Seeing Through

You may arrive at a point of observing someone and knowing what the intent is behind their every word and action. For instance, they want to appear attractive, friendly, interesting, funny, powerful, or wealthy.

Our demeanor and the words we speak reveal what is on our minds. We may not say what we are thinking precisely, but often just through listening and observing, you will come to See Through a person. You may even come to perceive them better than they know themselves.

When we lie or “bend the truth,” often we are doing this for the benefit of ourselves, just as much as we do it for others. But these falsehoods prevent us from truly Seeing at all.

A path to Seeing Through is to lose concern over how you appear to be and to focus entirely on someone else. You may do this by simply wanting to know the truth and exploring every statement that a person makes. Further, you may explore every facial expression, the intonation of voice, and what it is that this person wishes you to see, versus what actually is.

Any statement that deviates even slightly from the pure truth signals an intent. You will see that this person wants you to think something for a particular reason. For example, they exaggerated or implied something was the case when it wasn’t. Their words may have painted a beautiful picture of who they are and what they have done, but perhaps their actions haven’t lived up to their words.

See Through them to see things as they actually are.

And for any statement they make, you may ask what presumptions they have made. With those presumptions, you can quickly understand what beliefs or ideas are so important to them that they have stopped questioning them. They have assumed these things to be true when perhaps they were not.

Any statement at all tends to presuppose something, to assume that something is the case. You simply have to be willing to consider what they are and ask yourself “What assumption is at play here?”. Then you should be aware that the assumption could be wrong.

Seeing Through, essentially, is about taking a small amount of information, and extrapolating abundantly from there, to provide a full picture of where someone is coming from.

Soon enough, in exploring people’s demeanors and the words they say and beyond, you will quickly figure out their intentions. You will know how they want to be perceived and why, and what matters to them. You may know where they came from and where they are headed and why, just from a few words.

When you master the practice of Seeing Through, you will see that what I have said above is what often applies. People want to appear attractive, friendly, interesting, funny, powerful, or wealthy.

Some people may even make efforts to appear superior on all those fronts, perhaps desiring to be seen as better than others.

And strangely, the ones trying to be seen in a certain way have often failed to meet that goal. Otherwise, why would they focus on it so much?

Seeing Through others is an ability we may all acquire in due time, with life experience. But we tend to forget to use that ability on ourselves. We don’t practice Seeing Through our own empty desires to appear to be a certain way.

What do you want to appear to be that is not actually who you are?

See Through Others, and this is worthy, for you will come to see people as they are. See Through Yourself, and this is a higher path, for you will come to see yourself as you are.

---

To explore truths about yourself and the world more deeply, you may wish to read Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth. The book is available on Amazon and other major retailers.

Make Yourself Obsolete

We all want to feel important and needed, but are we really?

For every profession I look at, I find myself wondering how necessary it really is.

Many of us are not truly working from the deepest, most serious part of our hearts.

Instead, we see it as just a job, just a way to make some money, just a temporary station on the way to something better.

Ask yourself, when something goes wrong with your work, do you care about this deeply? And if you do, is it because you truly care, or just because you worry that others will think less of you? Be honest and sincere here with your thoughts. I am asking you to reflect on these questions, not to feel the need to get defensive.

A few months ago, I spoke with someone in the Education field interested in developing a better curriculum for her students. I told her that she would succeed when the student no longer needed the teacher.

I felt that this was not what she was expecting to hear.

I advised her to make her job unnecessary.

Why would I do that?

I’m not sure it’s a success when students graduate to need another teacher, and another, and another. I’ve often heard that students decided to pursue the next level, whether it’s to a bachelor’s degree, master’s, or even a Ph.D. because they didn’t know what else to do.

Is that worthy? Is that success? Or is it futility?

On the one hand, ongoing learning is honorable. On the other, we keep learning more and more stuff and not having much to show for it.

Is it the contents in our minds that are valuable, or the power we have to make something happen in the real world? Many of us have been led astray or forgotten which of these actually mattered.

