Chapter 19 - Viagnostic

We all have a sense of when something does not feel right about our lives. We may not know precisely what it is that we need, but we always know if we are deeply unfulfilled, or if something important seems to be missing or misaligned. There is a fundamental sense of order that we expect and we naturally monitor for any sign of imbalance; this includes gauging actions and outcomes that may not conform to our morality. Unsurprisingly, our consciousness is routinely awakened by countless murmurs of concerned voices that occupy our headspace and ultimately endeavour to get our attention, and it is typically the ones that cry the loudest or make the most persuasive case regardless of their actual suffering or the veracity of their rationale that command our focus. Yet they all share in their appeal to the continuity and quality of our lives as they cunningly play on our intuition that there is something lacking in our stories, whether there is a critical message not being imparted or an essential role not being played. Whatever the reasons may be, our narratives are calling upon us to act and add the value required for our lives to have meaning in an impersonal universe too vast to easily recognize our utility.

We see utility as finding or demonstrating some purpose, use or value. However, each of us appreciates events including our own deeds in a variety of similar and contrasting ways; this suggests that what we define as useful or valuable is quite subjective. Value can be objective as far as we can establish a collectively accepted standard and measure, but there is undeniably a great deal of utility in our experience that is underappreciated or goes entirely unnoticed. Fortunately, it only requires one person to perceive value and/or gain its benefit. And when one life willingly gives and another readily receives by some means of commensurate acknowledgement, it becomes a meaningful exchange between the consumer or recipient and the producer or provider of that value. The one who gives experiences utility in the other who receives it. The roles have to be complementary to surface their mutual significance, and any abuse of that sacred relationship spoils the meaning of its transaction. Hence, it is in the production and exchange of perceived value that utility is born and nurtured, and the healthy functioning of a society and its individual members relies on the shared experience of everyone giving and receiving in some way, including the infirm. This is the elementary source of our sentient power, and its expression transpires through the roles we play in each other’s lives.

Of the innumerable characters we may embody throughout the history of our interactions, we discover a relatively small, but enduring set of ancient allegorical archetypes that date back before our earliest recordings, such as the almighty warrior and the seductive serpent. We associate many of these primordial models with godlike and demonic qualities that complement one another when paired together. For example, the hero and the villain have remained relevant across generations and common to all traditions because the classic battle between good and evil is built into our nature and culture as an indispensable metanarrative that simplifies our chaotic lives and unfair realities. However, these themes mainly play on our primordial fears and desires that often manifest our hidden or dark side projected onto the unknown. While examining symbolic images that draw our attention help surface what we repress to overcome our burdening anxieties and possibly experience much overdue elation, this does not necessarily lead us to the roles that we need to play in our stories that will define and realize meaning in our lives. We want to better understand and tackle the frustrated or unsatisfied elements of our existence, and that requires us to recall our core functions that are always trying to express themselves in every situation because they underlie our potential utility.

Although we can invent unlimited roles, the ones we perform in the game of life are habitually confused with specific identities we establish as individuals and as societies, typically in a professional or recreational context. However, when we strip down the careers we follow and the interests we acquire to their bare features while appreciating our diversity in how we promote growth and ensure security, we discover four elementary and interrelated functions: Exploration, Generation, Preservation and Restoration. We also engage in numerous secondary activities such as planning, measurement, analysis and influence that are subservient to these four primary functions. And since they all serve to fundamentally shape the evolution of our own viagnostic narratives and contribute to the greater story of life, it is the integration of our essential functions that defines the fourth component or tenet of the viagnostic system. As individual roles, they are perhaps easier to identify as the wanderer, the creator, the protector and the healer, which we jointly coordinate their performance in our narratives to reflect our genuine utility. We need these modes of interaction with life to give rise to our sense of purpose and meaning in an impartial world that is indifferent to our happiness and peace of mind. And the more we grasp the value of these roles in their appropriate settings, the more we will be able to truly express the essence of what we really are.

We instinctively seek out situations that enable us to the play the roles that call to us to act because we only find our rightful place when who we really are faces a particular set of circumstances for which we were designed to demonstrate value. When we encounter such instances, there is a sudden and pronounced sense of clarity about one or multiple aspects of our unarticulated inner nature that we need to externalize or project. This is when we think to ourselves that we can do whatever it is that presents itself to us. However, many of us make the regrettable error of waiting for this lucidity to arrive prior to making any decisions or performing these fundamental functions in any capacity. Since we primarily attain this awareness through our outward participation and subsequent introspection, we risk indefinitely prolonging the process if we do not think of the things we do as opportunities to expand or narrow our focus and gain greater insights into our inner and outer realms. Moreover, everything we do is practice for those crucial moments where and when we truly test our utility. Hence, we need to partake in our narratives and at times change their direction even when we do not know where they will lead us because it is solely in our stories where our meaning ultimately unfolds.

