Spiritual matters, in their general sense, vary significantly across different ideological, value, and thought systems. For example, prayer and supplication in theistic religions are considered spiritual practices, whereas in Buddhism and Shamanism, praying to a deity is entirely meaningless and is defined differently. For those who identify as spiritual but non-religious, this concept is also different. It might be connected to nature, philanthropy, helping others, or any ceremony that creates a pleasant feeling of inner peace, such as music, meditation, or various group rituals.
The last time a friend of mine asked me what spirituality meant to me, I answered, “Spirituality for me is as simple as sharing a cup of coffee with you, walking barefoot on the sands of the beach, or spending hours in the silence of the forest. It’s having dinner with my family and friends and writing this book—just that simple.” My friend looked at me as if he hadn’t understood what I was saying and said with surprise, “I didn’t expect that from you. I thought you were a spiritual person.” I replied, “If every single thing you do in a day is based on your values and has meaning to you, then you become the most spiritual being in the universe.” Of course, since my friend experienced an expectation error he preferred not to continue his friendship with me.
In this book, when I refer to anything spiritual, I am pointing to a story that the mind creates when confronted with the emergence of content in the field of awareness, in an effort to give meaning to this process. As I mentioned in earlier sections, the human brain interprets every event to make it understandable, and this process occurs through language and storytelling. Even the explanations you are currently reading are narrative stories that my mind is constructing to interpret and make sense of the workings of the mind. From the earliest years of childhood, humans begin to ask questions like “what,” “why,” “how,” and “what does it mean?” All the answers we give to our children are rooted in a narrative. For example, when a bird flies, a child might ask, “Mom, what’s that?” “That’s a bird!” “What’s a bird?” Then you tell a story: “A bird is an animal that can fly!” “What is an animal? What is flying?…”
The flight of a bird in everyday language is a completely natural, material subject and doesn’t seem spiritual (unless we attribute the bird to luck or a good omen). However, with the above explanations, one could say that anything interpreted in our mind is a spiritual phenomenon because the human mind has made such an interpretation of this phenomenon, and the phenomenon itself has no interpretation and it just happens. If we could somehow view this phenomenon from the perspective of other animals, as described in the science fiction approach in the book “The Secret of Unity,” you might understand my point.
What the brain and nervous system process and produce in the form of sounds, then words, and sentences, results from the activity of millions of neurons.
When a person looks at a sunrise or sunset, they don’t just enjoy the view; questions arise in their mind in the form of thoughts, and these questions require language to be expressed. The answers they find also require language. It’s true that initial curiosities don’t necessarily need language; for example, you might curiously watch a bird’s behavior or observe a sunrise and sunset from different angles without language being involved in this process. However, from the moment you ask more complex questions and find answers to these questions, the language centers of the brain become involved.
Whether other primates also ask questions and find answers is not the subject of this book, and there are no precise answers to this either, as it depends entirely on how we define “asking questions.” As I have explained, we still do not have access to the first-hand knowledge of any living being. The only bridge to access the first-hand knowledge of a living being experiencing the world is language. I hope technological advancements will open new doors for us to access first-hand knowledge, but for now, the idea of being able to translate what goes on in the mind of an ant, a dog, a bird, and ultimately another human into comprehensible language is more like science fiction.
A belief, in this book, is a narrative that has shifted from being content to becoming a mental context, and now, the content appearing in the field of awareness is set against this mental context.
The process of turning content into a mental context is very complex, and I do not intend to simplify it for you, but with a few simple examples, I can explain what I mean by this process. Furthermore, the scientific explanations of what happens in the nervous system, which are presented at the end of the book, can help understand what I am explaining.
You are just a few years old when you ask your parents, “Where did I come from?” Your parents look at you for a moment, then look at each other, and then they tell you the silly story of the stork, perhaps showing you a Disney cartoon from the 1980s. You believe this story. Here, a few things have happened:
First, you asked a question. Of course, this was not the first time you asked a question. It has probably been two years since you started bombarding your parents with questions like “What is this?” “Why?” “How?” and “What does it mean?” This phenomenon is the foundation of this extraordinary process.
