The Path to a True and Fruitful Life
An Introduction
Today I will present my basic philosophy, which is my way of life, and this is the path I think more of us should consider. I believe these are the key parts to living one’s best life:
Truth, Balance, Love, Knowledge, and Transference.
Truth
One of the greatest human problems is that we conflict with ourselves. Our personal desires may guide us one way. Yet, society may guide us in another, religion in another, science in another, our teachers in another, our parents in another, our siblings in another, our friends in another. Some of these directions that we are guided in may overlap, but many of them will conflict.
Many disorders of the mind may arise from an incongruence within ourselves. We become split in our persona, psyche, direction, and even our truth when we focus on all the truths of people important in our lives, many of which conflict with each other.
As a basic example, one’s teachers may say to obey authority, trust what you are taught by your teachers, and don’t ask too many questions. One’s religion may say that the only authority to trust is the Bible itself. At the same time, one’s parents may reveal that our teachers and authorities are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and the teachings of religion are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. These same parents may guide you toward finding a stable, high-paying career, even if this conflicts with your own personal truth.
In my life, my personal truth has been to follow my curiosity. I have been extremely curious about the mind, consciousness, thought, optimal performance (e.g., genius, creativity, flow, self-actualization), and improving societies. This has led me to study psychology, philosophy, sociology, and history to varying degrees.
I was fortunate never to have anyone in my life tell me that I was on the wrong path. No one ever took me aside and said that there is no stable career on this path, or that I am no one special to consider such things. I was always free to pursue my truth, and this is because I have been given a privileged path, which is not available to all. But by having been allowed this path of truth in my life, I see that there is no other way. Any other path than truth would logically have to be falseness. We all walk the path of falseness to varying degrees, and so our goal must be to reduce and eliminate it as much as we can and always be truthful with ourselves. Being truthful and congruent with ourselves is the ultimate truth that we can strive for.
Pursuing one’s truth is one’s source of life, energy, a connection to a greater good, the truest expression of ourselves, and the ability to be harmonious and coherent with our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions, where we align into one unified being with ourselves.
Of course, finding our personal truths means exploring all the truths in our surroundings from our parents, siblings, friends, society, religion, science, etc. We can use all of these as options to select from. And our truth can be an organic, growing, evolving concept, changing along with our changing mind or changing environment. But some part of that truth should be stable and steady, highlighting universal concepts of goodness and rightness and oneness with ourselves.
Balance
A focus on balance is to see that when we focus on just one aspect of our lives, all others tend to become neglected or ignored. For example, someone born to be a fighter may train all his life and become one of the strongest, quickest, and best fighters by 20 years of age. However, in this time, if he knows nothing else, he will never know what to fight for. He may not have taken the time to develop his emotions, curiosity, intuition, reasoning, creative, and passive nature. He may have always focused on fighting and training to fight, thus becoming the best at this, but perhaps the worst at everything else.
We do not all need to be perfectly in balance, and to put equal weight on work/family, or strength/wisdom, or learning in every discipline to equal degrees, or productivity/recreation, or activity/reflection, or healthy and safe activities/fun and risky activities, money making / money-saving. There is no perfect level of balance that works for all.
Balance can be thought about at the individual and societal levels to make matters a bit more complex. An individual who is not very well balanced may help to balance out the rest of society. For example, consider an immensely creative individual who always talks about new ideas and inventions and makes up stories. He is always going into new directions and so rarely completes anything. However, his imbalances may help to balance out the rest of society. Perhaps most people are too conventional, stuck in old ways of thinking. When they meet this hyper-creative individual, this helps them discover new solutions in their daily lives or work goals. An occasional unbalanced individual can actually help to balance out society.
Another way to make a case for some people being unbalanced, is that for some people, they may find balance in the imbalance. To clarify, a workaholic may use the immense hours at work to feel a sense of inner balance. Spending so much time at work may have a calming effect on the individual and help him feel that he is achieving a higher purpose of helping others (providing balance to society somehow). There is even a chance that working extensively can help someone work through psychological traumas or avoid having to dwell on negative thoughts. The point here is that we all have ways of finding inner balance, even if sometimes it is done through imbalance itself.
We must use our personal truth to help figure out what level of balance we need in our lives. Just as there are many conflicting truths, we may decide that work is important and family life is important. Or we may decide that pursuing a well-paying career is important, but also pursuing something we find personally fulfilling is important. In your efforts to find balance, you have many different options available to you. You may decide to pursue a single path that helps to balance everything, such as starting a family business that has the potential to provide a great deal of income while working modest levels and helping to deepen connections with your relatives. Alternatively, you may decide to focus exclusively on work from Monday to Friday and exclusively on the family on the weekends. There is no one right path, but we will be happier and more fulfilled when we consider balance in our lives.
Love
Love is an energy that unites. Hate is energy that repels. In that sense, love is gravitational – it will pull others into your orbit.