No one wants to hear that their job should be made obsolete. No one wants to think that success is in finding a way to make your job unnecessary.

We want to hear that we are essential, that society needs us, that society would crumble without our involvement. But that simply is not the case.

We need doctors so badly, you may say. Sure, but isn’t that because we have neglected our health, to the point that we have outsourced its care rather than taken responsibility for it?

The most common “solutions” offered are medicines, which to some degree, act as poisons with their side effects.

We need teachers so badly, you may say. Sure, but isn’t that because we never taught students to think from the beginning? We led them to become reliant on digesting specific curriculums and memorizing them, only to forget most of it anyway. And the material they remembered would become obsolete in a few years.

The most common “solutions” offered are more degrees and more courses, often with no clear path toward careers. And for the ones that lead to careers, there is no guarantee that such careers will still exist in a few years.

When the “solutions” keep us reliant on needing more and more “solutions” from the same place, are they truly solutions?

I have no problem with doctors or teachers. I have merely used these as examples. I could have used any other profession.

For any career I can think of, the motivation of that job is to keep you locked in. There is never a true solution to any problem. It’s just a treadmill that keeps you running but staying in place at the end of the day.

Whether conscious and done purposely or not, it seems to be a consistent theme across most jobs. The client becomes an eternal source of revenue – always needing to come back for something more.

We never arrive at some desirable end point. There is just this empty feeling of needing more.

I don’t expect anyone to take today’s lesson seriously. I expect you to read this and continue about your job the same way you always have, and I can’t blame you for that either.

You are one piece of a much larger system. If you talk to your boss tomorrow and tell him: “I realized we’re just running our clients in circles here, and I think I know a way to get their problems fully resolved, so they never have to come back,” you’ll probably get fired on the spot.

There is no profit in true solutions.

We fear becoming obsolete the most, but perhaps it was what we needed all along.

Somewhere, in the Amazon rainforest, there was probably a panacea (cure-all) plant that would have cured everything. And it doesn’t matter because it would have made no profit for anyone. The only profit would have been to destroy the plant to avoid competitors, make it into a patentable drug, and then sell it at a high price.

This is where we are.

We are more interested in making people need us rather than truly offering something worthy. The most worthy thing to offer would be that which would make us no longer relevant or needed.

No one wants to hear this.

I don’t even want to say it because I know no one wants to hear it.

No one will hire me to give presentations at a Fortune 500 Company to tell them that they should make themselves obsolete. They would laugh at the idea that they should look for ways to dismantle their job positions and the company they work for.

Instead, they are focused on growth.

But the more a company grows, the more it shows they haven’t solved anything. They have learned to make others reliant on them, is all.

But if [Insert famous product here] is so great, why do we need more of it? Why does it never satisfy us? Why do I need to keep buying it or keep doing it to get that feeling?

Mind you, this is a feeling which is fleeting and illusory anyway.

If it were truly the best product, I think I could buy it once, and I would never need it again.

Those products don’t exist, of course. The products and services we have are the ones that keep us chasing our tails, coming back for more, like strung-out addicts.

The “solutions” we have are those that work for a few minutes, maybe an hour, maybe even a day, but not much more. In a recent post, I said: “The problem with solutions is that they are all temporary fixes. No problem has ever been permanently fixed.”

Our whole lives, nothing ever worked, but we think: “Maybe this new product or service will do the trick.”

I hope my books and Thoughts help someone somewhere, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they need me, my books, or my Thoughts.

My goal is not to keep you on the line, needing more.

Some of the “best” writers out there are actually the worst. If I read someone’s blog post, and it’s so great, why would I feel the need to read all their books and posts? If they were so great, I wouldn’t need to. If they were that good, I could read an article or two, get the message I needed, and never return to them again.

But that is exceedingly rare.

These days, I am writing everything I feel the need to so that it wouldn’t matter if I were to die. Even if I die, you can still access all that I thought was ever worth saying.

There isn’t this sense of “I must write 100 books or 1,000 articles.” That is irrelevant. The point is, did I say everything I needed to say, to the point that if lightning struck me dead one of these days, it wouldn’t matter?

