Stories and Wisdom from a Life Fully Lived

Category: Life

  • The River Cannot go Back

    From clear pure innocence and challenging mountains to…

    It is said that before entering the sea,
    a river trembles with fear.
    She looks back at the path she has traveled,
    from the peaks of the mountains,
    the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
    And in front of her,
    she sees an ocean so vast,
    that to enter
    there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
    But there is no other way.
    The river can not go back.
    Nobody can go back.
    To go back is impossible in existence.
    The river needs to take the risk
    of entering the ocean
    because only then will fear disappear,
    because that’s where the river will know
    it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
    but of becoming the ocean.

    by Kahlil Gibran

  • Perspectives

    Our personal, and All Humanities, Challenge

    All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

    Blaise Pascal

    We’re waking up, becoming more aware, but will our “awakening” be enough, and soon enough?

    The first and overarching Big Problem is to make the Good Person. We must have better human beings or else it is quite possible that we may all be wiped out, and even if not wiped out, certainly live in tension and anxiety as a species… This Good Person can equally be called the self-evolving person, the responsible-for-himself and his-own-evolution person, the fully illuminated or awakened or perspicuous man, the fully human person, the self-actualizing person, etc.”

    Abraham Maslow

    Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a demonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

    Carl Jung

    For, as all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have constantly insisted, man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. To be a self is, for them, the original sin, and to die to self, in feeling, will and intellect, is the final and all-inclusive virtue.

    Aldous Huxley

    Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphorical mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life, we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.

    Bob Samples

    Life in the 21st century demands mindfulness—getting to know ourselves better and seeing how we contribute to suffering in our own lives.

    Bill Gates

    One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase (consciousness / self-transcendence) amid all the clutter, and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top.

    Johathan Haidt

    Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.

    Abraham Maslow

    The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better… and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.

    Vaclav Havel

    We traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare and neurosis. If we do not quickly awaken to our predicament? Planetary catastrophe.

    Terence Mckenna

    Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment…

    Nikola Tesla

    The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character. The only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

    Will & Ariel Durant

    The problem in the West is people want enlightenment to be fast, to be easy, and, if possible, cheap.

    Matthieu Ricard quoting Dalai Lama

    There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

    Leo Tolstoy

    There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.

    Eckhart Tolle

    The mystics, saints, and others make great efforts to wake people up. If they don’t wake up, they’re always going to have these other minor ills like hunger, wars, and violence. The greatest evil is sleeping people, ignorant people… The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that. The only tragedy there is in the world is unwakefulness and unawareness. From them comes fear, and from fear comes everything else.

    Anthony de Mello

    Humanity’s Mind: Wisdom Catching up with Science & Technology

    There are more people on the planet today thinking for themselves than ever before.. Now, for the first time, a huge massive number of people are thinking for themselves.

    Sadhguru

    The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

    Oscar Wilde

    Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.

    Henry Ford

    The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. We cannot change it without changing our thinking.

    Albert Einstein

    The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

    Isaac Asimov

    We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

    E. O. Wilson

    We are living in space-age times with people who are living with Stone Age minds.

    Daryl Davis

    The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Palaeolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall… until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?–rationally.

    E. O. Wilson

    Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.

    Will & Ariel Durant

    The most urgent problems of our world today are the problems we have made for ourselves. They are human problems whose solutions will require us to change our behavior and our social institutions.

    George Miller

    The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

    Charlie Munger

    When I think about the world today and the challenges facing mankind, I don’t think the problems are technical. I think they’re human.

    Nichol Bradford

    In order to make peace with technology, we have to make peace with ourselves.

    Tristan Harris

    Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival–this is humanity’s challenge now. The dysfunction of the egoic human mind, recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom teachers and now magnified through science and technology, is for the first time threatening the survival of the planet.

    Eckhart Tolle

    Abundance and Leisure Post Workism

    Thus for the first time since his creation man will face his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

    John Maynard Keynes

    Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature results from ease and security, not from a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto, we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this, we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

    Bertrand Russell

    In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally, substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

    Peter Drucker

    The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

    E. O. Wilson

    Reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

    Bill Gates

    Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    Most of modern life, all our diseases, are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity.

