“A theory is a supposition, which we hope to be true; a hypothesis is a supposition which we expect to be useful; fictions belong to the realm of art; if made to intrude elsewhere, they become either make-believes or mistakes.” - George Johnstone Stoney, Physicist

Man is nothing more than a storytelling animal that cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of its daily lives. Hence, an examination of his condition, through the eyes of reason, reveals insuperable problems which man has to face to live rationally. On the other hand, the failure to face the truth of a situation and to respond in accordance with the logic of his commitments is the definition of irrationality. Thus, for the human kind that fluctuates, as the swing of a pendulum, between rationality and irrationality; science of life, by itself, can neither fully face his problems, nor help him solve the problems.

Nature

Science, after all, is only the attempt to understand nature in terms of the necessary formal relations of its parts; and is committed to Mechanistic Reductionism as espoused in Plato’s Timaeus, The Way of Necessity: the things that come into being through necessity and as the result of being, made up of necessity and mind. He holds that there are two original principles in the cosmos, namely, intelligence and necessity. The idiom “necessity is the mother of invention” came into being, thus; and that means that if you really need to do something, you will think of a way of doing it. To revert to the subject, religion may help somewhat to face life, though all religious belief, as espoused today, borders on the irrational. Religion is necessary neither to explain the universe, or to provide a foundation for morality, or to appreciate the beauty of nature, nor to provide a basis for a meaningful human life. Neither is atheism helpful, for atheism suffers from an unfair prejudice in its exclusion from public life. The fact: the energy of the mind is the essence of life, a thing that can nourish itself, grow, and decay.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. Like fact, it acquires its true and full value only through the idea that is, developed from it. Likewise, progress in the art of living is an experiment that is, made by trial and error and the recordings of each. However, the failures are generally a hundred times more numerous than the successes.

Failures

Yet, such failures are not, generally chronicled by the mind. The only reason for this is that people generally do not care to remember, to know, about their failures, because they look upon it as some sort of shame; and therefore, wish to forget or hide it and move on. Thus, they become incurious and this incuriosity prevents them from developing an academic turn of mind and a good memory. Yet, in spite of this, they can recite hundreds of lyrics and reel off any amount of information about matters they are interested in; but matters that does not help to progress in the art of living. This is because, despite their incuriosity, they are interested in those things. They are curious. If one is hungry for food, one is prepared to hunt high and low for it. If one is hungry for information, it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. One barely has to stir to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because, they do not care to know. They are not curious, even if all humans by nature, desire to know. Thus, this lack of curiosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is in man.

Notwithstanding this lack of curiosity, man has progressed in life, and in the art of living. If so, did the genome of our cave-dwelling predecessors contain a set or sets of genes, which enabled modern man to compose music of infinite complexity and write novels with profound meaning? If we are to go by all that modern man has achieved, it looks as though the early Homo sapiens, was already provided with the intellectual potential in great excess of what was needed to cope with the environment of his time. The sad truth is, despite the fact that we have learnt much, we still have not learned to utilize the full potential of what is, provided in the science of life.

Knowledge

The science of life is a systematically organized body of knowledge on life, life being the particular subject that science investigates in this case. This is why the science of life is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics and why, in life, a likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. Nevertheless, science is also about the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think, because any falsity in intellectual action due to a lack of courage becomes intellectual immorality. Due to this intellectual immorality - falsity in intellectual action - some believe that Reason and Truth are incompatible.

There is no incompatibility between Reason’s search for truth and its search for meaning. There is one world. The world of values and the world of truths occupy the same space. There is nowhere else for them to be, and the servants of each serve the same universe.

We like things. We care about things. Reason extends those commitments in systematic ways, in ways that overstep the boundaries of our life, our power, and our imagination. Our values have a rational structure, and a rational life must conform itself to that structure, just as a rational belief system must conform itself to the necessities of the laws of nature as revealed by the science of life. The problem of the meaning of life is the problem of ordering one’s life rationally in accordance with these constraints. After all, in spite of the effort to rationalize life and the meaning of life, life happens. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, flying away, burying, or hiding from it. We have to face life and allow ourselves to be loved by, the people who really love us; the people who really matter.

Too often, blinded by our own ignorance, our own pursuits of people to love us - the people that do not even matter in our life - we waste all our time, while people who do love us have to stand on the sidewalk and watch us beg in the streets for people to love us - people who matter not a mite. It is time to put an end to this. It is time for us to let ourselves be loved by the people who matter. This is the art and the science of life. One needs to adhere to this basic principle of life; failure will lead one to the dissatisfied reality of life.

Fiction

Sometimes, unexpected things can happen in life because a large part of the world is made up of fiction; and because people are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. Honesty and frankness will make you vulnerable. Nevertheless, be honest and frank; and remember, the first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching. Finally, spontaneity in life is a meticulously prepared art. Be spontaneous.

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