Did I make myself obsolete? If so, then that was a success in my book.

Again: I don’t need you to need me. If you can click away from this site, and never return and be better for it, then I have succeeded.

Here is a quick example of how making oneself obsolete can lead to success:

A friend of mine had a Master or Guide in his life. He provided direction and words of wisdom regularly. One day, that Master decided to move on. My friend had often received good counsel and friendship and was saddened by his departure. But after this, my friend grew immeasurably. He started to realize that he did not need that Master at all. Rather than following or abiding by the lessons taught, he was paving his own way. In being left Masterless, he was now finding the Master within.

The Master, Guide, Parent, or Teacher who can leave and make you something better for it is the truly worthy one. Don’t misunderstand me to condone abandoning anyone. Only you can decide the point where it is better to walk away, or give space, or leave and never come back. But know whether you do this selfishly or selflessly.

Make yourself obsolete. Make it so that even if you vanished, the world would somehow become better for it.

We risk being made (or revealed to be) obsolete by the natural order of things every day. We might as well do it ourselves.

---

Today’s post may be a heavy dose of Truth for some of us. If you would like to dig deeper into Your Life’s Truth, you may wish to read a book I just published, Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.

To Pursue Truth

What would it mean to pursue Truth?

To pursue truth would mean to see that there is a personal element to Truth, as, in the end, only you can decide whether something is true or not. Someone else can tell you a “truth,” but if it is not true for you, then it is irrelevant. To think of this another way, something may be “true,” but only in a particular context that does not affect you.

To pursue truth would mean to open yourself to the idea that any assumption you begin with has wrongness to it.

Assumptions lead to assumptions. For example: “If I can assume A, then I can assume B, which leads me to assume C.” This is how we often think, which piles assumptions on top of assumptions. Yet, we have an air of certainty behind our words, which is falseness.

To pursue truth would mean to see that what you want to be true and what is indeed true are not the same.

It would mean to see that the ideas you obsess over do not correspond to the reality around us. The past is an illusory story we tell ourselves, rather than fact. Our desires or anxieties are thinking that something good or bad will happen when it has not yet happened and may not happen.

It would mean seeing that who we think we are and who we are is not the same. Are you defined by a set of actions or thoughts which were handed to you? No. Who we think we are is just a story and not the truth.

To pursue the truth would mean that you are willing to go on a path that leads you away from comfort and happiness if that is where it will lead. To feel otherwise will mean resisting truth, which will ultimately lead you away from it.

If you long for the truth, you will lead yourself to it or be led to it. However, your longing for it must be greater than your willingness to give in to distraction, nonsense, and delight.

The pursuit of truth will mean a return to something you once had and have lost along the way. We can aim to retain the aspects of truth that we have not fully lost while seeking to regain the ones that were lost. This would be a starting point.

It will mean perceiving that a tone of voice can ring false, a single word can ring false, and so can an intention. Even an action can be done falsely. We can train ourselves to see such falseness, which will allow us to see truth.

The pursuit of truth is actually to learn to see the falseness within and all around us.

In the pursuit of truth, we will learn to say to ourselves, “that is false” so many times per day that we will be surprised to see that there are few human moments where the truth is present.

To pursue truth would mean to let go of such notions: ideas present us with reality, people are valuable sources of insight, and the material world is what it seems to be.

To pursue the truth will mean to see that anything less than entirely true cannot be said to be true.

It would mean to let go of the idea that the masses, your neighbors, your family, or friends have grasped truth.

It would mean to look inward, to stop looking for someone to follow, and start on your path that no one else could have guided you toward.

In your pursuit of truth, you will find that your thoughts have led you astray – the thinking that you have used all your life was not conducive to revealing truth. Instead, it set you up for self-deception.

From the beginning, we were set up to fail in the pursuit of truth.

In seeking truth, you will find that you must be sincere, as anything else would be a lie. If you acknowledge the challenge of being sincere, then that is the beginning of sincerity.

