Foreword to Expressing Love, Pursuing Truth, Experiencing Beauty

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FOREWORD

          Have you ever wondered, “What must I experience, accomplish, or become to make my life truly meaningful?” Most people want to be happy, or at least comfortable and secure, but few people actually define precisely what is required to make everyday life meaningful, and then consciously work, change, and even suffer to make it happen.
            If we want to pursue and create a meaningful life, we must first define the word meaning in terms of experience.  For most people, this alone is sometimes seen as too great a task, so our odyssey can be terminated before it begins.  Just for fun, let’s see if we can define the experience of meaning in terms we can all understand. 
            We can begin by candidly observing ourselves and other people and noting one thing that immediately pops out; we all have a brain that allows us to think about life, ourselves, and other people.  One consequence is we have the option to observe reality accurately and over time understand our internal needs and potentials, or we can use our imagination to create beliefs, feelings, and fantasies that often distort reality and also encourage us to follow our impulses and gratify desires.
            What do you see most people choose?  Does it seem to you that people choose to observe reality accurately and thinkuntil they understand their internal needs and potentials—or do they follow their feelings and fantasies and often create distortions?  Also, do you see most people truly master their internal needs and potentials, or try to gratify desires?  
      In my experience as a psychologist for over twenty years, and a teacher of internal development for the last ten, I have seen that most people are not trained to observe, think about, and understand their internal needs and potentials. Instead, they naturally follow their impulses and desires. This means few people differentiate the lasting satisfaction of feeding needs from the temporary pleasure of gratifying desires.
            It is important to note that if we do not distinguish between lasting satisfaction and temporary pleasure, then meaning is not an issue we can even think about.  If we do define the differences between pleasure and satisfaction, we can offer this initial working definition that says meaning is the result of any life-affirming experience that has enduring value.
            Now, we might ask, “If I learn to see reality accurately and then use the information to master my internal needs and potentials, will this create a lasting satisfaction that has enduring value?”  This question also contains a statement that implies our lives will be meaningful if we master our internal needs and potentials.  The next step is to test this statement by learning to express love, pursue truth, and experience beauty, and then see if we experience the fulfillment, self-worth, and peace of mind necessary for enduring value, or meaning.
            The purpose of this book is to provide the definitions and understanding that make it possible for you to test whether or not love, truth, and beauty are truly timeless steps to internal meaning.  With a normal degree of development, we rarely confront the issue of how to create lasting satisfaction, enduring value, and a meaningful life.  
            Instead, with normal training we usually try to achieve the conventional idea of success that includes gaining a feeling of control over security, approval and entertainment.  The only problem with normal purposes is that even if we are totally successful in feeling we control success and security, and we entertain ourselves into perfect oblivion; our lives may be pleasant, but they will not have the lasting satisfaction and enduring value that define realmeaning.
            My hypothesis is that to create enduring value, and therefore a meaningful life, requires that we fulfill our internal potential to master the experience of love, truth, and beauty until we integrate all three into our everyday consciousness and behavior.  To accomplish this somewhat daunting task requires that we define love, truth, and beauty in enough detail to create an initial mental picture of each experience.  The following working definitions will help paint into your mind a first sketch of these experiences by detailing a few significant characteristics natural to each one.

Defining Love—Truth—Beauty

Love—is a caring response to being alive—not a reaction to the excitement stimulated by gratifying lust, greed, or desire.  Love requires total commitment and complete surrender—it is never half-hearted or divided.  Love requires giving our whole-hearted energy and attention with a willingness to learn, change, and suffer in order to master the internal competence necessary to understand and nurture what we love.

Truth—requires that we observe facts, and then use reason and caring to discover what they mean, which we test over time until we create understanding.  Truth is not what we sentimentally feel, intellectually theorize, or spiritually intuit.

Beauty—is experienced through the creative expression of truth and love, and the varied creations found in nature.  Beauty is a fulfillment of our senses, never an assault; and beauty is always in harmony with truth and love, never in conflict. 
                