Since we define ourselves through what we do and how we interact with the world through the roles that we perform in life, we need to do what is necessary to bring clarity to who we really are. And this demands that we enter unknown territory within or outside of ourselves and momentarily dispense with obligations that we know are stifling our progress towards higher or deeper awareness. In the romantic comedy Roman Holiday [19], the character Princess Ann, who feels exhausted and confined by her royal duties as a direct heir to the throne, secretly escapes her sheltered and overly regimented life for one day to gain firsthand experience of being like common folk. Her pressing desire to explore beyond the boundaries of her nobility overcomes her responsibility to preside over state ceremonies and preserve trade relations in order to discover and express who she really is before the lines between acting and being are too distorted to know the difference. In the end, the risk she takes not only brings her closer to life but it also strengthens her noble commitments as she realizes more clearly the person she is to become. Our lives are never quite the way we want them to be and they undeniably come with compromises or opportunity costs. But we will persistently feel that something is lost or absent in our sense of value until all of these elemental forms of utility are conveyed over the course of our stories because we are the conscious embodiment of life and animate its cycle of rebirth.

We are naturally programmed to play these intuitive roles because stability and change are essential parts of our continuity, which include creating and restoring. However, as we learn to explore further in order to help preserve what is important while preserving what is necessary in order to be able to explore beyond what we know, we slowly become aware of the interdependent nature of our core functions. Just as every story requires its characters to perform their parts synchronously to complement one another in cooperation or competition and offer substance to the relationships they develop, these vital functions provide different, but interrelated perspectives that jointly make the narrative complete and carry its meaning. That meaning arises from our essence, which we symbolically release into our environment to biochemically and psychosocially react with the conditions of life.

However, we should be careful not to become overly attached to the identities we redefine based on the specific roles we fulfill and instead focus on the value we are trying to harness or introduce with the intention of becoming what we really are, and not what we are led to believe we should be. Since we are only actors playing our parts in all of the narratives in which we participate, it is imperative that we play them in this cosmic dance to see what is true but never confuse them with the truth. And by realizing which experiences shaped our perception of value and the relationships we crystallized from our interactions, we will find the meaning that underlies our stories. This includes the people we relate to and how well we relate to them that positively or negatively influence how we address our genuine needs and the complexities of a sentient existence. Our hope is that we come to understand and apply these intrinsic roles to ensure our well-being and maturity as individuals and as a society.

THE CURIOUS EXPLORATION OF THE UNKNOWN

We began our lives as children with a fascination about the world because everything was new to us, and our curiosity drove our exploration whether it was testing the expanding limits of our abilities or understanding the nature or mechanics of things around us. We perform this exploratory function shortly after we are born to learn as much as we can when our primary means of communication were bound to crying when we needed something and giggling when we were elated. Learning begins here, where the first step of intelligence is to scan and examine the world. And while we were making sense of events inside and outside of our heads, we took interest in people and activities in our surroundings because we wondered about what was beyond the horizon of our experience. We engaged in play and let our imagination travel to places that we would otherwise never encounter. We were and still are explorers, and we remain intrigued by those who cross the threshold to the unknown.

However, we do not confine the idea of being an explorer to a voyageur or an adventurer who travels or embarks on physical expeditions. It is more like the wanderer in all of us that sets out to discover or experience life across any number of realms from the emotional and the social to the material and the conceptual. For instance, science is essentially exploration. It seeks out variability to compare what is the same or different and tests a multitude of scenarios to push the boundaries of what we know out to what we do not know because what is known is used to survey the unknown just as anomalies and the unexpected challenge our body of knowledge. The nature of the wanderer as an explorer is to ask if there is something else to learn or something else to experience. In the social sphere, this includes the networker who is constantly meeting new people and seeking linkages to build relationships. People also represent sources of information and serve as extensions of our own exploration. They can be interested parties who are receptive to what we have to offer as well as committed investigators conducting their own studies and sharing their findings with us.

Exploration itself is not a personality trait because it is a built-in function of living. But the way we explore and what we like to explore may reflect our individual tendencies and differences. Some of us are more open to new ideas while others to new experiences. Some are inclined to encounter new people and some of us are more interested in new things. And while some want to expand the range or amount of novelty, others among us want to dive deeper into the unknowns of the same people or things. Given the variety of subjects that may interest us, it seems ironic that many of us make the error of narrowing our definitions and measures of openness. It is clear that we are all explorers. And the danger is not that there are too many wanderers, but rather that there is not enough diversity in how we wander across the entire landscape of our reality and potential. The real threat to the continuity of society is that too many of us will restrict practicality purely to the immediate or arbitrarily confine the perimeter of our study to remain within what is already established as known or what is assumed that can be known. This is why this is the one function where we must learn to let go of our prejudices and only permit our personal interests to rule while allowing others to explore their own because anything less would only inhibit the curious exploration of the unknown.

