Fundamental to human nature is our drive to understand and express the reality of our lives, at ever deeper, more universal levels.  Think about any subject that you’ve loved and studied for years and years.  You want to understand its essential nature, the universal truths that make it so; you want to understand it at the deepest levels of truth.  

 

My friend John-John is 70 years old and he’s lived a lifetime in music.  John-John says that the foundation of Western music, developed over the centuries, is the major scale (CDEFGABC, do re mi fa sol la ti do).  The major scale is a pattern that Western musicians know in their bones.  John-John can walk into any bar and jam with guys he’s never met, no rehearsal, and when John-John tells them it’ll be the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider” in G, the lead guitar steps in for his solo just right.  John-John keeps going deeper in his understanding of the major scale; he’s going down to the roots of his music to find the essential nature. 

 

I’ve trained martial arts for 20+ years now.  In the art of fighting, it’s all about technique... but there’s so much technique to learn!  It’s overwhelming.  With time and experience, though, a martial artist learns to feel the underlying truths that inform the various techniques.  We delve deeper.  For example, I’m seeing that power comes out of the ground.  In striking, power begins in your feet in the ground: focus on footwork and power flows in your punches and kicks.  In jiu-jitsu, power comes from using your levers (like feet, hands, elbows, head) in the ground to move your body.  A martial artist must be rooted in the ground for power to flow.

 

Why do John-John and I spend our life’s energy as we do?  We love what we love, and we want to know the nature of our beloved.  A thing’s nature is what it is and how it behaves, and it’s in our nature to seek to understand it.  That’s why I write this essay and that’s why you read it.  We want to see the essential nature of things. 

 

Now for my next point: where I put my eyes determines the nature that I see.  Reality is so thick that I can only see thin slices at a time, and the perspective I take determines the slice I see.  Therefore, to see the nature and truth of a thing, I need multiple perspectives and slices. 

 

Let’s say I’m a homicide detective on TV.  There’s been a murder!  The bullet passed through the victim’s heart and wedged in the wall behind him.  I send the body and bullet off to the crime lab where beautiful people pretending to be nerds make mathematical calculations.  They run a ballistics report on the bullet using Newton’s First Law of Motion.  Newton’s First Law says, in relevant part, that a body in motion remains in motion at a constant velocity forever, unless acted on by an external force (including for example, gravity, wind, air density, flying insects, the victim’s bodily organs).  Based on Newton’s First Law, the crime lab experts calculate, in numbers, the trajectory of the bullet, and from that, the location from which the murderer fired the gun. 

 

But what is Newton’s First Law?  It’s a law of physics.  OK, what’s that?  A law of physics clearly isn’t a material thing in the world that we can touch.  Rather, a law of physics is an essence, an essential nature of material things.  Specifically, a physical law is an abstraction (an idea) that we people use to express a pattern that we see in the movement of material things.  We look at the behavior of material things, and in that behavior we see regularities, and if a regularity is sufficiently fundamental, like Newton’s First Law, we honor it by including it within the category, “physical law of nature.” 

 

In brief, seeing essences and natures is how we understand reality, which means that even scientists are in the business of seeing essences.  You say, “All very nice, MacGyver, but who’s the killer?”  The crime lab did its job so now it’s time for another perspective.  I leave the crime lab and hit the streets!  Gotta ask Huggy-Bear, what’s the word on the street?  I talk with the victim’s associates and I assess their motives and abilities to kill.  Then I go to prison and ask Hannibal Lecter about the nature of the killer.  From Silence of the Lambs,

 

Hannibal:   First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?

Clarice Starling: He kills women...

Hannibal:   No! That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing?

Clarice:      Anger, social resentment, sexual frustration...

Hannibal:   No, he covets. That's his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer.

Clarice:      No. We just...

Hannibal:   No. Precisely. We begin by coveting what we see every day. … And don't your eyes move over the things you want?