The Compass: 61 Core Principles for Living the Good Life

[TheAvatarState]

What I present here are Leo's original 65 core principles (plus 2 of my own), compiled and organized into an extremely helpful list to help orient you through life. I call it "The Compass." For this is a man-made tool to help guide you through the turbulent oceans and wild mountains of everyday life. This compass POINTS to Truth, but is itself just a collection of symbols. I have found this guide to be extremely accurate and useful in my own life so far.

If you haven't already, please watch The 65 Core Principles Of Living The Good Life as Leo goes into much more juicy detail on each principle. All credit for this post goes to @Leo Gura.  

 

The first 4 principles are the purposes of life. Orient your life to embody these:

1. Raise your consciousness.
2. Raise your capacity to love.
3. Take in the beauty of life.
4. To feel alive! To not have a single day where you're just going through the motions. The key to this is to bring consciousness into every task, even the most mundane.
5. Practice present conscious awareness and acceptance. There is no suffering to be found here. (This is my own principle I added)
6. Ego is the root of all human problems and suffering. Self-deception. Self-bias. All fear, all judgment, all evil, all anger, and all suffering are delusion and falsehood. Do not demonize anyone.
7. No ideology or dogma of any kind.
8. Be radically open-minded. Recognize that you enter this world not knowing anything. You must explore all facets of reality without any pre-judgments, for you truly do not know a thing unless you've experienced it. Being close-minded cuts you off from direct experience. Also recognize that many of the deepest truths are counter-intuitive and will appear silly or crazy on the surface.
9. Question everything. Especially the most "obvious" things, as those are often the most misunderstood. Question the outside world as well as your inside one. Literally. Everything.
10. Direct experience is King. In order to cut through the bullshit of society and your own mind, ground yourself in your present direct experience.
11. Do not judge things which you have not personally experienced. If someone talks to you about something you've never explored, keep your mouth shut and your ears open.
12. Self-experimentation is the only way to truly find what works. This requires radical open-mindedness.
13. Prioritize big picture thinking over technical knowledge.
14. Care about philosophical and metaphysical matters.
15. Genuinely care about the Truth no matter the cost. Love Truth for Truth's sake. The Vow; my blood.
16. Genuinely intend to understand every point of view. Appreciate that the world is nothing but different perspectives.
17. Integral thinking. Spiral dynamics stage yellow. From studying multiple perspectives, gain a meta-perspective at the intersections of all. What does that tell us about life? Every point of view is fundamentally partial; there is a sliver of Truth to be found in every perspective.
18. Pull from hundreds of diverse sources. When you do this, the Truth gets triangulated and the big picture emerges.
19. Lifelong learning and self-education. Cultivate a thirst for knowledge and wisdom. This process should never end. Do not be cheap with your self-education. Develop a system for taking notes and organizing the information, such as a commonplace book.
20. Observation. The essence of learning is observation. It is through observation that insights come.
21. Build your metaphysical connection to reality. This is what spirituality is. You are not an object that exists in the universe, you are existence itself; you ARE the universe.
22. Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing (of course don't be dogmatic about it, be conscious of how you apply this). Reality is deeply counter-intuitive. Expect that reality will work the exact opposite of how you think it will, until you get experience with it.
23. Absolute Truth exists, but it cannot be thought, imagined, communicated, spoken, written, proven, or argued.
24. Nonduality is the ultimate Truth.
25. Reality is perfect.
26. Reality is infinite and God is a real thing. The word God points to infinity.
27. You are God. Remove ego from this realization. You created yourself, you are everything. Only when you realize you are God will you take full responsibility for your life.
28. Reality is not material. It is a giant mind. It is all imaginings within a mindscape, and mindscape is all that there ever is. All one.
29. Life is a dream. And like a dream, it is possible to awaken from it. That is, to become lucid and stop taking it so seriously.