When we hate others, we do not hate them. Rather, we hate the aspects of ourselves that are like them. If you hate insincerity in others, it’s because you hate it in yourself. The same for greed, superficiality, bragging, being overly self-conscious, an inability to make decisions, etc.
We see ourselves in everything around us and everyone around us. Our selves are tied to the entire universe because we only process the universe through our own minds and mental patterns (or, to put it another way, through ourselves). Think of this – all the universe fits inside your mind, and so all of your universe is affected by the way you think and your expectations. You cannot fully see anyone else because you are always using parts of yourself to interpret them. When I see my Mom, I am not necessarily seeing her for what she is now. Rather, I see what I expect my Mom to be, given all my prior experiences with her. A large part of my Mom in my mind is actually me perceiving aspects of myself and our prior interactions in a way that represents her. My mother is a representation of my mother in my mind – My mother, to me, is not my actual mother, but just a representation. This is the nature of perception.
Any emotion I have toward my Mom, is actually an emotion I am experiencing toward myself – my mother is represented by myself. I cannot separate myself from the representation of her. And this is the case with every individual I come in contact with.
So in a way, all love and all hate, and all emotions we feel for others, we are feeling for aspects of ourselves.
We must learn to love ourselves. This is true love that transcends whether we did the right thing or not, whether we succeeded or not, whether we helped or not, whether we failed or not, whether we tried hard enough or not, whether we loved properly or not, whether people liked us or not, and so forth. We need to transcend all of this and learn to love ourselves along with all the goodness and badness, rightness and wrongness, perfection and imperfections that go along with it.
Our emotions, in many ways, operate as reflections. If I carry anxiety, depression, and hatred with me everywhere I go, in my body, my mind, and my facial expressions, then the people around me will operate as a sort of reflective mirror, and they will tend to feel those types of thoughts back toward me. They may or may not consciously understand what they are experiencing, but either way, the effects will be there.
Thus, a person who could extinguish all extraneous emotions and feel pure love would have a tremendous impact on their surroundings. Every person they came in contact with would likely be forever changed. A genuine experience with true love would be life-transforming. Just the same, we don’t properly consider it, but carrying around hate, anxiety, depression, etc., may have similar transformative effects on those around us, for the worst.
The challenge of love will be to learn to love ourselves. This will be an immense quest on its own for most of us. We have learned to talk offensively, bitterly, and ruthlessly to ourselves, but we must unlearn those patterns and focus on more constructive, loving ways of seeing ourselves. From there, we must relearn how to love the people we are closest to in our lives. We must come from a place of true acceptance, understanding, unconditional love, warmth, gratitude, and such to learn to love those closest to us in our lives truly.
Then, we must learn to love our friends, colleagues, acquaintances, city, state, country, world, and then not just humans but also animals, plants, and even insects. We must even learn to love what we consider nonlife, for that nonlife supports all life. Nonlife is the Sun – it may not be sentient, but it helps provide the source energy for all life on the planet. Nonlife is water – again, something that helps to nourish virtually all life on the planet, and life originated in the seas, in water. Nonlife is wood – used for building homes and furniture, but it comes from trees. The point is that even nonlife supports all life, and thus nonlife deserves our respect and love.
I will remind you that I do recognize it as a great feat if you can love yourself. To truly love yourself fully regardless of what or who you are will help carry your love to the next level and onto the universe itself.
Knowledge (Along with Understanding & Wisdom)
Knowledge is quite a powerful force to behold. Many of us think that only the experts need to know their particular fields, but I have made it a habit to question the experts, and I think most people would be surprised at how little our experts sometimes know or understand. Often, with just a few questions, I can find limitations in the knowledge of an expert. We credit the experts for all they know, but we forget how little we all seem to know. Of course, we all need experts, but perhaps some parts of life are so important that we need to become experts in multiple areas too.
You may be surprised to find that in a short time, you can rival the knowledge of some experts.
We need to stop giving power to everyone else and take some of it for ourselves. Your average person should not be on an endless quest for power, but we should at least be looking to empower ourselves in our daily lives. If you lack awareness of why anything in this life is operating the way it does, then how can you possibly have any power or ability to influence even your own life?
To change your life for the better, or the life of those around you for the better, or to constructively solve problems, or to creatively look for new solutions, you must empower yourself through knowledge – which may then lead to understanding and wisdom.
We have no excuse. Knowledge is freely available in many cases. There are free online courses offered even from leading colleges and institutions. There are free YouTube tutorials to learn practically anything. There are libraries of free books and now libraries of digital books available to us all. There are websites or podcasts to access even more information from leading experts around the world.
The knowledge in schools and educational programs is worthy. Still, it is limited because it was prepackaged for the masses, predigested, and pre-thought out by the teacher, and this is good because it helps to make sure that it takes you toward an end goal of having a balanced, certified education. Yet, it is bad because it provides everyone with the same thinking processes, same conclusions, and same journey, rather than allowing you to pursue your own unique path of learning.
