Author’s note: If you’re new, I strongly recommend you start from the introduction, then learn the concepts one by one sequentially. By doing so you comprehend the concepts much better and can get the most out of it. Click here to do so.)
What is the “reality”?
Not what you’ve been taught, not your thoughts, not your personal experience. These are your perceptions to the reality.
The reality, on the other hand, is the systems of facts governed by principles.
Facts
Facts are objective.
For example, “you have never been a millionaire”, is a fact.
“You will never be a millionaire”, is not. It’s a belief, or, mindset.
Principles
From experiments
By definition, principles are something you must learn from carefully designed experiments. You can’t “think” your way to it.
Just in case you think that your life is a good experiment, let me state it from the very beginning that it had never and will never be. How can you possibly understand how the world works, by studying one person’s life? You have limited time and limited exposure. Thinking that “you can” is just like thinking you getting sick once or twice can make you a medical doctor. That’s non-sense!
In order to become a medical doctor, one of the essentials is you have to learn the mechanisms of diseases, which are discovered (not “think”, not “create”) by carefully conducted experiments, having all parameters fixed other than the one that has been testing.
In life, you can’t control any of the “variables”, let alone being able to “repeat the experiment with only one parameter changed”.
Therefore, one’s life experiments really can’t reflect anything useful on the reality. Sometimes it may give accurate understandings, but since you really can’t differentiate between the trues and falses, anything becomes useless.
Unchangeable
Principles are something like gravity. It exits, exerts its effects, and is unchangeable, regardless of whether you have discovered it yet, whether you understand it correctly, or believe it.
Will not knowing what gravity is makes gravity non-existent? Will calculating it wrongly skews its force? Will not believing its existence makes it disappear?
No. But if you didn’t understand gravity and act against it, say you jump off a building and think that you’ll float, you’ll die.
Same way with principles of living.
If you do not understand the principles act against them, you’re not gonna produce the positive results that you think you would.
Because it just doesn’t work like that.
The following story explains the concept of “principles” very well:
Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities.
Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, “Light, bearing on the starboard bow.”
“Is it steady or moving astern?” the captain called out.
Lookout replied, “Steady, captain,” which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship.
The captain then called to the signalman, “Signal that ship: We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees.”
Back came a signal, “Advisable for you to change course 20 degrees.”
The captain said, “Send, I’m a captain, change course 20 degrees.” “I’m a seaman second class,” came the reply. “You had better change course 20 degrees.”
By that time, the captain was furious. He spat out, “Send, I’m a battleship. Change course 20 degrees.”
Back came the flashing light, “I’m a lighthouse.”
We changed course.
-Stephen Covey, The 7 habits of highly effective people
We can’t “compete” with principles. We could only follow.
So, in order to produce the desired results, you must first understand the principles (i.e. how that thing work), and act accordingly.
Say you want to produce a fire. You have to first understand that, you will need fuel, oxygen, and heat. So you can start your work.
Any fire-producing work before learning the fire triangle is just a pure waste of time.
Two questions for you:
- What are some of the perceptions that you’ve been misinterpreting as facts?
- What is one thing that you want in life? Start understanding the principles of it and act accordingly!
Thanks for reading! Your attention and feedback matters to me.
-Learning How to Live 2.0
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