The above ideas cannot lead us to truth, shine a light on the path, nor do anything for us unless we are ready to let the truth in.

But if we are ready, awareness of the truths stated will help us steer ourselves more toward truth and away from falseness.

Even if we become aware that we have been unable to grasp these ideas fully and have been led astray in our lives, this can be the beginning of our journey toward truth.

---

If you are ready to pursue your unique path to truth and understanding, you may wish to read Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.

The Liar’s Scale (Some Lies Are Worse Than Others)

All lies are not the same, so today, I want you to consider how some lies can be better or worse than others.

On the path to seeking Truth in our lives, I think it’s important for us to think about this because if we don’t put any conscious attention on how truthful we are, or how truthful the people around us are or the systems around us, then our lives can descend into falseness. We may tell bigger and bigger lies, become surrounded by falseness, and then one-day truth and falseness can blur together.

We should always maintain our grasp on truth because grasping truth means grasping reality. To help you maintain a better grasp on truth and reality, I present you with The Liar’s Scale: (Lower numbers indicate lesser lies, and larger numbers are for bigger lies.)

1) The Survivor’s Lie

The purpose of these lies is to meet personal needs – such as for food, water, shelter, or other necessary comforts. When telling such lies, the primary goal is to survive and not take more than necessary.

2) The Positive Lie (E.g., “White Lie”)

The purpose of this lie is not to cause any harm and not to hide any misdeeds. The purpose is usually to help prevent someone from feeling bad or to help someone feel better. Your goal is to somehow improve the situation for someone else by telling a positive lie.

3) The Minor Lie

These are small lies that we may tell to get our way in fairly trivial situations. The purpose may be to help others somehow, but often we are more interested in helping ourselves to feel better or avoid a negative consequence, rather than on how this lie impacts others.

4) The “Saving Face” Lie

This is a lie where you make up an excuse or state something just for the purpose of not looking bad. At this stage, you want to manage how people think of you, even if this involves lying to them. Rather than being motivated to make people think you are the best, you don’t want them to think less of you. At this stage, you lie about who you are, which seems to be bigger than the prior lies on the scale.

5) The “I Can’t Fail” Lie

With this type of lie, you had a goal in your life, and you have realized that you could not meet it normally. To meet it then, you have decided to either tell a lie or to cheat in some way to get your desired outcome. At this stage, the lie should only be an isolated or rare incident and not a regular occurrence. However, this type of lie is higher than the prior ones because at this stage, to avoid derailing your entire life or losing a job, people can be motivated to tell much bigger lies (or cheat in substantial ways).

6) The “I Must Win” Lie

Here, the need to always win or be right or better than others will result in lying to always have that competitive edge and to maintain the illusion of being the best. You are determined to be highly competitive or possibly the best, even if it means telling big lies. This is a larger lie than the prior ones because you have decided on an outcome you must meet, and you will do anything to get that outcome, which includes lying or cheating to meet that objective.

7) The “I Will Protect You” Lie

With this type of lie, someone is aware of a bad action (by themselves or someone else), and this person lies (or purposely does not state the truth) to protect someone from having to learn about this bad action. Someone may tell themselves that they lie to protect others, but often they are also lying to protect themselves from the backlash they will receive if people learn the truth. This lie is fairly high on the scale because these lies can easily turn into further lies to cover up prior lies. It is also high on the list because, generally speaking, this involves lies that people consider major breaches of trust or integrity. Otherwise, they would not expend so much energy in maintaining this type of lie.

8) The “I Will Hurt You” Lie

The above lies are usually not intended to cause harm actively, and that is why this lie is higher up on the scale. At this point, a person is motivated to harm others – it may be for revenge, to teach someone “a lesson,” or because someone has personal reasons for disliking someone. Such lies may be used to acquire money or valuables or to cause psychological or physical harm.