            Does it seem that love, truth, and beauty as defined here are truly timeless activities, which if integrated into daily life would build enduring value and genuine meaning?  If you see that love, truth, and beauty are essential, does it also seem that you want your life to contain the enduring value necessary for real meaning?          
            Answering these two questions can help identify where you stand on the two most critical issues necessary to create a meaningful life.  That is, you must first see the need for love, truth, and beauty; and then you must want the work, risk, and change necessary to master all three. 
            Many people think they want to grow but find that when offered a clearly defined avenue for growth they do not want the work, risk, and change that are pre-requisites for all internal development.  In normal life the lack of a detailed definition for even one internal need or potential makes it possible to hide behind a belief we want to grow, when in fact we are too entrenched in our internal habits and patterns to move a millimeter. 
            If you really wantto grow, and your common sense says mastering love, truth, and beauty is a good place to begin, then you will love the clarity created by an observation based, reason enhanced, and caring supported picture of life and internal development.  If you do not want to grow then rest assured that no degree of clarity will be strong enough to disturb the inertia of your hard won status quo.
            In fact, it is not the purpose of this book to disturb anyone’s internal status quo.  Instead, it is the purpose of this book to pose and answer several critical human questions.  Two of these questions we have already asked.  The first is, “Can I see that I need to master love, truth, and beauty in order to create a meaningfullife?”  The next question is, “Do I want to do the work and experience the risk and change required to master love, truth, and beauty?” 
            The third question is “How do I master and integrate love, truth, and beauty into my daily life?”  All three questions will be addressed throughout this book, sometimes  directly, and sometimes indirectly.  In answering these questions your understanding of life, yourself, and other people will be expanded in ways you could not anticipate, but may discover creates an internal adventure with just enough risk and change to make the experience truly interesting!
            It is a fact that we humans have a complex brain and emotions that provide a potential for developing understanding and caring that is greater than any other animal.  We also have a longer life span than most animals. Together, our brain, emotions, and lifespan provide an opportunity for internal development that other animals do not possess.           Love, truth, and beauty are experiences that fulfill our human potential and provide a much needed internal risk, change, and adventure.  Sadly, as a group, we humans have failed to consciously pursue these experiences and fully develop our potential.  Perhaps, we have been too absorbed by survival needs to really care about love, truth, and beauty, which explains why we view these experiences as internal luxuries that we must feel secure enough externally to afford.
            The paradox is that technology has given us the power to exploit the earth and each other so totally that if love, truth, and beauty are not treated as necessities, we may just make survival impossible.  Even if we manage to survive, we are now in the process of making the quality of life so poor, so empty of all meaning, that survival may not matter. 
            What does matter is that we learn how to build the awareness and caring necessary to make our individual lives satisfying and meaningful, and then use our understanding to build institutions—political, economic, and educational—that are consciously designed to enhance and fulfill everyone’s life, rather than as mechanisms to protect a status quo that is too often exploitive and destructive.
            Up to now, love, truth, and beauty have been self-guiding principles of life to a few people, and sentimental ideals to most.  What we need is to clearly define the internal process of how to make love, truth, and beauty self-guiding principles of life for anyone who sees the benefit and wants the responsibility of mastering these timeless principles. 
            My interest in love, truth, and beauty really began at the age of 5, when my grandmother died.  She was my favorite person since she really cared about me, while my parents had for convenience sake dropped me off at her house each Monday morning and picked me up on Friday from the age of about 2 to 4.  The effect of my grandmother’s death was to awaken me to the fact that life is limited, and can end abruptly and without warning.  This sent me on a lifelong mission to learn what would make life meaningful.
            When I was 5 it was 1950, and the United States had a population one-third the size it is now.  Also, in elementary school my history books described the United States as having “limitless” resources.  My little world felt externally safe, but when my grandmother died it became internally empty.  So my quest for meaning began as a personal response to my particular circumstances and preferences.
            In the ensuing sixty years since I was 5, the world has changed dramatically.  Now, instead of a little over 2 billion human beings on the planet, there are over seven billion!  Instead of resources being “unlimited”, we are frantically scrambling to exploit what remains of the earth’s resources, just hoping to make it through our lifetime before we in the United States suffer like much of the rest of the world has always suffered.
            What these changes mean is that not only do we still need to make our individual lives satisfying and meaningful, but we also need the internal development that mastering love, truth, and beauty provides. Then we can think about our own and the world’s problems competent to see reality accurately and define every real need without the distortions created by judgments, beliefs, opinions, egos and feelings.
            Right now, all anyone has to do is watch the nightly news, any channel, for a few days to see that global human interactions are characterized by a chaotic cacophony of competing egos, advantages, belief systems, philosophies, theories, and manipulative tactics.  Somehow a respect for, and mastery of love, truth, and beauty are not what we see on the news, or in the actions of our political, economic, or educational institutions.  What we do see is a need for all three on every level of human life, from our individual lives to our institutions, to our global purposes and behaviors.
            Whether you are motivated to grow for yourself alone, for yourself and family, or for yourself, family, and the global benefit of all human beings, it is important to appreciate the need for internal development.  Feeding this need will provide a degree of internal fulfillment and genuine meaning that nothing else in human life can offer. 
            Of course, my saying this does not make it true.  So if you read this book and master the principles and insights, and apply them in your daily life, you will see for yourself what is true and genuinely satisfying.  The approach in this book is to present as much information as possible so you can actually create the experience of love, truth and beauty.
            In my other book, The Internal Tools Necessary to Become Loving & Wise, I approach the issue of internal development by providing the specific skills and awareness each person needs to acquire in order to think for understanding, feed internal needs, and build bonded relationships.  The information in these two books will help you develop a conscious identity necessary to master your universal internal needs and potentials, and you can then move on to discover, define and fulfill your unique needs and potentials.              
            This is a precise path to lasting internal happiness and genuine meaning that every human being secretly longs for, but rarely has the opportunity to create and experience.