This essential function includes initiating two general types of investigative behaviour that are particularly germane to scientific study. The first involves the desire to understand more about what is already known to us or engaging in new experiences in familiar settings. Within this scope, we tend to ask targeted questions to increase the specificity of our knowledge on a given subject of shared interest and/or gain more exposure to relevant events. The second pertains to our wary affinity to completely new phenomena where we do not yet know what queries to ask or theories to formulate because we are in the process of gathering any data or experience that might serve to frame a question even before we consider proposing a hypothesis. The latter requires that we are sufficiently open and uninhibited in approaching what remains largely unknown or barely has any documented evidence of its existence. But it also demands an additional degree of caution due to risks that we have not yet identified unlike the first category where there is always prior experience with a clear understanding of hazards.

We generally associate exploration with expansion, examination and discovery because we need to step outside of our known space to approach what is strange while trying to detect previously unseen patterns. It is the one role that we can rely on to set our journey in life into motion in search of our path to meaning. It is the part of us that believes in the possibility of things without knowing what the possibilities may be. It is the part of us that knows how little we know, and it is the part that wanders far enough to discover that there is something more to discover. When this mode of living terminates, life seems to stop for us as well. And all of us either know what that feels like or we are absolutely terrified to find out how it does feel because it is the wholly inert sensation of being dead while still being alive or awake. It is the moment when we no longer have any interest in anything at all. Nothing matters to us anymore, and when that ends, there is no drive to live. As we learn with every other role we play, we need something to care for or to care about in order to keep us moving forward. This means that we need to find something of value, and sometimes we need someone else to help us see what that might be, including our own lives.

However, we should not confuse not having a specific interest with losing our general interest in life. Many of us like to specialize and become experts or very skilled at one thing or one defined set of things where we can dig or drill deeper into a particular domain or exceed in our mastery of certain skills and abilities. By contrast, there are just as many of us who are generalists with a seemingly unlimited variety of interests but with little tolerance for investing the time and effort to developing expertise on any given topic. This is because we are more inclined to draw longer lines across whole subjects than tracing the dots in closer proximity to one another, especially when we already know that there are reputable authorities and connoisseurs in our fields of interest. The degree to which we tend to favour one over the other seems to depend on the history of technology that shifts the advantage between the generalist and the specialist over time. But the reality is that a natural balance needs to be reached between the two in our society over any given period as well as in the context of our own lives in how we subsist and progress because they are both crucial to enriching the quality of our lives.

The most significant challenge we face as a wanderer is not what or how to explore, but to learn to switch to the other critical roles more pertinent to the situations we encounter. Ultimately, we need all essential functions to derive the full meaning of our lives from our ongoing narratives. Hence, those of us who are captivated solely by adventure are destined to be lost. We do not know where we are going except to where we have not previously been, and we sometimes do not know how to return home, possibly because we no longer have one. Although we can leverage what we extract along the way and we may find what was previously never found because we look at where others have yet to look, we also cannot find what we want because we do not know what we want. Consequently, many of us keep searching for something better or something more either because we never seem to know what we have until it is gone or because we are running away from the deeper questions about ourselves. Uncovering our utility as an expression of our essence is more like an inner exploration than it is an outward journey. Moreover, it is not the quantity or quality of our investigation, but the angle from which we engage that matters and this means that we need to step out of our single-minded views and embrace our other fundamental roles in life to play out our entire viagnostic narrative.

THE CREATIVE GENERATION OF VALUE

There is perhaps no stronger association we have to life than creation. We may also think of adaptation and growth or perhaps suffering and death, but creation is inherently where life begins and it is how many of us relate to the notion of value. We value creativity over most things in this world, and although all roles have utility, creation or the broader concept of generation signifies this most and it is why the role of the creator is ingrained in all of us. Everything has to be generated in some way to physically exist, and we all create or at least generate something for our use and subsistence. We may not always appreciate the fact that we do, but this occurs constantly. It is only our narrow expectations of what we deem to be a worthy and notable expression of creation or creativity that blinds us to its ubiquity. We are so excessively concerned with the salience and acceptance of our most cherished designs and compositions that we fail to gain insight or pleasure from anything else we make. Value becomes the victim of its own artificial judgment that interferes with its genuine regard or receipt.

