Pursue What is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient
Meaning is what you have to
Buttress yourself against the tragedy of life
Despite the fact that you're a fragile
Damaged
Mortal creature
You found something to do that announced itself as
Worthwhile
That's meaning
It's an instinct
It's a deep-deep instinct
It's maybe the deepest instinct
It's like a form of vision
Meaning tells you when you in the right place
And the right place is between chaos and order
And those are real places, your hemispheres
Your right hemisphere is roughly evolved let's say to deal with things you don't understand
That’s chaos
And your left is there to deal with things you do understand
You can't just stay with the things that you do understand because you already understand them
And you can't just stay with what you don't understand because then your lost
You need to be in the middle of those two
And you can tell when you’re in the middle
Cause everything lines up
Cause everything lines up
Expedience is you do the thing that gets you off the hook the fastest, right now
You play that game across time it doesn't work
It sends you down
Because you're sacrificing the future for the present
Meaning doesn't do that
Meaning says ”I'm here where I should be”
And you can't tell why it's just that everything is right
You get this physiological
Sense
Right place, right time
Follow this meaningful path
That's your buttress against the tragedy that produces resentment and malevolence
Meaning is the antidote to that
That's the fundamental religious truth
Life is suffering
That's true
There's malevolence
That's true
Meaning is the antidote to that
Yes
People say, “Well meaning isn’t real”
It's like NO
That's wrong
It's actually
THE MOST REAL THING
It might even be more real than suffering and evil
It's possible
This isn't
A metaphysical assumption that I’m making
And you do feel it
It’s, you feel it in your body
It's not just a
Mental thing
It's not an idea
It's a place
Because we're in time and space, right
And a place is a place, you know
Three dimensions of space but it's also a time
And when the place and the time are set up properly
You're in the right place and
Your brain is telling you that
Your Being is telling you
The purpose of
Profound
Religious contemplation
Profound philosophical contemplation
Is to learn how to be in the right place at the right time
All the time
All the time
There's this line from
The Gospel of Thomas which was discovered in like 1957
And it says
“The kingdom of God is spread out before the eyes of men but men do not see it.”
And that's kind of what it's referring to
There are times when you're in the right place at the right time
And then you're
Where you should be
And you're not really trained to notice that
Because it isn't something, we ever talked about
It's like
You're in the right place at the right time
Okay, why?
What did I do right?
What did I do?
I need to do more of that
So, maybe it's only
Half an hour a week when you first start noticing
And then maybe with three months of practice you can get it up to like
An hour a day
And then maybe you can get it up to
Four hours a day
And god only knows where you could get it if you
If you keep practicing
You could be there
We don't know what the upper limit of that is