The limiting problem with concepts, when we focus too tightly on them, is that they obscure and remove the inherent mysteriousness of actual facts and objects. Concepts can only be themselves, consistent within themselves and in opposition to or complementation to other concepts. But actual things tend to be far more messy. The concepts of a particle and of a wave are useful ideas for understanding, describing, and predicting how reality behaves. They are distinct, understandable, and have a clear identity, such that one is unavoidably different from the other. But in the real world we find things, facts, like light, that behave as both.

The real world presents us with messy objects that cannot be reduced to a single concept, or that contain multiple seemingly conflicting concepts, or that behave according to one understanding at one time or viewed one way and according to another taken another way. And people themselves are perhaps the greatest example of such objects. They contain features and concepts both within themselves and as a group that seem to contradict each other at various times. They fit multiple maps. Even our very nature becomes an incoherent concept when we try to reduce it to purely physical, mechanistic processes or purely mental, ideal processes.

Our natures, much like those of light, are interrelated and overlap in some way we can’t comprehend. In our native way of thinking, the two seem exclusive. But in our actual experience, we find them overlapped. So we must always be cautious about living too deeply inside our own mental constructs whenever we consider something that is a fundamental mystery of reality, one of those strange objects we encounter that stretches across the boundaries of the realities we touch. If we seek to reduce them too much to the construct, we remove and obscure confounding aspects of the experienced reality of the thing, as well as the areas of how they resolve that are fundamentally hidden to us.

The deep realities of truth, goodness, beauty, God, the universe, and the nature of humanity are among those objects that are far, far bigger and wilder than the mere theories we construct about them. They are often doing and being more than one thing at a time; they are a nexus of many connected realities. We can pull them apart with our minds into single dimensions so we can observe and quantify and study them, but at their heart they exist in unity, on many levels, as all these things together in a tangle that converges in ways we cannot conceive.

That is partly why our theories, though they may illuminate new and dark corners to us, often seem inadequate or unconvincing. Someone somewhere sees another bit that doesn’t fit and reveals a far larger and stranger creature and says “Yes, but what about this?” And in our frustration we may even discard valuable knowledge because it seemed incomplete, it couldn’t fit the facts, in hope of pursuing a new perfect theory that will itself eventually prove incomplete for the same reasons.

Thus we see the constant leaping between different models of understanding things, like physics or human behavior, the apparent truth of many of them despite their radically differing identities, and the constant frustration and desire to collapse the other lenses for viewing reality into a single lens. This desire itself is, in some ways, a rejection of reality as it is, in all its complexity and dimensions. It is as well as a rejection of the diversity of the human soul, the many dimensions that make it up, and the many different kinds of people who see more clearly through one lens while others see best through another. Each require sthe other to add to their ability to view the glorious whole more clearly. To reject the other is a rejection of the finitude of humanity and a desire to embody godhood in ourselves, or else to see the world reduced to a thing small enough that we, in our smallness, could be gods of it.

This is rejection of our relation as limited creatures to the divine superreality, and a reduction of the world to a more limited reality, that we might be gods of it. Both mangle and do violence to the world and to the human soul, because they contradict the very natures of those objects. That’s why pride is prized in danger so high above other sins. It seeks to distort the very nature of ourselves, others, and the world itself.