As far as we know, no other animal asks its mother and father such questions as “What is this?” “What is that?” “What does it mean?” and “Where did I come from?”
Second, you receive an answer from your parents; in fact, you receive content that is quite different from the other content you have received, and it has a label that your brain assigns because it is coming from the most important thing in your life—your parents. This label, which I will call the “importance label,” plays a crucial role in the process of forming beliefs. If you had seen the cartoon before your parents told you this story, it is highly likely that your brain would have labeled it as insignificant and stored it in the memory dump. Even if you had seen the cartoon and believed it, and then your parents told you otherwise, the previous content would have been labeled as insignificant, while the new content would have been labeled as highly significant and stored accordingly.
During this process, other mental contexts, such as environment, genetics, nutrition, and, most importantly, the pantry (representing emotions), also have a significant impact. For example, if your parents gave you a delicious Swiss chocolate while telling you this story, the pleasant sensations of the melting buttery chocolate in your mouth, along with the story of the stork, would be stored simultaneously. When these memories are retrieved, the pleasant feelings you experienced are also retrieved with them.
Now, if a few years later, your family throws a stork-themed party for you and decorates the house with stork pictures, this ceremony reinforces this belief in your mind and aids the complex process of turning this story into a belief. This is exactly why a birthday, which holds no significance for me personally, is extremely important to many inhabitants of Earth. When people hear that I don’t celebrate my birthday, do nothing special for it, and that the day has no place in my philosophical or value system, they look at me with astonishment, as if they’ve seen an alien.
Now, imagine you go to a preschool where the parents and the staff have decided to uniformly repeat this silly story to all the children. The story is continually told and elaborated upon. Annual celebrations and rituals are held to honor the storks at the preschool. The stork becomes the most sacred symbol in your life and the lives of your little friends, and even holy places are established where the stork is said to have rested during its comings and goings. You can guess the rest of the stork’s fictional story. These celebrations, along with emotional moments of singing hymns and handing out sweets and chocolates during the ritual of hiding the paper goldfish for the stork, help reinforce this narrative, which is now turning into a belief.
Emotional content and other content that validates this narrative contribute to reinforcing this belief and accelerate the process of this transformation. Children do not have much choice in selecting the input content for their minds, and parents typically provide them with whatever they themselves believe and decide.
Now imagine that a few years later, you meet me in school, and we become friends. Then, over a simple topic, our discussion leads to a philosophical-existential conversation, and you tell me the story of the stork. Given this context, if I suddenly laugh and say, “My friend, what’s a stork? That was just a story they told you as a child,” what happens in your mind?
A new piece of content that attempts to change a well-established mental context appears in your field of awareness. How you react to me also depends on thousands of different mental contexts. If you don’t punch me in the face, you will likely be upset and take my statement as mocking and insulting your sacred beliefs. You will probably cut off your connection with me and immediately inform the school authorities and then your parents about this. If they smile at you and confirm what I said, you will probably experience an expectation error and feel very uncomfortable. All your beliefs and convictions will collapse and disintegrate. Now it’s time for your parents to comfort you with a hug and take you to the delicious Italian gelato shop down the street to help soothe the effect of this expectation error. During this process, they will tell you a new mythical story until you read this book in a few decades and all these beliefs are shaken again.
To fully understand the concept of labeling, let me give you another example. Imagine you are a 5-year-old child and you are sneaking toward the pantry to grab the Swiss chocolate I posted for you in earlier episodes. As usual, your parents are keeping a close eye on you. As soon as you approach the pantry, your father calls your name and gently asks you not to touch it, trying to persuade you with logical reasons that mean nothing to you, such as “Sweetheart, you’ll lose your appetite; you can have the chocolate after dinner.” You ignore your father’s request and keep going. Moments later, your father’s voice resonates in your ears. He raises his voice a little and firmly asks you not to go near the pantry. You freeze in your tracks, frown, and change your course towards your room. What happened? In both scenarios, content appeared in the field of awareness, but your reactions were different.
In this situation, your brain perceived the loud, firm voice as having higher importance and labeled the content with a high priority. Now, if this firmness is accompanied by punishment, the issue becomes even more complex. You will create a narrative based on “raiding the pantry equals punishment,” which is not pleasant at all, and emotional labels, such as the unpleasantness of the experience, will be attached to it.
