Why we might want to catch an updraft…
Why We Care
The truth is that we are each active, creative, and productive. We’ve been very successful at creating a great many things including a successful, functioning life on the planet. This is no small achievement. But, there is always room for improvement, and it seems to be the nature of a human being to want to make more, make new, make more beautiful, make more joyous. So this illustrated philosophy book is about just that: how to be more engaged, more successful, more productive.
This story of the relationship of human life to the world at large consists of a philosophy on one hand, and a practice on the other. These are answers to the perennial questions of “Who am I?” and “How shall I live my life?” (Or “What am I?” and “What shall I do?”) To relate the philosophy (what is) to the practice (what to do) we define a stance, that is, a definition of the most appropriate and effective relationship to what is and what we do.
Why bother? Because we all know the life can be more—more fulfilled, more productive, more free, and more fun. It also turns out, that in perfecting our ability to engage in this way, we contribute to more fulfillment, productivity, freedom, and the possibility of evolution for others and the world in general. Because as it turns out, we are not just in this boat together—-we are this boat together.
Creating Our Personal Basis for Choosing
There are many reasons to look into improving our lives—sometimes we are not pleased with what is happening and want to find a way to change things. Othertimes, we are happy but want to be more effective and powerful in what we do. In either case, the solution is evolving a more effective way to make the choices that comprise our everyday.
Most days we just want the world to be different. We wish that it should just become what we want it to be. We resist what is because we don’t like it. This is a really bad habit which we seem to think will change the world. As if disapproving what’s going on is a way to improve things. Turns out that it isn’t helpful or productive to just be unhappy about things—it is necessary to envision and work toward something different. We have to learn how to make the choices that will change things. We need to understand that the world as we experience it in this moment is a result of all of our past actions, and that it is our present action that will cause the future to be different than the present. You can’t just wish the world away, you have to live the process of changing it.
The truth is that if we are searching for a better life or more effectiveness in our work, then we are searching for a better, more workable basis for choosing our actions. Every choice we make leads to action, which leads to the results that we see in our lives, our art, and our businesses. And all of our choices derive from our understanding of the world—the working model we have internalized.
The way we understand the workings of the world is precisely the world we live in. We function in the world in the way that we understand it. So we must understand the world in such a way as to make it possible for us to succeed.
(At what? That is a key question: What is it that we want to succeed at? We will explore what it means to discover our own goals. And an explanation of the world must be relevant to our goals; if it is not relevant to our goals, then it will probably not make any sense in our worldview. It may not even be comprehensible.
Why don’t most of us understand quantum physics? Not because we can’t, but because it is not relevant to our understanding of what we want to do.)
Now considering and deciding what we want to do in life is an ongoing and changing thing. We are all more or less in tune with our life goals and constantly refining them. But at any given moment, we are attempting to create something (at a minimum a successful day), we are more or less succeeding, and we are seeing the results of our actions. We can see whether or not our choices, and therefore our worldview, is working for us.
We Live By Our Worldview
There are many types of worldviews with different contexts. Most of us have a physical or material model of how the world works. (For most of us this model is far from complete, accurate, or as deep as the reality of the world. Most of us are lacking a model that includes quantum physics, for example.) We also have metaphysical (beyond physical) models of the world that include beliefs in religion, luck and misfortune, superstitions;, beliefs about power and where it resides; beliefs about the intent (or lack of intent) of the universe; beliefs about our own adequacy to meet our challenges. These are conscious or unconscious decisions about how the universe deals with us beyond the scope of the physical.
And though we all work from such models of how the world works, we often have not considered them carefully. In fact, for the most part, we have not considered them at all. They are unconscious. We have adopted them from our personal history, our culture, or our families. We have not considered whether these adopted ideas are useful in helping us make the choices that will allow us to realize our goals.
In truth, the universe expresses itself as it does and we have only a human ability to comprehend it. So we build models of how we believe it works and the test of the model is how well it serves those who use it to accomplish their goals. Because, in the big picture, since our goals are the goals of the universe, it behooves us to have the most effective and relevant worldview to make our dreams not only possible, but probable.
In these pages we will find a design model that we can visualize and internalize, and therefore leverage into a working process for living a human life, creating a work of art, or bulding a business. It can be used to decide how to create our next self or our next creation—your very own illustrated philosophy of the everyday.
