Desires and Beliefs on the Path to the Truth!

Desires are like beacons on our path in life marking the direction towards our purpose. As any force of nature, they can be perilous and destructive or propel us towards our purpose in life if managed by a skillful captain. We are free to choose to guide the ship of our life towards exotic places or left without direction towards the only place our life will naturally go: the bottom, no matter how much we wallow in self-pity.

To find out where we are and where we want to go we try to base our decisions on fact and proven theory. But life is much more complicated and on top of that personal so its often hard to find useful advice and guidance. What are we and where do we want to go? Everyone certainly has some idea about that. So do your friends and wider circle of relatives, workmates etc. Their view may be close to yours or widely different. And somewhere there is the real you independent of opinion but certainly moving or being moved in one or other direction for good or bad.
Among all that we have our beliefs: the things we hold to be true without decisive proof because we didn’t have the time or the opportunity to check their validity. We still act upon them because we need to act and make choice big and small in every moment of our lives. So these beliefs influence reality and so in fact create into reality. Again, we may be successful but that would be entirely due to chance. Only by sharing our beliefs, assumptions, hypothesis with other reasonable people and accepting any constructive criticism can we see clearer in the fog of complexity created by contemporary society. Our desires, passions, values, goals being the compass the best map will be the one created by thinking and experience, and open to corrections by fellow travelers.
And not only for advice, often if not always we need outright help from others to achieve our goals.

But how do we enlist that help?

There are two obvious ways: 

Cooperation or Coercion. Coercion might come first to mind and seems like a quick and easy way to achieve your goals but it’s self-defeating in the end. Cooperation builds on common reasoning and pooling of resource to reach goals both personal and common trough understanding, compassion and common sense.

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I am

 

I am the way, the truth and the life….

The most important egoist – that’s Me!

Knowledge and cooperation are the two most important tools that the individual has to survive and succeed.

Knowledge – for obvious reasons – to be able to achieve his or her dreams, satisfy desires and learn how to yearn for more.

Cooperation for the same reasons – plus to disincentivize other people from encroaching on one’s life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

There is a story about a Chinese emperor who was the wisest person because he could learn something even from the dumbest person he met. And the dumbest person was dumb due to being unable to learn even from the wisest emperor.

Knowledge not only provides the means to achieve one’s goals but also clues on how to do that easier, lazier, more efficient – it teaches us shortcuts.

But there is irrelevant knowledge some would say – like astronomy, for example.

That may seem so.

But when Neanderthals were competing with our ancestors for a place in the future – we  won because we were more creative. The Neanderthals were bigger stronger and only engaged in inventing new tools when those tools seemed to obviously bring some immediate advantage. They also had art and possibly rudimentary faith. But we – had more – better art, stronger faith, more curious minds and that’s why we survived and they didn’t. That’s why we need astronomy, rock music, comedy and all the other good but seemingly useless stuff that we do and enjoy.

And yes knowledge gives us the idea of shortcuts and one of the most useful shortcuts is to exploit your neighbor. Doesn’t seem ethical but it works.

Mish Mash for busy minds