MasterSelf Year One Read online

  VIII. POTENTIAL IS WORTHLESS.

  No one cares what you are capable of. You could be the smartest person in the world, but if you don’t do anything with your intelligence, you are no better than the dumbest bastard alive. You could have the greatest ideas ever conceived, but if you do not make them into reality, you will be no better than the most unimaginative person who ever lived. Countless people are born gifted, exceptional, and full of potential and die without having done anything of meaning with their lives. Value must be created- potential must be actualized.

  IX. YOU WILL FAIL.

  Never, in the history of the world, did anyone ever sit down at a piano for the first time and play like Sergei Rachmaninoff or Kyle Landry. No one ever picked up a brush and immediately began painting like Michelangelo or Bryan Larsen. However, everyone that ever did anything useful absolutely spent more time creating useless, miserable failures before they did anything even resembling mediocrity. You will suck long before you are decent, and you will be decent long before you are good. You will fail, over, and over, and over again- and if you choose not to try out of fear, you will become the greatest failure of all.

  X. YOU WILL DIE ALONE.

  No matter what you do in this life, no one can die for you. Even if you have all the wealth in the world, you cannot pay someone to take your place. Even in you have your family around you, all they will be able to do is watch you pass away. This is inevitable, and if you do not live your life to the fullest, you will die alone and unfulfilled.

  These are the 10 brutal truths of reality. However, they will only have power over you if you live in denial of them. Once you confront these bleak facts, you will be free from the delusions that lead the weak and foolish towards permanent failure and eternal mediocrity. Knowledge is power, and the more it hurts to know, the stronger you will become.

  Life is not fair- but life rewards hard work. Your circumstances don’t matter- what you do despite them is what counts. There is no conspiracy- so the only thing holding you back is yourself. No one is coming to save you- now you don’t have to wait for a hero. It is no fault but your own- but you can take responsibility. You are delusional- but you can free yourself from your ignorance. You are capable of bad things- but you are also capable of true greatness. Potential is worthless- until you do something with it. You will fail- but nothing teaches better than failure. You will die alone- but you do not have to live that way.

  Finding Meaning: The Purpose of Life

  Since the first mind achieved consciousness, the question has existed- “What is the meaning of life?” Philosophers, priests, ideologues, and politicians have all sought to provide an answer to this question, among many others. However, I believe that we are living in a time in which the old answers have fallen short. This is an era of nihilism and hedonism, and the world is reeling in purposelessness. Some seek to cling to the old, failed models, while others strive to envision a world that rejects the past. However, the time has come to realize that the secret to finding meaning does not begin in the world, but within ourselves.

  Each of us are born with a particular disposition- some of us are more impulsive and others are more collected. These differences are altered and amplified by our upbringing and social environment. We may be encouraged to read, or discouraged from taking risks, and these interactions shape our growing selves. Inevitably, there are certain tasks that we have an aptitude and interest in, and others that we either are not good at or have no desire to engage in. We may even have an idea of what we’d like to do with our lives at this point, and those desires actually correlate with future job satisfaction.

  At some point, however, many of us give up on these earlier interests as the harsher realities of life and responsibility close in. We get older, and many of us compromise. Some take the safe bet and join the family business, or the higher paying but less fulfilling work. Others give up on their personal ambitions and dedicate themselves instead to family, community, or some other group enterprise. By this point, many people have long forgotten what it was that once caused them to be driven and passionate.

  This is where the work begins. If you are at a crossroads in your life, then before you make the choice of path you must take the time to know yourself first. Otherwise, you will be walking blind, and only time and hindsight will show you that you have chosen wrong.

  Consider the following questions-

  What would you be willing to give your life in the pursuit of?

  What task do you love enough to do without reward or recognition?

  What would the world look like if it were perfect, and what are you doing (or not doing) to bring that world closer to reality?

  What is your dream job and why aren’t you doing it?

  When did you stop being the kind of person you wanted to be as a child?

  Are you proud of the person that you have become?

  Are you like your heroes, and would they say that about you if you met them?

  If you can honestly answer these questions in a positive way, then you are well on your way towards your goals. However, if the answers you have aren’t the answers you want to have, do not despair- hope is not yet lost. The would you want to build is not lost, just delayed. Your mistakes are your teachers and the feeling of having failed is often the greatest motivation to never fail again. That being said, it will be hard- and the difficulty will break many who try and many more who never even start.

