This is not as novel an idea as it may seem, and my arrival at the number five is far from arbitrary. Religions, societies, thinkers, and disciplines have consistently promoted reflections of The Five Categories. Consider The Big Five Personality Traits, by far the most scientifically accepted model of personality. Consider the Toltecs’ Five Conceptual Tools by which human minds interact with information. Consider:
The Five Elements of Story
The Five Moral Foundations
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
The Five Pillars of Islam
The Five Observations of Hinduism
The Five Constants of Confucian Ethics
Each of these popular theories breaks down a mind-based subject into its most fundamental components, and each ends up with the same number of components.
Furthermore, each of these sets reflects the same, more fundamental five categories of human thought processing. In this model, I explain and demonstrate the five categories. I also connect the five categories with Five Moral Foundations, the Five Constants of Confucian ethics, and many other theories in a chart for ease of decoding. As far as I am aware, there has been no prior discussion of these theories as connected, or as part of a larger pattern.
Neuroscience cannot directly illuminate human thought processes; it merely illuminates the machinery creating thought processes. Neither can personal experience; we think, but we don’t have full access to the inner workings of our minds. One can’t directly study thought processes. One must triangulate from other disciplines.
Picture the human mind as a prism. Psychology, politics, culture, religion, and ethics are spectrums cast by light passing through the prism at different angles. Each is colored by human emotional problems.
As all the sciences follow the rules of physics, so do cultures, religions, politics, ethics, emotions, and behaviors follow the rules of the human mind. What I have discovered and shown here is that five core categories underlie all mental processes. There are five positive emotions underlying all others and five negative emotions. There are five ways the human mind processes information. There are five types of mental construct.
By studying commonalities among spectrums, I have isolated the nature of the prism. There are just five colors -- five lowest common denominators of human experience.
The implications of this tool are staggering. It is a unifying theory of the humanities. It establishes a universal format for psychological, political, cultural, religious, and ethical phenomena, maps connections between them, and facilitates cross-application.
