Inner True North: Training Decisions, Life, and Purpose
By Andre Fassler
We have the happy opportunity to make decisions - to act or not act - in ways that greatly influence our lives. For many people, this may be more true now than ever before in human history.
We also cannot help but make thousands of decisions every day. Some are of great consequence; others, seemingly little. However, even these can have unexpected consequences. Since actual importance can differ from perceived importance, it is wise to acknowledge our uncertainty about the full impact of any given decision.
There is truth in the saying: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” Part of its truth is about decision making. Much or all of our skillful action or inaction begins with this process and it is, at least somewhat, independent of any particular decision. Decision making is a skill unto itself.
The more important a decision is, the more important it is that we derive it from our “deepest truth.” This includes our core-most interests, deepest concerns, greatest insights, and sense of purpose. For simplicity, I'll refer to this personal depth as our "core." Only decisions made from our core guarantee service to oneself and others.
Decisions about physical training are consequential. How one trains has profound potential to positively influence one’s own and others’ wellbeing. Such decisions also relate in virtually innumerable ways to the rest of our lives. We should take care to make these decisions from our core.
Over the course of several posts, I will be constructing an analogy. My intent is to offer a tool towards both understanding and doing. My hope is it is useful for deciding about both training and life.
All The Places You've Been
Imagine this:
Your eyes open to a familiar landscape. You orient yourself. You remember how this place connects to all the other places you are familiar with. You remember that you aren’t particularly excited by what any of these places have to offer. You long for greater experiences. Or, at least ones that might be more comfortable and are definitely more meaningful than these. For the n-th time, you consult the maps you have with you. Some of the places they describe feel so attractive. However, you remember all the tasks you have in this place. You think about the challenges of forging into new territory. A familiar doubt arises: you’ll never experience much better places than the ones you have already been to.
Happily, some of us will not relate to crippling overwhelm, shrinking at challenges, or despair. However, we are all in a circumstance similar to the one described above:
Every day, we awake to a familiar life. A life composed of familiar experiences. A mind with a virtually identical history with the mind of the day before. We usually awake literally to the familiar scenes that are our bedrooms.
Thousands of times per day, we intentionally and unintentionally refer to our “maps.” Many phenomena function like “maps.” We consciously and unconsciously refer to some subset of our previous experiences; memory is a kind of map we maintain inside of ourselves; with it, we orient ourselves in the present moment. “Maps” include the worldviews cultivated (or not) in ours and others’ minds. There are many “maps” accessible through our devices. “Maps” exist in manifolds in the books of our individual and collective libraries. Intellectual, philosophical, and theological artifacts and accounts are used like “maps.” “Maps” are implicit or explicit in all media.
Some of us are deeply excited about the lives we live. Some of us feel more like those in the image above. In either case, it seems we almost all wish, most of the time, that ours and others’ experiences improved. We want better physicality, sociality, mentality, emotionality, etc. This sentiment is implicit in our efforts to grow, to love, and to heal.
We generally have such wishes many times per day. And these wishes are so often more like existential, spiritual longings.
Life Is Like A Landscape
These metaphorical maps describe at least some of life's possibilities. They often also (implicitly or explicitly) promise to guide us to certain experiences. In this way, our maps reveal that life is like a landscape in which each location is a possible experience.
Many of these maps alone or in combination are virtually useless. Actually, many appear worse than useless; some maps delude us.
Moreover, discerning high-quality, relevant maps is expensive. It requires ample time. It requires the possession and application of great intellectual, emotional, and psychological skillfulness. Thus, we almost always allow someone else to do this work for us. Usually, this is someone who claims, or merely seems to us, to have actually accomplished this work. They may be a spiritual or religious leader. They may be a scientist, philosopher, artist, or author. They may be a social media personality or a socio-cultural-political commentator.
To be sure, map-building is a worthy, invaluable endeavor. However, even perfect maps are insufficient. One must then apply them in action processes (including skillful inaction).
One critical action process is attuning to our core.