Now, suppose you are a few years older and going to school. Your mother asks you to do your homework because it will make her happy, bring pride to the family, and please your dear stork. You have an idea of what makes your mother happy, and this brings a narrative to mind because it has been interpreted for you since childhood. Making your mother happy means she smiles, hugs you, and even gives you something delicious from the pantry. If your mother isn’t happy, it means she is angry, which translates to frowning, ignoring you, and no treats from the pantry—things you don’t like. When your mother talks about being happy, you don’t necessarily recall these childhood stories because there’s no need to. Your mother’s happiness is valuable to you, and that’s enough.
What we call superstition has such a thin boundary with our beliefs that a deep-seated belief can instantly turn into a superstition or vice versa. What you believed for years and were ridiculed for your superstitious beliefs can become a common belief. This boundary is collective validation and acceptance. If all members of a tribe believe in something, it’s no longer superstition. But if only a small group believes the earth is flat and can be disproven in hundreds of ways, and they persist in this belief, the term “superstition” is applied.
If you deeply believe in the unluckiness of the number 13, the same process that shaped the stork story in your mind has occurred, except in school, you found others who think like you, and that is enough to validate your beliefs. When you find a group of people who share your beliefs and confirm them, the process of emotional bonding and forming friendships intensifies greatly. That we humans defend our beliefs like our honor has very complex reasons, and one cannot cite just one or two reasons for it. Still, if I were to explain it in the language of this book, I would say that our beliefs are part of our mental contexts. As I explained in the section on personality, our personality and identity are patterns of content appearing on these mental contexts. So, when these mental contexts are threatened, we feel that our personality, identity, and what we think we are is in danger, and we fight tooth and nail to protect it, without realizing that these beliefs are inherently insubstantial, and we are constantly changing and replacing them throughout our lives. Our values also keep changing and being replaced by new ones, to the extent that the values we held a few years ago may even contradict our current values. This change in beliefs and the resulting transformation in values forces us to change our friends, communities, and groups we belong to, because we need validation. Validation is the most important tool for turning content into belief, as I explained with the stork example.
The lack of validation by even a small, minority community makes us feel a sense of collective identity and belonging to our community. When our beliefs and values change, we no longer feel a sense of belonging to the communities we are in and are compelled to leave them.
I apologize; it seems I forgot to define what a value is. A value is a process aimed at realizing a set of beliefs that are created to assess the value of the content, actions, and behaviors we engage in. Values are also considered a type of mental context in this book. For example, in the previous example, pleasing and satisfying your parents can be considered good values. These values give direction to your life, assess the content of your awareness, and influence your emotions. In other words, everything you experience is influenced by these values. For instance, if you study your lessons today and get a good grade in school, making your mother happy, you have taken a step toward the value of “making mother happy” and received a reward in this path. Conversely, if for any reason, you fail to attend the ritual of sacrificing a fish for the stork, you may have displeased it, and you might regret it for years, at least until meeting me in school.
All ideologies, from the smallest, like your family or your favorite sports team, to the largest, such as religions and political groups, are based on the same elements: a set of narrative stories, rituals and ceremonies, a set of values that also specify the dos and don’ts, thereby shaping the reward path, and ultimately, collective validation, which is of high importance.
When you decide to be a blind follower of an ideology, from that moment, you place two pieces of cotton, one in your right ear and the other in your left ear, to no longer hear the words of others. These cotton pieces are called prejudice.
Prejudice is a weapon that your leaders subtly arm you with to prevent any change. Change is the scariest word for an ideology because it means that the ideology I believe in doesn’t seem to work very well. So, in addition to belief, you need prejudice to ensure no one can change your mind.
As you firmly place these beloved pieces of cotton in your ears, your dear leaders are busy arming themselves with much more powerful tools such as sanctity, distinction, and superiority. To continue their path, they create guidelines to distinguish themselves from other ideologies and strive to display their superiority. Supernatural matters also act as a catalyst for them, boosting the process of gaining power like nuclear fuel, because people love to hear stories with elements of mythical power.