9) The “My Life is a Lie” Lie

At this stage, someone has discovered that lying is a powerful tool for getting what you want. You may be able to gain sympathy by making things up or exaggerating your problems to absurd degrees. You may make up stories to entice people to give you money. Whenever your integrity or expertise is called into question, you may have lies ready to support your behavior. At this stage, major aspects of your life may have been fabricated. Your resume may be mostly made up of falsehoods, your attire may indicate that you are much more successful than you are, and your relationships may be based on promises you have made and never intended to follow through on. At this stage, a person is so used to lying as their way of life that when they are inevitably caught in a lie, they make up new “facts” to support a new story that justifies their actions.

The “Keeping the Justice” Lie

Another type of lie that will not be easily ranked above is the “Keeping the justice” lie, where someone lies to uphold some greater sense of justice or values. The reason this one will be kept unranked is that, in the end, we must all make our judgment calls as to whether it is worth it to try to keep the justice or not. And we may all have different impressions of what is justified.

I’m interested in discussing lies because it happens quite a lot, and we tend to accept it as a way of life. Anything someone tells you or anything that you read today may be a lie. We are all aware of this and probably have made some level of peace with this.

Unfortunately, the more lies a person tells, the more likely they are to fall into a pattern of telling deeper and bigger lies more frequently. At the highest stages of lying, a person’s life consists more of lies than of truth. When they get up in the morning, the first thing that runs through their mind is which made-up stories they may have to tell to which individuals to get the desired results or protect all of their prior lies from being discovered.

Even at lower stages of lying, one can easily slip into deeper levels. Imagine if someone perpetually tells minor lies (#3 on the scale). These may be small lies, but it seems like in time, this person may slip deeper and deeper down the scale as lying becomes a regular part of their life.

I would encourage you to become more conscious of any lies you may be telling in your life. Sometimes, they can become so routine that we fail even to notice them. For example, perhaps there is someone in your life which lies to you regularly. If you “go along” with these obvious lies, then in a sense, you are lying too.

If someone lies to you or those around you often, think about what you can do to break this cycle where they “sell” you their lies, and you appear to “buy” into them. We should find ways to reduce the lying around us because people who do this regularly may not even be conscious of what they are doing. And if they think they are getting away with it, they may be motivated to continue. Perhaps this is a bad habit they developed, and they will not stop unless they are called out on it somehow.

Here are some remarks I have made in the past or that I might make if I hear something that is an apparent lie:

• Really? That’s not what “such and such source” told me.

• Where are you getting your facts from? I don’t think I would trust that source.

• Some people are concerned with (insert whatever sense of integrity or value the person aims to protect with this lie), but I couldn’t care less.

• So what do you think about (mention another topic)? Or “Look at the time – I really have to get going.” (This can get them to see that you will not sit by and listen to lies.)

• Wow, that is truly unbelievable – that is one for the record books (said with slight sarcasm).

• Now you are just making stuff up (not in an irritated tone, but possibly a slightly amused tone).

• I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.

• Now that flies in the face of everything I know to be true (I may save this one for a pathological liar).

Think back to times you have noticed that someone was most likely lying. If you pay attention, you can often spot signals that will indicate someone may be lying. For example:

• An inconsistency in what someone has stated. Perhaps they claim to be whatever is advantageous at the moment, and this may result in conflicting statements.

• Their body language or tone of voice is out of sync with the words they use. They may tell you bad news in a happy tone of voice.

• They always have excuses to avoid having to do undesirable activities.

• They tend to get overly defensive, and their tone of voice rises sharply.

• They become uncomfortable and touch their nose or face as they speak.

• They closely monitor your reaction, possibly to see if you are “buying” their story. They may check for your reaction to judge if they should continue with their story or modify it to appease you.

• They make claims that do not have common sense or reason behind them – and they do this regularly.

I have given you a lot of information here. Why don’t you take a minute to reflect on the lies in your life? Consider:

What types of lies do you tell?

On average, where do they fall on the Liar’s Scale?

Have your lies gotten smaller or bigger in time?

What about the people around you. How much do you think they lie, and are you doing anything about it?

---

If you liked this post, you may want to read this post next - The Path to a True and Fruitful Life - where I discuss the most impactful truths that I have found in my life.