    Naval Ravikant

    Creativity is the last frontier… automation over a long enough period will replace every non-creative job… that’s great news. That means that all of our basic needs cared for, and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants.

    Naval Ravikant

    The machines came and took away the power of your muscle. Now machines are coming which will take away the power of your memory (referring to intelligence/intellect)… in the future, the only thing that matters is what kind of human being are you?

    Sadhguru

    Aligning our Human Nature with Universal Nature

    The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

    Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

    You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

    Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut

    Priorities must be Planet-Society-Economy as opposed to Economy-Society-Planet… The reality of the world is that the economy is the wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere.

    Ron Garan, Astronaut

    Driven by greed, ignorant of their connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that, if continued unchecked, can only result in their own destruction.

    Eckart Tolle

    There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview and in identity.

    Frank White

    Your definition of the word ‘home’ would rapidly expand to encompass the planet in its entirety, and for the first time, you might fully understand what it means to be one human family.

    Ron Garan, Astronaut

    Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are finding out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.

    John Muir

    I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.

    Buckminster Fuller

    Earth is not a platform for human life. It’s a living being. We’re not on it, but part of it. Its health is our health.

    Thomas Moore

    In the 1980s, simplicity was seen primarily as downshifting, or pulling back from the rat race of consumer society. Several decades later, there is a growing recognition of simplicity as up shifting—or moving beyond the rat race to the human race.

    Duane Elgin

    The solution to a lot of the world’s problems may be to turn around and take a forward step.

    Yvon Chouinard

    Humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years… but this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity… growing qualitatively, not quantitatively.

    Matthieu Ricard

    Voluntary simplicity does not mean a return to a more primitive past, but a movement ahead to a more sophisticated, compassionate, and collaborative future

    Duane Elgin

    Individual and Collective Purpose

    The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature.

    Joseph Campbell

    As the concerns of survival recede, human beings will naturally evolve into perceiving higher things.

    Sadhguru

    For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

    Viktor Frankl

    The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Only a small proportion of the human population gets to the point of identity, or selfhood, full humanness, self-actualization, etc., even a society like ours, which is relatively one of the most fortunate on the face of the earth. This is our great paradox. We have the impulse toward full development of humanness. Then why is it that it doesn’t happen more often? What blocks it?

    Abraham Maslow

    Maslow defined self-actualization as discovering what you are meant to do and committing to the ardor of pursuing it with excellence. The purpose of free society, I would suggest, is to systematically increase the percentage of people who do exactly that.

    Jim Collins

    Despite the severity of our physical problems, our deepest challenge is to overcome an invisible crisis: a lack of collective consensus and cohesion around a compelling sense of purpose

    Duane Elgin

    The most foundational challenge facing humanity is not devising solutions to the energy crisis or climate crisis; rather, it is bringing visions and narratives of the human journey into our collective awareness that empowers us to look beyond a future of great adversity and to see a future of great opportunity.

    Duane Elgin

    As tribal cultures developed into ancient civilizations, they allotted certain functions to certain people: ruler, priest or priestess, warrior, farmer, merchant, artisan, craftworker, laborer, and so on. A class system developed. Your function, which in most cases you were born into, determined your identity, determined who you were in the eyes of others, as well as in your own eyes. Your function became a role, but they did not recognize it as a role: it was who you were, or thought you were. Only rare beings such as the Buddah or Jesus, saw the ultimate irrelevance of caste or social class, recognized it as an identification with form, and saw that such identification with the conditioned and the temporal obscured the light of the unconditioned and eternal that shines in each human being. In our contemporary world, the social structures are less rigid, less clearly defined than they used to be. Although most people are, of course, still conditioned by their environment, they are no longer automatically assigned a function and, with it an identity. In face, in the modern world, more and more people are confused as to where they fit in, what their purpose is, and even who they are.

    Eckhart Tolle

    Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the surrounding culture. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s-land between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness had not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purpose have not merged.

    Eckhart Tolle

    Then comes the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose: to bring that essence-consciousness-into the world of form and transform the world. The ultimate purpose of that transformation goes far beyond anything the human mind can imagine or comprehend. And yet, on this planet, that transformation is the task allotted to us. That is the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose, the reconciliation of the world and God.

