Building a Life: Meaning and Purpose

Why are we here? What does it all mean? What the hell am I supposed to do with my life?

Without answers to these questions, otherwise intelligent people can become paralyzed by indecision and self doubt. To overcome this paralysis we need to have answers or at least acceptable working theories.

What is the meaning of life? I say that the meaning of life is living. Life is to be lived and enjoyed and has no other meaning. You don’t need to believe anything so crass, but you do need to figure out what life means to you. Without a defined philosophy man is like a ship without captain, adrift in an ocean of chaos.

One word of warning, however, your basic philosophy of life must actually be pro-life.

If your religion or fundamental philosophy encourages you to disregard the health and physical safety of your body, then you will have problems.

If your basic worldview is anti-money, anti-property and anti-profit, then you are likely to have problems there too.

Exhortations to poverty, chastity and self denial are anti-life and anti-humanity. If your religion proscribes the enjoyment of sex, or faces you to maintain relationships that are not conducive to your physical and emotional wellbeing then, I’m sorry, but you need to get yourself a new religion.

A healthy attitude toward pleasure and success is pre-requisite to everything.

Once you’ve come to your own conclusions about the meaning of life and the nature of reality, it’s time to start asking questions about society and your role in it.

As modern westerners we’re often told that we can be anything we want to be, or else that we’ll never amount to anything at all. Both of these lies are equally damaging.

The meaning of life is the same for everyone, even if we don’t necessarily all agree on what that is. The purpose of a life, the role of one individual in society, is something else altogether. Each of us is possessed of our own greatest passion, our own special talents and our own hidden wyrd. We can’t all be warriors. Nor can we all be priests, poets or magicians. Some of us were meant to be workers, some business people and, yes, some warriors or intellectuals. We can’t all be kickboxing personal trainers or society would have a really hard time getting much of anything else done.

Man needs a comprehensive philosophy, a worldview that explains something of the meaning of it all. He also needs a purpose, a goal, a mission or a role to play in society lest he be consumed by his own cosmic insignificance. Without meaning and purpose, nothing in life makes sense.

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Building a Life: Sex & Relationships

The human being is both a sexual and a social animal. Deprived of sexual contact or a sense of social value, most of us will start to go loopy pretty quick. I’ve already written about the value to be found in a deliberate study of the art of seduction, so I won’t repeat myself here. What I’d like to discuss today is the importance of developing real and lasting relationships.

Those of us born into the great western cities of the modern age face a number of strange psychological dilemmas. We are offered an almost infinite choice of profession and, perhaps as a result, often find ourselves paralyzed with indecision about our roles in society. We live surrounded by people, and yet often we feel disconnected and very much alone. Those who earn some mastery of the art of seduction will eventually learn that sex alone is not enough to sustain the human heart. We need sex, yes, but we also need community, family and love.

To master this element requires an ongoing study of communication skills, conflict management, ethics and reciprocity. It also requires a high degree of awareness of who you are, who you want to be, who you want to include in your life and who you want to keep out. You need to build a tribe around yourself because, without one, all the wealth and good health in the world seem meaningless.

In the first post of this series, I quoted the meaning of life as “Survival and Reproduction”. Those of us who already have children already know how true the second part of that equation is. For those of you who don’t have kids, you should try it someday. You may find, as I have, a whole new sense of connection to your family…past, present and future.

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Building a Life: Wealth & Lifestyle

 “The only real measure of magickal attainment is its manifestation in Midgard. I have to wonder about the claims of wizards who live on welfare, and don’t contribute articles because they can’t afford a second hand computer, or squander their talents on drugs and self pity.”

Sweyn Plowright

The second essential element of a full and happy life lies in mastering the balance between Wealth and Lifestyle.

Putting aside the question of money for a moment, I would like to point out that man cannot live in a vacuum. We need things. If you are going to survive in a human body, you will need a certain minimum amount of food and shelter. If you are going to survive in a human society, you are going to need a certain minimum of respectable clothing, transportation and some cash to spend on social events as well.

Oops, we didn’t get very far before the question of things became a question of money, did we?

