LIVING WISELY, DEEPLY, AND COMPASSIONATELY MEANS – living well through wisdom, reason, awareness, compassion, contact, acceptance, and wise use of one’s capacities and opportunities.
- statements about a philosophy of life that will maximize cooperation, love, and peace in our lives (and explanations of why some other philosophies will not lead to these ends)
- illustrations of unnecessary individual psychological suffering unnecessary societal problems, and unnecessary fighting and violence between us
- explanation of the qualities needed for a person to be wise, mature, and compassionate (and therefore to be emotionally healthy) and discussion of how to pursue those qualities
- adaptive attitudes and solutions to age-old human problems, such as painful self-esteem, frustration, disappointment, rejection, anger, and death!
Every philosophical or therapeutic system has goals in terms of the kind of people or the kind of life it wishes to produce. The choice of principles here is aimed at producing loving, cooperative, self-aware, self-confident, empathic, wise, and compassionate people. This describes a way of being and an existence that has the greatest chance of maximizing fulfillment, contentment, and satisfaction, and of minimizing conflict, hatred, and violence.
The measure of a life well lived lies in both the subjective experience and the behavior of the person.
“Psychological health” is having all of one’s capacities available for use in seeking achievement of one’s goals (and having few, if any, internal conflicts or “symptoms” that would interfere with use of one’s capacities), and having an adequately satisfying subjective state (including feeling some amounts of happiness and hope, and ultimately some amounts of satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment).
As a very brief summary, this relatively happy and productive life can be achieved by cultivation of these key skills for living– honesty responsibility acceptance love empathy equality cooperation fairness self-control autonomy skills for dealing with one’s emotions
The psychological problems of human beings can be usefully conceptualize in the categories of (1) dealing with reality (including assessing reality
accurately),
(2) managing eotions
(3) relations with oneself (self-concept, self-esteem, self-
love, etc.)
(4) relations with others.
A summary of the system ideas may be gained from reading
“What I Believe: An Idealist Deals With Reality” (click here to read)
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