Another critical thing we neglect or dismiss about creation is the creative process. Before life begins, before the actual moment of creation occurs, there is a whole set of steps that lead to its conception or materialization. We think of creation as an end product, but every artist and builder as well as every mother knows how much transpires prior to experiencing the fruits of our creative and procreative labour. Creation is a process long before it is a product and without which there would be nothing to bear, and it can involve much planning and preparation as well as drafting and testing before anyone can reap its rewards. Even the imagination grows from the act of imagining since the more we imagine, the more we can imagine. But while our imagination takes its lead from our exploration, it converts to creativity when it collides with something that we want to envision and actualize in the world. This is when an image projects out into something we believe will have value personally or publicly, such as a novel, a tool, a garment, a family or any number of ideas or things we can realize.

The creative generation of value lies at the core of utility, and it is in its unlimited expression where we recognize the role of the creator in a variety of professions and settings. These include artists and artisans, engineers and builders, theorists and inventors, composers and performers, farmers and chefs, and anyone who can design, construct or fashion something from pieces of the world or impressions of the mind. Anything we can imagine and shape into something of use reflects this role, and it does not have to be confined to pure physical utility. It only needs to offer some kind of value. For example, we do not necessarily consume art in the same way that we utilize fuel since its purpose is more closely related to appealing to our senses, feelings and ideations in its conveyance of beauty, disbelief and unpleasantness, even when it is created in the form of food, fashion or furniture. Sometimes, we express value as a memory of what is valuable or as a means of revering or celebrating something important and often intangible.

To deny ourselves the role of the creator is to deprive ourselves of life itself. We are not only able to participate at minimum in our own generation like all other lifeforms, but as part of an advanced intelligence, we can also surpass this vital function by conceiving ideas, stories, equations and designs and through the use of language as both a product of and a medium for creation. The creativity drawn from our thoughts and passions is not limited to what we can physically touch or grasp, but can extend to actions only experienced in their performance such as music and dance. Even relationships are things that we build, whether they are conceptual or interpersonal, and they exist as value to us in their recognition or interaction.

Like exploration, creation also pushes boundaries. The creative process tests the possibility of things by initially seeing the possibility and then creating it. We witness this in art, science, technology, business and any activity that involves establishing a vision that can translate into a physical or virtual representation of that vision. It may be accomplished by assembling or sequencing materials into a final product such as a piece of equipment or a documentary film, or it can involve eliminating or removing unneeded material to form a figure as traditionally done with sculpture or pottery. The fact that we extract and process minerals to produce newly refined resources, and remove rocks and trees to bore tunnels and lay out roads reinforces the notion of creation being innately destructive before it becomes constructive. Even cooking or preparing food requires us to sacrifice life when we kill or harvest it to nurture other life. For this reason, we must respect what we destroy to appreciate what we produce.

Although the creator is a religious term we associate with God or the gods, this specifically represents the notion of an original architect as the source and beginning of any creation. But whether we believe in a Great Originator or not, we can see how the product of creation is endowed with the power or possibility of creation strung to a regenerative cycle that staggers forward in waves of formation and destruction. And it appears that we are all part of the same construction and demolition crew that needs to know how to build in order to purposefully destroy. This helps us to convey the two main ways in which we engage in creativity. We either build from the elements we gather and refine or demolish pre-existing structures, natural or fabricated, to make way for something new. In both cases, we have to change what is already present to construct something that was previously absent. This tells us that what exists now has always existed in some form, and what we are actually doing is adding new value to what is inherently there by changing its configuration, use or meaning.

If we are habitually adding value to our sentient existence by appropriating and transforming what already exists, then it is also in our interest individually and collectively to pay more attention to the necessity and consequence of our actions. For instance, if our sense of utility leans too heavily on our freedom to create, then we may risk neutralizing what we construct by what we annihilate in the process. We do not want to test the impartiality of life in a universe that is intrinsically unforgiving because if we consume or spoil more than we generate or renew, then it will assume that we are voluntarily working towards our own extinction. It is like pursuing a temporary advantage over others by destroying or stealing their utility while onboard a sinking ship. We not only fail to attain any real meaning, but we succeed at expediting our self-destruction as the overall value of our dependencies rapidly extinguish as well. And yet, this is precisely what many of us do in business, politics, family and in our intimate relationships. We exploit commitments we cannot keep, and while it is sometimes necessary to sever our relations or distance ourselves from them, we typically cause others and especially ourselves more harm by developing or utilizing something that we are unable or unwilling to maintain. We easily diminish or lose our creative value when we create for the sake of creating without regard for its costs and without taking measures to generate real value that we can sustain.

THE PRESERVATION OF RELIABLE UTILITY

The only time that we can truly utilize value is when we actually possess it, but it also when many of us seem to have the least appreciation for value until unsurprisingly we experience its loss. These two realities provide the fundamental basis for why we need to better emphasize the importance of preservation as a key function of our utility. In this context, preservation means to preserve value or to uphold our values. Although we generally associate this role with the protector and demonstrate protection in numerous ways as defense and prevention, we also express it as promotion through ritual and instruction, which relies on records or an accounting of value and includes the notion of conservation and sustainable use.