Once everything is ready, the time comes to spread the ideology to the far corners of the homeland and start exporting it to neighboring countries, sometimes requiring a bit of war and bloodshed, and this is completely normal, and there’s no need to worry.
The mass genocide of the Nazis in Germany, the genocides by the Japanese and Armenians, the brutal slaughter in Rwanda, and the terrorist operations by the Taliban, among others, have all hidden behind a mask of justification. This mask directly results from the value system dictated by the leaders of these parties and the utopia promised to them.
It cannot be denied that the initial idea and foundation of an ideology often come with seemingly benevolent intent. The initial idea of the founders of Nazism was to create a superior human race; communism was about establishing justice, and the Taliban aimed at purging the world of evil and pleasing God. However, in a relatively short time, this seemingly benevolent intent turned into a tool of violence.
The human mind’s ability to fantasize and wander in the future has not only led to the advancement of science and technology but also created the problems mentioned earlier. The imaginary future that leaders and their directives provide to their followers, along with their empty promises, is nothing but illusion and fantasy.
But the matter does not end here; all the atrocities humans have cruelly inflicted on one another have not resulted solely from their leaders’ promises; other factors have also played a role.
Witnessing very ordinary people capable of massacring hundreds or thousands of people in a war without even having received a promise or waiting for a utopia can alter our perceptions to the extent that we might ask ourselves if it’s possible we, too, might commit such acts under similar circumstances.
One cannot ignore factors such as racism, wartime violence, ideological tools of justification and provocation, and a passion for obedience in humans, but there are other issues we shouldn’t overlook.
Many of us, as children or teenagers, have played computer games where we attacked, beat, or even harassed other characters. We attacked enemy forces and savored slaughtering them with pure delight. What has happened? Is killing other people in a computer game or a Hollywood movie enjoyable?
If killing people is considered unethical, how can we play such games with such brutality and enjoy watching such movies with such pleasure?
Besides the innate inclination toward violence in some people, repeating an unethical act and increasing its frequency reduces feelings of remorse over time and makes the issue seem quite ordinary. For a professional serial killer, killing a new person is equivalent to killing a mosquito for someone else.
This inclination toward violence, combined with the “normalization” process and other factors orchestrated by ideological leaders, has led to horrific events in history.
Imagine you are walking down the street, and a disheveled person approaches you asking for help. Their appearance is so messy that you are certain they are a drug addict. They ask for money to buy food for themselves and their family, but you try to ignore them and continue on your way.
Perhaps this moment occupies your thoughts briefly, or maybe it doesn’t concern you at all.
A few days later, your phone rings. It’s one of your friends, sharing a story about a poor family in desperate need of financial assistance. The father of the family is an addict, and the mother’s income from cleaning houses is not enough to sustain them. You willingly give your friend some money to help this needy family. As fate would have it, the father is the very same person you saw at the intersection a few days ago, the one you refused to help.
What happened? What made you refuse to help the first time but eagerly assist your fellow human the second time, feeling good about your act of kindness afterward? Is helping others a good thing? If it is, what form should it take? If a fellow human is an addict, should they not be helped? What if this addicted person has a spouse and children? What is the right thing to do?
Value systems are guidelines we follow, either knowingly or unknowingly. These guidelines can be designed by an individual, a family, a society, or an ideology. Their role is to assign value to our actions and even our thoughts. Differences in human values across various societies and cultures arise from these systems. In some cases, changing these systems is simple, but in many instances, they are deeply rooted in our beliefs and convictions.
Sometimes, a value system becomes so powerful that it stands up to human instincts and suppresses them. A priest who remains celibate for their entire life or someone fasting or going on a hunger strike for a specific purpose are examples of this.
From childhood, you were taught to help others because this was instilled in you by your family, school, religion, and society. This means that within this value system, the operator of care is emphasized to promote helping others.
However, there are also exceptions within these value systems, often overlapping and sometimes contradicting each other. In your family, your father never turned away anyone who asked for something. He always helped the poor and taught you that you are not in a position to judge. Whether a person is an addict, truly in need, or will use your monetary help wisely is not for you to decide. Society emphasizes that you should direct your help to organizations and registered individuals and avoid helping street beggars. Your group of friends tells stories about how these beggars earn more money in an hour than you do, operating in a completely organized manner.