    Eckhart Tolle

    Start with Yourself

    Don’t we all want to change the world? Do our part to make the world a better place, change humanity’s consciousness, mind, work, nature, and meaning?

    Paradoxically, the best and only place really, is to start with yourself.

    Busy remaking the world, man forgot to remake himself.

    Andrei Platonov

    Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

    Rumi

    There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

    Aldous Huxley

    It’s easier to change yourself than to change the world… Live the life you want other people to live.

    Naval

    The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

    Robert M. Pirsig

    If it’s true that “the macrocosm reflects the microcosm,” then you’d see the cumulative and compounding effects of more and more humans taking personal responsibility for their own lives.

    Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world.

    Sri Ramana Maharshi

    To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state. That means now.

    Eckhart Tolle

    The character of a society is the cumulative result of the countless small actions taken day in and day out by millions of persons. Small changes that may seem unimportant in isolation are of transformative significance when adopted by an entire society.

    Duane Elgin

    There is something greater than history. Somewhere, sometime, in the name of humanity, we must challenge a thousand evil precedents, and dare to apply the Golden Rule to nations..

    Will & Ariel Durant

  • In Lieu of One Life Purpose

    Instead of Your Life’s Purpose:

    A meditation on meaning that explores the non-linear ways life progresses beyond a simple conception of a personal mission.

    A common misperception many of us have regarding a meaningful life is that we have a special purpose in life—and that once we find it, all our confusion ends. We’re saved from the happenstance and absurdity of our lives.

    While some people may discover a mission that does this, most of us will not—at least not in a way that makes for a good “Hero’s Journey” story.

    Our infatuation with stories portraying “the hero’s journey” select for meaning stories that scratch a certain human itch. They project a narrative simplicity backwards onto lives full of false leads, crises, and dead ends. They gloss over long periods of despair, the noise of randomness, the elements of chance, and personal and moral failings to tell the story of someone special who carried out a special mission. We have been told these stories all our lives, so we have deeply internalized them. “If only I could find my purpose!” And there’s actually truth to this. It’s me. It’s the story of my life.

    There is an alternate truth to my life as well. It’s premised on the idea that life is full of randomness punctuated by sudden moments—crises and opportunities—with vast potential for meaning making, when our skills and virtues shine.

    Rather than struggle to discover a purpose or vocation, we become people who can recognize and exploit opportunities to create meaning as they arise—resourceful and audacious people who live adventurous lives.

    This approach means not waiting to find your story arc, but recognizing that there are stories that pop up which you can opt into if you recognize them and have the right skills and virtues. It is about being prepared for the call to adventure, and cultivating the ability to recognize it, rather than believing we can direct our lives from the perspective of some knowable, ultimate mission (purpose).

    Where does meaning come from?

    Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe, there’s people always dying trying to keep them alive.”

    Bright Eyes

    The meaning I’m talking about is the kind that relieves a certain despair—the despair that comes from knowing that we must suffer and die and wondering if anything can be worthwhile in the face of these facts.

    Some sources of meaning seem to be:

    • participation in something larger that will survive ourselves—a nation, a family, a faith
    • creativity and flow states—bringing something genuinely novel into the world. When all our talents, including our deeply held and latent ones are used, this is more meaningful than when we are schlepping along.
    • love—when our sense of wellbeing has loci outside of ourselves—friends, family, and lovers
    • pro-social utility, or good works—creating a surplus of security and resources that others can use to survive and pursue their own sense of meaning
    • an internal sense of coherence, wholeness, and dignity

    Some people may find their sense of meaning is satisfied entirely from one of the above sources. Most of us, however, develop a portfolio of meaning—we have multiple sources of it in our lives, and cannot in fact derive it from only one source any more than we can be healthy on a diet of bread and water.

    What is the linear approach?

    The linear approach imagines that the meaning of our lives can be reduced to a mission, like the kind that fixes saints, heroes and social reformers in the historical imagination. “Created a vaccine.” “Expelled an occupier.” “Founded a religious order.” Of course, these accomplishments may admit multiple achievements or adventures—but are usually reduced to one overarching narrative.

