I mentioned in the page about me that I hoped to experience ultimate fulfillment by adopting two parallel purpose statements for my life, namely, living for total health and consciousness forever, and living in appointed times by faith. Although the first of these could use some explaining, especially the word ‘consciousness,’ I will leave that for a future post as I feel it is mostly self-explanatory. In this post, I will unwrap a little bit of the second statement.

What do I mean when I say I want to live in appointed times by faith? First, the word ‘live’ denotes that this is a time paradigm, meaning that this regulates how I manage and view my time. I don’t think many people would disagree that every person, organization, denomination, and religion in existence today has some truth and some error. It might be as much as 99.9% truth and as little as 0.1% error. Or, it might be as little as 0.1% truth and as much as 99.9% error. Once we establish this, it puts everyone on the same plane. Instead of one entity having ‘the truth’ and others not, we all believe some things that are true and some things that are false. And, at least in this life, I believe we always will. Also, we need to be really careful about judging where we think others fall on this continuum between truth and error, because in doing so we are forced to use our vantage point, which is also on the continuum, and thus we might be as wrong or worse as the one we are judging because we lack information and thus truth. It may seem to some by writing this that I am denying absolute truth, but I am doing no such thing. However, though I believe that there are absolute truths as well as ideals, I don’t know fully what they are. And, I might add, neither do you. Now, feel free to argue with me about this, but I would like you to just stop and think for a moment. Do you have all truth? Will you ever have all truth in this life? If you answer these two questions with ‘no,’ then you are agreeing with me that though you may have some educated guesses, you really cannot say for sure what the absolute truths and ideals are, though you believe that there are such things.

What does any of this have to do with living in appointed times by faith? Well, I figure that since I don’t currently have all truth and never will in this life, I want to create a time paradigm that allows for and even expects regular change. I do not want to deceive myself into believing eternal principles that I can not 100% verify are eternal (even if I have some good hunches). So, instead of just living in a relatively changeless state, always following the same principles, focusing on the same things, believing the same statements, I want to live in APPOINTED TIMES. What this means practically is that I want to divide my life up into primarily two distinct modes of existence. One is scientific. The other is philosophical. By scientific, I mean it is regulated, scheduled, goal-oriented, purpose-laden, well-disciplined, focused, established, and definite. During this appointed time, I am following a preset paradigm of how to act, think, respond to others, schedule my day, respond to failure, and achieve results. There is very little wondering if what I am doing is the best thing, what the point of my life is, or whether I should believe something different. I have made a conscious choice to completely follow the paradigm that I set beforehand. However, what do I mean by beforehand? This is where the philosophical part of my existence comes into play. By philosophical, I mean it is unregulated, unscheduled, not concerned with accomplishment, purposeless, unfocused, undisciplined, unestablished, and indefinite. During this appointed time, I am not, by and large, following any preset paradigm, I have no goals I am pursuing, and thus failure doesn’t exist. The one thing you could say I am focused on at least somewhat during this time is rehashing my past scientific paradigm and tweaking or overhauling it for my next appointed time in the scientific existence. Other than that, I simply am.

These two modes of existence happen back-to-back in a never-ending succession, creating constant growth without succumbing to the philosophical condition known as paralysis of analysis, which according to Wikipedia is the state of over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome. Boiling it down, what this means is that I have two modes of existence, or appointed times. In one, I am trying as much as possible to have a complete paradigm in place and simply to follow it in my actions, words, thoughts, and attitudes. In the other, I am not trying to do anything. I am free to explore various subjects or not. I am free to engage in various activities or not. The only thing that you might say I am trying to do, and this definitely would not involve the whole period of time, is that I want to reset the paradigm for my other mode of existence, tweak it if needed, or abandon it altogether if warranted.