The fact that you might hesitate and reflect after ignoring someone highlights the existence of conflicting value systems. We all belong to countless value systems.
What we now call “ethics” is grounded in many operators that have been embedded in our genetic memory over millions of years and, like other capabilities, are largely subject to change and programming.
“Operator” is a term I use in this book to refer to behaviors passed down to us genetically. Many are universal among most living creatures, like fleeing, fighting, and hiding. Some are specific to certain species, like the operators of care, obedience, and jealousy. I intentionally use “operator” instead of “behavior” due to the general nature of the word “behavior,” which can lead to misunderstandings of the subject.
Throughout history, humans have created and adhered to different belief systems and value systems by modifying these operators. This is why one cannot say that ethics is entirely relative or absolute.
Part of it is transmitted to us through genetics, while others result from the value systems in which we were born and raised and the systems we have built and nurtured ourselves.
Helping others, as I mentioned in the example, is also influenced by this operator. To simplify it in the style of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, we could say that the genetic operator of care has undergone changes due to the teachings of value systems, displaying various behaviors.
Ethics can be likened to different tastes in the mouth. Tastes such as sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, spiciness, and sourness are flavors that all humans understand well, and the combination and intensity of these tastes depend on genetics, culture, geographic location, and the repetition of these flavors from childhood. We create thousands of different dishes by combining these flavors. A preference for or aversion to a particular food is influenced by several factors, such as environment, genetics, previous experiences, and many other mental contexts mentioned earlier. If you, like me, are disgusted by eating snake, alligator, and dog, it doesn’t mean that you and I are normal; rather, it’s entirely related to our mental contexts, including genetics, environment, and lived experience. In other parts of the world, such as China, eating these foods is completely natural and ethical.
I will never forget the first time I decided to try sushi. This experience was not only unpleasant but also completely disgusting and repulsive. Now, more than 25 years since that bitter experience, if you ask me what my favorite food is, you will hear the name of that once disgusting food without hesitation. I must admit it didn’t even take a year before, after a few tries, the strange and repulsive taste of seaweed and raw fish became so enjoyable that I even showed great enthusiasm for finding a new Japanese restaurant.
What happened? To simplify it, mental contexts such as the environment and the attitudes of those around me, past experiences, genetics, and repeated exposure to and experiencing this new food provided conditions that changed my taste and turned a disgust into a strong desire. In other words, my perception of this flavor changed through training. You could also view this as a skill. By repeatedly eating a new food in specific conditions, I strengthened the skill of enjoying it within myself.
This is why concepts such as good and bad, ugly and beautiful not only have different definitions across different cultures, sometimes even contradictory ones, but also change according to time, place, and circumstances.
As I am writing this book, concepts such as abortion, euthanasia, and gender reassignment are considered ethical in some societies and unethical in others. Even within a large society like the United States, some groups and parties condemn these acts, while others insistently seek their legalization and normalization.
Harming others, which is usually condemned and considered “bad” among humans, loses this concept in many situations. Not only a brief look at history but also a look at the past few decades and the examples I mentioned about well-known extremist groups shows that humans trample ethical concepts to realize their beliefs.
If you come to believe that a land has been promised to you by a higher power and that the only path to salvation for yourself and your children is in this promised land, and unfortunately, people are currently living there peacefully while you have to live outside your promised land, what happens in your mind?
You guessed it correctly. By believing in a fictional story (similar to the stork story), you have created an imbalance (refer to the section on expectations). Now, this imbalance must be balanced. You can justify yourself through philosophy and language, saying, “I am sure that one day justice will be served, and we will return to the promised land,” or you can start a military campaign and acquire the promised land through war and bloodshed, or through more cunning methods like purchasing property. By doing so, you restore balance to your mind.
This example is one of the many ways I have termed “justification.” Imbalance does not necessarily stem from an external event or molecular imbalance in the body. Still, a set of beliefs designed by an ideological system can create this imbalance in you and drive you to restore this inequality.
