Don't let what you are stop you from being what you could be.
Right.
And so then the question is, Well, what do you identify with?
Do you identify with what you are,
then you're a tyrant.
Do you identify with with chaos?
Because that's the opposite of order.
Say,
then you're nihilistic.
Well, you don't identify with either of those.
You know that they're both necessary.
You know that you have to live with both of them.
But you identify
with the capacity to continually transcend what you are.
And then you seek out error.
That's what humility is.
It's like I'm error ridden.
So I want to see. I want to put myself
in a situation where I can discover one of my errors.
Hopefully not in a way that's going to knock me completely out of the game.
Right?
I want to seek out a challenge.
I want to find out where my limits are.
I want to find out where there's not enough of me, yet.
And I want to do that in a way that's
engaging because you can wear yourself out fighting Dragons.
So obviously, you can exhaust yourself completely.
And that's not helpful.
One of the things I learned, for example,
when I was coaching lawyers, these were people who had very high end careers.
And so they had an infinite workload.
No matter how much they worked - flat out,
there was always way more work that they should do.
It's a very difficult thing to learn to manage.
So they were exhausting themselves.
And I said, Well, you have to work less per day.
It's like, Well, no, that's not happening.
I can't do that.
And so...
What I learned over time was, okay,
So this is what you have to do: every three months,
you have to block off four days and go have a vacation.
You have to plan that in advance, so it's in your calendar so that your
Secretary doesn't book your time, and then you need that because you have
to recuperate enough so that you can work as hard as you're going to work.
And of course, they were nervous about that.
And I said, Well, look, we can calibrate this.
Let's keep track of your billable hours over the next year
and see if they increase or decrease, because I bet you if you take more time
off, you'll actually have more billable hours.
You'll actually have your cake and eat it, too.
You'll get to have a vacation and you'll be more productive.
And that inevitably that was what happened.
And so that's a matter of calibrating the game properly.
Right? You want to play a game that you can play
today, but also one that you can play next week and next month.
We're not talking about
your career this week.
We're talking about you having a career that lasts 30 years that doesn't kill you.
That doesn't make you hate yourself or the job, that doesn't make you bitter.
That doesn't wear you to a frazzle, so it has to be optimized.
And so I think that you can, in fact,
decide to take on the load that's optimally meaningful if you want.
And then you get to have your cake and eat it too.
You're on the pathway to continual incremental improvement.
You only have to burn off a feather
at a time instead of having the whole bloody thing burst into flames.
But
it's a constant source of renewal.
And there's an idea that to be renewed,
you have to drink the water of life, right?
That's an old mythological idea.
And what's the water of life?
Chaos is water. Water.
Water is chaos.
Water is what washes away too much order and to stay continually, let's say,
refreshed by the water of life is to take on exactly the right amount of chaos
to make sure that your garden is properly nourished.
And I think meaning is actually the marker of that.
And as I said, you know that I wouldn't
consider myself either naive or particularly optimistic person.
I don't think I'm either of those, but this isn't actually an idea.
This is one of the only ideas that I've
ever found that I really believe to be rock solid.
I actually think that it's true, and it's very optimistic because it says
you can use your sense of meaning to calibrate your progress through life.
But there's rules.
You have to aim at the highest possible good that you can conceive
now in that subject update, because what the hell do you know?
But you start by aiming at the star you
can see rather than the dimmer one that you can't yet perceive.
And then you decide that you're going to do that honestly.
Right. That's a big decision.
So the first decision, I think in some sense, is a decision of love.
You're going to decide that being is
worthwhile and that you're going to work for its betterment.
And that's a decision that's based on love.
And the second decision is based on truth.
Having made that decision, you're going to play a straight game.
Having made those two decisions,
I think that you can allow your sense of meaning to calibrate your pathway.
And then what's so interesting is that you hit a state that's as close to paradizal
as you're going to hit right away because being
engaged like that... It's better to be engaged in the solution
of a complex problem than not to have a problem at all.