    This imagines that if we found a sufficiently noble cause to devote our lives to—one to which our talents were suited and appropriate—we would be free to the suffering that is caused by the knowledge of death (and the possibility that it might strike at any time).

    Of course, there are people who have been personally fulfilled from devoting their life to a cause. For many, though, it does not work—our noble causes run into moral complexities on the ground, or are mirages based on a distorted vision of the world. They may leave us open to manipulation by careerist sociopaths, who know that we will chase any projected image that offers a shred of meaning, like a cat chasing a laser dot.

    What is the non-linear approach?

    The non-linear approach is different—rather than trying to discover a particular arc path and follow it to its conclusion, it recognizes that there will be many moments and opportunities to create meaning that arise in our life. The idea is not that we will take part in one story that can be easily wrapped up by our biographers—but that there are many adventures and quests that we can pursue. Rather than the attitude of the saint who is given a mission by God, it takes the attitude of the swashbuckling adventurer who goes out to seek his fortune.

    Instead of imagining yourself as the hero of a Hollywood movie, imagine yourself as a hearty ancestor that you might brag about when drunk: the one who rode bareback, founded a town, fought a grizzly bear, raised 10 kids, saved her son’s life by drinking the governor under the table, and went to the frontier to stay one step ahead of the hangman and her gambling debtors.

    This approach to the problem of meaning recognizes that, rather than trying to discern a mission, it is better to become a certain person—a person who can act on and recognize opportunities to make meaning when they are seen.

    Opportunism and Power Laws

    One advantage of the non-linear approach is that it does not demand that we devote every spare moment of our time to fulfilling some pre-ordained goal. It is more adaptive to the realities of power laws—of moments of high payoff or high risk—than of the day-to-day grind of accrual. If our lives are rich in opportunities for meaning, rather than defined by a singular narrative arc, we can act decisively at particularly important moments rather than imagining that every moment is equally meaningful. There are profound asymmetries and power laws at play in the pursuit of meaning—a split second decision might be the most important one you make; years of lounging around in cafes and on beaches might pay off more than years of hard work—if it results in one excellent idea.

    Trying to treat all of our time as equally meaningful and fungible because you can devote it to The Cause leads to absurdities. Consider this example of someone debating whether he should tell someone their car trunk is open:

    I hold open doors for little old ladies. I can’t actually remember the last time this happened literally (though I’m sure it has, in the last year or so). But within the last month, say, I was out on a walk and discovered a station wagon parked in a driveway with its trunk completely open, giving full access to the car’s interior. I looked in to see if there were packages being taken out, but this was not so. I looked around to see if anyone was doing anything with the car. And finally, I went up to the house and knocked, then rang the bell. And yes, the trunk had been accidentally left open.

    Under other circumstances, this would be a simple act of altruism, which might signify genuine concern for another’s welfare, or fear of guild for inaction, or a desire to signal trustworthiness to oneself or others, or finding altruism pleasurable. I think that these are all perfectly legitimate motives, by the way; I might give bonus points for the first, but I wouldn’t deduct any penalty points for the others. Just so long as people get helped.

    But in my case, since I already work in the nonprofit sector, the further question arises whether I could have better employed the same sixty seconds in a more specialized way, to bring greater benefit to others. That is: can I really defend this as the best use of my time, given the other things I claim to believe?

    Time is not fungible—a moment of opportunity, or a chance to respond appropriately to a crisis, might not occur again. Our creative powers do not flow smoothly and evenly like water from the tap to the drain, but chaotically like a babbling brook going from the mountains to the ocean—with different shoals, rapids, pools, and speeds along the way. Believing that our efforts must flow from smooth, even and continuous effort rather than coming in uneven bursts leads to unnecessary guilt and anxiety about “wasted” time.

    The need to regulate our time into a continuous flow is the result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It is something we do to serve economies of scale in which we are interchangeable parts. But meaning, creative power and fortune arrive on their own schedules, and imagining that you can or should devote every waking moment to something is absurd.