The role of protector belongs to those of us who appreciate value once we have found, created or renewed it. And while this role may often emerge after the suffering of loss, it is always there waiting to be performed and fulfilled by any of us when we recognize the significance of things. It happens so instinctively that even when we are uncertain about our values, we only need to point to what we defend or encourage to determine what they may be. It is intrinsic to our nature to play the role of the guardian, which we express in many ways. This includes the warrior who defends against our enemies or the infiltration of evil, the conservationist who protects and conserves our precious resources, the law enforcer who maintains civil order by preventing or containing crime and corruption, the defender of legal or political rights and the legislator who create laws to protect those rights or values.

However, we find the most common form of protection in the guardianship of our children as our descendants. Parents and custodians protect and facilitate the development of biological and societal value for future generations, and we as a society outsource this classic role to varying degrees to a pervasive vocation we all know as the teacher or educator. These types of positions fall within the domain of promotion primarily to preserve knowledge, skills and creeds through their dissemination and practice. But promotion extends beyond education and advocacy to assimilate both religious and secular traditions that strongly serve as symbolic remembrance of the values we want instill in our communities; this includes ceremonies and festive holidays as well as sporting events and theatrical performances where we enact or display some of the realities and lessons of life. The function of our sacred rituals is to teach, remember and appreciate what is of value as a means of protecting it. And our attempts at ensuring reverence for what is important can be seen in multiple professions such as archivists, curators and historians as well as journalists who report on our times because our history is not confined to the scriptures and scribbles of antiquity. Storytelling, whether based on real events, legends or the hypothetical, fulfills our natural desire to recall and retain value that is never to be lost.

We naturally perform these roles and activities because we know that the preservation of value is inherent in its utility as an inseparable dependency. We can use value without its protection, and this includes prevention through the identification and management of risks or threats to this dependency. We do not instantly notice this as part of a protective function, but anyone who prepares, calculates and trains for the possibility of negative outcomes is in the business of prevention. We may not always practice it, but when it is applied, it is often unseen as an invisible line of defense. For instance, those of us who are good planners or investors know how to measure and mitigate risk, and we do so not just to protect the value earned or gained but to look ahead at opportunities and liabilities related to growing that value. Similarly, we see this in business and government where we dedicate a percentage of our resources to prevent or reduce incidents from occurring rather than focus entirely on responding to actual issues. Firefighting is a good example of where the main purpose is to contain a problem and rescue us from danger while taking proactive efforts to promote fire safety and prevention so that we can avoid hazards altogether. In a more general sense, this is what we all need to do every single day, especially as parents in relation to our homes and families, and we must do so much more consistently.

Our utility is only as good as its reliability. If others cannot depend on us and we cannot depend on ourselves, we will fail to offer value when needed. Volatility not only weakens our confidence, but it impedes our ability to support growth. The protection and promotion of value is not enough; it must specifically translate to the preservation of reliable utility to make this function essential. This is why we also need to examine whether the things we are protecting or promoting are still valid in their use or applicability. We might remember and practice a rule, but we eventually forget the basis for that rule. Consequently, when conditions change, we may neglect to change our state-dependent guidelines and procedures. This is a common problem in almost any organization and certainly reflects an overlooked obstacle in how we deal with the circumstances of our lives. While our dedication to value is essential, this is where our tenacity plays against us unfortunately by stifling development instead of supporting it. It requires mounting levels of energy to keep things exactly in the same state, especially when those things are increasingly flawed relative to their conditions.

Another danger of being focused strictly on the protector role is the potential reinforcement of solitary or codependent identities we see in the classic fantasy of the knight in shining armour coming to the aid of the damsel in distress. When the protector fixates on a person rather than on the value to be defended, especially on a person that is constantly held in the state of victimhood, there is the risk of becoming an eternal saviour or rescuer, who needs someone to save or rescue. The victim must remain helpless in order to justify the existence of the liberator or the redeemer. We strengthen this further by having a parallel need to fabricate an enemy that we must fight but never fully destroy. In a more domestic setting, we express this in cycles of abuse and reconciliation or in the pairing of offerings and obligations. We also see the interlocking of permanent identities between intimate partners or between parent and child, especially in single-child and single-parent families. Often stained with unspoken fear and shame, these entrenched roles are caught in unshakable codependency as opposed to being engaged in complementary interactions that are dynamic enough to reconfigure and enable our relationships to evolve with changing needs and conditions.

