If you take the journey you will find in yourself the reason for living.
LIFENOTES
about
your life
selections from our book
LOVE – In Search of a Reason for Living
What is this book? It is an essay about life, a book about you. Its purpose is to send you on a journey through your heart, mind, and soul. If you take the journey you will find in yourself the reason for living. If you care at all about life and people and yourself, you will take the journey.
If you are a humanist, a skeptic, simply do not know what to believe, or are just looking for a reason to live, please read our book, it represents an objective, rational, reasoned, search for a reason for living.
We begin our journey.
WHO AM I?
The day you were born you began a learning process that
will continue for the rest of your life. You were, from the beginning, molded
by your surroundings, parents, relatives, playmates, by all the general
attitudes, ideas, and beliefs you came in contact with. As you grew older those
early experiences affected and altered, both consciously and subconsciously,
what you felt and did about all the day to day things that went on around you.
Each new year of life added to your past, changing the way you viewed every new
day, influencing how you reacted to everything from the simplest daily routines
to complex events touching you, your family, and the world you lived in.
As you grew yet older you interacted with people from
different backgrounds with differing ideas about life. You found yourself
actively defending, modifying, or abandoning your early beliefs, adapting the
various ideas you came in contact with to fit your developing perception of
life. Perhaps new ideas were introduced to you by people with dynamic
personalities who espoused one philosophy or another. Faced with the challenge
of those ideas, you may have tenaciously defended your early beliefs,
dismissing unfamiliar concepts with alarming ease by resort to ingenious, if
not solid, arguments. On the other hand, you may have completely abandoned your
past and adopted new beliefs opposite to those you once cherished.
However, like most people, you probably belong to that
vast river of humanity which seems to move along in a fairly discernible
direction, concerned at any given minute with living that moment in the
easiest, most pleasant way possible. If so, you were and are more or less able
to blend ideas, feelings, philosophies, desires, and realities to justify what
you want to do. Along with the majority of people, you were and are good at
sending questions and ideas about the meaning of life and death, as well as
thoughts and feelings about what is good and right, deep into the cloudy
regions of your mind.
Whether we realize it or not, most of us are voluntary
prisoners of our minds, unwilling to question who we are and what we believe,
happy to simply roll along through life. Most of us will live from birth to
death in a world we have fashioned from our past to suit our present. Many will
find comfort through unquestioned acceptance of their family's, or even a
friend's, religious or philosophical heritage. Yet few will ever stand free
from their present beliefs and daily lives to ask what is
life about? Who am I? What should I do? What will I do? If there is
meaning to life, and a reason for living, those questions must be answered.
If there is a true meaning to life, nothing that you do,
say, or think will change that truth. What good is it to live your life
believing what you are doing is right if your beliefs are false and what you
are doing is wrong? It is an understanding of life that we seek, a search for
something in life worth living for.
If you are to find the meaning of life you must be willing
to recognize it if and when you see it. To do so requires you to open your mind
and accept whatever you discover, even if it is totally opposite to your
experiences, beliefs, and wishes. If you are to understand life you cannot hide
in the comfort of daily living, clouding your mind to avoid discomfort. You
must not reject what you discover if it does not fit what your life has been,
is, and what you want it to be.
Since our discussion deals with the
purpose of life, if what we are saying is true, your willingness to
understand is a willingness to grasp the very reason for your living. If the
answers you find are different from those you have molded for yourself, you
must decide whether to continue on the path you are on, or go another way on a
new path toward a new destination.
We suggest that before downloading our print versions you read LifeNotes online by following the links below in sequence, or
Click here to download a single pdf file version
of LifeNotes for offline reading and
printing
[our Lifenotes Online Version has hyperlinks to
more information than the Print Version]
If You Are
Who You Are, Then Who Are You?
Who Will You
Be When You No Longer Are?
A
Law Is A Law Until It Is No Longer A Law
The End May Be Just The Beginning
Why You Do What You
Want To Do
You’re
Not Normal If You Think I’m Not Normal
Lonely Islands In A Sea Of Normalcy
Additional notes
A Fanatic Life Or A Normal Life?
Most of our LifeNotes are taken from our earlier book
It contains essentially the same text as LifeNotes, with Appendices that discuss some of the topics in a bit more detail - click here to download a copy.
Comments are welcome –
comments@ws5.com
If you would like to help us maintain this website please send a contribution to:
LifeNotes, Inc.
P.O. Box 1422
Ashland, KY 41105-1422
Contents Copyright © 1980-2009
Compact Library Publishers – all
rights reserved.
Website Copyright ©
Lifenotes – all rights reserved.
You may distribute copies of our materials so long as you identify the source,
include all copyright information, and make no changes to the content.
Life Notes, LifeNotes, Life Note, and LifeNote, identify our online and print materials, all rights reserved.
tm