If, in the coffee-spilling example, I had seen your Lamborghini outside the cafe and an envious conversation had formed in my mind, like, “This guy must have cheated others to have such a car!” then spilling coffee on your expensive suit would be an act toward equalization, and it is evident that this act would not result in an apology from me.
How the envious conversation in your mind forms depends on your mental contexts and the mechanism of belief in the mind, which I have described.
If you grew up in a family, neighborhood, and society where having a luxury sports car signified something, and the people around you repeated such statements, and you haven’t designed and formulated your own philosophy and value system, you will likely repeat those narratives in your mind and pass them on to your precious child, just as our other friends have passed down their mythical stories about the promised land generation after generation. This is why our beliefs and the set of values that form the foundational pillars of our life’s philosophy are of great importance.
We are all part of countless value systems, even if you abandon all value systems and say, “I follow no one but my conscience,” you have created a new value system, and you may now be intuitively following its rules. Now, let me explain the concept of conscience a bit:
In a sports competition like football or basketball, or even a non-team sport like skiing, or non-sporting games like chess and poker, even though participants fully understand all the game rules and have trained for years to play according to these rules and guidelines, there is always a referee overseeing their performance. The referee’s role is to supervise the players’ proper conduct according to the guidelines of the game. Each time someone deviates from these rules, the referee blows the whistle and can even impose penalties on the offender. In our minds, conscience acts like a referee in these games. Although many of us have fully accepted and learned the ethical and unethical guidelines of a value system, we don’t necessarily always follow these guidelines. Why exactly this happens in the human mind will be explained in later chapters, but here, for the sake of brevity, we accept that most people, whether consciously or unintentionally, occasionally deviate from what they themselves have accepted as values and ethics. In these situations, parts of the brain (in this book, for simplicity and better understanding, I avoid mentioning complex names and parts of the brain and nervous system) responsible for judging are activated, and by providing an unpleasant feeling (both physical and mental), which I called pain in the section on pain and pleasure, it makes us aware of this deviation, and we sometimes call it a guilty conscience. It is clear that the definition of conscience can vary for every individual or system.
With this in mind, conscience is built on the mental contexts of value and moral systems, like someone who doesn’t know if they have been chosen to referee a football game or a basketball game. If touching the ball is a foul in football, the exact opposite is true in basketball. If a goalkeeper in football can touch the ball, other players cannot, and so on.
Now imagine you are sitting in your room, looking out the window at the street in front of your house, which is occasionally traversed by a passerby. For some time, there has been a pothole in your street, causing careless pedestrians to get into accidents, and you are always ready to help them. So far, several pedestrians have fallen into this pothole, and not only have you immediately called the emergency services, but you also rushed out of the house and stayed with the injured person until the ambulance arrived.
This act elevates you to the pinnacle of the joy of helping others, and you feel great about the ethical act you are performing until one day you open my book and come across this section.
I first ask you if you have ever contacted the municipality to come and fill the pothole or if it ever occurred to you to do it yourself and fill the hole as much as you could, or at least put something over it so passersby would notice it.
You ponder for a few moments, and after your facial features become contorted, you respond, “Oh dear, why didn’t I think of that?” And from the exact moment you become aware of this, a new system in your mind will start functioning, which may deter you from continuing your charitable act, or even if it doesn’t stop you, it will create an unpleasant feeling within you.
This example is an exaggerated version of similar stories that happen multiple times daily in our lives in various forms, and we consciously or unconsciously make decisions that yield similar results.
Now, let’s examine a value a bit more closely. One of my values in life is “health.” I believe health is essential because it allows me to enjoy life more and experience better feelings, and this is the narrative behind what I have come to believe. From the earliest days of childhood, when you and I tried to kill ourselves in thousands of ways and our dear parents saved our lives thousands of times, the importance of health has been emphasized. Ideological systems have also emphasized it in various ways, magnifying its importance several times over. Doctors, teachers, and everyone else continually provide us with methods to improve health, so this subject has become a belief and a value in my mind.
