the laws of logic, mathematics and physics; artists sense intuitively the laws of a new moral order and in their abstract art they focus on the new reality, one of forms and relations, of conflict and resolution in abstract terms.
  

The fourth cycle presents modern art, culminating to the wolf and the helix, symbolizing the process as the unifying scientific principals, celebrating beauty and simplicity not as a girl or as the One God, but as the alternative ways of resolving conflict, as integrating diversity into the formal continuum of a calculus of managing power wisely.

The fourth cycle presents observing art for the reverse purpose, to identify the process as a formal sequence and then as the personal formal sequence. The process as a sequence and the conflicts of the artist, how one resolves conflicts and how to evolve toward expediting conflict resolution. The case happens to be of conflict in a marriage that is breaking up while another relationship starts. The cycle presents the practical usefulness of this analytical approach to art as art is now used to find out about conflict resolution patterns of one person, a married man’s journey past his marriage and into a new relationship; ‘the Donald Trump sequence’ of sculptures illustrates the therapeutic use of creativity

• Finally the fifth cycle or validation cycle reviews the prior four cycles as constituting entire cycles of formal transformation, a single story, many stories in the context of their stories in a continuum, episodes of one story in the context of other stories conceived as sequential developments. Art of the same person presents aspects of the personal continuum. All mental states are in perfect formal relationship to each other, illustrating the formal six part order as universal; it is integrating the separate stations of the four cycles into the new and universal order of the unit of the Conflict Resolution Process.

Starting from the art we are able to demonstrate the formalization of behavior into the Moral Science. Art is not only a metaphor but it is used as clear evidence of science. The six parts are integrated into the understanding of the problem solving nature of the unconscious mind.

The Formal Theory is Ushering in a New Era

The trail presents a new abstraction in the context of the history of abstractions; the trail ushers in the era of the scientific understanding of behavior and morality leading to ‘happily ever after’ as the secure path for conflict resolution, meaning and purpose. At the end of the sculptural trail visitors feel reconciled intellectually and spiritually reviewing humanity’s history unfold as an ongoing progression of ideas seeking meaning and finally finding it in the succession of levels of abstraction attesting to the validity and reliability of an all encompassing unit order. The air is cleared; humanity is built on a sound foundation. Our future seems secure.

The scientific explanation demystifies religion and psychology presenting and validating the hypothesis that morality stems from the unconscious need to resolve conflicts along a certain pathway. Science identifies the secrets to happiness as three relational principals, laws of science. It also demonstrates that morality is not determined by external authorities, be that the magical animals of fairy tales, the power of the goddess, or the one God. Religions are shown to be a manifestation of the unconscious need to resolve conflicts; the creative process is merely a driving force organizing information meaningfully. It is the mind then that is the origin of the scientific secrets of happiness or conflict resolution.

So the sculptural trail is not a simple display of art. It is not about eclectic art, isolated specimens of creativity. It is about a new way of art appreciation; it makes art and behavior meaningful and intelligible. The formal analytical perspective recognizes the spontaneous moral and natural science organization of emotional reality. It is about making sense of our world by introducing a clear new construction, the holistic entity of the creative process. Living happily ever after is the scientific integration of our diverse and fragmented experiences; conflict resolution rediscovers the Aristotelian Teleion Holon or Perfect Universe of ideas in a dramatic play. The ideas are also emotions and energies, conserved but transformed from chaos to order in six steps. Understanding the perfect world of ideas helps to understand the universe of the world of reality in all its manifestations.
The perfect understanding of ideas requires the shift from faith to reason. Reason, science understands morality better than religions. Religions pioneered conflict resolution through revelation making great practical distinctions for moral dilemmas. Christianity pioneered compassion, Judaism prefers assertiveness, wrestling with God, Islam chooses submission. The reliance on intuitively reached but arbitrary distinctions is rectified by detecting abstract or formal distinctions.

The formal alternative advances the origin of morality as stemming from the heart rather than the commandments delivered on the mountain. The secret to happiness stem in understanding the ways of the heart as an innate ethical power management. Ethical choices are directed by understanding the calculus of choices and consequences as a spontaneous and automatic equilibrial system. Reason requires a redefinition of God as respect not of a human but of a superhuman moral order determining our fate. Rather than worshiping a Wizard, a moral benevolent dictator, we need to respect universal laws. The wisdom of any one good authority, any wizard, is not as broad as the universal laws of science.

The trail then affirms the nature of morality as a process that has been gradually clarified during the history of civilization. The process paradigm organizes the evolution of the old paradigms and takes us a step further in thinking about morality abstractly, scientifically, a step that has never been achieved until now. As we are looking at the process we are discerning the new perspective as the true origin of morality. Morality treasured in the revelations is seen to be in all stories but not defined by the content of the stories but by the universal plot of stories, the common denominator of all moral messages.

‘Living happily ever after’ cannot be fathomed accurately by storytellers, it requires scientific knowledge, but we also need an attitude of reverence; we need to stay closer to the wizard than to pure wisdom. Though morality evolves to become scientific or abstract the traditional spirit of respect of the moral law, piety, should in no way be compromised. The discovery of the importance of natural law does not diminish respect for the moral law implicit in natural law. Respect, or piety, then must be shifted from reverence of the traditional male Pantocrator to reverence of the abstract notion of a genderless process that administers justice, the laws of nature implicit in the nature of wisdom. We recognize beyond the stories an entity which is more meaningful than the stories, the plot of stories as the conflict resolution process. The trail pays attention to this process as composed of the images of heroes of stories and the Gods of many religions as a circle of dancers holding each other along their outstretched and interwoven arms. The heroes and Gods are the ideas of humanity in a dialectic formation that illustrate the revered scientific reality, the teleion holon of the abstract or pure but well meaning benevolent thought process.

In this overarching entity we encounter predictability of resolution, or moral order. Its understanding is the secret to enlightenment; it is the new conditions for happiness or resolution to occur in our lives and our times. Science has the new secrets to all moral order. Natural laws underlie the elusive phenomenon of moral order. It is this natural science entity that is responsible for the creation of all happiness.
Humanity in search for meaning is finally stumbling upon the orderly process that organizes all information in the field. The process underlies the magical reality of fairy tales, the epics of the Goddess, the wisdom of the Bible and the three prophets; it goes beyond the deities in heaven, earth and the underworld. It is the new explanation that integrates all stories about the human condition, wellness and illness. The process is the rational mechanism behind all mental order. Operating unconsciously as the need to resolve conflicts it is the foundation of all realms of thought. This scientific discovery starts a revolution in the field of ideas, of psychology and religion. A natural science phenomenon unites the humanities and the sciences and revolutionizes the fields of education and psychology and the related social sciences. This discovery is presented in the context of humanity’s exploring the nature of meaning and gradually grasping the nature of the process and of the secrets to living happily ever after.

 

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