---

If you are ready to pursue your unique path to truth and understanding, you may wish to read Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.

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

Find Your Inner Truth

The most important thing in life is to always pursue your inner truth.

Life throws much falseness at us. It presents us with false choices such as going along with our parents or against them. How can there be such a thing? If your parents taught you to stand up for yourself and to tell the truth, then if you go along with your inner truth and stand up to them, you are for your parents, even if you are against them, are you not?

Words themselves often present us with falseness. For example, the “mastermind” is a title often given to criminals rather than people who have actually mastered their minds. A person who has truly mastered their mind would never mastermind a horrific crime. This is just one example of the falseness of language.

Why does the truth matter so much? I have noticed in my life that I am happy when I am pursuing my truths. When I am going along with my ethics, beliefs, deep needs (not just survival, but also intellectual and creative), I am happy and feel fulfilled in my life, as if I am on the right path.

When I deny myself, my beliefs, my ethics, then I am in misery. You cannot lie to your true self, as your true self always knows if you lie.

Understand that we live in societies full of falseness.

Corporations are looking for shortcuts to increase their profits while decreasing their expenses, meaning degradation of the product while making it appear to be of higher quality. The ones who best accomplish this are rewarded with greater profits. Politicians who tell the truth about their skills and motives will have the shortest careers. Unfortunately, the more lies they tell us, the more likely they are to have satisfying and full careers. Some musician’s voices are processed through software that helps to perfect the voice quality, regardless if the original musician has any talent or not. Those who make the best use of the software may be more likely to succeed, rather than those with the best singing voices and techniques.

There is much falseness, and we must learn to see it to move beyond it and wake up to the truth.

If asked how we are doing, we are expected not to share our pains but only put on the façade that we are doing well. We must all wear masks that all is well, even if we are dying inside. We smile on the outside and frown on the inside.

Many groups will, of course, argue for their version of the truth. There are the materialists and the spiritualists, the liberals and conservatives, the countries that always seem to be at war with one another and insist they are right and the other is wrong, the majority and minority groups with their quarrels, and so forth. We always argue that we are right, and therefore other groups must be wrong. But in the end, likely everyone has some rightness and some wrongness to their beliefs and behaviors.

You may realize that I refer to truths when they are personal realities for ourselves, but these same truths turn into beliefs when viewed on a grander world platform. My truth may be that war is wrong for me. But to someone else who is forced into perpetual wars even though they hate it, war may be an uncomfortable truth. It cannot be wrong because they did not choose it. To the person sucked into perpetual wars, they would say that I believe that war is wrong.

This is where language provides us with falseness once again. How can truth = belief? Well, even though it seems to be a contradiction, they sometimes do equal the same thing. This is a source of great misery in our lives. The truths which I may hold to be of the highest value may ultimately be my personal beliefs. And someone else in a different circumstance may be right to see my truths as wrong or naïve or even malicious. I do not intend any of my truths to be malicious, but someone else may interpret them in that way if my truths function as an imposition on other people’s truths.

In sticking to your truth, it is important to commit to positive ways of being and seeing that will not add pain to the world. If your truth is based on hatred, then I would urge you to find another way. Find a constructive use of your negative energy if you hold it, and morph it into something positive to help make things better for your people. Making things worse for someone else is unlikely to make things better for yourself in a way that is true to yourself.

The most important thing in life is to find our truth. No one is going to give it to you. The easy-made truths of following an ideology, a leader, a parent, and so on can give us a starting point. But it is not always best to go with what is conveniently in front of you. Of course, if you are happy and fulfilled with what you have, it makes sense to stick with it. If you find yourself questioning and doubtful, and unhappy, it could make sense to explore other truths outside of the ones you have been exposed to.

In the end, I believe that we select our truths. As an example, one society may believe that thieves should have their hand cut off. They will justify this by showing that thieves can no longer steal so easily when they are missing a hand, making the rest of society happy. We end up justifying the truths we select for ourselves - if we cut off hands, we have fewer thefts, meaning that we can continue to justify this course of action.

