The Beauty of the Human Psyche: The Patterns of the Virtues

Abstract

The human psyche, or soul, reflects the most beautiful forms of the universe: the human virtues, which are reflections of the attributes of God. It appears that virtues begin with God and in some mysterious way are cast upon the human soul, much as the sun casts its rays upon a mirror. Those divine attributes are then reflected from our soul into our mind and manifested as virtuous thoughts (virtuous cognitions) and spiritual emotions; then the mind interacts with the body, creating patterns of neural activity in our brain. Next, through an act of will, those neuronal patterns are transformed into actual behavior and thus into virtuous deeds. This creates a feedback loop in which those virtuous deeds then influence brain patterns, which then influence cognitions and emotions in the mind, and which then may interact with the soul, burnishing it to reflect more fully and purely God’s attributes. This paper combines insights from science and the Bahá’í Writings to outline the “journey” of those virtues.