In this book, I try not to divide topics into physical and mental categories. For instance, physical health and mental health. This goes back to my perspective on the mind, which I tried to clarify from the outset. Physical and mental health are not two separate topics but rather categories we use to simplify perception. Therefore, when I talk about health, I mean the general and common meaning of health without separating the body and the mind.
Health, like many other concepts examined in this book, is not a tangible, fixed concept and has no clear boundaries. You can exclude physical disabilities from this definition, where someone with a disability can be healthy in every other way and may even have higher abilities than people without any disabilities. The same applies to various deficiencies that may be inherited or arise for other reasons. Such individuals, even though they require special care throughout their lives, can make this condition so routine that it does not disrupt their functionality and may even act as a motivational lever for them. Therefore, putting up boundaries and labeling people as healthy or unhealthy is futile, as everyone can present their own definition of health. Health refers to a process and is not a binary system that switches on and off.
It is important to note that no human can live their entire life without facing illness, injury, or dysfunction in their body and organs without any faults. Not only humans but all living beings grapple with various diseases and challenges from the earliest days of life, and this is part of the nature of life.
Health does not refer to an accessible status that one can achieve but is a value-based concept that can guide one’s path in life.
You can never achieve health with one or a few specific meals or physical activities, or ensure the health of your teeth by brushing them once; instead, all of these require continuous planning, effort, and constant review and improvement.
Now, I want to introduce you to the term “super value.” A super value is the highest value that can also influence your other values. This value acts like the North Star and directs the sailing ship of your life.
For many of us, the super value in life is success, whether it be professional-financial success, social status, or family success, like marriage and starting a family. For many others, this super value is what their ideological system teaches, such as pleasing God, the afterlife, “good thoughts, good words, good deeds,” or Buddha. For another group, the super value is maximizing pleasure and living in the moment, and their entire life plan is based on this.
Our super values are not fixed and are constantly changing and shifting. For many others, the super value is money and power. Those whose super value is either of these two, and their broad spectrum, can cause the same disasters as mentioned in this section. Someone whose absolute power is the only thing that satisfies them will do whatever it takes, even committing genocide, to achieve and maintain this value. Oil and arms companies in recent decades have shown what catastrophic actions they are willing to undertake to achieve these two goals.
For me, at this moment, the super value is wisdom. A few years ago, my super value was different, and it may change again in the future. It is considered the opposite of superficiality and foolishness. Including a complex concept like wisdom in a single sentence is challenging, so after a brief definition, I will provide more explanations to help understand it.
Wisdom is the ability to use awareness and experience to perceive, judge, and make decisions considering their consequences and results in alignment with one’s values and the benefit of the surrounding world, walking the path of moderation. In this definition, awareness includes knowledge and insight into mental content (including emotions and thoughts, sometimes called emotional intelligence) and awareness of one’s own mental contexts (e.g., past experiences, traumas, impulses, and other elements mentioned in the mental context section).
The surrounding world refers to other humans, nature, and living beings, which a wise person considers subtly and evaluates before taking any action. A wise person continuously improves the ability to put themselves in others’ shoes and view life from their perspective, using this skill in their decisions. They do not see themselves as separate from the universe, nor do they see the universe and everything in it as separate from themselves, which makes them live humbly and unselfishly.
A person who walks the path of wisdom distances themselves from excess and moves toward moderation and balance. This person fully understands that excess in pleasure-seeking comes with greater suffering, so they constantly balance suffering and pleasure.
A wise person knows they do not know and uses their ignorance as a tool for curiosity and inquiry, eagerly embracing learning and experience.
A wise person is well aware of their values and periodically reviews them. They are also continuously identifying the contradictions they encounter in life and finding the balance between them while revising and formulating their value system and philosophy.
Wisdom is not a specific point in life that one can reach but, like health, is a value concept that can be used to illuminate the path. It is a fluid, uninterrupted flow. It is not a straight, smooth path with a specific destination but is full of ups and downs.
No one can walk the path of wisdom without experience, and experience requires making mistakes, correcting them, trying again, and continuously repeating this cycle. This cycle starts and continues through learning and exposing oneself to diverse experiences. Therefore, a retrospective look at the life of someone on the path of wisdom can show numerous mistakes and excesses, as well as continuous corrections and improvements.