    When there is only one possible source of meaning in our life, we adapt ourselves for efficiency: our goal might be to win souls for Jesus, or stop Skynet. We make ourselves machine-like. When the world is full of possibilities for meaning, we adapt ourselves for resiliency, flexibility and maneuverability. Resiliency, because we must survive long enough to take advantage of these latent sources of meaning, and flexibility, and maneuverability in order to act quickly and appropriately when they come up. Instead of looking for a cause to devote your life to, you might try to become someone who is useful and level-headed in a crisis, who is well connected and makes friends easily, or who regularly has good ideas.

    Interests and Projects

    Giving up on a life’s purpose does not mean there are not areas which are more fruitful to pursue than others. When you are interested in something, this suggests a fertile area. If nothing else, interests represent low-hanging fruits of reward-to-effort payoff: when you are pursuing an interest, rather than an obligation, you can use the energy you would otherwise need to browbeat yourself into actually doing things. Therefore it seems so easy to read about whatever your personal obsession is – astrology, kabbalah, entomology – rather than whatever the marketplace or superego tells you should pursue – tax law, Bible study, a programming language (these are examples only many people have interests or disinterests in these subjects!) Like the God of the Old Testament, we will love whom we will love, and we will be fascinated by that which fascinates us.

    If we have an interest, there is a challenge to make it meaningful – with some things, this will be easier than others, because our culture that tells us how to do has given a script to us so. More obscure interests represent more of a challenge – but also easy opportunities. A quick glance at the internet will reveal artists who are using new media to create works of brilliance in unexpected places. There are Twitter threads made by anonymous writers which contain more insight than most published academic papers, and memes which capture the human condition better than most works found in art galleries. Your heroes become what they were by breaking genuinely new ground – doing things that those before them thought were unthinkable. To be like them, you must surf the void at the frontiers of meaning – and discover meaning where no one else thought it would be, transforming harsh barrens into lush gardens.

    The linear approach of finding a mission and dedicating one’s life to it – is typically best for those who have an overpowering, obsessive interest in something. If you are like this, chances are this article is not for you, and you are not grasping at meaning but hoping to read more about the Thing which so consumes your thoughts. If this is the case, your vocation has already chosen you.

    Selfishness, Love, and Integrity

    Because several loci of meaning – pro-social utility, love, and self transcendence – involve escapes from our localized self interest, we can feel guilt or a dearth of meaning when we act selfishly, when we cannot love as often or as deeply as we should, or when our interests do not lead down paths which generate surpluses and resources for others.

    Sometimes it is, in fact, necessary to put others first – you may have to take time out from your career or hobby to care for a child or an ailing parent, or to help your community or nation deal with some crisis. You may realize that you are spending too much time in the workshop and not enough time with your children. But taken too far, this thinking can also produce crippled, resentful individuals who give back only a fraction of what they would have if they were flourishing. Your children need food, clothes and education, and they need your love and guidance – but they also need to see you happy and engaged with life.

    Most of us have probably met some version of the pinched and crabby moralist – one who dedicated his or her life to some cause and did not get the spiritual payoff they thought they would, and are now resentful and controlling. There was a time when this was me. Thankfully, that period is part of my past.

    Instead of selflessness, strive for integrity. When you create, it should be things you think are good – that honestly portray your inner and outer world as best you are able. When you are honestly pursuing your own values and vision – and not subordinating them – you are more likely to generate meaning than if you are navigating a maze of compromises with some goal in mind. Especially if these compromises are dictated to you by a nagging superego that torments you with an image of moral heroism which you can never live up to.

    This requires faith and willingness to trust your values and intuitions rather than the well-worn stories dictated to you by culture. Recognize that the heroes whose lives inspired you did what they did, mostly by going out into the unknown and doing what others thought was impossible. This is not, incidentally, a guarantee that if you do so you will succeed – for the world to be a meaningful one, there must be uncertainty and risk.

    Meta-ethics and Meaning

    This approach to meaning – becoming a certain kind of person who can act appropriately in response to opportunities for meaning making – lends itself well to a particular school of meta-ethics, which is virtue ethics. Deontology, (a study of duty and obligations) represents the ethics of duty: the floor beneath which we must not sink, if we are to co-operate with others to pursue the goods of survival and flourishing. Consequentialism is the ethics of power and emergency, when there are clearly defined stakes which must be traded off against one another. In its utilitarian version, if flounders, precisely because a definition of “the good” requires more legibility than is typically available: of both our own values and the results of our actions in a real-world environment.