Another society may say that the punishment is too strict. If we punish them that way, will we punish all minor crimes with such violence, leaving much of society mangled and feeling bitter and hateful? This society does not cut off hands and instead tries to help poor people so that they do not feel pressured into stealing. They implement this course of action, and it leads to fewer thefts. So again, they continue to justify this course of action.

No matter which course of action we take, if it is based on deeply held beliefs, then we will probably find a way to justify viewing it as a success and wanting to continue in that direction.

We justify our beliefs and truths to ourselves every day. So every day that goes by, our truths seem truer than ever. And anyone who disagrees seems more wrong than ever.

Our minds want to see one pathway as correct, making all other pathways incorrect – but perhaps this assumption is itself false. There may be multiple competing truths and some statements or paths which are more true than others.

Most of humanity’s misery is one group looking at a coin on its side and shouting that it is heads, and the other group looking at it and shouting that it is tails. Both groups are right from their own vantage point but fail to realize that the other side is also right. Then, both groups fight over their truth and belittle each other to get the other group to understand their viewpoints, which makes things worse.

We should trust others to know what is true for them and stop imposing our truths onto them. Tell others what your truth is, without expecting them to follow you. And allow others to tell you their truth, but do not feel pressured into following it.

If I were to search for some basic truths, they would be as such: Treat others as you want to be treated. Do not harm anyone – it is most important to avoid physical harm, although, of course, we should avoid verbal abuse or emotional abuse as well. Do good deeds when you can, to whoever you can – such as helping someone survive or accomplish their goals.

The above truths are nothing new – many religions and philosophies point to some basic truths. And many of those truths overlap with each other. Obviously, basically, everyone agrees that to kill is wrong and to steal is wrong. And even these basic truths may have their exceptions. Many people would agree that to kill in self-defense or in defense of loved ones is acceptable. And to steal food when you are starving can also be viewed as acceptable.

Our task is to explore ourselves deeply to find what our inner truths are. What are the truths that we must actualize in our lives to feel whole? I recently spoke with a music lover who told me he had no access to music nor to learning it and that he was faced with the choice of finding a well-paying job or being a bad and poor musician. But our deepest inner truth isn’t just an abstract concept. It is who we are. Your deepest truths are an expression of who you are.

If music is in your soul, to deny yourself music is to deny yourself to yourself. It is to allow falseness in your life. Every day when someone asks how you are, and you say “fine,” then you are a liar because you are never fine since you do not have music. Choosing a paying job or music is a false dichotomy once again. You don’t have to choose. You can pursue both. You can pursue a solid job that involves music somehow (even if it is only in the background) and then pursue learning music on your own time. You can even play on the streets to earn extra income.

What are the most important truths of your life? Focus on the convergence of your thoughts, words, needs, desires, and actions. When your thoughts are in one place and actions in another, you are not living your truth. Do not lie to yourself.

If you privately think that it is wrong to curse, but you allow people to curse around you all day long without saying anything, then you are not living your truth. You may take a stand for yourself and tell the people around you that this makes you uncomfortable, and you want a respectful environment. Importantly, you should not impose your truth on them but rather state your perceptions. Either that or you change your view that perhaps cursing is not worth raising a fuss over every time.

Perhaps you focus your truth elsewhere. You may decide to look for a positive thing to comment on about the people you find a negative flaw. Every time you hear someone curse, you may look for something to compliment them on. This may be a middle path where you guide people in your life away from cursing – by shifting their attention to something positive rather than directly asking them not to curse. This may be wiser, as it is often more fruitful to ask people to do something than ask them not to do something.

Following your inner truth is the most important thing you can do.

However, this can be a challenge, as it is easier to go with the flow and allow our surroundings to guide our behavior. Your family will have its own rules, written and unwritten, then your company has different rules, written and unwritten. Your government has rules, of course, and so does your religion, if you have one. It is easier to go with the flow and follow the rules than to stop and think about them and realize that perhaps your personal truths do not always converge with those other rules.