And that's no different than saying
it's better for there to be being than nonbeing, because being is a problem.
And so if you want to have no problems,
then you have no being and you could say well being is so miserable that maybe
that's the route we should take and fair enough.
But maybe you can have your cake and eat it too.
You can have the damn problem.
It could be a problem worth solving.
And you can be so engaged in solving
the problem, that it justifies the fact that the problem exists, and then
you get to have the problem and the solution at the same time.
And maybe that's better than not having the problem at all.
And I believe that because one
of the things I have seen and I've seen this so being so interesting when I've
been lecturing to people, especially more recently.
And this has also manifested on itself on YouTube.
I'm talking to people a lot about responsibility,
and it's young men in particular that seem to be responding to that.
And I think that's partly because I think that young women,
in some sense have their responsibility map already laid out for them.
It's also less voluntary in some sense, for women, because they have more
complicated problems to solve in the first part of their life, right?
Because they have to get the family problem solved.
But whatever.
I've been talking very in a very delineated matter
about responsibility, which is a strange thing to sell to people.
But responsibility is what gives your life meaning.
And so then you might say, Well,
then take on ultimate responsibility and what happens.
You have an ultimately meaningful life. And then you might say, Well,
if your life is ultimately meaningful, doesn't matter if it's
punctuated by tragedy or even predicated on tragedy, it's worth it!
And I think that's true.
And everything I've seen indicates to me that's true.
Every time I get my clients to take on more responsibility,
and it isn't an injunction. You're a bad person.
You should take on responsibility.
It has nothing to do with that.
You can define the damn responsibility.
It isn't something that someone else should impose on you.
It's not a matter of doing what you should do in some abstract manner.
It's not that it's the choice of what game you're going to play,
and you can play the game of the seeker, I would say, and if you play that game,
then everyone wins, and it's the best game you can play.
And so...
The answer in some sense,
to the tragedy of life, to the catastrophe of life to the fall,
is to adopt the responsibility of mortality that goes along with that.
And to play that game maximally
and paradoxically, it's in the willingness to do that, that the solution emerges.
And I have done my best with every single thing I've talked to you guys about.
I have done my best to do what Dostoevsky
does in his novels, which is, I make a proposition, and then I spend
months or years trying to figure out if I can take the bloody thing apart
if there's something wrong with it, because I want to find out.
I want to hit it with a hammer and see if it breaks.
And what I've been trying to do is to tell
you all the things that I've gathered, let's say,
or laid out or articulated or discovered over the last 30 years that I have not
been able to break with the biggest hammer that I could take to them.
And I guess that's the fundamental one is
that I believe that...
The idea that lurks in these images
derived from very different cultures.
It's the same idea.
Life is suffering,
Right?
Indisputable.
What do you do about that?
You voluntarily accept it and then strive to overcome the suffering.
That's a consequence of that.
And you do that for you.
And you do that in a way that makes it better for other people.
And then that works.
And one question might be, well, how well does it work?
And the answer is
the only way that you can find out is by trying it.
That's it. That's the existential element of it.
The proof is to be derived
by the incarnation of the attitude in your own life.
No one can tell you how it will work for you.
It's the thing that your destiny is to discover that.
And
you have to make the decisions to begin
with, because you can't do this without
commitment, you have to commit to it first.
That's the act of faith that Kierkeegaard was so insistent upon.
You have to say, I'm going to act as if being is good.
I'm going to act as if truth is the pathway to enlightenment.
I'm going to act as if I should pursue the deepest meaning possible in my life.
And there's reasons to do.
None of those.
They're real reasons.
So it's really a decision.
But you can't find out what
the consequence of the decision is unless you make the decision.
I think the same thing happens when you get married, by the way, is:
if you think you might leave, you're not married.
And then you think, well, the marriage didn't succeed.
It's like, well,
maybe you were never married because the rule is you don't get to leave.
And there's a reason for that rule.
Now, I'm not saying that there aren't
situations where there should be exceptions made for that.
That's not the point.
The point is that there are some games you don't get to play unless you're all in.