The bottom line is we do need stuff to live and, in this day and age, we need money to buy the stuff we need to live. If you want to talk about going back to a DIY hunter/gatherer/farmer lifestyle, then we can talk, but I don’t want to hear anybody give me any crap about how the spiritually enlightened don’t need material possessions because that’s just a bunch of crap.

The monks, priests and yogis who preach most fervently against materialism are also the ones who beg for a living, in case you hadn’t noticed. I really fail to see how begging can be considered somehow more noble than producing something of value that you can trade with others.

The third possiblity would be to steal what you need, I suppose, and it certainly seems that some of our ancestors considered this a viable option. Personally,  jail time would interfere too much with some of my lifestyle preferences. So I’m planing to stick with earning a living for now.

This is, in fact, the important point that most success gurus overlook. Once you get beyond the bare essentials, how you make your money very quickly becomes more important than how much you make. It’s not much good making $10,000,000.00 a year if you have to work in hell eighteen hours a day to do it. It might make sense, in some cases, to put in a few hard years and save for an early retirement. To me it makes much more sense to find a way to make the money you need doing something you love and still have time for friends and family.

So what are the essential steps to mastering the balance between Wealth and Lifestyle?

1. Make a decision that you’re going to take responsibility for your own financial situation. The universe does not owe you a living and you’re not going anywhere in life until you realize that fact.

2. Develop a valuable specialized skill. Unskilled laborers earn peanuts and are generally subjected to crappy working conditions into the bargain. You need to make yourself valuable to your fellow man if you want to earn anything more than a subsistence.

3.Make sure that your special skill is something that you enjoy and that you have a natural talent for. There’s no such thing as nine-to-five in the real world and you may need to be doing your thing for a long time

4. Find an honest way to make money off of your special skill. Unfortunately, the money does not roll in automatically just because you happen to be great at something. You have to learn how to sell your services and you still have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the day.

5. Learn how to manage and invest the money you do make. I’ve met plenty of poor/rich people who bring in huge paychecks but blow it all on crap and live neck-deep in debt. Don’t be one of them.

6. Don’t forget the meaning of life! Money is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Take the time to relax, enjoy yourself, look after your health and never ever forget the people in your life who make it all worth while.

That’s it! Not a lot of detail this time, just the broad strokes. The details are going to depend on you! What’s your greatest passion? What are your special talents? What do you want out of life and how far are you willing to go to make it happen?

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Building a Life: Health & Safety

It’s been over two months since I wrote the first post in my intended series on “Building a Life”.

Some readers may have wondered if I’d dropped off the face of the earth. Well…that’s actually pretty near to being an accurate explanation, but there’s a simpler explanation for why it’s taken me so long to get back to writing. Before I could comfortably preach my new philosophy, there were certain elements that needed to be put more rigorously into practice.

That said, let’s take a look at the first elements of a life…

Health

It should be pretty obvious that if you haven’t got your health it’s going to be pretty difficult to get your life together in other ways.  It should be obvious, yet we so often ignore common sense preventative maintenance until it’s too late.

When you’re sick or out of shape your productivity declines, making it that much harder to make a living. To make matters worse, poor health decreases your your sexual and romantic attractiveness. It’s going to be that much harder to find true love when you’re fat, sick and tired looking. Finally, physical illness can lead to depression and other psychological disorders. Your brain is a part of your body, after all.

Letting your health slide is usually the first step in a vicious cycle. Stop taking care of yourself now, and you may soon find that you no longer have the energy, resources or support you’d need to stop the downward spiral.

To begin on the path to building a life, you must first come to understand your body as your vehicle and your temple. If fact, it is often best if you stop thinking of your body as “your body” and start thinking of simply as “yourself”. I am my body and there is no sense in which it is possible to conceive of “my body” as spearate from “me”.

While it’s obviously not necessary, possible or desirable for every adult human being to go to medical school, there are a number of basic skills that are necessary for self maintenance. A preliminary (i.e. incomplete) list for your consideration would be…

A working knowledge of basic hygiene.

A working knowledge of nutrition.

A working knowledge of cooking, in order to make good nutrition pleasant and palatable.

A working knowledge of exercise science.

