The Path to Self-Realization and Ennoblement
Sit on your bed one day and ask yourself, "What remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life?" And if you actually ask that question, but you have to want to know the answer, right? Because that's actually what asking the question means. It doesn't mean just mouthing the words. It means you have to decide that you want to know. You'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl. 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.
Committing to the Highest Good
You might also ask yourself, "Do you really have anything better to do?" And if you don't, well why would you do anything else? If you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day, that works. And I actually think that, that's in accordance with what we have come to understand about human perception. Because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim, because you're a creature that has a name. You 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. And so you have a name. Let's say your aim is the highest possible aim. Well, that sets up the world around you. It organizes all of your perceptions, your emotions, and your motivations. So you organize yourself around that aim.
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. 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 makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning, that that's how, 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.
Preparing for Chaos
And then the issue is, well, what about when chaos comes? What about when all hell's about to break loose? Well, you might want to be doing something that you regard as truly worthwhile. Because that's what will keep you afloat when everything is flooded. And you don't want to wait until the flood comes. Just start doing that. Because if your ark's half-built and you don't know how to captain it, the probability is very high that you'll drown.
Ask and it shall be given you. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. That sounded pretty optimistic again, but again I think it's a description of the structure of existential reality. By that, I mean when I'm in my clinical practice and I observe, and this is also the case with my students, let's say people's lives aren't what they would like them to be. And so then you ask why.
One of the main reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is. And the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you, let's say, which would even be better than what you want, right? Because you might be wrong about what you want easily. But maybe you could get what would really be good for you. Well, why don't you? Because you don't try. You don't think, "Okay, here's what I would like if I could have it." And I don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods or status or something like that. That isn't what I mean. I mean something like imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for. And then you thought, "Okay, I'm caring for this person. I would like things to go as well for them as possible. What would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case?" Well, people don't do that. They don't sit down and think, "All right, let's figure it out. You've got a life. It's hard, obviously. It's like three years from now, you could have what you need. You got to be careful about it. You can't have everything. You have to have what would be good for you, but you have to figure out what it is. And then you have to aim at it."
My experience with people has been if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it, then they get it. And it's strange because they don't necessarily do it the way they think they're going to do it. But they get it. And it's strange because it's not quite that simple. Because you may formulate an idea about what would be good for you and then you take ten steps towards that. And you find out that your formulation was a bit off. And so you have to reformulate your goal. You're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal. But a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success. And so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely, the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero. And so there's a proposition here. The proposition is if you actually want something, you can have it. Now, the question then would be, well, what do you mean by actually want? And the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible. And that's a sacrificial idea. It's like you don't get everything, obviously. But maybe you can have what you need. And maybe all you have to do to get it is ask. But asking isn't a whim or today's wish. It's like you have to be deadly serious about it. You have to think, "Okay, I'm taking stock of myself. And if I was going to live properly in the world and set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation, exactly what is it that I would aim at?"
So the issue is not so much the blindness of others, even though there's as much blindness among others as there is for you. But the issue here, the advice here, the description here is you should be concerned about what's interfering with your own vision first. And you should leave other people to hell alone in relationship to that. So if your mode of being in the world is, "If you would just act better, things would improve for me" or if you identify the evil and the catastrophe as something that's outside, that someone else needs to fix or that someone's response someone else is responsible for, then you're not going to fix that. And you're going to remain blind to the things that you're doing and not doing that make things not go well. And so it's just better to think, "Alright, I'm probably blind in many, many ways. And maybe there are some ways that I could rectify that." Because it's highly probable that you're blind in all sorts of ways. I mean, it's in fact, it's virtually certain. And so it's just more useful to think, "How is it that I'm wrong in this situation?" I'll tell you something that I learned to do when I was arguing with my wife, which happened quite frequently because when you actually communicate with people, you find out that there's many things that you don't agree on. And that's because you're actually different creatures. And so if you're actually going to have a truthful conversation, then you're going to find out that you don't see things the same way. And then you can either pretend that that's not the case and gloss over it and then end up in a 30-year silent war. Or you can have the damn fight when you need to have it and see if you can straighten it out.
So now and then we'd get in a situation where we were at loggerheads, we couldn't move. And you know, it would spiral up into hate speech. Let's say because, yeah, everyone laughs because they know they manifest plenty of hate speech towards those they love. So one of the things we learned to do was when we hit an impasse was to separate and to go our own ways and to go sit and think. Okay, look, we're at this unpleasant situation, we can't figure out how to move forward. I'd always think, of course, it's her fault. Obviously, it's her fault at least 95%. But maybe there was something I did that contributed like 5% to it. If you do what it is that you're called upon to do, which is to lift your eyes up above the mundane daily selfish impulsive issues that might beset you and attempt to enter into a contractual relationship with that which you might hold in the highest regard, whatever that might be, to aim high and to make that above all else in your life, that fortifies you against the vicissitudes of existence like nothing else can. And I truly believe that that's the most practical advice that you could possibly receive. The way that you fortify your faith in life is to assume the best. Something like that. And then to act courageously in relationship to that. And that's tantamount to expressing your faith in the highest possible good. It's tantamount to expressing your faith in God. And it's not a matter of stating, "Well, I believe in the existence of a transcendent deity." Because in some sense, who cares? Who cares what you believe? I mean, you might and all that, but that's not the issue. That's not the issue. The issue, it seems to me, is how you act. The issue is not what you believe as if it's a set of facts, but how you conduct yourself in the world. The purpose of thinking is to let your thoughts die instead of you. It's a brilliant notion.
So the idea is something like you can conjure up a representation of yourself. You can conjure up a variety of potential representations of yourself in the future. You can lay out how those future representations of yourself are likely to prevail or fail. You can call the potential future representations that will fail. And then you can embody the ones that will succeed. You do that well, simultaneously conjuring up a representation of your current state and determining for yourself, because of your own undue suffering, which elements of your pathetic being need to be given up so that you can move forward into that future. And the goal, what is it that you're aiming at with that work and that sacrifice? That's the ultimate question. What is it that you're trying to do? You're trying to improve the future. We believe that the future can be improved. We believe that it can be improved as a consequence of our sacrificial work. And so, once again, what are the limitations? What are the limits to that? What are the necessary limits to that? I would say we don't know. We conjured up this remarkable idea. The future exists. We can see it, even though it's only potential. We can adjust our behavior in the present in order to maximize our probability of success in the future. How best to do that? Well, the idea is something like don't hesitate to offer the ultimate sacrifice if you want the future to turn out ultimately well. What is it that you could contract for, let's say, if you were willing to give up everything about you that's weak and unworthy? The proper sacrificial attitude produces a psychological state and then a social state that's a manifestation of that attitude that decreases the probability that the world will careen into hell and increases the probability that people will live high-quality meaningful private lives in a society that's balanced and capable of supporting that. And none of that seems to me to be questionable, really. I also don't think it's anything that people don't actually know. You know, people have told me many times that when they listen to me talk, they're hearing things that they already knew but didn't know how to say. It's something like that. And this is one of those things that I think is exactly like that. I mean, I think it's at the very core of our moral knowledge, which is our behavioral knowledge and our perceptual knowledge.