This may be a difficult concept to think of philosophically, but most people actually tend to fall into this naturally at least to some degree in their lives. Most people work for five or six days a week and then have a weekend. During the work week, these people have goals to accomplish, a schedule to follow, and people to please. On the weekend, they can kick up their feet and do as they please. However, this usually is not done consciously and so doesn’t really help them too much in the area of consciousness, which I will delve into in a later post. This is because they aren’t really following an all-encompassing paradigm during the week. They are following bits and pieces of different paradigms that many times are incongruent with each-other. Also, on the weekend, they are usually not truly free but often allow themselves to adopt an accomplishment-mindset at least in certain ways that makes it look like they are still following a paradigm during this time; it is simply a different one from the one they were following during the week. In future posts, I will go into more detail on how I flesh this out in my own experience. I also will explain what faith is and why it is important.

Selfishness is viewed in a negative light by most people. Selfishness is usually equated with stinginess, unconcern for others, ruthlessness, and egotism. However, in order to know whether selfishness is really bad we need to define it. According to the World English Dictionary, selfishness is the state of being chiefly concerned with one’s own interest or advantage. Can you honestly say that you are not chiefly concerned with your own interest or advantage? Well, if you say you are then that means you are selfish. Doesn’t sound so bad and evil anymore, does it?

Really, every single person is inherently selfish. This is part of what it means to be human. We are conscious beings and therefore have the ability to make our lives better by innovation and skill. We aren’t just hardwired to live and behave in a certain way (at least I hope you aren’t). This is in large part what distinguishes us from animals.

Why do we associate all these bad qualities then with being selfish? It is because we are only looking at the bad kind of selfishness to draw our perceptions of it. The question is not should we be selfish or not, but rather how should we be selfish? Should we selfishly gorge on junk food because it fulfills a momentary urge or selfishly go for healthy snacks instead that will guarantee us better health and more longevity? Should we selfishly bully other people to make us feel superior, or selfishly give respect to others to forge quality relationships and connections that will bring great opportunities for financial success and emotional well-being? Should we selfishly spend our time watching movies and reading novels, or selfishly spend our time improving our skills and exercising our body so we feel good about ourselves and have more opportunities of advancement in the world?

I am selfish. You are selfish. However, you do have a choice to make. What kind of selfishness will you practice? The kind that will bring you ongoing joy, health, and security, or the kind that will bring you disease, no friendships, and self-loathing? Choose wisely.

I want to make what may seem an audacious claim. Every person that is living today, has lived in the past, or will live in the future is living for the same purpose. Whoa…wait a minute! You mean to tell me that Atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Deists, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, and who knows what else are ALL living for the same basic reason? Yep. Actually, this is fairly easy to prove if you just think about it for a minute. What is the Atheist living for? Personal fulfillment. Since they believe there is no afterlife, they do all they can to experience and achieve what they think will bring them the most personal fulfillment in this life. They may do things that seem to be selfless or humanitarian at times, but even these actions if taken to the root motivation will seen to be done out of a desire to experience personal fulfillment. Take giving money to someone in need. That is looking for the fulfillment of others and not yourself, right? Wrong! The reason anyone would give to someone is because that fulfills them, either by making them feel good about performing a perceived or manufactured duty, or avoiding the societal guilt that they might feel if they didn’t help someone in need. The same is true for Christians. Why do Christians believe in a higher power, and why do they believe in the resurrection of Yeshua the Christ, and why do they (or at least some) seek to “work out their salvation with fear and trembling”? Is it just because they happen to for no reason love the Almighty? No, it is because they want a personally fulfilling eternity. They too are living for personal fulfillment, though in their case it extends beyond this life.

Really, everything everyone does is at its root done for personal fulfillment. One may have to dig through a pile of secondary and tertiary reasons, but that is always the root. And we would think very strangely of a person that was not living for their own personal fulfillment. We would probably think they were mentally retarded. After all, who is going to do things they feel will never (either in this life or after this life) give them personal fulfillment in any way? I don’t even know if that is possible. So, the next time you are talking to someone with a different worldview or outlook than your own, realize that both of you are actually seeking and living for the same thing; you are just using different routes to get there.