The Ultimate Foundation
Many people lack a principle or belief that grounds them and guides their actions. Because they lack this guiding principle, they drift around aimlessly, a slave to their impulses.
For those that do have a guiding principle, it could be family, money, fame, or some goal in life that they are working towards.
The problem with most principles is they are prone to be shaken up by reality. It's inevitable that most people will get a reality check at some point in their life that causes them to spiral into a crisis. In many cases, they have intense regrets that haunt them emotionally.
Most people's guiding principles are vulnerable and rely on external circumstances to go a certain way in order for them to achieve happiness.
The best system is built on reality. This means that nothing can come and shake you up. It's indestructible. And not in an egoic sense, but a belief system that is rock solid; a belief system that people can't wash away with arguments.
Many people think the most solid foundation is their experience, their guiding principle is their experience, because you can't go below experience, right? This causes people to get stuck in concepts like "the secret" where they believe they can bend reality with their thoughts. And they become a slave to their experience and crave good experience which ultimately ends up being the cause of their misery.
But underneath our conscious experience is a very advanced pattern of logic. It requires memories, thoughts, emotions, all kinds of neural activity that we take for granted. Logic is the foundation of experience.
Our conscious experience is built upon and emerges from reality/logic.
So if all your actions are based on experience, you will ultimately still be at the mercy of reality. Reality (this includes other people) will be in control of your happiness.
If you want to truly be free, unshakable, and indestructible, you need a foundation that is free, unshakable, and indestructible. A foundation that guides your thoughts and actions.
Logic is the ultimate foundation. Even more foundational than right action because right action also emerges from logic.
Logic can be seen in a sense as god. And if logic is your god, making sense can be viewed as prayer. Making Sense is how you communicate and align your self with god. And you do this through understanding and critical thinking. Unlike traditional religion, it doesn't require you to blindly follow certain dogmas, it simply requires you to be honest and think for yourself.
In order to feel fulfillment from making sense, you need to connect logic to your reward center by truly loving logic. Once you achieve this state, you will not longer desire to do things that don't make sense because doing so will cause you a lot of dissonance.
When you're confronted by something that doesn't make sense, rather than falling into coping mechanisms and faulty beliefs, you're completely wired to understand it and fix the root of the problem.
No person or event will be able to shake you up because your entire framework for operating in the world is based on the ultimate truth. If you're confronted with anything, you just think about it and either discard it, revise it, or adopt it and then you move on.
This will also provide unshakable confidence.
The act of making sense never stops. There is always work to be done. You need to always be skeptical of yourself because it's extremely easy to fool yourself. Spend time each day thinking about your actions and motives to make sure they are aligned with logic. If you find something that isn't clicking, work on it, think critically until you understand what's going on. Ask yourself why you do what you do and why you believe what you believe. And the key is to be completely honest with yourself.
This process is only possible if you're not emotionally attached to any of the concepts. The only thing it benefits being emotionally attached to is logic itself. Beliefs can be flawed due to a lack of knowledge or understanding, but logic itself is pure and consistent, the only time logic appears flawed is due to a lack of understanding.
In order to get your subconscious to adopt and value logic over everything else, it needs to be done on an emotional level. It won't work if you try to do it rationally. You become emotionally attached to whatever you believe provides you safety and this then becomes your core value.
So it's a process of proving to yourself that logic will consistently provide for your safety more than anything else. It's the only thing that can guarantee your safety and is completely independent of anything else. It can guide you, watch over you, and be with you 24/7 without fail.
The brains natural instinct is to be resonant and get rid of dissonance through the path of least resistance. The problem is, it's easy to patch up dissonance with wrong beliefs that might be a quick fix for the dissonance but it introduces dissonance in another area. Then you patch up that dissonance with another coping mechanism and so on. Soon enough, you're stuck in a downward spiral of faulty beliefs in order to patch up all the different sources of dissonance.
It's much more efficient and permanent to simply fix the dissonance at the root. Coming to a logical conclusion using critical thinking is the true path of least resistance as it requires the least effort in the long run and doesn't require all the coping mechanisms that most people lean on to handle their dissonance (e.g. ego and external distractions).
You don't need a lot of knowledge to make sense. Because making sense drives you to find knowledge, that's part of the process of making sense. Even if the things you do and believe right now don't seem to make sense, you are like that for a reason, because you lacked the awareness and understanding to do differently. But now that you have the awareness, you can begin the process of unravelling things that don't make sense, step by step, you are making sense.
The beauty in making sense is you can start right now from where you are with what you have.