  Reality is on our side- but the first task is to determine what the reality is and to bring ourselves into alignment with it. As they say, the truth hurts- but nothing hurts more than the pain of a wasted life. Figure out what kind of person you are, and what you have to do to become the person you want to be. What is the first simple change you could make to bring the two closer together? If your life was perfect, what would it look like- and when was the last time it looked like that, even if only briefly?

  Meaning arises at the intersection between our skills and the challenges of the world. There is something that you are capable of doing better or more passionately than anyone else on this planet. Your experiences and perspective are unlike those of any other, but many people sacrifice these differences to fit in- you will not be so foolish. There is something within you that yearns to be expressed- find it and bring it into the world. Failure will stop many before they are finished- you will not give up. You will never surrender.

  Your being already contains the hidden purpose of your life, buried deep at the center of who you are. Reach deep into the forgotten caverns of your mind, face down the demons within you, and claim the treasure of purpose that you never truly lost.

  Finding meaning is done by searching within, and your purpose is to bring that out into the world- the world of your dreams. Arise, dreamer, and go forth with meaning.

  “Just imagine becoming the way you used to be as a very young child, before you understood the meaning of any word, before opinions took over your mind. The real you is loving, joyful, and free. The real you is just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun.”

  -Don Miguel Ruiz

  Sat: Truth, Reality, and the Sound of a Tree Falling

  Have you ever heard the Sanskrit word “Sat” before? Hold that thought for a minute, let’s start with movie time-

  In the opening to the film Cloud Atlas, there is a discussion that goes on between two characters, Adam Ewing and the Reverend Horrox. They’re discussing the ways of the world and the writings of Ewing’s father, Haskell Moore, who has apparently written on the subject. Ewing mentions a certain part of the tract-

  “… it is an inquiry concerning God’s will and the nature of men. The question he does pose is: if God created the world, how do we know what things we can change, and what things must remain sacred and inviolable?”

  This, I believe, is a fascinating question. Let’s remove the sacred element here and rephrase the question-

  “What things in the world can be changed, an
d what things cannot be changed?”

  This may seem, at first, to be something of a simple question, but we will soon see that this is not the case.

  There is a mantra that I am quite fond of (I have the first line tattooed on my forearm) in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (one of the oldest Hindu scriptures) called the Pavamana Mantra. The mantra reads as follows-

  Om asato mā sad gamaya,

  tamaso mā jyotir gamaya,

  mṛtyor mā amṛtaṃ gamaya,

  Om shanti shanti shanti

  This translates to:

  Om, Lead me from ignorance to the Truth,

  Lead me from darkness to the Light,

  Lead me from death into Immortality,

  Om peace peace peace

  (Fun side note: this is where they got the lyrics for the song Navras from the Matrix series.)

  As I said before, we won’t be touching on any sort of religious element here, so we’re going to be examining this through a secular lense. The reason I mentioned this mantra is to illustrate a fascinating distinction between English and Sanskrit here with the first line-

  “A – sat – o – mā sad-gamaya” can be translated into English in two separate ways. The first is as above, “Lead me from ignorance to the Truth.” The second, however, is “Lead me from the unreal to the Real.” Where in English we have a distinction between Truth and Reality, in Sanskrit, both are “Sat.” Thus, “ignorance” and “the unreal” are both “a – sat,” (with the “a-” indicating the opposite of “sat”). (There are many more definitions of “Sat,” which we may touch on in a bit.)

  This may seem like a small distinction, but it’s actually supremely important- what this indicates is that somewhere in the philosophical foundations that supported English-speaking countries, a dichotomy between what is “true” and what is “real” exists. (Realistically, this is probably due to the Enlightenment era philosophers, but I’m not going to get into that for the sake of brevity.) You may be wondering why this matters, and rightfully so. Think about these two questions:

  “What is real, but not true?”

  “What is true, but not real?”

  I’m not going to attempt to guess what your answer to these questions is. However, I do want to point out that (as far as I can consider) there should not be any in the first place. If you did come up with a few answers, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing- it just means we have something to investigate.

  One argument is that anything that isn’t physical isn’t real (this ideology is called materialism). Materialism proposes that everything in the universe (including consciousness) is strictly the result of the interactions of matter. There is a counterargument, called Idealism, that suggests that the mind (subjective thought) comes before the brain, and that the world of things comes from the mind, not the other way around.

