Judge Your Own Work

As an existent —I exist alone. This is the existential ideal.

As an another —I exist for others. This is the religious ideal.

As a person —I exist for myself and for others. This is the spiritual ideal.

If I create for myself and not others, I become conceited because I can only take.

If I create for others and not myself, I become hallow because I can only give.

The trouble remains, how does a person create for themselves and for others at the same time?

The person has to transcend giving and taking. What the person does or creates must simultaneously be for oneself and for others, in which case the creation must be completely internal, done for oneself, and yet upon reaching the world, find its value there.

Most often, this will not happen —as psychoses and erroneous beliefs crowd mental space and would have the individual believe that their desires are at odds with others therefore preventing any work from expressing itself honestly and as oneself. Biologically speaking, this is true, but intellectually speaking, our desires are one and the same —we all wish to be prosperous in all domains of life, in living.

If intellectually we are in agreement, then what is good for myself is also good for the other. That we are in intellectual agreement already is the only way that I can create solely for myself and yet benefit others.

We like to believe we are shopping for different ideological solutions online, hearing different voices and perspectives. There could be no greater lie. The intellectual idea is the same —how do we better humanity? therefore the measurement of whether the idea is valuable or not can also be agreed upon: does it better humanity or not?

If an article, a post, betters humanity —then it is good, and if it does not, then it is bad. How do we judge good and bad? that I cannot say, it is complicated, but we should not rely on our feelings entirely.

People mistake feelings for results. An article that makes you feel good, does not mean it is good. Drinking soda and eating fast food may be pleasurable, but it does not result in a healthy body. To be healthy physically means to exercise, which feels bad initially.

Ideologically, this holds true. Good ideas feel bad to the untrained mind, it is coping with the strain of exercise which it has not done for years, but given time, mental exercise will become another pleasure. Bad ideas feel good, but continual consumption will only lead to further difficulty in the future.

Pay attention to your feelings when you read —authors would have you believe logic, reason, and objectivity is the only qualification of good and bad ideas, what they didn't tell you is that Truth itself is a feeling —the feeling of certainty that arises when we believe that sufficient evidence has been given to ground our belief in reality. Certainty is a feeling —relative to how much faith and doubt a person has on a particular topic and to believe in Truth is to value certainty —which is subjective and relative to the times.

Feelings are not as subjective and relative as we make them out to be if they are the root of the concept Truth. Pay attention to your feelings when you read —do not mistake them nor let them guide you totally, but listen so you can discern what is good or bad. In the same way you can judge your own work and come to a conclusion about its worth.