If geometry shapes the physical world, and if resonance shapes consciousness, then it shouldn’t be surprising that our ethical lives show patterns too. Moral experience doesn’t feel random. It has direction. It has shape. Choices feel like movements—not just decisions on a menu, but shifts in orientation: up or down, open or closed, toward or away. Long before I ever tried to formalize anything, I felt that moral life had a geometry.
Most ethical systems try to describe this using rules, duties, rights, or consequences. Those approaches can be useful, but they often fail to capture something more immediate: the shape of a decision in experience. So over time I started to think of morality less as a checklist and more as a field—a patterned space with distinct directions, attractors, tensions, and gradients. And the more I thought about it, the more the hexagon imposed itself as the natural structure.
A hexagon has six directions radiating outward. If you imagine each direction as a “virtue vector,” you get a simple but surprisingly expressive map of moral life. I tend to think of the six as: compassion, justice, truthfulness, fidelity, humility, and reverence. These are not commandments; they’re orientations. They describe the direction in which a choice moves your character. Their shadows—control, vengeance, ideology, tribalism, pride, and fanatic purity—sit in the opposite directions. Most of our ethical confusion happens when we misread the vector or follow the shadow instead of the virtue.
But the hexagon is only the plane. The moment you add depth, a new structure emerges: a dual-apex pyramid, with one apex pointing upward and the other downward. This third dimension captures something every ethical tradition has tried to describe—whether with the language of “heaven and hell,” “grace and sin,” “enlightenment and delusion,” or “love and domination.” The upward apex represents generativity, compassion, and self-emptying; the downward apex represents domination, fear, and collapse into the ego.
In physics terms, these are two types of singularity: a white-hole orientation that erupts outward with life, and a black-hole orientation that implodes inward into control. In psychological terms, they’re two different trajectories a person follows when placed under pressure: either expanding into empathy or contracting into self-protection. In moral experience, this often feels like “rising above” or “sinking into” yourself—language that is metaphorical on the surface but geometrically coherent underneath.
This dual-apex structure solves a puzzle that has haunted moral philosophy for centuries: the problem of why some people, when pushed to their limits, become more compassionate, while others become more cruel. Traditional ethics tries to explain this through upbringing, culture, habit, or rationality. Those explanations matter, but they don’t capture the felt sense of direction. A geometric model does. Under stress, we don’t pick from a set of doctrines—we fall along a vector we’ve been shaping for years.
Where the hexagon describes choice, the apex describes orientation. One is two-dimensional; the other adds depth. But the two are inseparable. Every moral decision is both a movement across a field and a drift toward one apex or the other.
In the next post, I’ll explore how theology reflects this dual structure—how the God of love and the God of domination aren’t two different beings, but two different apex orientations inside the same manifold of ultimacy.
