What does it mean? Let's dive in.
Bear with me for two paragraphs, they will be needed to understand the context of this article.
I am a curious human who loves to get into the root of things. This part of me grew stronger over the years, and led to problems with choosing how I should behave. With science and modern understanding of the world - "good" and "bad" quickly lost their practicality. For example, being kind and honest made me satisfied, but it didn't mean that people who were actively hurting others fared badly at the same time. That lead to a thought - ok, feelings are not really a good measure of how things work. So how do they? That was even worse, because no approach seemed to give a conclusive answer. They didn't even work 90% of the time, any philosophy or religion contradicted itself at some point.
This split me inside, and for a reason: are we just constantly deceiving each other? Without some factual basis for our actions, everything is just a game of poker. We are all bluffing, and the one who is the best at it makes others do his bidding. But even he it will fail at some point anyway. So we are all just struggling, and then die. Not fun for me at all. And no, nihilism also doesn't work, it is just another bluff. That's what got me asking.
I found a way to approach this problem, and I want to share it with you. The answer is in the article title. I don't think it as a philosophy, because you won't get any concrete answers, but a compass that you can use to ask better questions on your own.
So first, a foundation.
We began as life, and evolved to be humans. In essence, life wants to thrive, sustain itself and hopefully reproduce. This is embedded in our nature. At some point to be better at this, through evolution, living things can gain intelligence, a game changer. You start to gain more and more cognitive functions, and at some point, you enter the world of consciousness. You are aware of your internal state. This leads to an observation - consciousness (some may call it spirit/soul) comes after intelligence (mind), and both are preceded by some kind of organism (body). Each affect one another as they come together, but they are not the same (emergence).
This is super important, as your body, mind and consciousness can play tricks on each other. An example - "I hate him" is an opinion. How does it come to be? First, you get an emotion (body), you are angry. This sparks a thought (mind), what does it mean? If you observe (consciousness) that someone constantly makes you angry, you make spark a thought that you don't like this person. This may start another chain of thoughts, until you get into this weird spot where you cannot bear sombody's presence. This loop of feeling, thinking about it and noticing becomes your experience. Experience is also a potential starter for you, it may stem additonal thoughts. This is the catch, because experience is no longer something real, you created it. It is abstract. This is where all of our bluffs start, and how culture functions. We develop a sequence of illusions, pass them on and use them. Some may be useful. Still, they will always have holes in reasoning - they are not reality and cannot fully express it. That's a simple
Thoughts live of conflict. They cannot exist without it. It's natural, nothing to worry about. Thought is meant to solve problems, so it needs a starting state and a desired one. They are part of us, so in some sense, we, humans, are conflict itself. But we are more than just thoughts, so we can live without conflict. You get hungry naturally, and you sure as hell can notice that without thinking about it first.
If you learn to regulate your mind, you can change how you engage with the world. This is the basis of mindfulness, and it works - I feel angry, but I am not angry. A huge difference. You effectively observed that you are more than just your bodily functions, than your experience. At that moment, you expand as something more than just a body (again, emergence). You can see reality as it is, and use your experience as a tool, a heuristic, but not the unchangable truth. No matter if this is also just a reaction in your brain, the observer is the observed after all. We don't want to split from our nature and enter a voodo land, just see what it really is and try to go beyond it.
Be in touch with reality. While you live - live. You have this moment only, both your past and future are just a thought - a visage. Everything happens in the now. This is the essence. Use your tools to make the most out of it. Follow your desires. Construct goals. Enjoy what you have, your stuff, your relations. Create new things if that interests you. Experience what happens as you go, don't make idols out of your thoughts. And if you get lost, see if that situation came to be because of your thought. If so, then you will see the nonsense of it. After you become aware, out of that moment, a natural action will arise. Doing things this way is hard because all of us got conditioned. We think too much, and once you experience the state of awareness, it is easy to convert it into a thought too. I need to feel this way, I have to do it, this is how it should be. With expectations, you are back to the square one, you create new illusions, and as we stated, they are not the reality. You need to be able to come to a halt with your thoughts, try to access them only to solve problems, possibly without attachment, and then let them go.
If you will be able to use all of your parts for what they are made for - body for doing, mind for solving, and consciousness for interactions (relations), you may naturally start to do the right thing. As you don't hold conflict inside you, by definition you won't have issues with yourself. Pieces start to fit together. Kindness, love, honesty, compassion, empathy - come as expressions of freedom. They spring out naturally without the illusions covering them. Joy follows, when you don't waste energy, it is converted into feeling of being content. Primal emotions, like fear, anger or grief, if you observe them, don't run from them, you will see see how truly valuable they are. Hate, jelousy, greed - complex emotions negative are just a result of becoming a slave to your own mind. If your desires are necessary, natural, that's who you are - act on them, why wait? If you have what you need, you really see it, why would you need more?
I think that to live true to yourself, in the now, is to live without conflict. If we can do it, this may bring the radical change to the world that we are all looking for. Nothing to reach, but infinitely many things to enjoy, create, and pass on.
That's how I approach my life and understand it. I found this heavily practical and hope that you can consider it too. Please, do send me a message if you have any questions or comments. This is probably one of the most important topics in my life, and I would love to confront my thinking with you!
Sidenote: You can give a lot of counterarguments to what I have written. I also do. And I started to catch those moments when doing this goes exactly according to what's written. Especially when discussing gray areas of life. Here is an example - what if somebody wants to kill me? How can I be compassionate and kind to him? But you see, if you remove mind from that, defending yourself is something totally natural to do. Trying to make it right or wrong is a construct of your mind itself. You can be kind and compassionate to him, but you don't need to be a punching bag. If you could approach this situation fully with a clear mind, any result that sprouts from it should be the right one - even if it would result in someobdy losing their life. Situations like that are really hard, and we don't have any tools to be sure what happened in sombody's head. I assume that humans are able to reach a high level of self-reflection, but not that all will start to follow it at the same time. So we still should have things like society, laws and rules, probably forever, because life is life and we sometimes become grumpy ^^. But you see - there is hope we can change for the better, that doesn't require any illusions like authority or religion.