The most valuable information for navigating life always already exists in each of us. Maps can and often try to describe this truth; to point us toward our core. Maps can even help to guide us into it. Yet, for the core to offer us its invaluable guidance, we must connect with it. Engaging with maps can never amount to engaging with our actual core. To achieve this, we must persistently choose to connect with psychological openness.
The Inner Compass
In life, as in literal terrestrial navigation, we need at least one way to identify “true north.” In navigating the landscape of possible experiences, we have a kind of "inner compass." Its “north” corresponds to our best, most preferable, or better available experiences.
The compass signals the "orientation" of our core. One may think of this as perception of (at least some aspect of) the core itself.
Maps may tell us how to connect with the compass. Maps may tell us how to interpret its signals. But, engaging with maps can never amount to engaging with our actual inner compass.
To make any decision that serves the good of ourselves and others, we need to pay attention to the signals of this compass. We must then also act in alignment with these signals. When we do not, our decisions are like gambles with poor odds. When we do, there are instant as well as delayed goods. Instantly, we have peace from living in alignment with our core, and it may be that no experience is more important. Later, perhaps with luck, we will actualize the experiences for which we are so deeply longing.
Until Next Time
What, if any, of your regular action processes (practices, habits, etc.) connect you with your core?
What do you find?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Email me.
Andre@basishp.com
Addendum: For Readers Concerned With Ideas of Moral Truth
Making sense is often cognitively overwhelming. Inquiry proliferates. Close inspection of important questions and their possible solutions reveals many unresolved sub-questions.
Not everyone is inclined towards or interested in doing this cognitive work. That’s okay; human difference and specialization is a wonderful reality. Some people do feel inclined towards or interested in "closing" these "open loops." This section is for those readers.
Throughout these blog posts, I will be articulating ideas that involve notions of best, preferable, or better experiences. These ideas relate to ideas about moral truth. Understandably, such ideas can be controversial. They can challenge deep, personal aspects of people’s worldviews. They can also have serious moral implications.
It seems possible to safely engage with ideas about moral truth. This requires something like intellectual containment. This seems to be a complex ability. It involves reducing the ways entertaining an idea might negatively affect oneself. It also involves observing and accounting for the ways entertaining an idea is affecting oneself.
To get this essential sub-conversation started for now, I offer the following observations:
Suppose there is an objective fact of the matter about what experiences are best or better. What is objectively best for different people may be different. This fact may also vary over time.
Suppose there is no objective fact of the matter about what experiences are best or better. Even if preferences are somehow entirely subjective, people may still have genuine preferences.
Suppose one of two things. There are objectively best or better experiences or people have genuine subjective preferences. Then, suppose that our preferences can, or do, vary so much at a time or over time that they are irreconcilable. This alone does not seem to negate that pursuing at least some of these preferences matters.
If you are a nihilist and think nothing matters, let’s have coffee. I imagine we will have a fascinating conversation.
Settling these matters seems to depend on what knowledge we have about the nature of reality. However, there appears not to exist much or any knowledge about the nature of reality, per se. We do seem to know much about many phenomena (our experience of ourselves and the "physical world"). Exactly what all that entails about ultimate reality, though, we so far seem to have little or nothing to say.
Two more points.
First, earnest people spend their whole lives trying to understand life, experience, being, or consciousness. They try to understand reality, possibility, which possibilities to choose to actualize, in what way choice is even a thing, and how to actualize what we choose to. If this were easy to do, these people would not live this way or they would not be earnest.
Second, there exist people who appear to live good lives without knowing reality, per se. Indeed, this appears true of most (maybe all) people living good lives. Therefore, at least some worthwhile experience does not seem to depend on having such knowledge.
Do you have any thoughts, feelings, or intuitions about some experiences being better than others? If thoughts and you think they are true, why? If feelings, what might they mean? If intuitions, which survive scrutiny? Do any seem to be the signaling of your core? How do you know?
Email me.
Andre@basishp.com