“The meaning of life resides in joy and the feelings of harmony connected to happiness; without happiness, life loses meaning. Happiness is at the heart of our lives and our demand for a meaning.” Dalai Lams

“Life is a journey of hope through time that is full of pain with occasional interlude of happiness. For humans, it starts with wanting to know and do something and ends with regret of not knowing and doing enough. A fool worries about the meaning of life while the wise get on with it because life is full of mysteries that no one understands the essence of it.” Nosa Olotu.

Below is a continuation of Steve Pavlina article that I find very interesting.

Nothing to Fear

In the Fall of 1992, I decided to go back to college, starting over as a freshman. This time I went to Cal State University, Northridge (CSUN). The computer science program wasn’t impacted, so all I had to do to get accepted was to apply. I moved into the dorms at age 21. But I was no longer the same person I was at 18. I was still an atheist religiously, but now I had a strong collection of personal values to guide me. I wanted to see what I was capable of and what these new values might do for me, especially the value of integrity. There would be no cheating, no stealing, no drinking. For me it was all about setting goals and taking action and pushing myself to do my best. My courage was like a new power source, but now I had a strong harness on it. My Berkeley friends had said to me, “If you’d put all the energy you put into criminal behavior into your studies, you’d get straight As.”

But I knew I could get straight As. I’d done that in high school taking all honors classes. That wasn’t a big enough challenge. So I upped the bar my first semester, opting to take 31 units (10 classes). The average student takes 12-15 units per semester. Unfortunately the dean of the computer science department wouldn’t approve my extra units. She was the gatekeeper, and she thought I was either joking or nuts. I talked her up from 18 units to 25 units, but there she stood firm, and even then she still thought I was probably joking. So I took 25 units at CSUN and enrolled in another six units off campus, for a total of 31 units. That was against the rules, since the extra unit approval was technically inclusive of off-campus units too, but I wasn’t going to let pointless bureaucracy stop me.

I devoted myself to the study of time management and learned to use my time very efficiently. I aced all my classes and took my straight-A report cards from both schools back to the dean, now asking for 39 units for my second semester. This time it wasn’t hard to get her approval, but I think she was a bit scared of me when I left. I aced that semester too. Then in the summer of 1993 I did full-time contract work as a game programmer and also went vegetarian. No summer school. In my third and final semester, I added a double major in mathematics (which was pretty easy to get, since there were so many courses in common with computer science), and I took 37 units while continuing to work full-time. I graduated with a 3.94 GPA and ended up receiving an award for the top computer science student each year. Two degrees in three semesters.

This experience gave me a deeper appreciation of the power of context. I would not have even attempted such a thing as a Catholic. I would never have set the goals I did. I’m not sure anyone can truly understand how different reality seems from the perspective of different contexts if you’ve never switched contexts. If you subscribe to a disempowering context, you may be absolutely crippled in your ability to effectively tackle certain challenges no matter how hard you try (if you even try at all).

In the year after graduation, I started Dexterity Software, met my future wife, and continued to explore different belief systems. But now I was doing it very consciously. I was driven by the idea that if one context could open the door to previously untapped potential, then what could other contexts do? Might there be a better context than my current one? My experiences at Berkeley and CSUN were totally opposite, and I knew it was because of my different belief systems. One “religion” nearly sent me to prison; the other allowed me to successfully tap into potential I never knew was within me. I absolutely had to learn more about this.

Over the next decade I experimented with agnosticism, various new-agey belief systems, Buddhism, objectivism, and more. I even tried Scientology for a few months just to see what it was like. I wanted to assimilate a variety of different contexts, experience them from the inside, and then back off and compare their strengths and weaknesses. This produced a lot of instability in my life but also tremendous growth.

I was like a chef trying different ingredients to discover what recipe of beliefs would lead to the best life. And again, the definition of “best” is part of the recipe itself, so my understanding of the meaning of life was also in flux.

Many times I found that a new context set me back, and my results began to decline. Other times my new context was more empowering, and I again started to surge ahead. In the long run as I integrated new empowering beliefs and shed disempowering ones, my life began to improve across the board. For the past year they’ve been fairly stable, and 2005 has by far been my best year ever.