Teacher Strategy 271greatest pleasure or the greatest pain can occur, depending upon whether
the end result is integration or destruction. Therefore, I suggest that the
best Mercy feelings occur in an environment in which people can be totally
vulnerable while at the same time confident that every interaction will
result eventually in greater integration and not destruction. Mentally
speaking, Mercy thought would regard this combination of protection and
vulnerability as paradise.
I suggest that it is also possible to describe the conditions for Teacher
paradise: The greatest positive Teacher feeling occurs in an atmosphere of
incredible complexity in which it is guaranteed that Teacher sequences will
always come together eventually to produce greater order. Notice that
while the definitions for Teacher and Mercy paradise are different, they are
not incompatible.
According to Webster‟s Dictionary, paradise is “a place or state of
bliss; a region or condition of supreme felicity or delight.” If it is Teacher
and Mercy strategies which are responsible for producing these feelings of
“supreme felicity or delight,” then as long as we continue to live within our
present minds, it logically follows that the only physical paradise possible
is one which is consistent with both Teacher and Mercy mental „paradise.‟
Any other type of paradise would first require a brain transplant to give us
minds appropriate for appreciating its „pleasures.‟
Teacher Emotion and Fractals
Moving on from the sublime to the theoretical, I would like to look at
the relationship between thinking and Teacher theories. I have said that
Teacher emotion comes from discovery of order within complexity. This
relationship is illustrated by the mathematical concept of „fractals.‟