Despite the challenges of our unquestioned values and ossified expectations, preservation provides a unique role in sustaining utility. The explorer may seek value while the creator produces it, but the protector retains value by defending or revering it and supports its use and growth by endorsing it or ensuring a stable environment. The utility of preservation is in the continuity of value generated. If someone designs or develops a tool, someone must use it and maintain it. Similarly, if someone composes music that elicits what we need to feel, then we require someone to record it or play it. Even identifying an event that marks an important turning point or lesson in life requires us to celebrate or honour it. Each role is distinctly critical to perform in relation to value. And while all of them are so basic that we often undertake them without realizing their importance, they are nevertheless essential to building a sense of meaning in our lives. However, we tend to overlook one additional function that is indispensable to our personal and societal well-being that is also common to all of nature.

THE RESTORATION OF A RESILIENT FUNCTION

Healing is a fundamental feature of life because there is no life without injury or suffering, and our resiliency is both physically and mentally necessary to continue functioning as sentient beings. This reality forms the basis for the role of the healer to emerge with the purpose of restoring things to their normal operating state, or more broadly, bringing the world back into balance. Like the protector, the healer preserves value except that this is accomplished by renewing value rather than protecting it. As a biological function, it runs almost inconspicuously through our bodies where there is a constant removal of waste and the mending of tissue. Yet regrettably, since its utility is often demonstrated discreetly and gradually, we easily dismiss its significance until we fall ill or face great misfortune. It is only in moments of need when we confront death, decline or degradation that we suddenly become deeply appreciative of its support to restore our health and regain some dignity in our lives.

However, the essential function of restoration is not restricted to bodily healing because it encompasses any activity that brings things to their originally intended state. The healer is a restorer who can recover the utility of anything that has value. This includes those who provide reparation services such as mechanics and renovators as much as those who work in the health professions such as doctors and nurses as well as counselors and therapists. And although maintenance is related to preservation, those who clean or provide care partake in restoration when responding to devastating incidents or signs of societal neglect. Cleaning is in itself an act of rejuvenation, while caregiving nurtures, and therefore, supports desired growth and recovery. But generally, anyone who fixes things, solves problems or returns things back to their natural order or harmony understands this role. This could be a caseworker or a mediator who resolves domestic or political matters as well as a facilitator who seeks reconciliation among adversarial parties to bring communities together, or alternatively, an elicitor who stirs up conditions to a point of intensity that forces a response or a necessary change.

Restitution normally requires us to perceive that something is wrong or not functioning, and then inquiring further to get to the root cause or unveiling the real issue that we need to address. This can involve a great deal of monitoring prior to diagnosing and treating the ailment. Understandably, we often need to know what has been disturbed in order to restore things adequately back to their functional state. Once we know what, how or why something is unbalanced or unhinged, then we can work to guide it back into equilibrium. And although recovery can occur simply by recognizing the problem, it typically requires a long period of remediation to achieve intended results, which depend on the extent of the damage. This applies to both our minds and bodies, but the mind is vastly more elaborate because we are always accumulating new information while reconfiguring our memories of the experiences that shaped our lives for better or for worse. And since we are always changing, we never quite return to what we were because either we carry something more now than we had previously or life has significantly transformed what we have become. Trauma, which arises from many forms that includes negligence, can interfere with normal functioning to the point of rendering our commonly accepted practices ineffective, and this is where we need uniquely restorative solutions offered by those of us with specific types of awareness.

Trauma can hold us back or add a deeper burden to the healing process that may mean recovering to a less than ideal state, but it can also result in gaining something more from the harm we may have suffered. We can become more than what we were before the events that led to our grief, and their detrimental impacts can also serendipitously propels us forward to a better existence. In such cases, the internal or external healer serves as a guide or a companion when we are afraid, stuck or lost and takes us back to where it started if necessary with the goal of restoring us through new experiences that turn a past of undeserving hardship into an anomaly that need not define our present or future. In intimate relationships, the healer can be a lover as a nurturing partner whose healing effect can occur by the expression of once seemingly unattainable love that can calm the beast inside us all when we are unable to contain our rage or to escape our suffocating anxiety anchored to the dark weight of depression. And yet, salutary influences can more often result from the unexpectedly kind gestures of complete strangers or the mere presence of another person giving us attention at the very moment when we least expect it but most need it. The healer as a nurturer or a listener may be our last line of defense in salvaging our vitality when our spirit is broken and we are about to give up.

While remediation and nurturing are the principal expressions of restoration, healing is also associated with refinement or continuous improvement. Since we are not perfect just like everything we value and utilize, we are always susceptible to harm or dysfunction. And every time we recover from injury or disease, we want to improve our ability to recover better or faster the next time we encounter a similar circumstance. Given this basic reality, both the protector and the healer also try to reduce risk and prevent future damage by providing support and changing our environment. But while prevention is basically the domain of the protector, the role of the healer is to build our resiliency to an inevitable world of unfavourable conditions to which we will always be subjected. It is the restoration of a resilient function that lies at the very heart of healing and renewal, and this includes not only learning how to better heal ourselves but to recognize when there is an ailment to address.

