The fundamental element in human existence is a sense of mission. By definition, that is your reason for living. It is not necessary to give it a name or be able to explain it in some concise statement. Chances are very good your concise statement will lock you into something that misses the point. It’s far more sane to express things in terms of roles. That’s how God views it.
Your role will always be relative to the context. The sanity anchor in the midst of this flexibility is your sense of something beyond yourself. While I typically use the language of God and His Laws, speaking of it as something beyond this realm of existence, you can still use the basic rationale with something less defined. The point is a functional sense of something beyond your ego boundaries that you can’t change, something to which you feel a sense of accountability. Without that, you aren’t likely to find much use in anything I write on this blog. There has to be something beyond you which offers the touchstone of reality or you lose your sense of identity. You can’t militate your role onto the rest of the world; it’s an interaction.
The concept of domain is recognizing the boundaries. It really isn’t a matter of enforcing them so match has having a distinct sense about when you have to decide, when something requires a response. Moral Law suggests you will definitely sacrifice at times, but you need to be aware of what it costs you. Otherwise, you can’t build an expectation of how the moral fabric of the universe will respond. The whole idea behind studying God’s Moral Laws is having an internal sense of regulation, a pattern with some sense of boundaries for all things. If you don’t get a feel for blessings and curses, you can’t gravitate to either one. You seek to build a faculty for measuring where things are on the moral scale.
While struggling to maintain a connection to something outside you, the whole point is embracing and internalizing something of that moral fabric. It is guaranteed to conflict with that of others at some point and on some level. That is the norm, even if they are on the same sheet of music about moral foundations. Their mission is not your mission. The people closest to you will collide the most, but they remain close because there is some indefinable affinity which makes it necessary to cooperate for the sake of the mission itself. They are part of the mission, even if they are your primary source of conflict. Conflict is an essential feature of living in this world. Don’t attempt to objectify the mission, but realize handling the conflicts is critical to what the mission is.
It shouldn’t be necessary to state the obvious: If you transgress your own moral boundaries, you will pay. Temptation is anything drawing you across those boundaries by taking advantage of entirely normal desires and needs. The whole business of studying God’s Laws is seeking a sense of where those boundaries are in His mind. We try to make our understanding match His, since He’s running the show. But less obvious is the understanding that we face painful consequences for failing to defend our mission and our domain, whether it be from others or from our own weaknesses. There’s nothing schizophrenic about recognizing your worst enemy lives inside your own soul. You have to keep an eye on your boundaries, not as a hard and fast rule, but as a living expression of your divine imperative.
Thus, the principle of domain is the idea you must decide. It’s not a sense of privilege, but of obligation to some divine imperative. It’s not even about winning your battles, but of knowing when to engage the battle. As always, it’s not about being or doing, but about commitment. When something enters your domain, you take responsibility for your response to it. Your domain is whatever falls inside the fluid boundaries of the imperatives which shape your existence. Neurosis is a volitional attempt to avoid it; psychosis is an inability to deal with it, regardless of how you lost that ability. Dr. Szasz says the same thing in other terms, but the principle remains that the whole question of sanity is one of moral choices.
Your mission and your domain are roughly equivalent terms.
