Different Views
Daniel Schmachtenberger
From https://civilizationemerging.com/how-to-live-a-meaningful-life/ by Daniel Schmachtenberger
A meaningful life involves three different modes.
Everything that is meaningful is one of these three. Engaging in all three consciously as a virtuous cycle leads to a maximally meaningful life. All three are ultimately inspired by love.
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Being
- Appreciate the beauty of existence.
- Beauty doesn’t exist in objects.
- It arises from the relationship (ways of looking) of the subject appreciating the object. Meaning is inherently relational.
- The depth of our appreciation of the beauty of the world increases the meaningfulness of the world.
- When we are conscious of this, we can deepen our appreciation, and with it, both the joyfulness and meaningfulness of the experience.
- Appreciate the beauty of existence.
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Doing
- Adding to the beauty of life
- Create art, science, or technology that can allow others to enjoy the beauty of life (paying attention to 2nd order effects)
- raising children, planting trees,
- In doing, we don’t think about what’s in it for us because we are already fulfilled by our mode of being
- Similar to how Rob Burbea talks about Samadhi Practice
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Becoming
- Getting better at being and doing
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Increase your ability to appreciate and add to the beauty of existence. Deepen your ability to recognize beauty everywhere. To take it in. To be touched and moved by it. To feel gratitude, reverence, awe. And develop your capacities and willingness to add beauty. Not just in a narrow domain you call a vocation…but in all the situations and ways you can. Every skill, every insight, every tool and capacity…has a role to play in the evolution of life – in the evolution of the beauty of reality. This is the mode of becoming.
There’s a virtuous relationship between these three. Each one of them on their own would be incomplete.
Derek Sivers
- Life has no meaning. Everything is a blank slate that you can project whatever meaning we want on to.
- Meaning is not a fact, it’s just a belief, a perspective
- You can try on meanings and adopt the one that makes you take better actions.