A favored sport or physical activity, in order to make exercise fun, purposeful and meaningful.

A basic understanding of medical principles, in order distinguish good medical advice from bad.

A working knowledge of natural home treatment options.

and

A working knowledge of First Aid.

This last item on the list brings us to my next point, the other side of the first element…

Safety

Make no mistake, the primary causes of death for educated people living in civilized countries are the completely preventable, self inflicted “diseases of civilization”. There are few things more ironic than the sight of a sick, out of shape “martial arts expert”. (Except perhaps a sick, out of shape doctor, fitness trainer or nutritionist.) That said, there are other threats to your long term health and physical integrity that need to be adressed if you plan on functioning in the real world.

Just as it would make no sense to spend your life in paranoid fear of criminal attack, only to end up dying of heart disease, it makes equally no sense to cultivate a perfect healthly body only to end up stabbed, shot or smashed up in a car accident.

With that in mind, there are a few additional skillsets you need to master…

A working knowledge of practical self defense (note, I did not say “martial arts”).

A working knowledge of the most common weapons in your area (should be included under the heading of “practical self defense” but people tend to skip over this part).

A working knowledge of First Aid (yes, I included First Aid twice).

A high level of competence in Defensive Driving (car accident is a much more common cause of death than violent assault).

Again, note I did not include Martial Arts anywhere on my list essential skills. Now I happen to love martial arts (or rather, I love real martial arts) but formal training in martial arts is not necessary for most people.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, not everybody can (or should) be a warrior. Every free man and woman should , however, take responsibilty for their own health and safety. What we’re talking about here is the development of basic, practical skills, stripped of any  ritual or tradition. On the other hand, basic practical skills are where it’s at when you’re talking about real martial art, anyway. It is precisely the process of taking responsibility for yourself and developing these practical skills that leads to the catharsis that warrior training is so famous for.

Now the above may sound like a lot to learn, but remember that these are essential life skills we’re talking about. This is stuff you need to know to keep yourself fully functioning, healthy and in one piece.

These are also, ironically, topics that have been among the most terribly abused by confidence artists great and small. There is a huge amount of disinformation out there about health and safety. Learning to see through the bullshit may well be the first and most important step on the path to becoming a true Occult Philosopher, as well as a healthy, happy, free human being.

Think about it.

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Building a Life

I have a long term quarrel with our education system. I’ve always believed our present system spends way too much time teaching us things we don’t need and de-emphasizes or completely ignores way too many things we do.

Most, so-called, magickal and occult training systems are no better. In fact, they’re usually worse.

But it’s easy to level criticism without offering any solutions. What is important? What do we need to know? I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about these questions, and I think I’m getting pretty close to having a definitive answer.

In my view there are four elements, four key components, to building a life.

Health & Safety

Wealth & Lifestyle

Sex & Relationships

Meaning & Purpose

Each of the elements has two main aspects and each of the four (or eight) implies a critical skill set you must master in order to function as a complete, independent, adult human being.

Astute readers may notice some similarity between my list and Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”. You may also notice there’s a fair degree of crossover with Carroll’s “Eight-Colour Theory of Magic”. Actually, the inspiration for my four element model came from somewhere much more unexpected. A simpler version of this model was published in the book “The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed” by Erik von Markovik. (Told you that was unexpected.)

In Mystery’s (von Markovik’s) version, the meaning of life is given as “Survive/Reproduce” and the elements of a life are given as Health, Wealth and Sex.

I was immediately attracted to the cynicism and simplicity of this model (for reasons obvious to anyone who knows me) and even more impressed with his explanation of how the elements are interrelated. According to Mystery, the three elements are interdependent. A deficiency in one area will sooner or later lead to a deficiency in another area and eventually to the collapse of the entire system (your life).

This is a radically different way of looking at things than the more commonly known Maslow model, but seems much more correct to me. My expanded, four element model is also intended to be taken as interrelated. Some elements might seem logically to be more fundamental (or more urgent) than others, but if you don’t cover all four you’re going to have a serious problem.

In my next few posts, I plan on reviewing the four elements in more detail.

Leave a comment if you feel I’ve left out anything important.

Clint.

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