30. 99.9+% of people are deluded and asleep, and they don't know about any of these deeper principles. Which means you can't look to others for guidance on this path. When it comes to your own well-being, you are essentially alone. This doesn't mean you can't find help in a specific avenue where someone has complete mastery of, like a doctor or therapist or counselor. However, very, very few people could ever provide you with proper guidance in big picture thinking, and the only true guidance is to look within yourself. It's all there. I understand that these principles serve as a compass to help orient me, not a Holy Book itself. Question everything, but do the work. All of these principles make sense to me now but wouldn't have just a couple years ago. This is only because of my direct experience.
31. Society is still in the Dark Ages. We are still in adolescence as a species. Very pathological and dysfunctional.
32. God is the devil. This is a distinction that collapses. When you understand, you'll stop seeing evil in the world, and that all the "bad" things do in fact have a higher purpose and intelligence behind them.
33. All identity is relative and fluid. The goal is to dis-identify with your egoic constructions and to start aligning with one-ness and Truth. This is the trick to overcoming death. Or put another way, it is the trick to realizing you're already "dead," to overcome that fear. Out of this nothingness, you can truly start living.
34. Everything is relative. A thing is only known in relation to something else.
35. Prioritize context over facts. Recontextualization is an extremely helpful tool.
36. Everything boils down to inner game. Your psychology. Everything you think is "external" is actually a reflection of you.
37. Authenticity. In every facet of your life.
38. Develop a life purpose. Figure out who you are and what you want out of life. Without this, you get the default--mediocrity.
39. Be a strategic motherfucker. The 7 pillars of strategic thinking are: 1. Strategic Intent, 2. Strategic Analysis, 3. Strategic Preparation, 4. Concentration of Force, 5. Detailed Execution, 6. Adaptability, 7. Study of Principles. Watch Leo's video with the same title.
40. Take 100% responsibility. Anything less is suffering.
41. Be a leader. Be proactive. Be decisive. Take risks.
42. Be a creator. Tap into the joy of creativity. Provide massive value to mankind.
43. Become a master at something. This should directly be tied to your life purpose.
44. Reason and rationality cannot be trusted. All the highest insights are trans-rational.
45. Embrace confusion, paradox, and not knowing.
46. Develop emotional mastery. It is emotion that dominates the reasoning process.
47. Integrate the masculine and the feminine. 
48. Do not lie. (my own rule, but one worth saying. Of course, follow this consciously. This should be 99%+ true, not necessarily 100%. Be aware that in many cases you feel like you should lie, there's a way to structure the truth in a way that's more acceptable. You should never tell a bold-faced lie. By lying, you actually poison yourself and stray from authenticity.)
49. Do not manipulate.
50. Satisfy your base needs so that you stop craving. Using Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualize video.
51. Master your basic survival and livelihood. Learn business. Learn how money works.
52. Keep your life simple and spartan. Practice minimalism. When your life frees up, the ego mind will seek to fill it with various obligations, commitments, and distractions. Use that time instead for personal development.
53. Be a systems thinker. Develop an awareness for the ecological interconnectedness of things. Leo's Intro to systems thinking video.
54. Think ecologically. How are you impacting the world? Be conscious.
55. Happiness is only possible with enlightenment. No material possessions will ever make you happy. This is more certain than the laws of physics.
56. Learn to be happy all by yourself. If you can't be happy sitting on your couch doing nothing, then you can't truly be happy. "Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." -Aristotle
57. Development AND Awakening; not one or the other, not one above the other.
58. Without practice, exercises, and techniques, there will be no results. Theory alone, while important, will not produce much results.
59. Here are the most important and powerful practices for personal growth: psychedelics, meditation, meditative yoga, journaling, contemplation, self-inquiry, visualization, and solo retreats.
60. Plan to meditate for one hour every day for the rest of your life.
61. Do not turn Actualized.org into an ideology.

 

 

Edited December 19, 2018 by TheAvatarState
Fixed Link