    The non-linear approach to meaning is about becoming the person who will, given a chance, act effectively to realize their values in this world, even if those values are not articulable except as a felt sense of meaning. It requires us to become developed along multiple axes of development: capable of risking it all in a dangerous, uncertain and beautiful world full of hazard and opportunity.

  • Natural Laws

    Self-enforcing life rules…..

    1. Law of Mechanical Repair   – After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch and you’ll have to pee.

    2. Law of Gravity – Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible place in the universe.

    3. Law of Probability – The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.

    4. Law of Random Numbers – If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal; someone always answers.

    5. Variation Law – If you change lines (or traffic lanes), the one you were in will always move faster than the one you are in now.

    6. Law of the Bath – When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone will ring.

    7. Law of Close Encounters – The probability of meeting someone you know INCREASES dramatically when you are with someone you don’t want to be seen with.

    8. Law of the Result – When you try to prove to someone that a machine won’t work, IT WILL!!!

    9. Law of Biomechanics   – The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.

    10. Law of the Theatre  – At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from the aisle, always arrive last. They are the ones who will leave their seats several times to go for food, beer, or the toilet and who leave early before the end of the performance or the game is over. The folks in the aisle seats come early, never move once, have long gangly legs or big bellies, and stay to the bitter end of the performance. The aisle people also are very surly folk.

    12. Murphy’s Law of Lockers – If there are only 2 people in a locker room, they will have adjacent lockers.

    13. Law of Physical Surfaces – The chances of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a floor are directly correlated to the newness and cost of the carpet or rug.

    14. Law of Logical Argument – Anything is possible IF you don’t know what you are talking about.

    15. Law of Physical Appearance – If the clothes fit, they’re ugly.

    16. Law of Public Speaking — A CLOSED MOUTH GATHERS NO FEET!

    17. Law of Commercial Marketing Strategy   – As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it OR the store will stop selling it!

    18. Doctors’ Law – If you don’t feel well, make an appointment to go to the doctor. By the time you get there, you’ll feel better. But don’t make an appointment and you’ll stay sick.

    Dennis Miller sent the above humor contribution to this blog.

  • Just for YOU

    This is an excerpt from Marc and Angel’s Newsletter MarcandAngel.com

    You’re likely familiar with what’s known as the Serenity Prayer. It goes like this:

    God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

    There’s an important lesson here—one that’s very often glossed over…

    When a chaotic reality is swirling around us, we often try to relieve our anxiety by exerting our will over external things we cannot control.

    It helps us stave off one of the most dreaded feelings: complete powerlessness.

    With that in mind, I have good news and bad news.

    The bad news is that generally speaking, almost everything is outside your control. What other people do, whether it will rain tomorrow, whether or not your efforts will be appreciated—all of these outcomes depend on factors that aren’t you.

    That’s also the good news.

    The friction and frustration created by trying to change things you cannot change is the crucible where a ton of unhappiness is born. Accepting that most things are outside your influence gives you explicit permission to let them unfold as they may.

    Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it this way:

    “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our actions.”

    Overcoming the “three big un’s” that so many of us struggle with daily—unhappiness, unconvinced things will ever change, unsure what to do next—begins with understanding what you can control and what you cannot.

    The mental shift here is not easy. Most of us have spent a lifetime worrying about things that we can’t control. Society practically encourages this. For most, it’s a bona fide habit…

    A habit that should be replaced with a healthy understanding of how much we can actually change. Again though, it’s hard to get your mind wrapped around all this when you’re constantly hearing…

    “Why don’t you just get over it?” “Just let it go.”

    We’ve all heard some flavor of this advice before. And it passes the sniff test, to a certain extent.

    I mean, “time heals all wounds,” right? Well, yes… sort of. But wounds heal differently depending on how they’re treated.

    Left alone, a gash in your skin will leave a large scar and be vulnerable to injury again in the future. This is why we get stitches—it helps the wound heal in a way that limits the chance of re-injury down the road.

    Emotional wounds work the same way. Given enough time, most emotional pain will diminish—that’s true.

    But just “getting over it” leaves scars.

