Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. The opposite of will is not indecision…but being uninvolved, detached, unrelated to the significant events. The interrelation of love and will inheres in the fact that both terms describe a person in the process of reaching out, moving toward the world, seeking to affect others or the inanimate world, and opening himself to be affected; molding, forming, relating to the world, or requiring that it related to him.

Eros is the mode of relating in which we do not seek release but rather to cultivate, procreate, and form the world…there is in eros an eternal reaching out, a stretching of the self, a continuously replenished urge which impels the individual to dedicate himself to seek forever higher forms of truth, beauty, and goodness. 

-Rollo May

I have been wanting to write an introductory post to The Four Principles for awhile (considering I’ve already described each in detail), but I was having trouble getting to the kernel of what I wanted to say. If, indeed, I wanted to call alignment, sensitivity, creativity and mystery “The Four Principles of Human-Centered Living,” then I felt I had some questions to answer about my terminology and its application. Chief among these is, what do I mean by “human-centered living,” and what is its goal? That is, if I live according to these four principles, what will the end result look like? How will my approach to life and my quality of life change? 

I know, and have known all along, that cultivating a kind of zest for life, or joie de vivre, is the goal, along with a sense that life is valuable and inherently worth living. In recent days, love had begun to preoccupy my thoughts. Isn’t that what the four principles are designed to do? To help us find the space within where Eros lives and learn how to operate from that place?

My mind kept returning to the notion that “God is love” (1 John 4:16), that love is the great integrating agent in our lives, even, perhaps, in the whole of the cosmos. But “love” isn’t the answer I was looking for. Not quite. And this morning, finally, it occurred to me: what makes love possible? Specifically, what makes love of life possible? The answer is “will”. 

Will is agency. It is the power to act, to assert ourselves in the world, to reach out, to relate to one another and to our environment, animate or inanimate, as well opening ourselves to being affected by these things. In order to love, we must first have the capacity, or impetus, to relate. The Four Principles are about will first and Eros second. Above all, they are about relatedness. About relating to the world in a way that makes love of life possible. Human-centered living is about using the tools we’ve each been given, in terms of creativity and our unique constellation of talents and abilities, as well as the senses and other attributes of the physical body, to relate to the world in such a way that we can reclaim our will.

Rollo May suggests that “apathy is the withdrawal of will and love, a statement that they ‘don’t matter,’ a suspension of commitment.” At the time he published Love and Will in 1969, he believed society was undergoing a “crisis of will,” a widespread and pervasive sense of affectlessness and powerlessness, a sense that no one cares and nothing matters, that life itself isn’t inherently worth living. I imagine if May were alive today, he would probably feel that the undermining of will has gotten worse—much worse. 

To my mind, the biggest threat to the undermining of will, at present, is technology. Or, rather, how we’re using it. If we are using to technology instead of developing our skills and abilities, if we’re using technology instead of pursuing our goals or fulfilling responsibilities in the physical world, if we’re using technology instead of interacting with our physical environment, if communication via social media replaces socializing and face-to-face interaction, if we’re sitting in front of a screen all day and not getting physical exercise or sunshine or fresh air, if our attention spans are so short and we’re so distracted that we cannot focus our minds on what we’re doing, then we are undermining our own will. We are refusing to relate, to reach out, to assert ourselves in the world. This is a form of individual and collective disempowerment. 

The Four Principles are about restoring dignity to human experience through the reclamation of will by altering the ways in which we relate to our environment and to one another. Alignment is not only the first principle; it is the core. When we are aligned, we are involved, as May suggests, in a continuous “stretching of the self,” or a “continuously replenished urge which impels the individual to dedicate himself to seek forever higher forms of truth, beauty, and goodness.” We’re not only involved in developing our talents and abilities, but we are also impelled by a desire to live according to the highest values, to use our talents to enact some sort of good in the world. Sensitivity, the second principle, is vital both because our senses are a form of reaching out and also because desensitization breeds apathy. Desensitization robs us of a sense of wonder, awe, and gratitude, as well as the ability to perceive the miraculous in the everyday. The third principle, creativity, is about giving form to the stuff of everyday life, of infusing our personality into everything that we do, and about using our imagination to engage deeply with our environment, such that simple tasks and routines that would otherwise be meaningless begin to mean. The fourth principle, mystery, is about transcending the mundane and coming to understand ourselves in the context of eternity, in which context we are neither powerless nor passive, but incarnations of the divine.