In my personal journey, I got my B.A. in psychology and then my M.S. in industrial-organizational psychology. I was on the path toward a Ph.D., but I decided to abandon that path since I wanted more control over my learning. I wanted to learn in a more broad and interdisciplinary fashion, rather than be locked into a particular school of thought or be locked into needing to study a particular field in a certain way and examine particular problems others found important to examine. I needed my own path, to find my own truth, in my own way.
In this day in age, you can choose your own knowledge path. It may involve books and podcasts, school or university, or it may involve personal tutors, or certification programs, or self-learning (with free online resources), or finding a variety of mentors to guide you along your way, or a combination of these, or none of these.
The important thing is to seek out knowledge. Many in this world are motivated to get you to see things their way. People will try to convince you that this religion is better, or this product, or this philosophy, or this service, and so on. They will try to convince you, and the less you know, the more easily fooled you will be. If you do not pursue your own knowledge and way of learning, being, seeing, and doing, then you may forever be led by the currents of our times rather than the currents of your soul and your personal truth.
As a part of seeking out knowledge, I recommend incorporating experimentation into your life. Test what works for you, what does not work for you, and what needs improving. Also, measure how you are performing on the metrics most important to you. If you want more love in your life, are you performing loving actions every day? If not, you may want to measure this to make sure you are on track.
Transference
The idea of transference is to see that the above pursuits and qualities may be good. Still, they are somewhat useless if an individual pursues them in conflict with society or at the expense of society. Rather, we must find a way to unify ourselves with society at large.
Through transference, we will aim to act as a conduit and transfer the four forces of truth, balance, love, and knowledge onto others. We will act as a stream of higher consciousness, passing these forces along to everyone around us to magnify them and help humanity reach a higher plane of being.
For example, I have sometimes met people who had higher levels of knowledge than me, especially when I was younger. And I sometimes noticed that they did not really want to share what they knew with me. They might make a statement about how fixing a particular problem was actually quite easy. Still, when asked about how to do it, they would be vague, suggesting theories or that a person might learn them from trial and error. I realized that some people enjoy having knowledge that they can hold over others. They can boast about knowing things or having resolved problems, and when someone else has difficulties, they can sit back and enjoy watching them struggle when they already know the solution. As you might imagine, this is the opposite approach I suggest we all take. I understand that some people have limited time and do not wish to spend their time explaining something. Still, even then, I think they should suggest reading a particular book or taking a particular class, or something rather than just a vague remark that leads nowhere.
Let’s go deeper into what I mean by transference.
Transference in regard to truth will mean seeking your own truth while avoiding counteracting someone else’s truth. It will also mean helping others on their path toward truth. Sometimes, this help can be indirect or counterintuitive. If a wise person notes that his friend spends money on things he doesn’t need, and then often runs out of money before his next paycheck, the wise person may refuse to help this person with any money issues, so that he is forced to learn his lessons on his own.
Transference in regard to balance will mean seeking your own balance while avoiding counteracting someone else’s balance or avoiding causing imbalances in other people’s or living being’s lives. If it helps balance yourself to listen to loud music, this may disturb your spouse or roommate, causing them imbalances in their life. So we should learn healthier forms of balance that balance ourselves and those around us.
Transference in regard to love is fulfilled on its own. When you love fully, that energy is transferred or passes to the person you love, making it much more likely for them to pass it on to others.
Transference in regard to knowledge means seeking your own knowledge path while helping others build their knowledge. The ideal knowledge seeker will mentor at least one person and have a mentor of his own, helping and being helped. You are always learning and teaching. Not just learning. Not just teaching.
The general idea of transference is that whatever your philosophy maybe, if your reasons are strong enough for your convictions, you should aim to transfer this way of thought and being onto others, but this transference need not be through preaching. It can be through real actions that you commit to on a daily basis. Just as a child learns from the parents' actions, the world will learn from your actions more than it will from your words.
Final Thoughts
Something important to note is that all of these principles or forces will operate in different people’s lives in different ways. For one person, truth may involve delving fully into a scientific way of thinking and being. For another person, their truth may be to delve fully into a religious way of thinking and being. For another person, they may incorporate a mixture of scientific and religious truths into their lives. Truth is not a single path, but it allows countless possible paths to open up before us. Our lives will become much simpler when we pursue truth rather than open up the paths of falseness.
Truth expands into all the other principles. When you pursue your truth, you can figure out the best way to love for yourself, the best way to balance your life, and the best way to pursue knowledge. It is even possible that for some people, their truth will point them away from balance and instead point them fully toward love or fully toward knowledge.
Everyone’s journey or path will be unique, and this philosophy is meant to help bring out the best in all individuals and society at large.
If you are interested in learning about specific Thoughts to help you walk the path toward a True and Fruitful Life, I recommend reading:
Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth
7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life