And the other thing that's so interesting about being alive is that you're all in,
no matter what you do, you're all in.
This is going to kill you.
So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can
while you're waiting...because do you have anything better to do?
Really? Why not pick the best thing possible that you could do?
Why not do that?
Maybe you could justify your wretched existence to yourself that way.
I think you could.
That's what it looks like.
People find such meaning in the responsibilities they adopt.
It stops making them ask questions about
what life is for if you have a newborn child, for example,
like, unless you're really in a bad way, psychotically depressed,
or maybe your personality really needs some retooling, you stop thinking about
anything but ensuring that that baby is doing well.
And if someone comes along and asks you
an existential question about your commitment to that, the right response is,
why are you asking me such stupid questions
when this is manifesting itself right
in front of your eyes? Like, how blind can you be?
That isn't the time for questions about the meaning of life.
The answer is right in front of you.
And if you can't see it, it's not because life has no meaning.
It's because you're blind.
That's what the image of the Virgin Mother and the child is all about.
It's like, what's the answer to the meaning of life?
Here's an answer.
Well, I'm going to criticize that.
Well, go right ahead.
What do you call that? A termite knowing on a temple.
There's no utility in that sort of criticism.
It's blindness.
And it's the same thing with regards to the path of the hero.
It's like it listens in front of you and you can criticize it.
It's like,
Fine.
Put the cart before the horse and see how far you get.
So I thought to bring full closure to the class.
I was trying to solve
this terrible puzzle that confronted me and many other people
about how it was that human beings got themselves in such a tangle about what
they believed, such a tangle that we were pointing
the ultimate weapons of destruction at one
another, which, by the way, we are still doing.
I thought, okay, well, I understand that we need the belief systems.
They orient us.
And that means there will be conflict between belief systems.
And that can be a catastrophe.
And that's being played out everywhere again, in very many ways.
What's the solution to that?
Well, one possibility is there's no solution.
It's just
mayhem all the way around could be the case.
But it seemed to me as I delved into it
that the proper solution to that was to live properly
as an individual
because you're more powerful than you think.
Way more powerful than you think.
I mean, God only knows what you are in the final analysis.
You're blind to your own weaknesses, but you're also blind to your own strengths.
And so then I think, Well, if you got your act together, it'd be better for you.
And instantly it would be better for your
family, assuming they wanted you to get your act together.
And not everyone does.
And then it would be better for the community.
It's like, how far could you take that if you stopped wasting time?
And if you stopped lying,
and if you oriented yourself to the highest possible good that you could
conceive of and you committed to that, how much good could you do?
Well, I would say, why you find out?
So that's what I think you should do.
You should find out you don't have anything better to do.
And there's nothing in it.
As far as I've been able to tell there's nothing in it but good.
So
maybe you could sort yourself out so that you wanted nothing but the good.
And then maybe you could help make that manifest in the world.
And
maybe we wouldn't have all these terrible problems then.
At least we'd have fewer of them.
And that would be a start.
So...
The answer to the problem of humanity is
the integrity of the individual.
That's the answer
and States that are predicated on that realization are healthy
and States that aren't, are doomed to stagnation and catastrophic collapse.
And personalities that are predicated on
self tyranny and the tyranny of others are doomed and doomed to collapse.
And then you think, well,
what's the barrier and the barriers are you willing to accept the responsibility
and part of the answer to that is reduce the damn responsibility until it's
tolerable you don't have to fix everything at once.
You could just start by fixing the things that you could fix,
or you could even do it more.
You could do it with even less self sacrifice.
You could start by fixing only the things that you want to fix.
God, you can get a massive way that way.
So do it.
See what happens.
That's what you should have been taught in University right from the beginning.
It's like aim at the highest good, tool yourself into something that can
attain it and go out there and manifest it in the world
and everything that comes your way will be...
Everything that comes your way will be a blessing.
And so
all you have to do is give up your resentment and your hatred.
I know that's a hard thing to give up because you have plenty of reason for it.