And here we have the choice or the question of our lives. Will we adopt the rules handed to us, without thought, and mindlessly follow them? Will we assume that the rules are all there for a reason and abide by them? Our lives are, of course, filled with endless rules. Every time you access a new forum online or download a new app or piece of software, you may be urged to sign a 100-page document of rules. Even the people who write these Terms & Conditions do not expect you to read them, of course. It is all intended as legal protection for them.

Please do not get distracted by the rule books that dominate our lives. It is easy to get frustrated and overwhelmed and decide that the rules do not matter. Everyone has rules, and they often conflict. Yes, some agencies have gone overboard with their rules. Ironically, there are so many rules in modern society that most people don’t know what they are and don’t care. We only find out a rule, often, when we are being punished for not following it. Then we are always told that ignorance of the rules does not excuse us from them. We should have read the 100-page rule book, apparently. Or likely, thousands of pages when it comes to national, state, and local laws and regulations.

As strange as it may be, I would suggest that you form your own personal rule book of truths that you follow. We should all have this book of personal truths. The key question is, “What is my truth”? If you do not know your own truth, then you cannot live by it. If you don’t know your own truth, you cannot scrutinize it. And if you can’t scrutinize it, then you will stunt your growth as a person.

You may be living in falseness if you have never consciously thought through your life and core truths.

In time, your truths become your way of being. If one of your truths is that small matters in life should not cause you to blow up in anger, then reminding yourself of this will help you actualize it.

A truth I find important is that we should be more aware of ourselves and our surroundings. Every day, I see people walking into the streets, absorbed with their phones. I feel that this is a tragedy waiting to happen. People are so absorbed with their phones that they forget to check for oncoming traffic. They are much more likely to entrust their life to a green light or “walk” sign, forgetting that drivers often neglect these rules. My truth is that every moment of every day, something critical to our lives may be about to happen. If you are not looking, you could miss the most important moment of all. Bad people with bad intentions rely on good people who are completely unaware of what they are doing. Also, children get into trouble when no adult present is aware of that child.

A strange thought that I have sometimes is that someone in my vicinity could be in big trouble, and they may be waiting for me to notice it. For example, what if you are in a pool having fun, and while you are distracted, a child is drowning in the shallow end, and there is no lifeguard? What if there is a “missing child” poster, and you later see that missing child by chance, but you were not paying enough attention?

Imagine if we were put in the position to save a life every day, and we had never realized it. A depressed friend may call you today, but absorbed in his own falseness, he may insist that everything is fine. If you do not read through the signs of despair carefully, that his tone of voice is defeated, that he has just lost his job and the right to see his kids, then you will not be fully aware and present and able to help him. Put aside the falseness, and see through the falseness, and you may find that you will save a life today.

One of the greatest truths must be that what we do matters, as it impacts ourselves and everything around us somehow. And so, this reality must be important in some way if it is part of the collective truth that we are all living in. Then this means that we should work to help each other in this reality. We should give ourselves more to this real-world and stop escaping as much into the world of the phone and the screen, and social media. These tools of escape often drive us further from the truth. There are surely some good resources online, but we tend to spend most of our time on the most superficial parts of the online world, such as social media posts that manipulate our emotions and fill us with falseness. Most of the media, online and offline, seems to have an agenda, to teach us what it wants us to think. Rather than accepting what is given to us as truth, we must form our own basic truths and stop being swayed like a leaf by the winds of superficiality.

I would caution you not to adopt someone else’s truth so easily. Many people or agencies want to teach us to hate someone or something. If someone teaches us to hate their competitors, it gives them time to rise to power. Also, it shifts attention away from the source’s possible incompetence or deceptiveness. Hate is used as a tool to gain money and power. But you do not need to be an instrument of hate and should instead pursue your personal truth to gain personal power so that you can nullify hate and the negative energies in this life.

---

If you liked this post, you may want to read this post next - The Path to a True and Fruitful Life - where I discuss the most impactful truths that I have found in my life.

---

If you are ready to pursue your unique path to truth and understanding, you may wish to read Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.