However, like all other roles, the independence or dominant expression of the healer can cause an overall imbalance of our system. The greatest issue faced by the healer as a problem solver is the dependency on having a problem to solve, whether it is having someone to heal or something to fix. This can lead to creating or perceiving problems where none may exist, or potentially prolonging them by applying interim measures at the expense of more sustainable solutions. Hence, solely focusing on restoration or any other function fundamentally highlights why all four are necessary to ensure balance in society, and especially in ourselves, which is achieved through the constant movement in their necessity and applicability to keep us optimally functioning. And by enabling each one to be always supported by the other three, the viagnostic narrative will ultimately evolve to reach a depth that floods our lives with the meaning we seek because these inherent roles are needed to develop and play out our own stories.

INTEGRATING THE ESSENTIAL ROLES OF THE NARRATIVE

It is not uncommon to think of these four modes of operation as part of a cycle following a natural chain of events because these functions largely emerge in alignment with our own development. As children, we commence our exploration with immense curiosity because everything is new to us and learning is our priority. As we grow older, our creativity builds upon what we learn and we experience the power of generating value or something new. When we achieve a certain level of mastery and appreciation for what is valuable, we feel the urge to preserve that value through its use, maintenance and protection; this includes its promotion and celebration as well as passing on that value to others through its teaching and through our exemplification. In that process, we find the desire to care for the things that matter most to us and work to restore them when they have been damaged or have strayed away from their value. Life naturally brings out these roles in us, but our challenge is to acknowledge and apply them all and each one accordingly to enable the emancipation of our utility.

It is not entirely coincidental that we may overemphasize a particular role or focus them all solely in one direction that can be towards others and the world rather than towards ourselves. For instance, being a wanderer driven purely by the opportunity to travel to distant places, or a dedicated healer in some recognized discipline, can reflect our own hidden fear of looking inwards by redirecting our energy to the outside world. While this may hold true of any role, many of us may also suffer from a lack of personal value and compensate by being a creator or by performing any function that can increase our worth in the eyes of our society. Moreover, the thought of losing our value or having any doubt regarding what we believe is important or true may terrify us and lead countless among us to identify with the protector or switching to a role that may provide the opportunity to restore our faith in ourselves. Our careers and families as well as our lifestyles and politics are quite often distractions from our deepest concerns in life that we do not know how to address or that we are afraid we will fail to address. Hence, it should not be surprising that our occupations can become our preoccupations, and the more we emphasize a certain way of being, the more we may be frightened by its opposite.

However, despite our tendencies towards a dominant role, most activities can involve and combine multiple roles. For instance, the act of cooking may include exploring new recipes and ingredients, creating a new meal, preserving the best practices of fine cuisine and using food to nurture us or restore health in others. In addition, some secondary functions such as measurement can appear in multiple settings. The wanderer or explorer may identify a need to measure while the creator could be inventing a means of measuring. And while the protector will likely use and maintain the measuring instrument, the healer will restore or refine it when it stops measuring correctly. This can equally apply to our problem-solving abilities. Although we may see either the healer or creator as the main problem solver, the involvement of other roles depends on the nature of the problem itself. We tend to conduct exploratory research when dealing with something novel or mysterious, and when the effects of an effective remedy are not instantaneous, we may focus on its endorsement to ensure its continued use until we gain its long-term benefits.

Regardless of whether we confine our universe to a single problem or to an entire story, all four functions come together to produce our overall sense of utility. And it is by integrating the essential roles of the narrative that we unleash the essence of who and what we truly are to find the meaning we either determinedly or unwittingly seek. When properly aligned, these functions work like a tetrahedron with all four sides facing one another. Each keeps an eye on the other three to reduce gaps or extreme deviations from the rest of the group since each one is stronger with the others in place and since there is no story to develop or to tell without the coordination of all four roles. Otherwise, there is not much purpose in exploring or generating value if there is no one to preserve or restore it.

This suggests the need for a quiet overseer or regulator that provides the adhesive to glue all of these sides together and ensure all parts are in play. Although we may consider this to be an invisible yet influential fifth member of the cast, it behaves more like the conductor of an orchestra who keeps everything in harmony by first conceiving and initiating the performance and then bringing it to its completion while optimizing its value. And since this must be simultaneously managed from outside the story and from within, it is only the self as a product of its own consciousness that can be the overseer of the viagnostic narrative. The self is able to slip into the spirit of each role unseen precisely because it is already embedded in each of the four functions that regulate one another. And given that these core elements are intrinsic to life, they emerge unitarily to form the tetrahedral paradigm of the self as we become conscious of the world and of ourselves. At the centre of this naturally self-organizing model, the sentient mind serves as an adjustable lens to focus our efforts in attaining optimal conditions within us as well as among our interactions with others in interpersonal, organizational and overall societal settings. However, if the higher awareness of the self quietly remains dormant or the self is unhinged by alienation or by acquiring incompatible identities, it may not integrate or adapt to help us pass through the channel of our viagnostic narratives.

