Creating a Life of Meaning and Purpose
It doesn't matter what your personal circumstances are, there's always something that isn't right near you, isn't correct, isn't laid out properly that you could just fix if you wanted to. There's no shortage of opportunities to do that. You can do that in your own mind, you can do that in your own room, you can do that in your own household, in your local community, and maybe if you get good at doing it at all those levels, then you can start to look beyond that. If you adopt the attitude, an attitude that the role that you should play is to make things better wherever you are, however you can, that what would actually happen would be that things would get better wherever you are. The world shifts itself around your aim because you're a creature that has a name. You have to have a name in order to do something. You're an aiming creature. You look at a point and you move towards it. It's built right into you, so that sets up the world around you. It organizes all of your perceptions, it organizes what you see and you don't see, it organizes your emotions and your motivations. So, you organize yourself around that aim, and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems, and if you solve them properly, then you stay on the pathway towards that aim and you can concentrate on the day. And so, that way you get to have your cake and eat it too because you can point into the distance, the far distance, and you can live in the day. And it seems to me that that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize, well, that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life.
An Uphill Trajectory
An uphill trajectory is actually even better than being somewhere good, as far as I'm concerned because one of the things that really makes your life meaningful is the clear realization that you're headed somewhere better than you are now, and then it's even better if you also understand that there's a direct causal relationship between the things that you're doing and the steepness of that incline. There are two modes of being in the world. There's one where you adopt the responsibility for living properly, for being properly, and you make the sacrifices necessary for doing that, and then everything will flourish properly. And the other one is a pathway of resentment, bitterness, rejection, and genocide.
The Power of Incremental Improvement
If you make your life a tenth of a percent better a week, man, in two or three years, you're in such a better place than you were that it isn't even like the same domain. And if you keep that up for 10 years or 20 years, especially if you're young and you start early, you start to straighten yourself out and fix the things that you can fix. You can transform your lives in ways that are completely unimaginable, and God only knows what the upper limit of that is in terms of human possibility.
Confronting the Unknown
The way what you're actually made of, what you're made of is what you encounter when you voluntarily encounter the unknown. And so, the more you voluntarily encounter the unknown, the more you get made of, and the more you get made of, the more there is to you. And then the more you're good at encountering the unknown and restructuring order and calling forth proper order out of the potential of being. And God, you've got to think, why wouldn't you do that? Since you can do that. The fact that you're fragile is actually a precondition for your heroism because if you weren't fragile, then there'd be nothing heroic about doing something difficult.
The Majesty of Being
People denigrate the opportunities that are right in front of them, and there's no reason to do that because what's right in front of you is the majesty of being. That's what's right in front of you. It's inexhaustibly complex and full of potential, and there's no reason to assume that wherever you happen to be isn't as good a starting place as anywhere else. I know some people have terrible, terrible lives. They're in situations that are absolutely unbearable. But I also do know that even situations like that can be made a hell of a lot worse by the worst kind of attitude, that's for sure.
The Power of Truth and Alignment
What I learned to do, I think, was to stop saying things that made me weak. I mean, I'm still trying to do that because I'm always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I'm saying are either making me align or making me come apart. I think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it because I think if you say things that are as true as you can say them, let's say, then they come out of the depths inside of you. Because we don't know where thoughts come from. We don't know how far down into your substructure the thoughts emerge. We don't know what processes of physiological alignment are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being. We don't understand any of that. We don't even conceptualize that. But I believe that you can feel that. I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak, and what happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying. I would say 95% of it. It's a hell of a shock to wake up and realize that, you know. And you might think, "Well, do you really want all of that to burn off?" It's like, well, there's nothing left but a little husk, 5% of you. It's like, well, if that 5% is solid, then maybe that's exactly what you want to have happen. The issue is there are times in your life where you know that the thing that you're saying is not true. It's a deception, it's a lie of some sort, and you're using it to manipulate yourself or another person or the world. And you're also possessed, fully possessed, of the idea that you can get away with it. Where are you once you destroy your own ideal? What's left for you? There's nowhere to go. There's no up. And when there's no up, there's a lot of down. If you destroy your own ideal, which you do with jealousy and resentment and the desire to pull down people who you would like to be, let's say, then you end up in a situation that's indistinguishable from hell. Your moral degeneration contributes in no small way to the degeneration of the entire cosmos. Stop cheating at whatever game it is that you've chosen to play. That's a good start, and that'll straighten out your life.
Embracing Responsibility and Making a Difference
Just exactly what are your motives? If you're not doing something important with your life, maybe you're prone to cause trouble just because you don't have anything better to do because at least trouble is more interesting than boring. And so, if you're not doing something, if you're not pushing yourself to the limits of your capacity, then you have plenty of leftover willpower, energy, and resources to devote to causing interesting trouble. There are so many things that need doing that all you really have to do is open your eyes and look at them and then decide that you're actually going to do something about them. And you might think, "Well, what's within my scope of influence is so trivial that it's not worth doing." It's like, it won't stay trivial for long if you do it, not at all. And I don't think it's trivial to begin with. I don't think that anything, I really don't believe that anything done right is trivial. And my experience in my life has been that anything I actually did paid off. It didn't pay off necessarily in the way that I expected it to pay off, that's a whole different story. But if it was genuine commitment to do something, even if it went sideways and the outcome was really something other than what I expected, the net consequence over time was nothing but good. Every new frontier that can be conquered is an advance forward, and there's no shortage of frontier because we're surrounded by the unknown. We're surrounded by our own ignorance, and that's the secret to proper being. If you're interested in life, if you're interested in proper being and you're disinclined to produce any more suffering than necessary, then you want to know how to conduct yourself when the catastrophe comes so that you have a reasonable possibility of moving through it.
The Courage to Pursue the Highest Good
If you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize, your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else. Well, how are you going to find out if that's true? Well, it's a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. There's no way you're going to find out whether or not that's true unless you do it. So, no one can tell you. Either you have to be all in in this game. There is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then strive to attain it. There's no better pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it.
Finding Meaning in Everyday Life
You can take whatever job you have and you can make it a real nice little piece of absolute misery, or you can act like a civilized human being and notice that no matter where you are, there's a richness and a complexity that's completely inexhaustible right at hand. And then you can take that seriously and you can say, well, I can make it a lot better if I want to. I can get along properly with my co-workers and not gossip behind their back, and I can treat my customers properly, and if an opportunity comes my way, I can take it and I can see what happens. You