  This debate, I believe, is no different from the separation of “Sat” into both “Real” and “True,” and this is why I brought it up. I believe that mind and matter are inherently connected, and I will demonstrate this with a famous question:

  “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

  Take a moment to think about this question before you continue reading.

  …

  The two traditional answers to this question are:

  Materialism: Sound is the subjective experience of air vibration (caused in this case by the falling tree), so- no, there is no sound heard because there is no observer.

  Idealism: Nothing exists without an observer, so if no one is there to hear it, no tree is there to fall.

  Both of these answers, however, are flawed. The materialist explanation is more of a way around the question with semantics, and the idealist explanation doesn’t really explain how trees could fall when no one is around (because you can walk into any forest and find fallen trees that, presumably, no one watched.) However, I think the problem is not so much with these answers, it is with the question. Let’s ask a different one-

  “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, what is a tree?”

  Imagine you’re standing beside a pine tree. You can see it with your eyes, you can feel it with your hands, you can smell the scent of the pine (you know how I feeeeel…), you can taste it if you feel so compelled to lick a tree, and you can hear it (if it were to fall on you at that moment). Your knowledge of this tree is limited entirely to your sensory perceptions of it, which your brain combines into a single concept in your mind that you will label “pine tree.”

  Now, say you leave the forest. Because you still exist, the concept of the tree still exists- consider the fact that the pine tree you just imagined is imaginary, and different from any pine tree you’ve ever seen. Because existence moves on unchanged, the tree is fully capable of falling with no one hearing it, so the vibration never gets experienced as a sound.

  Let’s go deeper. Imagine, or at least, try to imagine, a universe that has no consciousness in it. A tree, insofar as we covered it, is only comprehensible with sensory perception. A universe with no observer would theoretically be an indistinguishable sea of waves of energy. No qualities could be observed, because there is no observer and quality is subjective. The idea is beyond imagination- literally. The only thing we can not think about is the absence of consciousness (because thinking about it means you’re conscious). This would be a purely materialistic universe.

  The opposite of this would be pure consciousness with no external stimuli (which is a big part of a philosophy called solipsism). Close your eyes and imagine never having seen, felt, tasted, smelled, or heard anything in your life. Think about what that would be like- but don’t use any words, you wouldn’t know words. Just empty all the thoughts from your mind- of course, you wouldn’t have a concept of thought or mind, because those are words that distinguish the two.

  The trick here is that consciousness that doesn’t interact with external stimuli would literally not be conscious. There would be no change, no experience, no interaction- at all. Pure awareness doesn’t make sense if there is nothing to be aware of.

  These two opposite approaches, however, could theoretically still have “existed” (I’m using that term very loosely here) in some alternate universe. However, these are both completely nonsensical, incomprehensible, unimaginable concepts. Whether or not they are real or true does not matter (because it’s impossible to determine)- they are (literally) irrelevant.

  I use the word irrelevant here to indicate something that is only capable of being imagined, not experienced. These two concepts have no possibility of being experienced, and since we are beings of experience, they’re not useful to us at all. They’re irrelevant to anything we will ever do in our life. This brings us to the answer to the question, which we will rephrase into a statement:

  “In a universe without an observer, there can be no trees.”

  Here we find the solution to the dichotomy between materialism and idealism- there may very well be universes that have no observer (a real universe), and observers with no universes (a true consciousness), but they’re irrelevant. The only universes that matters are those that are have the interaction between the objective (the real) and the subjective (the true). Because the others are irrelevant, as far as our universe is concerned (the only relevant one, in my opinion), real and true are the same. Thus, we get “Sat,” and we escape the trap of dualistic thinking, at least in this case.

  Let’s get back to the definitions of the word “Sat.” From Wikipedia’s list:

  ● “absolute truth”

  ● “reality”

  ● “that which has no distortion”

  ● “unchangeable”

  ● “that which is beyond distinctions of time, space, and person”

  ● “Supreme Entity”

  ● “that which pervades the universe in all its constancy”

  ● “Brahman” (not to be confused with Brahmin)

  With the understandin
g that our universe is relevant, the word “Sat” applies to it. Because we have seen that things that lack the quality of being “Sat” are irrelevant, they can be called “Asat.” This means that the core experience of being, which is “Sat” is also “unchangeable,” which is another of the definitions- if we were to change it, it would become irrelevant, and thus, “Asat.”

  Finally, we are left with the answer to the our modified version of the original question-

  “What things in the world can be changed, and what things cannot be changed?”