Since the integration of the self is central to the integrity of our narratives, there are at least four prerequisites for the self and the story to align. Firstly, and as obvious as it may seem, we need to be engaged in our lives because without engagement, the self cannot align to any narrative. Everything begins with our participation in our own stories, where we learn and carry things forward based on what we receive from and contribute back to the world. Secondly, as we learn, we also communicate or teach by means of demonstration. As most of us already know, we lead by example and practice what we preach, and what we practice is what is important to us. The self is the conduit through which we express our essence. Hence, if we retreat from what we are, our stories will not develop or they will drift into a series of events that take the shape of another self or another life that is not ours.

Another critical requirement of our personal literary alignment is our vigilance. This requires that we routinely monitor our stories to assess or evaluate what is relevant insofar as what may potentially add value to them or threaten their continuity. Our discernment of people and situations is crucial to our decisions regarding the direction of our narratives with each role providing a different view to entertain. The wanderer probes for anything unfamiliar or unprecedented that may be of interest or conspicuously inconsistent that challenges existing knowledge. The creator identifies something of value in its perceived patterns and relationships. The protector detects risks so that it can evade them or manage them if they turn into issues, and the healer gauges the imbalance within its field to determine what remedies to apply and where things can be improved. Failure to be vigilant in any one role can jeopardize the whole, and this brings us to the final prerequisite for integrating the self with our stories.

We all know that we have to be adaptive to survive and succeed in life, and yet we routinely defy this awareness over the course of our lives. Sometimes, we see the importance of our defiance or resistance to a world running contrary to our values, but often we are merely fearful of change and its uncertainty, especially if there is any possible disruption to our livelihood. But most of the time, we have to be adaptive to the conditions we encounter to serve some greater purpose that we want to achieve, and we want to address our immediate circumstances in order to resume development of our larger story. Adaptiveness may mean agility in getting the job done, but it also assumes that we are ensuring all parts are working in unison to be successful in the same way that all members of a team must agree to work together by performing their expected roles to attain cohesion and gain success. Moreover, being adaptive requires us to act according to our circumstances, where and when a difficult situation we face demands it.

The roles and events in our stories are not set in stone like reading a classic novel. Life is typically on a collision course with a perfect plan, and following a prewritten script always has an expiry date or comes with limited mileage. This is why when and where one role is unable to be performed as it was originally intended, we may have to compensate for its absence or accommodate a change to enable its presence in the future. Within the self, this means letting go of what we desire in that instance to keep the show running while we make revisions routinely to our screenplays so that we may ultimately direct our core functions to converge on our chosen destiny. Although our mere awareness and intention may sometimes be sufficient to elicit a favourable change to occur, we often need to accept failure in one moment in order to unleash greatness in the next and safeguard some semblance of a story rather than risk having no story at all. And while compromise may be unavoidable and a necessary part of our adaptation to reality to achieve our ultimate goals, it is only worthwhile if the self can remain fluid while operating within the boundaries of its inner nature. It cannot deviate from its essence indefinitely for the same reason that a dolphin submerged in deep waters must eventually come back up for air. We literally and figuratively risk killing who we are. Similarly, letting one of these fundamental roles dominate our stories or suppressing any of them for far too long can lead to extreme reactions within us or from others that are too harsh and volatile to steer our stories towards the meaning we endeavour to find.

Since these are the most elementary roles of life, everything else we do arises from their base functions. And while any two roles can be combined to be complementary and all four are necessary to provide a comprehensive expression of our utility, we cannot conduct all of these parts concurrently on our own. We need others to fill in those inactive or absent roles and preferably perform them in synchrony with all other indispensable participants much like a theatrical performance or a concert. Consequently, we cannot find utility without the other just as one writes a book for another to read it or one needs to play music for the other to dance. Although we can perform each function independently to harness value in our stories, its utility carries forward through its exchange with others, and it is our interdependence that enables all of our stories to be integrated and aligned with the essence of who and what we are. Our stories are dependent on one another, and it is only in our shared engagement that these stories have any genuine meaning. However, if we try to become too autonomous or feverishly tribal in responding to an impartial existence that seems to be without justice, we lose sense of our true nature and identity because the self must be free to author its own story while embracing its existential dependency. This is the maturity we work so diligently to attain in our interdependent spirit that moves and flows through our interactions consciously and unconsciously with one another. And while the roles we play in our lives may be perceived differently by others in their own stories, they all build towards a common and greater narrative where there is a place for all of us individually and collectively, and where being viagnostic aligns with the universal truth.