    In the emotional sense, scars equal baggage—baggage we carry with us into every aspect of our lives. These scars grow and accumulate until one day you wake up suffering from one or more of the “three un’s” (unhappiness, unconvinced things will ever change, unsure what to do next).

    Don’t get over it. Go through it.

    Honestly, I understand the desire to “get over” difficult experiences rather than facing them. Revisiting painful memories and facing our demons is really, really hard. And we’re hard-wired to not cause ourselves pain.

    However, as our parents taught us, ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away.

    And in addition to the scars, to ignore or downplay a wound puts you at risk for infection, emotionally as well as physically.

    Unresolved issues from the past take up residence in your mind and influence your decisions, your relationships, and your attitudes.

    They rob you of your happiness. Doing the hard thing now will be hard, yes. But it’s far better than the alternative.

    Of course, doing the hard yet necessary thing can feel impossible.

    One way I address this is the practice of being “hootless” meaning that I try to recognize the things I cannot or should not change, relax and just ‘let go’ of those things and let the river flow where it will. While I may influence the behaviour of others, that is best accomplished through example. Thus allowing them to choose their own behaviour rather than ‘shoulding’, bullying or coercing them to accept MY values. After all, aren’t we all responsible for our own choices and the consequences therefrom?

  • Don’t Blame the Lettuce

    Enjoy these insightful words from Thich Nhat Hanh:

    “When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change”

  • Steve Jobs

    This is a story about Steve Jobs, legacy, and a brutal truth most people never confront. 

    It’s about a single sentence Jobs included in the letter he wrote when he resigned as CEO of Apple, 10 years ago this week. But it has its roots in the commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005.

    Here’s the key passage from his resignation letter. It runs just 17 words:

    “I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.”

    It’s simple, matter-of-fact, and almost boring, despite how momentous the letter itself was. Read it in the context of what Jobs had said at Stanford, however, and it takes on incredible power. 

    These lines from that 2005 speech have stuck me ever since I first heard them:

    “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. 

    It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

    Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

    Steve Jobs

    (I’ve embedded the video of Jobs’s speech at the end of this article. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.)

    By early 2011, Jobs understood that he was becoming “the old,” and that it was happening ahead of his time. Turning 56, he was battling pancreatic cancer for the second time. He’d had to take medical leave for most of the year.

    He knew what was coming, and he died just 42 days after stepping down at Apple.

    I expect that we’ll see quite a few retrospectives on Jobs’s life over the next little while, as we approach the 10th anniversary of his death.

    But, these lines came racing back to me when I read that Cook, Jobs’s hand-picked successor, was entitled to a $750 million bonus this week for having served as Apple CEO for a decade. 

    It’s a lot of money, obviously. And I’m not going to pretend that Apple is without its detractors and its problems right now. 

    Still, consider that not only did Jobs recruit Cook to Apple, but he set up a succession plan that has now resulted in stable leadership for a full decade, and a company that is worth more than 7.5 times what it was in 2011.

    Things often look inevitable in retrospect. But, all you have to do is compare the seamless transition at Apple over the past decade to succession battles at other companies that wind up consuming everything.

    Heck, Jobs was a veteran of multiple succession battles at Apple, for that matter, dating back at least to when he recruited John Sculley as CEO, only for Sculley to force Jobs out of the company.

    Couple that history with the fact that Jobs had already had the experience — he talked about it in the Stanford speech — of being told that his cancer would likely kill him in a matter of months.

    He defied those odds for several years afterward, but the experience guided him.

    The brutal truth here is really twofold:

    First, all of us will die someday: you, me, everyone we know and love.

    But also, if you want the things that you build to live on, then you have to begin to let go ahead of time.

    Think far into the future, recruiting and growing the people you hope will take over. Let go of the very human concern that succession planning is about finding a replacement, and instead think of who might lead in his or her own way, and to destinations you might never dream of.

    It means recognizing that when it comes to the tumultuous, emotional experience of a leadership change, it’s much better to be in a position where your official announcement can be as “matter of fact” and “almost boring,” as Jobs’s was.

    Here’s the video of his speech at Stanford. If you haven’t seen this, I think it’s worth your time.