Essay:Virtue
A Deeper Look at the Virtues
Almost all religions and secret societies have their own particular list of virtues that they would have you aspire towards. Such lists can act as a useful guide and reminder of how we can best live. Unfortunately such lists are incomplete and arbitrary. The compilers of such lists and philosophies, whilst sometimes wise, must have been ignorant of the true nature of the virtues. The various Human languages are distorted and incomplete maps of a beautiful and universal conceptual matrix. It is wonderfully symmetrical and interconnected. It is intimately related to every part of your life.
Just as a small number of letters can combine to make countless words and just as all the myriad substances in the world are formed from a comparatively few chemical elements so all the concepts and situations, in their infinite variety, are made up from a limited number of simple conceptual elements. The branch of the universal matrix that we are concerned with now is the virtue matrix. The universal matrix of virtues is the ideal blueprint for our character's development. In fact our true nature, underneath the various false beliefs and rubbish, is identical to it. All the parables and teaching stories in the world are contained within it. By its' very nature it is beyond dogma and sectarianism. It is, in short, the underlying unifying bridge which connects all spiritual and mundane schools of thought.
Virtues come in pairs which are complimentary to each other: the opposite of a virtue is always another virtue. If we internally prefer one virtue to its opposite partner, it becomes over extended and imbalanced whilst its partner becomes weak and stunted.